Feminist Knowledge Research Articles

The Role of Translation in Disseminating Feminist Thought in Telugu Context

This paper studies the role of intermediary agencies in translating global feminist knowledge into the Telugu1 context. Identifying translators, organisations, publishing houses and magazines as such agencies, it offers an analysis of the function of this feminist thought. The study discusses the ideologies of agents in using translation as a political instrument to construct feminist discourse in the Telugu context. While demonstrating how translation was used as a transmitter for the circulation of feminist ideas, it gauges the influence of global feminist thinking on Telugu feminist translators, writers and activists. It also throws light on the opposition met in translating feminist ideas into Telugu, intellectual efforts and the resistance provided by the feminist translators, writers, activists and publishers as agents of social change to make feminist translation work relevant in the Telugu context.

Influence and expertise: distancing and distinction in online youth feminist knowledge cultures

ABSTRACT In recent years, feminism’s visibility in Western pop culture and social media has seemingly made it ever more accessible for young people (Banet-Weiser, S. 2019. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). This article uses the framework of youth ‘knowledge cultures’ to analyse how feminist knowledge is negotiated and remade in online culture, going beyond characterisations of online feminism primarily in terms of either ‘activism’, or the linear ‘accessing’ of feminist ideas. Drawing on an ongoing empirical project located in Australia involving 50 young feminists who regularly engage with feminist social media culture, we highlight participants’ affective practices of analysis and critique in connection with three Australian feminist ‘influencers’ with significant social media presences: Clementine Ford, a white columnist and memoirist; Abbie Chatfield, a white former Bachelor contestant, now podcaster and TV personality; and Lillian Ahenkan aka Flex Mami, a Black entrepreneur, and podcaster. We highlight how practices of distancing and proximity are enacted by participants in affective knowledge practices in relation to these influencers. We suggest the framework of ‘accessibility’ that predominates in scholarship obscures the complex classed, racialised and gendered dynamics through which knowledge is hierarchically made, contested, and accorded legitimacy in social media knowledge cultures.

Fictions, Frictions and Fragments: Reflections on Feminist Futures of Research

ABSTRACT Building on critiques of ‘traditional’ fieldwork methods that not only reproduce masculinist and imperialist epistemes but also circumscribe possibilities of what can be studied and by whom, this article unpacks what it might mean to study the global North from the global South. My research focuses on the figure of the Indian doctoral candidate, with field sites in India, engaging in feminist knowledge production within American universities. My fieldwork then is not so much rooted in a physical site but is a shifting terrain marked by many intra-actions – of peoples, of technologies, of theories and of knowledges. If ethnographic writing depends on conjuring the sensory and experiential time and place of ‘immersive’ fieldwork in order to achieve credibility, then my own writing steps away from this credo and focuses on politics of in-betweenness, fragmented-ness and dissonance in an attempt to establish integrity. Unpacking the possibilities and constraints of researching from afar, rather than simply claiming closeness to my interlocutors or an abiding sense of mutual trust I choose to claim fictions, frictions and fragments that pass between and through us to reimagine feminist futures of research.

The politics of emotion as affective judgement: bike-and-ride transit in Greater Sydney, Australia

The promotion and uptake of commuter cycling as part of economic revitalisation plans has been critiqued by feminist scholars for its gendered, classed and racialised dimensions. What is often missing from these conversations is feminist knowledge on affect to analyse the politics of emotion. We aim to help fill this gap by building on feminist geographers’ engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Here, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘lines’ is a guiding tool to analyse the politics of emotion as affective judgements. The article draws on online semi-structured interview data and sketches collected from 19 people who bike-and-ride transit in Greater Sydney, Australia. To illustrate what emotions do, the article focuses on two events narrated by our participants, peak hour railway carriages and ascending station stairs. We argue that the concept of lines that focuses on the emotive/affective body extends feminist knowledge on the politics of emotion by engaging with both structural macropolitical forces and micropolitical transformations that occur through events and encounters when commuting. In conclusion, we argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of lines is valuable for feminist geographers’ research on the politics of emotion as affective judgements by drawing attention to the transformative possibilities of extraordinary affects.

