Feminist Engagement Research Articles

1960s Bombay stars and fashion cultures: The queens in our hearts

This article looks at the influence of Hollywood stardom on Bombay films in the 1960s that gave birth to Indian female star figures: the influence of Audrey Hepburn and the political events in India had major roles to play. Stars, such as Sadhana Shivdasani, Sharmila Tagore and Mumtaz, occupy an important role in the advent of economic and sexual liberalization that became central to feminist (re)presentations. They also played a key role in creating the image of the ‘ideal’ Indian woman. Despite its many patriarchal-centred narrations, Bombay cinema occupied a prominent place in feminist engagement as it created more opportunities for dialogues and awareness for women than were generally available at the time in Indian culture.

Maria Czaplicka: Gender, Shamanism, Race [Maria Czaplicka: Płeć, szamanizm, rasa; Biografia antropologiczna

Maria Czaplicka: Gender, Shamanism, Race [Maria Czaplicka: Płeć, szamanizm, rasa; Biografia antropologiczna

The pandemic as gender arrhythmia: Women’s bodies, counter rhythms and critique of everyday life

AbstractIn this paper we build upon recent organizational research drawing upon the work of Henri Lefebvre, and feminist engagements with his theory of “Rhythmanalysis”, to examine how the COVID‐19 pandemic disrupted women's everyday lives and the impacts on their relationship with work. Drawing upon interviews with 38 women from diverse socio‐cultural backgrounds living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we describe the pandemic as an “arrhythmia”, a radical rupture to the familiar rhythms of their everyday social and working lives. We describe how the pandemic arrhythmia was felt in and through bodies (i.e., sleep, weight), and how women responded by creating counter rhythms (i.e., hobbies, exercise, food) as strategies to support their own and others wellbeing. Furthermore, radically disrupting linear repetitions of everyday work, social and family life, the pandemic prompted many to reflect differently upon how pre‐pandemic rhythms shaped by the social, economic and gendered structures of neoliberalism were causing various forms of alienation (i.e., from their own health and wellbeing, meaningful social connections, ethical and sustainable working practices, and from pleasure). For some women, the pandemic arrhythmia was a puncturing of their normalized time‐space gendered routines, leading to critique and transformation to their everyday work‐life patterns. Engaging a feminist reading of rhythmanalysis, this paper brings into focus how neoliberal gender regimes are reconstituted and disrupted in the rhythms and routines of women's everyday lives. In so doing, we highlight the potential in feminist engagement with arrhythmia to extend understandings of the gendered politics of everyday life during and beyond pandemic times, and the value in such approaches for organizational scholars interested in understanding the gendered rhythms of daily life and their effects on relationships with work.

Feminist New Materialist Entanglements With “Kinetic Excess” in Women’s Muay Thai Boxing: Moving With Embodied Discomfort as a Post-Qualitative Coach-Researcher

Feminist engagement with fight sports is often ambivalent given the masculine history of combat and the achievement of “self” transformation at the “expense” of another, exist in tension with the possibilities of women’s empowerment. Acknowledging the multiplicity of embodied meanings produced through Muay Thai Boxing (Thai Boxing), this feminist post-qualitative project seeks to do “research differently” through a generative ethos of knowledge production that is co-constituted with participants and the coach-researcher (Erin). We explore how a Thai boxing program—“fight camp”—worked through-with an affective feminist coaching pedagogy that sought to transform gendered patterns of movement mobilizing moments of discomfort and pleasure. This research practice involved attuning to the embodied dynamics of learning-coaching—the intra-actions of boxing—in terms of what these movement practices “do” and how they “affect” women in the process of becoming-fighters. We write through three provocations—“the drunk uncle,” “get ugly with it,” and “show and tell”—to engage readers in the affective relations entangled within the processes of coaching-researching MTB. Our post-qualitative research approach has implications for the provision of physical cultural practices and alternative coaching pedagogy more broadly.

Utopier, hopp och hopplöshet. Hur feministiska framtidsbilder och känslor av hopp påverkas av den nyliberala diskursen

If those who formulate visions of the future are prevented from thinking freely because of a reduced capacity to imagine a different world, then there is a risk that they only advocate limited changes. Some feminist researchers in political theory and philosophy, such as Wendy Brown (2003, 2008, 2015) and Johanna Oksala (2011, 2013), claim that this has affected feminist movements. They believe that hope for a different future has been weakened among today’s feminists and that this development can be explained by the spread of the neoliberal discourse. In this article, I discuss theories on how the neoliberal discourse has affected feminist movements and relate such theories to the lived experiences of contemporary feminist engagement. The latter is based on an interview study with seven Swedish feminists engaged in different feminist organizations. The analysis indicates that the neoliberal discourse could have affected how utopias are used and what inspires hope among contemporary feminists. The result of the study also indicates that feelings of hopelessness can be useful in feminist work.

