Feminist Critique Research Articles

Critical Feminist Approaches to Migration and Mobility Justice in Canada: Guest Editors' Introduction

<p>This themed section examines how inequality constrain and enable contemporary human movement at state border crossings. It responds directly to questions, practices, and knowledge gaps that arise from critical migration/refugee studies, critical tourism studies, border studies, and/or mobility justice research by denaturalizing assumptions about the rights of some to choose to move across borders freely and others who are forced to leave, denied access, or detained. In so doing, we highlight research on human mobilities and borders in Canada to advance understandings on the dynamics of territorial control and access to state borders. What links the articles is the commitment to examining the reproduction of power through the following three shared understandings and starting points: (1) a critique of the Canadian nation state’s global reputation as exceptionally humanitarian (Nguyen and Phu 2021); (2) a consideration of the global entanglements of racial capitalism and colonialism that structures human movement (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018); and (3) an understanding that the mobilities of some and the immobilities of others coexist and are in fact co-produced (Ahmed et al. 2020; Bauman 1998; Sheller 2018).</p><p> </p>

Psychologists as Anti-Racist Change Agents on Campus: “What We Do Is More Important than What We Say or What We Say We Believe”

Psychologists, based on their training in the science and practice of change, are well-equipped to make vital contributions to combating inequity and embracing social justice at colleges and universities. By examining the oppressive systemic contexts of higher education and reviewing models of change, this article provides psychologists with critical perspectives and practices to ensure a more transformative and anti-racist approach to change. We consider three conceptual models to help move colleges and universities forward, employ evidence-based research and assessment strategies, and apply them at the individual, group, and organizational levels. A Black feminist critique is also utilized to further understanding of the role of resistance, coalition building, and freedom in creating change on campus.

Conspiracy Theories Left, Right and...Centre: Political Disinformation and Liberal Media Discourse

We are living in a time when conspiracy theories have never been more maligned by those who occupy the centre ground of politics. Liberal critics and journalists accuse conspiracy theorists to their left and right of paranoia, irresponsibly excessive rhetoric, and fallacies such as strawtargeting, 'anomaly hunting' and 'determined flexibility'. At the same time, major liberal institutions from the BBC to CNN emphasise the risks that such conspiracy theories pose to public order, safety and trust – and to the very future of what they call 'our democracy'. However, we argue that many of the same threats, flaws and fallacies have characterised hegemonic liberal analyses of contentious recent political events in the West from Trumpgate to the British Labour Party's anti-Semitism 'crisis'. With a proclivity for ad hominems, deliberate misrepresentations of evidence and other dubious methods, liberal conspiracy theories have had harmful societal impacts such as discrediting progressive political movements and fanning the flames of war. These are arguably consequences of greater magnitude than those resulting from right-wing conspiracism. Moreover, we show that centrist conspiracy theories often involve the implementation of genuine conspiracies against anti-establishment figures such as Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. Despite the empirical existence of such conspiracies, we conclude by suggesting that the historical materialist critique of social reality has considerably more explanatory power than the conspiracist analytic. To demonstrate this we point to an epistemological weakness at the heart of liberal thought dating back at least to Thomas Carlyle's 'Great Man Theory of History' that, much like the marginal conspiracy theories liberals condemn, involves a vast exaggeration of the role of individual agency and intentionality – and covert interpersonal relationships particularly – in determining social, economic and political affairs.

Structural Racism Within Reason

Abstract In this discussion, I engage the politics of intention to explore how structural racism structures the production of meaning and the practice of reason. Building on María Lugones's analysis of intention formation as a form of practical reasoning, I explore the reasoning at work during the 2011 Stand Your Ground (SYG) hearing of black survivor of domestic violence, Marissa Alexander, to contend that structural racism—in this case, both intimate personal violence and intimate state violence against black women—enacts race/gender domination through projecting constructed intentions onto black women as a strategy to rationalize punishing black women. I also discuss two key black feminist critiques of reason—Patricia Hill Collins’ discussion of “controlling images” (2000) and Michelle Cliff's concept of the “mythic mind” (1982)—to propose controlling intentions as a framework to theorize how structural racism produces fictive intentions used to rationalize the criminal punishment of survival and justify that outcome as common sense.