Decolonizing Feminism: the NGO-ization Paradigm between the Global Circuits of Neoliberal Power and the Politics of Location. The Case of Romania

While the NGO-ization paradigm helped explain the institutionalization, professionalization, and bureaucratization of feminist movements around the world, from the late 80s and early 90s on, by focusing on the most visible actors, it often concealed the multiplicity of feminisms and their internal heterogeneity. By looking at the institutionalization of feminism in Romania through decolonial lenses, this essay aims to understand some of the transnational processes that have been overlooked or curtailed within the NGO-ization literature, the mechanisms through which certain forms of feminist knowledge and practice became hegemonic and institutionalized, and some of their consequences. The essay argues that the traveling and crossings initiated by those excluded through these processes and who inhabit liminal, in-between spaces contributed to making visible multiple worlds of sense towards pluralist feminism, opening the possibility to build deep coalitions by engaging in complex communication.

An action research case study of the San tsî Khoen Digital Archive 2020-2022

The United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages[i] for the promotion of language development, peace, and reconciliation. One of the stated aims of the awareness campaign is the integration of indigenous languages into standard settings, bringing about empowerment through capacity building and through the elaboration of new knowledge. The San tsî Khoen Digital Languages Application & Archive is a project based in the San & Khoi Centre at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Established in 2020 and funded by the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, it is informed by a co-design digital curation process with the community. The project archives the endangered and erased languages of the indigenous San and Khoi communities of southern Africa, with an initial focus on N|uu and Khoekhoegowab. To obtain this, the project integrates decolonial scholarship within a digital environment of human languages technologies that creates a visibility of not only erased and endangered languages but also indigenous African feminist knowledges that have been lacking in scholarship. Its co-design digital curation process challenges the insular and fragmented nature of academic output, thereby allowing for a greater degree of critical analysis. This action research and digital curation processes are not without its challenges, as co-creating knowledge in an attempted decolonial framework that aims to foreground African feminist knowledge in a region of historical linguicide that was subjected to epistemic violence, as a consequence of colonialism and neo-colonialism is in itself not without its various contestations. This paper critically discusses this collaborative research and co-design knowledge production process engaged with over a process of forty research workshops [ii], over the past two years. The analysis and discussion in this paper are derived from a thematic analysis of this co-design digital curation process facilitated by the San & Khoi Centre between 2020 and 2022.

Inisiatif Perempuan Membentuk Environmental Culture sebagai Upaya Mengatasi Perubahan Iklim

This research discusses the efforts of women in the community as a form of environmental culture in responding to the climate change crisis. The arrogance issue of patriarchal reason has distorted human ability to recognize the main problem of environmental damage. Humans are trapped in the illusion of the domination of reason which seeks to control nature as non-humans. As a result of this arrogance of reason, culture is formed hierarchically dominating nature (non-humans). We offer a change in cultural perspective through the environmental culture raised by Val Plumwood. This culture with an ecological and caring perspective is a form of the feminist ecological thought movement. We use the method of analyzing feminist issues through feminist knowledge standpoints that interact with ecological research methods. We collect data through various media with a focus on telling the experiences of women in dealing with environmental problems. Our analysis comes to the conclusion that concrete initiatives and actions are needed that involve all ecological elements as a form of solidarity. In this way, we no longer glorify humans as the rulers of reason, but rather create critical and creative communities in realizing an environmental culture.

Torn apart! Transnational feminist researchers’ geopolitical positionality in (pre-) COVID-19 times

In this article, we examine the ‘geopolitical positionality’ of transnational feminist researchers caught between hostile countries (home-field). We define geopolitical positionality as the researchers’ position influenced by international politics, discourses, and practices by core powers and hegemonic states. By revisiting our fieldwork experiences, we interrogate how our geopolitical positionalities have a great impact on the process of feminist knowledge production and researchers’ well-being amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. In the era of global trade wars, the geopolitical positionality of transnational researchers requires more scholarly attention; however, a focus on this geopolitical positionality remains practically nonexistent in feminist geography. This article works to fill this void by reflecting on our fieldwork experiences in the geopolitical tensions between China and the US (for Ruwen Chang) and between South Korea and Japan (for Jaeyeon Lee). By sharing our vulnerabilities and hardships concerning our fieldwork prior to and during the COVID-19 crisis, we aim to accomplish two goals. First, by showing the vulnerability of transnational feminist researchers who are caught between hostile countries (home-field), we hope to create a space of compassion and support in/beyond academia. Second, with our analysis of geopolitical positionality, we demonstrate that transnational knowledge is precariously produced across imaginary and material boundaries between the personal, the academic, the national, and the geopolitical.