A feminist engagement with Spanish modernism: the social objects of “las Sinsombrero”

ABSTRACT Spanish archives house hundreds of documents related to avant-garde male poets who wrote during a period of cultural effervescence known as the Silver Age of Spanish literature (1898–1936). Feminist researchers like Tània Balló and Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles have successfully brought attention to the smaller corpus of archival materials related to modern women artists and writers, known as “las Sinsombrero”, who rebelliously took their hats off in public. Scholars working with female subjects must confront the inaccessibility of material documentation to address the historical absence of modern Spanish women. Balló's three Las Sinsombrero documentaries exemplify the wealth of non-material documentation about the lived experiences of women within cultural networks. I argue that Maurizio Ferraris's theory of documentality provides a key methodology for examining non-material social objects, such as gatherings of women at the “Academy of Witches,” as legitimate objects of study that can better represent the cultural milieu of Silver Age Spain.

The Politics of Shame, Stigma and Gender: Implications for Restorative Justice Conferencing with Justice-Involved Girls

Feminist engagement with restorative justice (RJ) have tended to neglect the importance of gendered factors relevant to RJ interventions used with women and girls who offend. This article begins to address this gap in knowledge and presents findings from qualitative research with offending girls who participated in a RJ conference, a group whose voices are seldom heard, and RJ practitioners. Focusing on the key themes of shame and stigma, the article critically explores how the macro-social processes underpinning stigmatization and the gendered politics of shame can produce harmful implications for girls participating in RJ conferences within an offender capacity.

Writing the Landscape: Exposing Nature in French Women’s Fiction 1789–1815. By Christie Margrave

The feminist recovery project in francophone women’s writing is decades behind its anglophone counterpart and this book makes an important contribution to the field. Christie Margrave’s analysis of women writers’ feminist engagement with the ­Romantic vogue for natural landscape not only offers a fresh perspective on Romantic ­luminary Germaine de Staël; it also sheds light on the novels of Félicité de Genlis, Sophie ­Cottin, Barbara von Krüdener, and Adélaïde de Souza. These writers remain astonishingly under-researched, despite their considerable renown during the First Republic and First Empire, and notwithstanding vital work by scholars such as Gillian Dow, Isabelle Brouard-Arends, and Mary Seidman Trouille. Margrave illuminates the mutual influence of all five Romantic-era women and their canonical male contemporaries, demonstrating that the women reconceived fashionable landscape imagery to confront and challenge the patriarchal norms, restrictions, and prejudices which shaped the female condition and informed their writing. The subtitle, ‘exposing nature’, refers to Margrave’s analysis of natural landscapes but also to the centrality of what she calls, adapting Virginia Woolf’s famous phrase, ‘a landscape of one’s own’ (p. 1 et ­passim), a fictional topography representing the contours of women’s lived experience. Although the monograph would have benefited from a stronger feminist theoretical framework, Margrave’s work is rich in fascinating detail about the ­landscaping vogue and language of flowers, and this thorough research underpins persuasive and pivotal close readings. Occasionally, these readings are limited by her tendency to interpret the novelists’ commentary solely in terms of gender and sexual politics. In the case of Souza’s Adèle de Sénange (1794), for instance, the emphasis on gradual reform could easily be read as a political metaphor, especially in light of the recent Revolutionary Terror. On the whole, however, Margrave’s literary-critical acumen is impressive. Chapter 3, ‘Landscapes of Rebellion: Natural Madhouses’, is particularly effective, placing forensic analysis of the works of Cottin and Krüdener in the context of nineteenth-century attitudes to mental illness to demonstrate how landscapes function to portray female madness as feminist protest. Another highlight is Chapter 5, ‘Writing the Landscape: The Ossianic North and the Debate over ­Women’s Writing and Education’, which analyses Scottish landscapes as well as implicit and ekphrastic allusions to James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ poems in Cottin’s Malvina (1800) and Staël’s Corinne (1807). Connecting the eponymous heroines with the Ossianic female bard, Malvina, Margrave demonstrates that, even as Cottin and Staël depict ­women writers suffering social exclusion and psychological torment, they also engage in ­meta-commentary on their cultural importance. In a particularly innovative reading of Corinne, she argues convincingly that the love affair between the heroine and the British Lord Oswald models the synthesis of social independence (Corinne) and political liberty (Oswald) that could free future generations to live on terms of political and gender equality. She goes on to demonstrate that Staël depicts Corinne taking up the legacy of Ossian’s Malvina, making her the doomed prophet of this ideal. This is an insightful, valuable, and timely study bound to inform and inspire future ­scholarship in French women’s writing of the Romantic era.

