International Feminist Research Articles

Dr. Maša Živanović: A Pioneer in Health Care for Women and Children in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The aim of the article is to present, primarily to the medical world and also the general public, the personality and work of Maša Živanović (1890-1960), a pioneer in the health care of children and mothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH), a health educator and one of the leaders of the Yugoslav Women's Rights Movement in the period between the two world wars. She was born in Croatia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) as Maria Skopszyński, in a family of Polish-Czech origin. After studying at the Temporary Women's Lyceum in Zagreb and passing the matriculation exam at the boy's High School (1909), she obtained the title of Doctor of Medicine in Vienna (1916). Her activity in the Women's Rights Movement has so far generally attracted more attention from researchers than her medical work. However, this work was very important because the general and health education of women, expectant mothers and mothers, after the two World Wars was very poor in BH, and the rates of child morbidity and mortality were high. Maša Živanović spent almost her entire working life in Sarajevo. For 30 years, she was the head of the Dispensary for Mothers and the Children, later the Institute for Maternal and Child Health Care, into which the previous institution grew in 1931. She was among the first followers of the new concept of "comprehensive paediatrics", which included social care for children, disease prevention and treatment of the sick. She successfully connected the medical mission with the mission of a women's rights activist, also trying to act as a health educator through articles published in the Women's Movement magazine (Ženski pokret). For a time, she was the president of the Society for the Education of Woman and Protection of her Rights, i.e. the Women's Movement, and a delegate at conferences of international feminist organizations. CONCLUSION: Maša Živanović was a physician, a pioneer in the health care of children and mothers in BH, a long-time director of the Institute for Health Care of Mothers and Children in Sarajevo, and one of the leaders of the Yugoslav Women's Rights Movement.

Embodied ambivalence in Taiwan: fat women and gender minorities’ negotiation and subversion of their hyper(in)visibility

ABSTRACT Based upon Jeannine Gailey’s concept of ‘hyper(in)visibility’ of fat women (2014), this article has two goals: (a) to analyse Taiwanese self-identifying fat women and gender minorities’ management and negotiation of their (in)visibility; and (b) to examine the local appropriation of the important international feminist movement that is fat activism in a non-Euro-American context. Drawing upon in-depth conversations with Taiwanese women, fat activists, and gender minorities who self-identify as fat, the findings reveal that they embody a paradoxical hyper(in)visibility. Given their large body size, fat women and gender minorities are hypervisible and their bodies are dissected publicly and privately, while at the same time their corpulent bodies are marginalized and overlooked. Moreover, since the most important criterion determining whether a Taiwanese woman is considered beautiful is thinness, the beauty cult also means a fat-phobic culture within which participants suffer from a dehumanizing gaze. As a result, some fat women choose to enact docile and cute femininity by embodying the figure of a ‘marshmallow girl’, while activists subvert gender and body-size norms and fight for fat acceptance and body diversity. Some activists try to reverse and queer the fat-shaming and abject representational codes and embody fat euphoria momentums.

"I Came Here, and it Got Worse Day by Day": Examining the Intersections Between Migrant Precarity and Family Violence Among Women with Insecure Migration Status in Australia.

While understanding the diversity of women's lived experiences is a key focus area in the international feminist literature on family violence, research with migrant women in Australia remains limited. This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of intersectional feminist scholarship that examines how immigration or "migration status" impacts the dynamics of migrant women's experiences of family violence. The article examines precarity in relation to migrant women's lives in Australia and focuses on the ways that their specific circumstances contribute to and are compounded by the experience of family violence. It also considers how precarity functions as a structural condition that has implications in terms of various forms or patterns of inequality that can heighten women's vulnerability to violence and undermine their efforts to ensure their safety and survival.

‘Knowing’ Palestinian Women: Interrogating Western International Feminist Assumptions, Governance, and Social Science Discourses

This paper traces Palestinian women’s political mobilization for social change emphasizing historical and contemporary involvements in national struggles against colonial occupation and patriarchal oppression. Second, critical Middle Eastern feminists’ analyses, through their attunement to gendered orientalism, unmask a troubling pattern of culturizing categories of violence against women (VAW) within global feminist and human rights discourses. In particular, culturized framings of gender-based violence in the lives of Palestinian women ignores the multiple sources of violence and power of settler colonialism as ongoing everyday realities. Third, I share how social science instruments like the Conflicts Tactics Scale (CTS), criticized by US gender scholars, is widely used as a measure of VAW in the global South. By overestimating interpersonal gender-based violence among Palestinian women, Global feminist discourse and the otherness of women outside the West continue to reciprocally constitute each other. Thus covertlsolidifying global feminist discourse universalistic assumptions in scientific and objective forms.