Curating the history of POWES and Feminist Psychology in the UK: In conversation with Rose Capdevila

Rose Capdevila is a Professor at the Open University whose research interest focuses on gender in digital spaces, taking a critical feminist and poststructuralist approach to her research. Rose is currently working on a longer-term project with colleagues Katherine Hubbard (Surrey) and Lois Donnelly (Worchester) exploring the History of Feminist Psychology in the U.K. At the 2022 POWES Conference, Rose presented her keynote speech entitled ‘If I could turn back time’ which curated and reflected on the history of POWES and Feminist Psychology within the U.K., in which she discusses some of the work she has been doing with Katherine and Lois. As someone who missed the POWES 2022 conference, Rose and I organised an email interview to (digitally) discuss her keynote and covered areas beginning with Rose’s history with POWES, the evolution of her keynote research and some of the interesting findings from the work, concluding by considering the important work that can be done in feminist spaces and importance of memorialising feminist knowledge and contribution.

Education in Sexuality and Equality: Needs in the Initial Training of Teachers in Spain

Introduction. Sexuality and equality education are considered areas of relevant pedagogical research and intervention within current educational contexts in view of the violence and inequalities derived from the patriarchal system. Aims. This paper presents the main results of a research study that seeks to analyze the competence in sexuality and equality of university students during teacher training in Spain (Castilla la Mancha University). Method. For this, the study used a quantitative methodology and administered a nine-dimension questionnaire to 371 students. Results. The study revealed the weak acquisition of competence in sexuality and equality and the persistence of stereotyped images of sexualities. Furthermore, these findings show that future teachers have a weak equality-based professional practice due to an educational approach that lacks a gender perspective. Conclusions. The main conclusions highlight the evident formative needs in sexuality and equality and the absence of transforming feminist knowledge. All this can affect the development of quality education in sexuality and equality in students’ future educational practices.

Chemical Disability and Technoscientific Experimental Subjecthood: Reimagining the Canary in the Coal Mine Metaphor

The “canary in the coal mine” metaphor is used by the chemically sensitive community to make sense of and crip spaces containing low-levels of toxic atmospheric petrochemicals. This article reflects on the technocultural genealogies entrenched within the metaphor. A by-product of the imperial exotic bird trade, canary companion species played a formative role in early technoscientific understandings of toxic exposure starting in the nineteenth century as animal sentinels in coal mine rescues. Chemically sensitive people mobilize the canary metaphor to situate themselves within toxic environments as sentinel and experimental subjects, potentiating a feminist knowledge about chemical disability. Identifying as a human canary underscores how consumer commodities are universally structured for the chemical capacities of able-bodied male subjects, revealing gendered and ableist technocultural logics. The metaphor may also conjure a universal form of sacrificial life that ignores how canaries and self-identifying chemically sensitive people are differently situated in the colonial surround of racial capital. Canary knowledges arise from practicing metaphor as meaning and method—they offer a trajectory for crip-led community practices to build more capacious knowledges of exposure by extending anti-colonial and anti-racist commitments towards relational productions of accessibility. Reclaiming technoscientific experimental subjecthood can thus encourage new collective possibilities to address the global onslaught of chemical violence.

Dependency as Situated Knowledge: A Reflexive Politics of Location on the Positionalities of Chinese Feminist Scholars

While feminist knowledge has historical roots in China, the academic knowledge production about women’s and gender studies (WGS) as situated knowledge has always been a contestation between opposing forces. The Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, marked the critical discursive and organizational moment for grounding the feminist concept of gender as an analytical and action framework. Since then, WGS have flourished, but the label of feminism has been ambivalent. To examine the complicated state of academic dependency and the politics of location in this interdisciplinary academic field, I interrogate researchers’ positionalities in some recent publications on feminism and gender studies about China by pointing out the interplay of diasporic and domestic positionalities in English and Chinese publication outlets. This article argues that for an interdisciplinary program like WGS, with its inextricable connection to the political state of China and socialist state feminism, the theory of academic dependency cannot adequately capture the often contested, strategic, and situated standpoints of feminist scholars. While diasporic and domestic scholars are deeply aware of their own positionalities in the channel of publications that grant them voices, they are also caught in the current hegemonic political economy of knowledge. This article interrogates the contested positionalities of overseas and domestic feminist scholars in creating a feminist academic field about China.

