Feminist Issues Research Articles

I Prefer a World without Men: A Study of Language, Gender and Power in Women Writers of South Asia

This essay investigates the multiple issues of feminism’s combat with the triple P’s, phallocentric disposition, patriarchal authority, and the paterfamilias. Researchers propose to apply the Theory of Community of Practice to the feminism writings by selecting three short stories of female writers. Researcher’s primary text includes Banana Yoshimoto’s Newlywed from Japan; Ding Ling’s When I was in Xia village from China and Krys Lee’s Temporary Marriage from Korea. After analyzing the domain of language, power and gender and also exploring the community of practice theory, Researcher dig out that the three aspects in researcher research area overlap and complement each other. The gender or the community in general contributes the other gender to accept its practices. The negligence, rebel or protest result in personal isolation and rebuke from society in general. But, exceptions do arise and mark themselves according to their capacity. A remedy is possible when all the lingering threads of language, power and gender and community practices are knitted in a harmonized pattern of social and linguistic applications. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2015.v5n2p223

How “your hands look” and “what they can do”

Women use the #ManicureMonday Twitter hashtag to educate people about hand and nail care, share their nail art and expertise, and look at various hands. Beginning in 2013, the scientist Hope Jahren organized a hashtag hijacking in which scientists who were not in control of or associated with #ManicureMonday disrupted individuals' collaborative conversations about manicures, tried to educate participants, and expressed the scientists' values and interests. The scientists argued that what women's hands do is more important than how they look and that women and their manicured hands are constructed as passive objects on the Twitter feed. Jahren and these other scientists have identified Twitter as useful for their conversations about science and extended their own social capital by microblogging. They also use Twitter as a way to instruct women about objectification and other feminist issues and to intervene in women's interest in their nails, which these scientists believe is frivolous and disempowering. In this article, I address the diverse ways in which these ideas of usefulness, useful media, instruction, and social capital are articulated through #ManicureMonday by performing a close textual analysis of the manicure tweets and the hashtag hijacking. My reading is based on the relationship among feminist inquiries about viewing positions and objectification, the literature on useful media, and conceptions of social capital. I argue that we need to attend to the ways the #ManicureMonday hijacking and other instances of media education may not be useful for all participants.

Whitesel, J. Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma, New York: New York University Press. 2014. 192pp. £13.99 ISBN 978–0814724125

For many years, the debate whether ‘fat is a feminist issue' has been, understandably, at the heart of the discipline of fat studies. Yet recently there have been monographs by scholars such as Lee Monaghan and Sander Gilman that have been devoted to the consideration of masculinity and fat. Whitesel's research monograph now broadens these debates to address the issue faced by men who identify both as fat and gay. To identify as fat in contemporary Western culture is extremely difficult when nearly all media and cultural discourses exalt thinness and gym-toned muscularity. Fat prejudice (if not even fat phobia) continues to be a problem in many cultural and social settings despite advancements in fat acceptance politics. However, in the body fascist ‘no pecs; no sex’ world of metropolitan gay masculinity it is, arguably, even more challenging to identify as fat. Whitesel emphasises that fat gay men face a double exclusion – first from heteronormative culture and then, because of their size, exclusion from within gay culture itself. As such, fat gay men are ‘a subaltern within the subaltern’ (p. 2). Attempting to challenge these prejudices are a number of support and social groups in metropolitan gay culture and Whitesel's ethnographic study, drawing upon interviews and in-depth field notes, analyses the politics of one such group: Girth & Mirth. Whitesel's highly accessible book begins with an overview of the history of Girth & Mirth and shows how this organisation functions as both a social club and support network for fat gay men. The second chapter examines the bullying that fat gay men often experience and chapters 3 and 4 then consider how Girth & Mirth events attempt to challenge and subvert the strategies of oppression that these men may have suffered. Whitesel engages in detailed analyses of the events that Girth & Mirth organise, including the Super Weekend in which fat gay men redefine themselves as sex objects rather than abject bodies of derision, and Convergence, which aims to challenge issues of class stereotyping usually associated with larger bodies. The final chapter addresses an important issue within queer studies: shame. Can fat gay men address the stigma of fat through strategies of carnivalesque and camp and what do these strategies do to a body's sexualised identification? Fat Gay Men is one of the first sustained studies of the politics of fat, gay male embodiment in metropolitan Western culture. Although it is an academic monograph, Whitesel's accessible, lively writing style – and command of the critical material – would also make it an excellent text for undergraduate teaching. Each chapter is underpinned by relevant cultural theory but never falls into the trap of recycling academic jargon. Throughout every chapter it is evident that the analyses are never simply abstract theories but are informed by the lived experience of larger gay men. One slight disappointment is that the reader may have appreciated some comparative analysis to consider the differences and similarities between fat, gay men and their heterosexual (male and female) counterparts, but the book stops a little short of doing this. However, a consideration of Western fatness is not the book's remit and instead Fat Gay Men should be appreciated for its detailed and nuanced investigation into subcultural identifications and performances, which may well be unfamiliar issues to many scholars. Even queer-identifying readers may not have been aware of the political efforts that fat gay men need to make in their fight for equality within gay culture itself. The struggle fat gay men may face in order to identify not only in terms of sexual desirability but simply for the right not to apologise for being oversized is brought to the foreground of the debate in every chapter. Whitesel's own emotional investment in the politics of this group is extremely engaging and infectious and so all readers, whether gay, straight, fat or thin, should feel they are not simply reading about the subcultural activities organised by Girth & Mirth but instead recognise and relate to this narrative of struggle on the road to acceptance.