Daoist feminist leadership for international peace: the case of Jeannette Rankin

ABSTRACT Introducing the concept of Daoist–feminist hybridity to international relations (IR) scholars, this article makes a novel contribution to current debates over global feminism concerning the relevance and attractiveness of feminism in non-Western societies, the need to build transnational feminist solidarities, and the urgent need to decolonize feminism. Drawing upon the Daoist philosophy of Laozi’s Daodejing, which expresses an early and Indigenous form of non-Western feminism, the article constructs a model of Daoist feminist pacifist leadership as illustrated through the case of Jeannette Rankin (1880–1973), an influential women’s suffrage advocate and global peace activist who was the first elected congresswoman in the United States (US) and the only congressional representative to vote against US involvement in both World Wars I and II. As the article demonstrates, Rankin’s unwavering commitment to pacifism not only reflects core values of Daoist philosophy intermeshed with her twentieth-century feminism, but also illustrates the value of empathic engagement between Daoist thought and modern feminism, as making such connections can help to build alliances and partnerships among international feminist peace leaders today in the US, China, and elsewhere.

Feminist approaches to justice: contributions to CSW66. Editors’ introduction

ABSTRACT Our introduction to this special issue explains the background of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and the civil society panels in which these articles were originally presented during CSW66. The articles included are all examples of international feminist criminology, They analyze national and global issues related to women in prison, women in the judiciary and policing, women activists and women victims/survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Our effort in editing this special issue is to connect academic research to the work of United Nations policymakers.

The Contemporary Reception of a Feminist Icon: Translations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in Twenty-First Century Spain

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), is nowadays presented as a foundational text for modern feminism. Its rapid rendering into European languages such as French and German contrasts with the late translation into Spanish, which was not published until 1977. Nevertheless, the twenty-first century has witnessed a renewed interest in the figure of Wollstonecraft and her role as a precursor of the first feminist wave in Europe. Within this framework, this study examines Wollstonecraft’s public reception in Spain through contemporary (re)translations of her work. For this purpose, attention is paid to translations into Spanish and other co-official languages published during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, as well as the author’s public reception in Spanish newspapers. This research, thus, attests to the recent process of recovery of Wollstonecraft’s work in Spain and underscores her iconic role in contemporary local and international feminist discourses.

Doria Shafik: A Staunch Egyptian Feminist Ahead of Her Time—Damnatio Memoriae

Doria Shafik:A Staunch Egyptian Feminist Ahead of Her Time—Damnatio Memoriae Samia I. Spencer (bio) I was getting more and more conscious that Freedom is one entity—Freedom of Women being inseparable from Freedom of the Nation. I was convinced that there would be no free women in an occupied country and no occupied country with free women. Doria Shafik1 I decided to fight to the last drop of blood to break the chains shackling the women of my country in the invisible prison in which they continued to live, a prison, which being invisible, was all the more oppressive. Doria Shafik2 Today, if you ask educated and well-informed Egyptians who is Doria Shafik (1908-1975), no one is likely to know. If you ask the same question of Middle Eastern scholars or international feminists, the great majority will also have no idea. Yet in the middle of the twentieth century, Shafik was a household name in Egypt and beyond, not only as a dashing and controversial figure but, more importantly, as a renowned journalist, published poet and novelist, militant feminist, and political activist. Unlike [End Page 39] her distinguished mentor Huda Shaarawi (1879-1947)—the eminent grande dame of Egyptian and Arab feminism, and founder (1923) of the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU)—whose name has made it into academic circles and textbooks, Shafik has gone from the pinnacle of celebrity to the oubliette of history.3 This article will focus on the consistency of Shafik's principles and action throughout her life, and her unparalleled determination and courage as she sought to achieve equality, freedom, justice, and political rights for Egyptian women. The Early Years (1908-1928) Doria was born at the dawn of the twentieth century, December 14, 1908, when harem life was nearing its end and slavery recently banned (1889) and totally abolished (1904), yet her grandmother still owned two slaves. The third of a brood of six, she grew up in a middle-class Muslim family, her childhood spent between two provincial towns in the Nile Delta: Mansoura, where her father, a civil engineer, worked for the railroad; and Tanta, with her grandmother, to attend Notre Dame des Apôtres, the same French school where her mother was educated. In this conservative environment, the precautious and perceptive child developed the unique aspects of her identity: aesthetics and feminism. A gentle and affectionate daughter, Doria was close to her mother with whom she shared an appreciation for beauty and the arts. Watching the Nile from her window, she bonded with the river, its eternal flow arousing in her a yearning for the absolute and enhancing her predisposition for poetry. Socially, she was surrounded by women: a score of female servants, including her French-speaking Syrian nanny, and numerous relatives, friends, and family members. The conversations they shared and the stories they told raised many questions in the mind of [End Page 40] the bright young girl: Why were boys always more privileged than girls? Why did women resort to witchcraft to have sons, not daughters? Why was she not allowed to go to mosque, but her brothers could? Why did husbands take second wives? Reflecting on her observation of the prejudice, humiliation, and injustice experienced by women, especially within the institution of marriage, she hoped to evade that fate. Early on, the seeds of feminism were rooted in her mind and continued to grow as various events and encounters magnified it. Shortly after the traumatic experience of losing her mother at age thirteen, the teenager went to live with her broadminded and understanding father, whose job had taken him to the port city of Alexandria, Egypt's commercial and financial capital, its most modern and most cosmopolitan center.4 Discovering a different world and starting a distinct chapter of her life, Doria relished a newfound freedom in a vibrant multicultural urban setting. Moving to another French school, Saint Vincent de Paul, she focused on her studies, passing the Brevet national exam—equivalent to ninth grade in the United States—with highest honor. Beyond that level, no secondary education was available for girls.5 Undeterred, Doria and a friend decided to study on...