Cornering the Market on Maternal Affect: A Discourse Analysis of a Social Media Marketing Campaign for Infant Formula

Breastfeeding advocates and global health agencies have been sounding alarms about the dangers of digital marketing practices of the formula-feeding industry. This study comprised a feminist discourse analysis of materials produced (blog, social media posts, comments) in a paid partnership between baby formula brand Enfamil and an influencer, Marilou Bourdon from Trois fois par jour. Our analysis reveals a sophisticated marketing campaign that co-opts feminist critiques of breastfeeding promotion discourse while carefully avoiding explicitly violating the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes. Underlying this campaign is a rhetoric reliant on pathos to assuage maternal guilt and shame for feeding formula.

The Forgotten History of Our Times: Revisiting Utpal Dutt's Titu Mir in Contemporary India

This paper is an exploration of the most recent revival of Utpal Dutt's play Titu Mir in 2019 by the ensemble group Theatre Formation Paribartak in India. Islamic religious reformer Titu Mir led a peasant rebellion from 1827 to 1831 in the Barasat region of Bengal and the play focuses on a narrative of revolutionary resistance to colonialism. Titu Mir becomes an articulation of political theatre against the Hindu right-wing agenda of expunging Muslim national heroes from Indian history. This essay seeks Titu Mir's relevance as a site and theory of materializing historical contradictions, and as part of a ‘gestic’ feminist criticism of theatre. The essay attempts to understand how critique of patriarchal ideology is enmeshed in critique of colonialism in Titu Mir, especially in those moments where the play addresses complexities of political violence, interracial romance, martyrdom, alienation in the colony and deep-rooted misogyny in the project of colonialism.

(Mis)Translations of the Critiques of Anti-Muslim Racism and the Repercussions for Transnational Feminist Solidarities

Abstract As critiques of anti-Muslim racism travel transnationally, they get translated in relation to complex histories of imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and nationalism. These (mis)translations produce unexpected uses and abuses of anti-Muslim racism as an academic and political concept, with significant consequences for transnational feminist solidarity. This article explores, as a case in point, the emergence of a “Black Turk” identity in millennial Turkey where pious Muslim identity, once marginalized under a secularist state, has reasserted itself by deploying an analogy of Black to pious Muslim. Obscuring the nuances of local power relations, the pious Muslim/secular fault line was oversimplified and mistranslated into the resonant American idiom of the Black/white binary. This analogy and the progressive critiques of anti-Black and especially anti-Muslim racisms were then instrumentalized by an increasingly authoritarian and gender-conservative Islamist Turkish government to legitimize its repressive agendas, even succeeding to garner unexpected sympathy from some feminist politicians and academics in the United States. Naive confidence that such dichotomous racial/religious categories and familiar political vocabularies can guide feminist analyses and politics risks employing a seemingly transnationalist and anti-imperialist but in truth U.S.-centric understanding of non-U.S. struggles for social justice and thwarting potential transnational feminist solidarities.

Film is a woman. The manifestation of femininity in the work of Maria Sadowska based on Women’s Day

The aim of this article is to discuss a film by Maria Sadowska, entitled Women’s Day. The main theme around which the artist decided to build its plot is Halina Radwan’s herstory. A woman fulfils various socio-cultural roles, including that of mother, worker and woman, which exposes her to discrimination and exclusion. Feminist criticism therefore proved to be the primary tool used in the analytical process. The article refers to representatives of different research disciplines. The focus lies in capturing the relationships experienced by the main character in Sadowska’s film, both within the private and public spheres. This is preceded by an introduction, which outlines the subject matter addressed by Sadowska, and accompanied by an overview of the basic assumptions of feminist perspective in film studies.

Disability, trauma, and the place of affect in identity: Examining performativity in visual impairment rehabilitation

This paper examines rehabilitation services for visually impaired individuals as, in part, an amplified instantiation of disciplinary social forces maintaining heteronormative, ableist, and neoliberal norms. We problematise traditional rehabilitation's predominantly material focus, which elides experiences that are internal, emotional, relational, and reflective of issues of identity and social belonging, while creating links between gendered and ableist performativity. To do this, we draw on two qualitative data sources: firstly, interview data from a study of rehabilitation service organisations in South Africa, and secondly, a vignette provided by the second author, which describes a graduation ceremony (a performative ritual at a rehabilitation organisation). By means of a critical feminist disability studies lens, we consider the transmission of meanings and performative imperatives in these services, which tend to disallow the expression and processing of socially engendered trauma, thereby limiting the ability of visually impaired individuals to explore secure and authentic self-identities. Through the prism of visual impairment rehabilitation, commonalities between forces of dehumanisation resonant in the lives of both women and people with disabilities are brought to light, with implications for secure identities based on diversity, as well as for the creation of caring societies that embrace the reality of interdependence.