VII. Our place in history: Young feminists at the margins

Feminisms in Portugal, as elsewhere, have been shaped historically. From the revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which ended monarchy and established a republican system, women have taken a stand. In the late 1970s, after 48 years of dictatorship during which feminist issues were effectively silenced, feminist groups began to appear in Portugal. It was then, in 1976, that UMAR (Uniao de Mulheres Alternativa e Resposta [‘Union of Women for Alternatives and Answers’]) began its fight against discrimination and violence against women. While the issues that UMAR addressed were relevant throughout the country, their initiatives did not always reach all of the regions of Portugal. In 2008, with the intention of overcoming this deficiency, as well as engaging with contemporary debates on feminism, we joined a group of young women to create an UMAR regional core in Braga, in the north of Portugal. In a clearly conservative region, our group stood out; creating unique dynamics that nevertheless echoed with the historical memory of earlier feminists. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to

The subject of rape: Feminist discourses on rape and violability in contemporary France

Rape is a tricky issue for feminists, not least because it poses the problem of how to protect women as violable embodied subjects without assuming a mind/body separation that goes against the contemporary conceptualisation of the embodied subject. This article explores this tension in feminist discourses in France in the 1970s and uses Luce Irigaray’s radical reconsideration of the embodied subject as intrinsically violable and relational in Democracy Begins Between Two to explore alternative models of rape and violability in twenty-first-century France. Analysis of recent rape testimonies, including but not exclusively those recounting the highly mediatised phenomenon of the tournantes, challenges prevailing feminist conceptions of rape ‘victims’ and of an autonomous violable subject. This article mobilises the image of the scar as configured in the rape testimonies in order to rethink (feminist) responses to rape more productively and more openly through acknowledgement of (bodily) violability as the site of potential dialogue and resistance.

Physical Strength and Politico-Economic Attitudes: An Attempt to Replicate

Background. According to two recent studies, upper-body strength and muscularity are positively associated with opposition to economic redistribution policies, at least among high status males. The findings were interpreted as indicating that at least in the evolutionary past males who were physically strong were favored for harboring more self-serving resource-procuring policies, while weaker males were favored for supporting more equitable procuring policies. We sought to replicate and extend these findings. Methods. Using archival data, the present study analyzed questionnaire data from over eleven thousand U.S. and Canadian college students who were asked questions about both their physical strength and attitudes toward human equality. Results. Findings failed to confirm that an inverse association exists between physical strength and attitudes toward economic distribution. In fact, the associations between equality attitudes and physical strength were predominantly positive among both males and females, with the exception of pro-feminist attitudes. In this latter case, physically weaker males expressed the greatest pro-feminist attitudes while the opposite pattern was found among females. When statistical controls were imposed for parental social status, most of the positive correlations between equality attitudes were made slightly weaker. We also included measures of self-reported intelligence and intellectual interests and found these too to be positively associated with support for economic equality (but mixed results regarding feminist issues). Conclusions. The present results suggests that physically stronger (and more intellectually-oriented) individuals are generally more (not less) supportive of efforts to increase politico-economic equality.