УЧАСТЬ ЖІНОК У ЗОВНІШНІЙ ТА ВНУТРІШНІЙ ПОЛІТИЦІ В УМОВАХ ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЙ ПОЛІТИЧНИХ РЕЖИМІВ

The article highlights the historical formation of the political status of women. The conditions for their inclusion in the political process were characterized and the issue of discrimination against women in politics was investigated. The methodological principles of the study of the women’s issue in politics, taking into account the national specifics, have been determined. The mechanisms of strengthening the political role of women are analyzed. The article attempts to explain the growth of gender norms and feminist strategies in domestic and foreign policy. In order to address these main research questions and stimulate cross-national comparative studies, this article proposes theoretical foundations for defining gender foreign policy. They are based on two directions: international feminist theory and foreign policy analysis. Researchers single out three methods by which a comparative analysis of gender in domestic and foreign policy can be carried out: by distinguishing variations of pro-gender norms and analytical assessment of international trends; by explaining the growth, as well as countering gender norms in foreign policy; by studying the sequence of changes in gender norms to reveal contradictions in foreign policy.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

A feminist climate policy? Examining Canada’s climate commitments

ABSTRACT The Canadian government recently oriented its foreign policy in a ‘feminist’ direction, including the launch of Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP). At the same time, the Trudeau government has also reoriented Canada’s efforts to address climate change, ratifying the Paris Agreement in 2016. This article reviews Canada’s Paris Agreement commitments, formalized in Canada’s Nationally Determined Contributions and National Communications, through the lens of feminist analysis. While Canada has made significant efforts to mainstream gender into its climate commitments, these commitments emphasize a focus on women in the Global South and the reinforcement of common assumptions about women, climate change and development. In doing so, Canada’s efforts to integrate gender into its global climate commitments overlook the realities of gender and climate change in the Global North, as well as areas in which feminist analysis is needed, specifically in technological development and strategies to mitigate climate change.

Feminist International Assistance Policy Kanada: Studi Kasus Bantuan CFLI untuk Jakarta Feminist 2017–2021

This article aims to analyze the assistance provided by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives to the Jakarta Feminist in the 2017-2021 period as one of the proofs that Canada's Feminist International Assistance Policy has so far been running smoothly. In addition, this article also aims to correct the misunderstandings of foreign policy observers regarding FIAP as a feminist foreign policy. FIAP has so far only used elements of Liberal Feminism as a lens of observation to focus on their foreign aid agenda to achieve a safe, inclusive, and prosperous world development. Therefore, this article argues that FIAP does contain elements of Feminism but focuses more on assisting non-profit organizations in developing countries, one of which is Indonesia. By using a descriptive qualitative research method that processes primary and secondary data from personal interviews and literature review, this article finds that CFLI, under the auspices of FIAP, has been successful in assisting the Jakarta Feminist in 2017-2021 and has also managed to reveal that FIAP is not a feminist foreign policy. FIAP oversees several foreign aid programs initiated by Canada for developing countries, one of which is CFLI.