Activating Jewish Women’s Bodies with Eugénie Foa (1796-1852) and Hélène Cixous (1937-)

In a comparative study across genre and nearly two centuries of historical and political ferment, the writings of Eugénie Foa (1796-1852) and Hélène Cixous (1937-), two female French-Jewish writer activists, present through their fictional and autobiographical works, respectively, nuanced criticisms of what for each in their times constituted a control of Jewish women’s bodies. In the context of Foa’s engagement, crafting tales in alignment with popular national narratives, specifically those featuring disenfranchised Jewish female characters, her work takes on the task of reassessing the ancient and modern systems of marriage and divorce that contribute to the systematic oppression of women. Her stories call into question the sinister ways religious and national systems of patriarchal control place Jewish women at the mercy of choices made concerning their bodies. Cixous, with several decades of ardent feminist engagement in her arsenal, turns this lens inward, remembering and reimagining her upbringing in a Jewish family in French-Algeria, one punctuated by war, racism, wide-spread anti-Semitism, and competing nationalisms. She offers a series of stories that illustrate pivotal moments in her understanding, through her own experience and those of whom she was close to, of the ways meanings assigned to women’s bodies contribute to their harmful mishandling by the systems that exploit them. When analyzed together, their works reveal fascinating parallels which the following study explores through specific examples from their texts.

The Politics of Female Anger in Older Age:The Good Fight, Older Femininity and Political Change

This article identifies an important conversation about the politics of female anger in older age in the CBS show The Good Fight (2017–). By centring the narrative around the emotional life of a woman in her 60s, the show offers older femininity as a site for discussing social and political changes that have occurred in the USA in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. Through a close analysis of the four seasons that were released before the Covid-19 pandemic, this article maps the emotional journey of Diane Lockheart through her personal, economic, and political crises, showing how different emotions are connected with Diane’s engagement—and at times disengagement—with politics. Ultimately, the article contributes to the field of feminist cultural studies by exploring the way The Good Fight offers female anger in older age as key to feminist engagement and political change.

Decolonizing American Philosophy

Decolonizing American Philosophy

Critical Appraisal and Masculine Authority: The Boys Clubs' Derogatory Method of Reading Canadian Feminist Speculative Fiction.

Culture scholars have shown that cultural intermediaries play a crucial role in the reproduction of inequalities in consecration (Corse and Westervelt, 2002; Maguire Smith and Matthews, 2012; Miller, 2014; Ridgeway, 2011; Steinberg, 1990 cited in Bourdieu, 2010). However, the analysis of gender inequalities in reception and canonization has focused on individual bias, neglecting the contribution of scholars of hegemonic masculinity about the importance of patterned practices in the reproduction of men's dominance over women (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Given that art worlds are not settings where typical markers of hegemonic masculinity are valued, such as money and physical prowess, what are the tools of hegemonic masculinity in art worlds? I answer this question through a comparative analysis of the reception of two iconic Canadian feminist novels: L'Euguélionne (2012 [1976]) by Louky Bersianik and The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood. Building on feminist scholarship, I find that the discursive apparatus of hegemonic masculinity in art worlds consists of a derogatory method of reading employed by critics in newspapers. This method of reading is founded on three discursive components: (i) a reductive reading of feminist politics; (ii) a man-centred assessment of feminism and (iii) a questioning of women's creative credibility which belittles the contribution of feminist authors. By translating the concept of boys' club (Delvaux, 2019) and identifying its derogatory method of reading, I propose a framework that illuminates how critical appraisal shapes discursive resources available for both professional and non-professional readers to draw upon for evaluation and classification of women's cultural productions and feminist engagements.