Zur (Un-)Möglichkeit von Solidarität und Bündnis zwischen Frauenbewegungen in der Türkei

The critics on the category of gender as it is ref lected in poststructural and postcolonial theory as well as in identity politics of new social movements is not only a ›western‹ phenomenon but comes also to existence in Turkey, as an echo of universal questioning of collective subjects of women’s movements. Concordantly the struggle for gender equality in Turkey gets critical interventions by women from various backgrounds, with different identity positionings and differentiations. Even both the structural discrimination and violence against women are unifying components for activists, topics like the dealing with diversity, possibility of solidary actions and building alliances are vital to discuss. This discussion paper aims to shed light on the understanding of the concepts of solidarity and alliance by activists of women’s movements in Turkey. By taking the historical background of women’s movements in Turkey into consideration and exemplifying women’s platforms or cooperatives the paper tries to tackle the strategies for productive and constructive approaches which might be developed by recognition of differences and enable new solidarity and alliance possibilities for the sake of feminist issues. The discussion paper is based on field researches in the frame of an empirical field-research project on »Comparing women’s movements in different cities in Turkey« conducted at Bremen University.

Feminist identity, collective action, and individual resistance among contemporary U.S. feminists

Synopsis This article examines the relationship between feminist identities and engagement with feminist activism in everyday life, including collective action and individual resistance. I draw on in-depth interviews with women and men in knitting communities, which some have identified as part of contemporary feminist culture. I found variety in feminist identities, including those who identified publicly as feminists and those who identified as feminists only privately. Other participants held postfeminist positions, represented by support for feminist issues but declining a feminist identity. I found that feminist identity was inconsistently associated with feminist activism. Participants with public feminist identities, with definitions of feminism that drew on discourses of equality (rather than choice), and those with broader knowledge of feminist issues were more likely to be engaged with feminist activism. In defining activism, participants put significant emphasis on individual resistance or everyday feminism.

Dancing with an Illegitimate Feminism: A Female Buginese Scholar’s Voice in Australian Academia

Dancing with an Illegitimate Feminism: A Female Buginese Scholar’s Voice in Australian Academia

Feminism and Gay Liberation: Together in Struggle

The thesis of this Essay is that any successful movement for equality — indeed, any movement for freedom — for gay people needs the insights and theories of feminism for sustenance and for flourishing. Drawing heavily on the work of radical feminist scholar Ann Scales, and with special emphasis on the importance of feminism to the lives and political aspirations of gay men, the Essay compares the theoretical matrices of feminist legal theory and queer legal theory. By exploring the relevance of issues generally thought of as “feminist issues,” such as pornography and abortion to gay men’s lives, the Essay shows that, rather than abandon feminism as much of queer theory suggests, gay men — and all LGBT people — should embrace feminism as a fundamental component of an ethical movement toward substantive, social, and legal equality.

Feminist issues in domestic and transnational surrogacy: The case of Japan

I consider how a feminist account might address the practice of surrogacy in Japan, both domestically and in the transnational context. Japanese culture emphasizes traditional values, family heritage, and the value of reproduction. Japan offers an interesting case study, since surrogacy is currently under review, and the government is in the process of determining its stance on the practice. I will advocate for legal changes to how surrogacy is treated, suggesting that Japan should eliminate the koseki, or the Family Registration Act, which stipulates that only birth parents may register children as their natural children. A principle of respect for women should be explicitly adopted in setting regulations or guidelines surrounding this practice; additionally, attempts should be made to address citizens’ reproductive needs domestically, thus reducing the global demand for these arrangements.