Reproductive governance and the affective economy

The governance of reproductive practices, processes, decision-making, experiences, desires, subjectivities, and bodies has received and continues to receive significant attention in feminist efforts to name and resist reproductive oppression. And over the last 30 years, articles published in Feminism & Psychology have made significant contributions to the visibilisation and critique of this form of oppression. In this Virtual Special Issue on Reproductive Governance and the Affective Economy, we apply repronormativity and affect to our reading of 20 articles published in Feminism & Psychology. Collectively, these articles provide a glimpse of the wide-ranging scope of reproductive regulation (including that which is re-produced by/within feminism itself), and the various work that repronormativity and affect do in this governance. The challenging of reproductive governance notwithstanding, we conclude by arguing that the centring and circulation of certain reproductive subjects and their experiences within feminist knowledge production is itself a part of and upholds repronormativity and forecloses the possibility of reproductive freedom for all.

A Review of Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory and Mothers (Futures of Data Analytics in Qualitative Research)

How do we begin to connect to those who are no longer living, those who have been historically silenced, and those whose memory becomes a faint existence in our modern, colonial imaginary? Within Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory, and Mothers, Jeong-eun Rhee, a qualitative educational researcher, examines the tension that often accompanies the implementation of decolonial feminist knowledges, methodologies, and epistemologies, especially when these theoretical perspectives challenge the academic canon rooted in modernity and social scientific empirical realities. This review addresses Rhee’s major theoretical conceptualizations such as Rememory, M/others and Haunting throughout the various processes that often connect individuals through death and grieving. Rhee demonstrates that the production of knowledge being constructed through the rememory of those who have since passed, not only provides existence to their stories, but makes their lives, histories, and memories “very much alive and present.” Rhee challenges notions of the living/dead, remembrance/forgotten, time, national borders, and the fragmented self in an effort to establish new decolonial imaginaries and methodologies for bringing the silenced voices of women of color to the forefront of our modern reality. This book is recommended for any qualitative researchers and decolonial feminist scholars who are interested in challenging colonial matrices of power that often silence voices/stories from being included in western canons of academia, and those who want to examine the very notions of academic scholarship, epistemology, ontology, and methodology in order to secure a place where the rememory of those silenced out of existence can thrive and whose haunting enacts a decolonial resistance to the continued systems of oppression dominating the colonized other.

How feminist knowledge is made in and beyond disciplines

ABSTRACT This article investigates the relationship between disciplinarity and feminist knowledge-making in Australia’s humanities and social sciences. To identify the conditions of possibility for successful feminist knowledge projects, we interpret career trajectories of senior feminist and gender researchers within five disciplines: economics, history, philosophy, politics and sociology. Feminist knowledge-making about gender occurs in every field, but it has uneven impact and status in relation to different disciplinary practices. Career trajectories are analysed to understand how feminist research is practiced within, or perhaps against or beyond, conventional disciplinarity. Strategies for feminist knowledge-making vary across and within fields. Epistemic pluralism is a key possibility condition necessary for feminist knowledge-making. In fields characterized by conceptual openness (sociology, history), feminist knowledge-making can most easily be practiced as ‘core’ disciplinary work. In disciplines characterized by epistemic closure, feminists are carving out new subfields within (economics, politics) and beyond (philosophy) their mainstream disciplinarities.