Critical Feminist Law-Making: Imitative Spaces and Improvised Coalitions

ABSTRACT Feminists working in the law may experience tension between mainstreaming feminist ideas to make the everyday life of women better and maintaining a critical feminist method of law-making. Some (including myself) might at times feel pessimistic for the present, and future of, critical approaches to law. Mainstreaming feminist demands can be a powerful and effective method, potentially monopolising feminist engagements with law. In this article, I take this concern seriously by exploring the hope and possibility of an improvised coalition between mainstream and critical feminist approaches. To show this, I use the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, specifically its finding that gender-based violence constitutes a form of torture, as a methodical example of law-making. The result of this is an identification of an imitative space in which critical feminist law-making could maintain its possibility. I argue that the imitation embedded in both mainstream and critical feminist approaches to law, and the Court’s autopoietic method, could create this imitative space to safeguard feminist critical engagements with law. My analysis shows how feminist demands, mainstream or critical, carry the potential to activate an imitative space, where subversion becomes a possibility.

The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary

The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary

Womenʼs Rights vs. Gender Justice? Exploring Oppositional Womenʼs Organizations and the Reshaping of Feminist Engagement in De-democratizing Turkey

Reflective of a wider, global trend of changing civil society space and anti-gender backlash against womenʼs rights, research is increasingly interested in exploring the dynamics and implications of hybrid and authoritarian regimes strategies toward civil society, and womenʼs organizations in particular. Nevertheless, few have focused on studying the role of governmental womenʼs organizations – so-called women-GONGOs - as mechanisms of regime strategies, such as in the case of competitive-authoritarian Turkey where women-GONGOs aim to constrain civil society space and feminist, gender equality-oriented discourse and practice. In this study, the aim is to explore how feminist, oppositional womenʼs organizations, despite their “outsider” positions in Turkeyʼs civil society, use and reshape feminist strategies to adapt, renegotiate or resist women-GONGOs as mechanisms of control, co-optation and regime interference.Based on in-depth interviews with 21 womenʼs organizations in Turkey, the study finds that “outsider”, feminist womenʼs organizations in competitive-authoritarian Turkey perceive the influence of women-GONGOs as central to possibilities and limitations in civil society and womenʼs organizing. Consequently, interviews show that “outsiders” employ a variety of feminist strategies, mostly in combination, to create or maintain their activism and operations within the Turkish de-democratization context, for example turning to grassroots in combination with finding new alliances, or connected to sustaining activities within broader democratization movements. However, the study suggests that the changing space of civil society in Turkey affects these “outsiders” in different ways; for example service-oriented womenʼs organizations are less constrained in their feminist strategies compared to claims-making “outsiders”. Lastly, the study illustrates how the dominant role of women-GONGOs in Turkey impacts feminist discourse and practice of “outsiders”, thereby providing empirical insights and theoretical contributions to better understanding transformations of feminist engagement in Turkey and similar gendered de-democratization contexts across the Mediterranean and beyond.

Taking feminism beyond the state: FIFA as a transnational battleground for feminist legal critique

Abstract The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) plays a fundamental role in defining and asserting the boundary between men and women in football. Its decisions condition the way the game is played, the way players and clubs contract, and the way the FIFA World Cup is organized and experienced by people around the world. FIFA’s private transnational governance regime is, at least hypothetically, as prone to gender bias and discrimination as states or international organizations. Nevertheless, feminist legal scholars have rarely directed their sights on transnational private regulators such as FIFA. This article suggests to take the feminist legal critique beyond its traditional battlegrounds and highlights FIFA as a transnational governance site deserving feminist scrutiny. While it does not advocate for the introduction of specific policies, it aims to provide a convincing justification and a helpful roadmap for future feminist engagements with FIFA.

Fashioning feminism: how Leandra Medine and other Man Repeller authors blog about choice and the gaze