Baroness Alexandra Gripenberg and the International Council of Women: the Finnish feminist's international success and national adversity, 1888–1911

ABSTRACT In 1911, Finland became one of the last northern European countries to join the ICW. The formation of a national chapter was preceded by an almost twenty-five-year crusade by one woman, Baroness Alexandra Gripenberg, who was the most internationally recognised Finnish feminist of her time. By focusing on her correspondence, this article sheds light on an important chapter in the history of international feminism in Finland. It discusses Gripenberg's successful career in the ICW from the 1880s and her national attempts to gather the various women's movements under one umbrella organisation that would be eligible for the full membership of the ICW. The article also suggests that universal suffrage in 1906 had an ambivalent impact on women's organising in Finland: as women's activism was channelled into political parties, the Finnish women's rights organisations lost some of their previous appeal.

Wages for Housework: The Marxist-Feminist Case for Basic Income

This article explores the Marxist-feminist critique of capitalism of the International Feminist Collective (IFC) of the1970s and its Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign. WfH theorists, including Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Marie Mies and Claudia von Werlhof, combine Marxist and feminist perspectives to articulate a compelling critique of capitalism designed to unite the entire working class, including both waged and unwaged workers. I argue that, despite the movement’s seemingly narrower slogan, the WfH demand was an implicit argument for an unconditional, individual, and universal basic income. Like other historical precedents of contemporary basic income movements, the WfH campaign was unsuccessful in achieving its policy goal. Despite its failure, its identification of unwaged housewives as workers, its extension of the concept of the housewife to precarious workers in the globalized economy, and its identification of the strategic deficiencies of mainstream working class and feminist movements are critical to contextualizing contemporary debates on basic income and to the development of successful strategies for contemporary working class movements.

Atomic aesthetics: gender, visualization and popular culture in Egypt

Abstract How was the atomic age visualized in Egypt in the years immediately after the creation of the bomb? What role did gendered images, symbols and metaphors play in narrating and normalizing nuclear technology? How can these help us understand nuclear policy today? This article engages visual and textual media, including satirical magazines, cultural journals and film. It presents a plurality of images: the depiction of the bomb as an egg, as a miniscule and aesthetically pleasing object, alongside more alarming illustrations of the bomb as a monster. Through fluid and unstable visualizations, nationalist modernizers highlighted the ambivalence of nuclear technology, seen as containing potential for postcolonial rebirth and global death simultaneously. By exploring nuclear imaginaries from the decolonizing world, the article challenges the dominant narratives, histories and aesthetics of the atomic age. Despite the continuous reiteration of nuclear weapons as masculine in feminist International Relations, this conceptualization is not necessarily universal, and this research illustrates that feminizing nuclear imagery can still reinforce the nuclearized world. Considering visualization from, and not only of, the global South, the article emphasizes that people in non-nuclear weapons-possessing states also participated in the production of the nuclear-armed world and in discussions on the nuclear condition.

Rethinking global nuclear politics, rethinking feminism

Abstract This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, ‘Feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics’. In this article, we argue that feminist International Relations scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that reckon more fully with the colonial matrix of power and its contemporary realignments. As the initial step in such a task, the first part of the article explores some of the distinctive insights that are generated about global nuclear politics by a feminist approach that takes coloniality seriously. We show that such an approach reconceptualizes nuclear destruction as a lived reality for many, within a broader history of domination; exposes the racialized, gendered and colonial dimensions of nuclear discourses; and casts fresh light on the material colonial relationships at the heart of the global nuclear order. In the second part, we reverse our focus to critically think through how the content of feminism, and its relation to coloniality and struggles for self-determination, might be understood differently if we start from a concern with global nuclear politics. The third and final part surveys the articles in the special section, highlighting where they pick up on the themes we have explored and some future lines of enquiry.

Women’s houses in the Basque country: political, cultural and bodily laboratories of feminism

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the key characteristics of the Women’s Houses in the Basque Country and how they are run. These municipal centres are promoted by the feminist movement in close collaboration with local institutions and are part of the long international feminist tradition of creating spaces specifically for women. The Houses run a diverse range of programmes and offer legal, employment and sexual health counselling services and other targeted support for precarious groups. The central point of this article is that these spaces are laboratories in which activity related to politics, training and support services influences the recomposition of the political subjectivities of the people who participate in them. Another key and distinctive aspect is the particular interrelationships found in the Houses between the institutionalist rationale coming out of the politics of equality and the rupturist rationale of movements like the feminist movement. Furthermore, different groups of feminist women (members of associations or institutions, professionals and researchers) co-exist in the Houses, which contributes to the horizontality of the relationships. Nevertheless, these aspects are not free of tensions, a point that will also be analysed here.

International Feminist Movements and Battered Women’s Shelters in Pakistan

International Feminist Movements and Battered Women’s Shelters in Pakistan

We want ourselves alive and debt free!