Subaltern Feminisms: Rethinking Politics, Praxis, and Theory from the Margins

Subaltern Feminisms:Rethinking Politics, Praxis, and Theory from the Margins Sanjam Ahluwalia (bio) Setsu Shigematsu. Screams From the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 271 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8166-6759-8 (pb). Mina Roces. Women’s Movements and the Filipina, 1986-2008. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012. 277 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8248-3499-9 (cl). Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose, eds. South Asian Feminisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 422 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8223-5179-5 (pb). The books under review enrich the global component within feminist scholarship, centering non-western histories, struggles, and debates on issues of gender, sexuality, reproduction, violence, religion, nation, globalization, trafficking, imperialism, and neo-liberalism. Reflecting the intellectual and political vibrancy of feminist scholarship on, from, and about Asia and its connections with the wider world, Roces’s and Shigematsu’s monographs focus on the Philippines and Japan, while Loomba and Lukose’s volume concentrates on the South Asian countries of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Each of these studies refuses the ahistoricity of the linear model of “waves” dominant within western feminist thought, highlighting instead the intellectual and political energies that have galvanized feminist theorizing and actions within the non-Atlantic-centered margins. They also demonstrate the impossibility of grasping historical experiences of and from the margins through a template derived from a universalized western location. By focusing on the indigeneity of feminist thought within non-western locations, these texts present alternatives to the provincial and reified articulations of gender within dominant Euro-Anglo-American feminisms. As a non-western “first world” capitalist economy, Japan occupies a particular positionality of “in-betweenness.” While Japan is a dominant player in Asia, its non-white and non-western status marks its socio-cultural marginality within the larger geopolitical arena. Shigematsu’s monograph on Uman ribu, the Japanese women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, foregrounds Japan’s in-betweenness while also globalizing the history of feminisms. In tracing ribu’s genealogies, fissures, and contradictions, Shigematsu [End Page 186] deploys “a kind of transdisciplinary and translocational” approach (xviii). Japanese feminists, Shigematsu argues, did not operate exclusively within the insular intellectual and political boundaries of the nation. Ribu’s radical feminism is situated within an interlocking scalar framework, where its “Japaneseness” does not necessarily mean relinquishing its “multiplicity of origins and points of connections, within and beyond the nation” (xxvi). In Shigematsu’s reading of radical feminist politics via a Japanese lens, the dominant Anglo-American script of feminist theorizing is effectively defamiliarized. Such Japanese theorists of radical feminism as Tanaka Mitsu are not simplistically presented as mere additions to our historical cast, though that contribution is not insignificant given how often non-western thinkers remain invisible within the western feminist canon. Focusing on Tanaka Mitsu and her contemporaries, Shigematsu pushes open the range of gender, sexual, and political issues impacting women in non-western locations. In the innovative resolutions, strategies, and articulations Japanese women furnished to address feminist issues, they drew from and negotiated their localized histories and experiences, which in turn unfolded within an interconnected world. Urban bourgeois Japanese feminists in the 1960s and 1970s organized around issues of women’s sexuality, reproduction, violence, imperialism, and left-wing politics. The “Liberation of the Toilet,” or the manifesto of the ribu women, through its “explicit, sexual, and vulgar language,” simultaneously sought to politicize sexualized subjectivities of Japanese housewives and comfort women. The manifesto declared: “The chastity of the wives of the military nation and the dirtied pussies of the ‘comfort women’ are both two extremes of a structure of consciousness that denies sex” (18). Ribu politics were sharply attuned to recognize the ideological loops that connected the romanticized and idealized national constructions of the peace-loving Japanese mother with state-sanctioned sexual aggression against other colonized Asian women (19). Ribu activism and theory unpacked the overlapping and tangled organizational logic of patriarchal power structured along axes of sexuality, reproduction, and imperialism. The ribu’s slogan on women’s procreative capacities called for “the creation of a society where we want to give birth.” Ribu women were seeking a wider socio-cultural transformation...

A Black Feminist Statement

A Black Feminist Statement The Combahee River Collective We are a collective of black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974.1 During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. We will discuss four major topics in the paper that follows: (1) The genesis of contemporary black feminism; (2) what we believe, i.e., the specific province of our politics; (3) the problems in organizing black feminists, including a brief herstory of our collective; and (4) black feminist issues and practice. 1. The Genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism Before looking at the recent development of black feminism, we would like to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women’s continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. Black women’s extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule) has always been determined by our [End Page 271] membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes. As Angela Y. Davis points out in “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways. There have always been black women activists—some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown—who had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique. Contemporary black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters. A black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American women’s movement beginning in the late 1960s. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. In 1973 black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate black feminist group. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of us were active in those movements (civil rights, black nationalism, the Black Panthers), and all of our lives were greatly affected and changed by their ideology, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and antisexist, unlike those of black and white men. There is also undeniably a personal genesis for black feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual black women’s lives. Black feminists and many more black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence. Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule, and, most importantly, feminism, the political analysis and practice that [End Page 272] we women use to struggle...