Leandra Medine indicates that she wants the Man Repeller multi-author blog to ‘serve as an open forum for women to draw their own conclusions’ instead of making ‘any sort of feministic statement’. Medine renders feminism as amorphous and an individual choice but she has been widely lauded for offering a feminist engagement in fashion. Her practices and position, as I argue throughout this article, allow her to fashion feminism, including associating feminism with the man repeller style and replacing aspects of second wave and rights-based feminisms with the purportedly more equitable and liberating website ethos of choice and equality feminism. Yet in replacing ‘feministic’ critiques with promises of stylish cultural change and clothing that reportedly repels men, Medine and other Man Repeller authors elide how systemic oppression functions. This ambivalent relationship to feminism, and dearth of intersectional advocacy, prompted a backlash in 2020. Critics interrogated Medine's facile statement about #BlackLivesMatter, the company's lack of diversity and the unsuccessful restructuring of the blog. As a means of analysing Man Repeller, I employ textual analysis, feminist and queer literature and media theory. I define fashioning feminism as a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thinking, including the negation of certain forms of feminism. I assert that attending to the fashioning of feminism can foreground central and developing feminist theories; the appeal, unstylishness and effacement of feminism; and the connection between style and politics. This includes readers’ interrogations of Man Repeller's politics, which are occurring along with contemporary examinations of racism. Since fashioning feminism is a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thought, engaging with its concepts and debates can further the critical study of feminism, nurture feminist conversations and advocate for social change.

Law Reform Processes and Criminalising Coercive Control

ABSTRACT In 2005, Reg Graycar and Jenny Morgan published ‘Law Reform: What’s in It for Women?’ in which they raised a number of issues and tensions faced in feminist engagements with law reform processes. Relying on Graycar and Morgan’s work I explore three recent law reform processes focused on whether coercive control should be criminalised: the NSW Joint Select Committee on Coercive Control, the Queensland Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce, and the South Australian exposure Bill. All answered this question in the affirmative. However, there were distinct differences in terms of their respective terms of reference, processes undertaken, participation of diverse and marginalised groups, consideration of implementation issues, and engagement with existing research. This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of these processes. The importance of Graycar and Morgan’s work is that it insists that we examine the processes of law reform, and not just the outcomes. While outcomes are obviously critical, the processes necessarily shape what those outcomes might be. The diversity of views around criminalisation of coercive control meant that attention to these processes was critical, particularly for those who are most likely to experience violence and state interventions in their lives.

Bleed, kill, cut, kin: Uterine violence, body-talk, and feminist subjectivities

abstract Contemporary young feminists (in South Africa) are claiming and proclaiming reproductive agency, often through public social media discourses and popular activist sentiments. Key features are expressions of embodied warfare via the female reproductive organs, talk of an agentic uterus that periodically ‘tries to kill’ its host, and emphatic descriptions of violent modes of relation. This article aims to recognise that reproductive violences play out not only in the material inequities of everyday life and sexual and reproductive health/care, but also in the language practices of social collectivities, where discursive practices and norms can make or unmake, injure, negate and erase, or affirm and transform subjectivities. Proceeding from an examination of the discursive contexts in which dominant societal (hetero)norms may enact sexual and reproductive violences, I explore a broadened recognition of reproductive violence that engages with discursive arenas, namely the intimate public (Berlant 2008). My analysis shows that the discursive work done in the examined public is vital for feminist cultural production of new imaginaries of gendered and community life, and what it means to be co-imbricated in feminist social reproduction. I conclude the analysis with a gesture to feminist engagement on mutually desirable notions of reproductive justice while attending sufficiently to unexpected forms of reproductive violence.

Becoming equals: the meaning and practice of gender equality in an Islamic feminist movement in India

Building upon an ethnographic exploration of the pedagogy and alternative dispute resolution activities of an Islamic feminist movement in India called the Indian Muslim Women’s Movement (Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan), this article speaks to the tension between Saba Mahmood’s influential account of religion and gendered agency, and a liberal feminist conception of gender equality. Anthropological explorations of Muslim women’s pious commitments as well as liberal feminist engagements with religion and culture are premised upon a presumed dichotomy between ethical engagements with religion, and a commitment to gender equality. Yet there is little analysis in existing scholarship of how gender equality is constituted by social movements premised on a religious identity, such as Islamic feminist movements. This article moves beyond thinking about gender equality merely as an abstract liberal normative good to explore how the discourse of gender equality is constituted in a movement that brings together everyday ethical commitments inspired by notions of piety and concerted everyday struggles against social and legal inequality. The ethnographic vignettes show how gender equality ( barabari) connotes social and legal equality between men and women premised on their equal spiritual status as God’s creations, their equal pious obligations irrespective of gender and the equal imperative of ethical conduct on both men and women based on Quranic values of compassion ( raham) and justice ( insaf). The pursuit of gender equality also entails reinterpretation of social norms in the light of ethical conduct, and an ethical commitment to collective struggle against gender discrimination in state and non-state forums.