Resisting climate change vulnerability: feminist and decolonial insights

In climate politics, understanding and contesting the meaning of vulnerability has proved extremely difficult. On the one hand, it is an increasingly formalised term that means something very specific scientifically and methodologically within the climate change institutions. On the other hand, vulnerability is part of a colonial discursive framework of risk. In this article, I show how contestations into the scientific project have not sufficiently worked to address the colonial geographic imaginaries that underlie the discursive framework of vulnerability. I suggest that bringing together the work of critical adaptation studies (CAS) with critical feminist and decolonial scholarship, such as the counternarratives of the Pacific,offers a way to resist the victimising politics of disposability and also rethink vulnerability as a concept of resistance, relationality and reflexivity.

Chopping carrots and becoming ‘real’ men: Uzbek boys, household work and the reproduction of masculinities in post-Soviet Uzbekistan

ABSTRACT Since Uzbekistan gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, nationalist discourses have been overtly masculinized, continuing to inform Uzbek males’ daily lives. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Uzbekistan, this article illustrates how Uzbek boys’ domestic relations contribute to the way they learn to (re)produce masculinities, foregrounding a high degree of agency and utility. The analysis uncovered three themes central to the (re)production of Uzbek boyhood in Uzbek families as a site of informal learning: (1) being helpful through domestic labour; (2) being social through showing hospitality; and (3) being tarbiyali through practising national culture. Through scrutinizing the intersections of gender, education and nationalism, this article concludes by connecting Uzbek boyhood in the domestic sphere and nationalist campaigns fostering masculine hegemony in Uzbekistan’s nation building process. Through domesticity – a contentious concept in feminist criticism – this article expands our understanding of the (re)production of boyhood in a conventionally feminized space.

Critical Feminist Scholarship as a Roadmap Toward a Just Future

Critical Feminist Scholarship as a Roadmap Toward a Just Future

Book Review: Polygamy, Policy and Postcolonialism in English Marriage Law: A Critical Feminist Analysis

Book Review: Polygamy, Policy and Postcolonialism in English Marriage Law: A Critical Feminist Analysis

Bureaucratizing like a girl: Objectivity and the reinforcement of patriarchy at an Israeli government committee

AbstractWhat does it mean for women bureaucrats to work “objectively?” How does the attempt to work objectively affect the hierarchal structure and the preservation of women in lower positions, two interrelated key elements of patriarchal ideology? The bureaucratic staff of the Israeli Sal Committee offers a unique case study to examine this question. Aware of the life‐and‐death implications of committee decisions, this all‐women staff attempt to work “objectively,” which they interpret as compiling and presenting data that carries no marks of their positions. To fulfill this ideal, staffers inhibited themselves from speaking in committee discussions. Consequently, they were treated as “good bureaucrats” but also as “women bureaucrats” and their work remained mainly unacknowledged. Aspiring for non‐positional objectivity thus contributed to preserving their lower positioning and reaffirming their bureaucracy's hierarchal structure. But this disposition also forged an a‐hierarchal work style within the staff, presenting a feminist alternative to mainstream bureaucracy. This ethnography suggests that an ethics of objectivity may carry more diverse possibilities than is commonly hypothesized in feminist critiques of objectivity.

Part-Time Mothering: A Poetic Autoethnography of a Precariously Employed Academic’s Mothering Experiences

While studies have explored the experiences of motherhood among female academics, the experiences of motherhood among precariously employed academics have not received adequate attention. This autoethnographic inquiry uses poetry to embody my experiences of mothering, in the context of my emotional journey and my subjectivities as a precariously employed academic in a premier higher educational institution in India. From a critical feminist standpoint, the poem explores the experiences through known metaphors including the leaky pipeline of academia, work–life imbalance in the ivory tower, and the sense of being on the hamster wheel. This work is a critical inquiry voicing the everyday realities of precariously employed academics mothering their children. It delves into how the nature of their work status influences their inner turmoil, decisions, and actions vis-à-vis motherhood. It also attempts to demonstrate and raise consciousness about how the private (motherhood) and the public (work) interact.