Rereading Dam Street in the Chinese Cultural Context

As an emerging film director, Yu Li has yet to be recognized by the international academic critics. By examining Hongyan/Dam Street in the Chinese cultural context with the assistance of analyzing scenes in detail and the film’s visual style, this article argues that the film illustrates the protagonist Xiaoyun is stuck between traditions and modernity, providing a sophisticated insight to an important feminist issue. The reading of the traditions involves chastity code, the image of a rouge face which is the translation of the film’s Chinese title, the Chinese four-character idioms, the time-honoured terms, the development of feminism, and the characteristics of the modernity in China. The perversity of the modernity originates from the social commercialization. Prejudices from the traditions and the modernity leave little space for women to settle in.

(Des)fazer corpo, (re)fazer teoria: um balanço da produção acadêmica nas ciências humanas e sociais sobre intersexualidade e sua articulação com a produção latino-americana

A produção acadêmica brasileira sobre intersexualidade no campo da antropologia em particular, mas também nas Ciências Humanas e Sociais, é ainda tímida, embora se possa observar seu crescimento nos últimos anos. De forma geral, os trabalhos tomam a perspectiva feminista como referencial para as análises. Neste artigo, será indicada uma espécie de caminho teórico e também político que pode ser traçado entre as questões feministas, mais especificamente ligadas ao campo dos estudos da ciência, e a intersexualidade. Serão abordados alguns aspectos da recente produção acadêmica latino-americana, nas Ciências Humanas e Sociais sobre intersexualidade, apontando para determinadas particularidades da constituição desse campo nesse contexto. Trata-se, assim, de um breve e não exaustivo balanço sobre essas produções na América Latina e o modo como essa também é uma história que começa a ser escrita, bem como articulada e somada às discussões sobre antropologia, gênero e sexualidade no Brasil.

ISSUES OF FEMINISME IN THE PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY AS PORTRAYED IN ANANTA TOER’S “THE GIRL FROM THE COAST”

This article revolves around the issues of feminism in a novel. Issues of feminism are interesting to analyze because they have been leading issues in many societies. There are two problems addressed, namely what issues of feminism are and how the main character reacts to her condition in the novel. Marxist and feminism theories are used to analyze the position of the main character. Results indicate the girl’s tiresome yet fruitless struggle against the patriarchal oppressions in her unequal marriage and there is no victory for a woman except she is willing to leave her life behind. The novel is suitable for use in literature and also good for reading activities in an intermediate to advanced English class

Disability Is a Feminist Issue: Bringing Together Women’s and Gender Studies and Disability Studies

This paper tracks a series of conversations between a women's and gender studies professor and two of her undergraduate students, all of whom are interested in disability studies. We explore the links between disability and feminism, and to think through the possibilities of having disability studies become part of the academy. Our primarily positive interactions with the academic institution and our interest in disability studies has led to our argument that disability is in fact a feminist issue. Disability studies has allowed each of us to re-conceptualize our own relationships to feminist theory, and shaped our ability to envision a better academic environment for all students. Keywords: feminist disability studies, intersectionality, pedagogy, mental disability

“Mother Ireland, get off our backs”: Gender, Republicanism and State Politics in Prison Short Stories by Northern Irish Women Writers