Verónica Gago is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and author of Neoliberalism From Below (Duke 2017); Feminist International: How to Change Everything (Verso 2020); and, with Lucí Cavallero, A Feminist Theory of Debt (Pluto, 2021). She is an active member of the grassroots feminist movement Ni Una Menos, founded by a group of artists, activists and academics in Argentina. Ni Una Menos has described itself as a 'collective scream against machista violence'. It has regularly held protests against femicides, and has connected femicide to a range of other issues, including sexual harassment, abortion and reproductive rights, transgender and sex worker rights, the gender pay gap, gender roles, neoliberalism and debt. Its first demonstration was organised in the wake of a 14-year old pregnant girl, Chiara Paez, being beaten to death by her boyfriend, in Buenos Aires in 2015. This brought together 200,000 people. In 2016 the movement came to wider attention on social media through the hashtag #NiUnaMenos, and protests spread throughout Latin America, particularly in Chile, Uruguay and Peru, where it prompted what has been described as the largest demonstration in Peruvian history. In 2016 Ni Una Menos launched a national women's strike. After sustained campaigning, in 2020 abortion became legal in Argentina; and in 2021 a law was passed giving employment rights to travestis and trans people. Its campaigns to reclaim rights and resources continue. In this interview, conducted in July 2021, Jo Littler talks to Verónica Gago about Ni Una Menos, her work and activism.

Global Racism and International Publishing

Global Racism and International Publishing Kwok Pui-lan (bio) George Floyd’s murder sparked protests globally as protesters connected the Black Lives Matter movement to racial oppression in their own contexts. As I am writing this in the final days of US evacuation from Afghanistan, I am concerned that Islamophobia will rear its ugly head in the future fight against the Taliban and the resettlement of Afghan refugees in the world. I appreciate Judith Plaskow’s insightful, self-critical reflection on racism and Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR) and her tenacity to stay in dialogue even when the conversation became personal and painful. But she has left out the dimension of global racism and feminist publishing. Even as she points out that the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR) remains a largely white Christian enterprise, she fails to interrogate that it is a US-dominated white Christian enterprise. As a former coeditor of JFSR (2000–2005), I want to reflect on the challenges of global racism in knowledge production and publishing. It would be myopic to reflect on racism and JFSR only from the US context. JFSR was founded in 1985, at a time when feminist and womanist religious scholarship gathered momentum globally. Asian feminist theology began in the late 1970s and the journal In God’s Image launched in 1982. The Womanist Approach to Religion and Society group at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) was formed in 1985. The AAR’s Native Traditions in the Americas group was formed in 1987.1 In Africa and Latin America, feminist religious networks also began. For example, the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians was founded in 1989 and published numerous books. In Latin America, the ecofeminist theology and spirituality group Con-spirando was formed in 1991 and publishes a widely read journal. [End Page 19] JFSR supports and promotes international feminist religious scholarship. The editorial board has international scholars; an international board was formed to encourage foreign submissions and networking. As a premier feminist journal, JFSR appeals to international feminist scholars, some of whom would find it prestigious to publish in an American journal. So, why is it difficult to publish more articles by female scholars from the global South? This issue was discussed in some of our editorial board meetings. People said international authors did not know the logistics of writing for an American journal. Reviewers of international submissions said the authors did not reference representative or latest works on the topic (their libraries may not have had these books). Some remarked that these submissions seemed more fit for the Living It Out or Roundtable sections. Even as we encourage board members to solicit international submissions, it would take much time for them to “coach” the authors to make their pieces publishable. This is doubly taxing for board members of color, who are already overstretched. As a coeditor of the journal, I devoted much time to overseeing the editing and proofreading processes, as the journal did not have a paid staff. Instead, we relied on student help and volunteers. This was on top of my full-time job, with no course relief. The editorial team worked constantly under pressure. I worried about meeting the deadlines for each issue and did not have the luxury of thinking about long-term planning or expanding international networks. Thus, we cannot assume that if we have women of color as JFSR’s coeditors or serving on the editorial board, we will increase publications by women of color or women from the global South. The problems are more systemic. As a feminist peer-reviewed journal, are we subscribing to the academic and publishing standards defined largely by the white academy? Do we understand feminist work if it is not done according to the protocols of research methods conceived and developed largely by white scholars? What is allowed as data using these methods and what is concealed? Are we using the master’s tools, only adding a feminist twist? What new feminist research methods in religion have we developed? Can women in the global South be theorists, and not merely providers of data or stories to be incorporated into the theories originating in the...