Medical fetishism in education: gendering the ‘clinical’ metaphor

ABSTRACT Teaching is increasingly called upon to become a clinical practice profession, like medicine. The term ‘clinical’ is used in a common-sense way to describe idealized teaching practice, as if universally understood to be a superior and desirable way to enact professionalism. Yet there is little in the literature that mounts a feminist critique of the cultural politics put to work through the word ‘clinical’ in education. We ask what it reifies and how it operates to firm up inequalities and binaries, especially in relation to the gendered concept of ‘mastery’, the unquestioning adoption of epidemiological-style evidence-based practice and the worship of masculinist data cults. We call for further work to explore how teachers both take up and resist the clinical label.

Centre de Recherches Italiennes – CRIX) Dalla parte delle scrittrici: Alba de Céspedes

What should remain of the literary 20th century? Despite the efforts made, particularly in the last decades of the last century, by feminists and intellectuals to re-evaluate the works of unjustly marginalized women writers, the current canon still does not give them the prominent place they deserve. Dalla parte di lei (1949), by Alba de Céspedes, represents singular, but not individual, case of novels by women writers which, despite having been well received by the public and the critics when it came out seem to have fallen into oblivion. Despite the recent revival, particularly in the field of feminist criticism, which allowed de Céspedes’ work to be published in the Meridiani (2011), the writer’s novels remain little read and little studied. This article aims to highlight their formal and content-related qualities that should make them reference works of the 20th century.

EURİPİDES’İN MEDEA’SI, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’İN MACBETH’İ VE ÖZEN YULA’NIN GAYRİ RESMİ ROXELANA’SINDAKİ BASKIN KADIN FİGÜRLERİNİN TEMATOLOJİK BİR KARŞILAŞTIRMASI

This paper presents a thematological comparison to the portrayal of powerful woman characters in Euripides’s Medea, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Özen Yula’s Unofficial Roxelana. The feminist analysis of the three plays indicates that women are portrayed as always seeking power, control, and recognition. Their desire for power is tested by patriarchy on several trials and tribulations. Even though the three female characters belong to different cultures and times, they share common themes of patriarchal oppression, desperate desires for power and recognition. The three women are observed to deviate from expected gender roles by exhibiting unconventional manlike behaviours according to the patriarchal framework. The feminist criticism reveals the motivations behind their deviation from their culturally constructed gender roles. Through the thematological analysis, as a subfield of comparative literature, the selected texts are compared in their relation to each other in terms of their unique themes by the help of feminist criticism.

Backwoods of Language. The Modernist Prose of Djuna Barnes in Polish Translation

Only eighty years after the original publication of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood was the Polish literary market enriched by a translation of one of the strangest novels of Euro- American modernism. Marcin Szuster’s translation, with the Polish title Ostępy nocy, has already garnered praise as well as prizes, leading to the first Polish discussion concerning the work of the eccentric American writer. The focus of this article is to analyze the Polish translation of Nightwood with a special interest in Barnes’s style, which itself becomes a central character in the novel and which connects, according to feminist critics (K. Kaivola, S. Benstock), to its emancipatory potential. In this article I discuss the claim that the complex style of such prose is the (conscious) manifestation of a woman’s voice (as an affect), behind which one can discover a body – one that experiences and is experienced (J. Taylor). The body, both a structural and a rhetorical category in feminist criticism, can be seen in Barnes’s prose as an element which organizes both time and space – therefore, the ambiguity of her terms and the complexity of style make for a real translation challenge. Marcin Szuster as a translator needs to follow Barnes’s “distinctive point of view,” which is a “feminine” one, distanced by gender, experience and time.

Adam Smith’s Case against the British Empire

The paper articulates Adam Smith’s claim that the British Empire was inimical to Great Britain’s interest. It is argued against Smith that, given the structure of global trade prior to the Industrial Revolution, the mercantilist restrictions on trade and capital movement characterising the British Empire probably increased Britain’s national income. But it is also argued, in agreement with Smith, that the military costs of enforcing these restrictions outweighed any benefit. Smith’s ‘cost of enforcement case’ against the Empire resonated strongly in liberal critiques of Empire in the century after Smith. At the same time, Imperial Federationists of the early twentieth century used Smith’s proposal of a political union in place of the Empire to validate mercantilist sentiments which Smith deplored. Smith’s case against the Empire is of mixed value and had conflicting impacts on its readers.