The dominant discourses of incarceration in Northern Ireland, those of the republicans and the British state, have been mainly male-centred. Like in other public discourses of the Troubles, women have had little part in these narratives which either omi[t] the experiences and actions of women or se[e] those experiences and actions as fundamentally undifferentiated from the actions and motivations of men in their communities (McAuliffe 2010: 171). A number of academics, however, have looked at incarceration from an alternative perspective in which gender interlink[s] with these powerful and competing 'constructions' of the same (McAuliffe 2010: 171). Elizabeth Shannon's I Am of Ireland (1989) and Eileen Fairweather et al.'s Only the Rivers Run Free (1984) explore the Troubles through interviews with women from different social, political and religious backgrounds. These feminist studies cover a wide range of issues and although imprisonment is one of them, they only discuss it in some sections. On the contrary, Megan Sullivan's Women in Northern Ireland focuses entirely on the topic of incarceration. She examines its cultural representations in female non-fictional, film and literary narratives, but she does not include short fiction as part of those literary narratives. Other academics have focused exclusively on women's direct experiences of imprisonment. Nell McCafferty, a feminist journalist who was a delegate of the Armagh Prisoners' Solidarity Committee, published The Armagh Women in 1981, the year in which the prison protests culminated with the second hunger strike. Her book seems factual but it has a feminist agenda. McCafferty centres on the idea that nationalism is a feminist issue, an opinion to which many feminists were hostile. Similarly, in her article It Is My Belief That Armagh Is a Feminist Issue she urges the women's movement to support Armagh prisoners on the basis that their struggle is a feminist matter. Margaret D'Arcy's Tell Them Everything was published the same year as The Armagh Women and has similar feminist objectives. D'Arcy, a feminist playwright with a strongly republican family background, (2) spent three months in Armagh Jail for refusing to pay a fine for demonstrating outside Armagh Jail on International Women's Day. Tell Them Everything is an account of her time in Armagh with the republican women on no-wash protest. Despite the republican prisoners' request to 'tell everything' when she was released, D'Arcy failed to put them on centre stage. Her account is self-centred and extremely subjective as she talks about her own experience rather than the experiences of the prisoners. Her deliberate efforts to enter Armagh and be moved to A Wing as well as her determination to fit in and participate in the protest make us have reservations about her neutrality. References to romantic notions of Irish nationalism (claims of unconditional solidarity, the use of terms such as revolutionaries and young warriors or allusions to to Celtic mythological figures) also evidence lack of impartiality in her supposedly factual account. Mary Corcoran, on the other hand, has published factual and detached research about female political prisoners. (3) Her study Out of Order (2006), the most comprehensive research on this matter to date, combines theory, history and sociology in order to analyse political imprisonment for women in Northern Ireland at different stages of the Troubles. The shortcoming with factual narrations like this, however, is that they cannot provide new avenues of understanding female imprisonment because they can only adhere to facts. The nature of creative writing enables to explore subject-matters at a deeper psychological level. Although the studies mentioned above have been vital to acknowledge the experiences of Northern Irish women with regards to incarceration, I believe that the short stories analysed in this article manage to throw new light on this socio-political phenomenon. …

Diffusion de la recherche féministe dans les Amériques. Émergence, construction et consolidation d’un champ disciplinaire : Le concept de genre dans la revue Feminist Studies (1972-2013)

The journals disseminating Feminist Research are communication channels needed for sharing, questioning, confrontation and consolidation of knowledge on women and on social gender relations, of theoretical underpinnings and of the political scope. Since the publication of the first issues of Feminist Studies (1972), of Women’s Studies : An Interdisciplinary Journal (1972) and among others of the still current journal Signs (1975), the Association of College & Research Librairies listed, for 2008, about forty journals in the Women and Gender Studies section; these journals contributed to the continuity and transformations of Feminist Studies in the Americas. The issues addressed, the authors’ background, for more than 40 years, contributed to establishing the credibility of feminist issues on scientific bases. These publications are obviously in English and are excluded from this list South American and Mexican journals, including the excellent Brazilian journal Revista Estudos Feminista (1992), publishing in Spanish and in Portuguese, and the Quebec and Francophone journal Recherches feministes (1987), that have to be added to reflect the diversity of themes and approaches and provide an overview of the evolution of the field in the Americas.

Feminist Scholarship: Cross-Disciplinary Connections for Cultivating a Critical Perspective in Kinesiology

Kinesiology has not been a particularly inviting space for feminist critical analysis. In this article, as a graduate student in the field, I argue that feminist scholarship from women and gender studies can be applied to kinesiology issues to promote a critical perspective that is often missing in kinesiology. I draw connections between feminist scholarship and issues related to gender, race, sexuality, and their intersections within sport and physical activity space, which is a central focus of kinesiology research and practice. These interdisciplinary connections can move kinesiology toward developing a critical approach to sport studies and kinesiology-related scholarship.