The Uses of Mourning

The Uses of Mourning

Decolonizing feminist knowledge: The standpoint of majority world feminist activists in Perú

From its beginnings, feminism has challenged knowledge about women and gender and questioned the methods by which that knowledge is produced. Feminist psychologists are well-positioned to engage in a critical re-examination of the assumptions underlying theory or the constructs employed in the construction of knowledge. Macleod et al. noted that feminists have rarely adopted a single theory, recognizing that every feminism bears the stamp of its place of origin. The current study contributes to feminist decolonizing efforts by using the standpoint of activists in Perú to conduct an examination of feminism. The project involves scholar-activist collaborations with the Global Feminisms Project, at the University of Michigan, and a feminist organization in Perú, Flora Tristán. Nine key feminist activists were interviewed through testimonio. Participants held positions including: Indigenous leaders, scholars, Congresswomen, directors of organizations, and youth leaders. Key findings reveal that the feminist activists interviewed believe that production of knowledge is not a monopoly of the academy, feminism is inherently intersectional and is a process, not an academic definition, and one crucial for political action.

The exigencies of the necropolitical: rehearsing livability through feminist performative storytelling

In this audio-textual performance woven as an Armenian fairy tale from ethnographic research, poetry, and songs, I employ the performative as part of a feminist aesthetic and pedagogical praxis. Through this feminist performative storytelling I affectively study and mourn the immobilizing effects of the densely interconnected processes of death-making whether it be through colonization, ecological extraction, militarization and war, or sex-selective abortions. Drawing on transnational feminist knowledge, I suture life-sustaining moments of respite and healing, however transient and quick, into this protracted study and mourning to practice living in the wake of ongoing catastrophes and crises.

Creating safety: Group reflections on surviving as a female, social work early career academic in the neoliberal academy

Female social work early career academics (ECAs) face many challenges within a neoliberal university context. The tension between balancing the social justice mission of the profession against the consumer model of higher education is conflicting and contributes to feelings of isolation and alienation. This article documents a group of female ECAs experiences by drawing on critical, post-modern and feminist knowledge traditions. The qualitative methodology used was collective autoethnography and critical reflection where the group documented and collectively analysed individual experiences of teaching social work education as female ECAs. The purpose of collating these experiences was to explore the emancipatory capacity of female agency as well as embodying what it is to be a female ECA. Vignettes were thematically examined in a three-part process including (1) reading and reviewing data; (2) categorising and group data and (3) finding themes and connecting these to the original data ( Chang et al., 2016 ). Analysis of the vignettes highlighted the tensions of working as female social justice educators within a neoliberal university causing feelings of oppression and discomfort. In finding one another, sharing and writing stories as well as a collective response this challenged the masculinist model which has been the norm within neoliberal universities. Female led support strategies coupled with the utilisation of feminist methodologies contributes to the emergence of a new, feminist and collectively safer academic culture.

Türkiye’de dijital feminist platformlarda feminist terim çevirisi uygulamalarına bir bakış

Feminist terimler, feminist mücadelenin arka planındaki bilgi ve deneyimlerin yansımalarını taşır. Feminist terimlerin yoğun olarak kullanıldığı metinlerin erek dil ve kültür dizgesindeki dolaşımı söz konusu bilgi ve deneyimlerin kamusallığını artırır ve feminist aktivist mücadele için güçlü bir altlık oluşturur. Feminist matbu ve dijital mecralar da söz konusu terimlerin feminist aktivistlerle buluşup yaygınlaşması ve standartlaşmasına zemin hazırlarlar. Feminist mecraların kitlesel olarak erişilebilirliği düşünüldüğünde, özellikle içinde olduğumuz dijital çağda feminist dijital platformların feminist kuram ve mücadele açısından merkezi bir öneme sahip olduğu açıktır. Bu çalışmanın amacı da, Türkiye’de dijital feminist yayıncılık alanında faaliyet gösteren çevrimiçi feminist platformlardan seçilen çevirilerde kullanılan feminist terim çevirisi stratejilerini incelemek ve feminist çeviri faaliyetinin boyutlarını tartışmaktır. Çalışmada 1990’lı yılların sonlarından itibaren aktifleşen dijital feminist platformların feminist mücadele alanındaki konumu ve feminist terimlerin erek dil ve kültür dizgesindeki yolculuğuna yaptıkları katkılar tarihsel olarak değerlendirilecektir. Bu hususta, Feminisite, Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu, 5Harfliler, Çatlak Zemin, Ekmek ve Gül ve Dijital Topuklar platformları ele alınacaktır. Söz konusu platformlar Türkiye’de kullanıcı sayısı, etkinlik hacmi, erişilebilirlik ve feminist terimlerin yolculuğuna etkileri bakımından alanda öncül bir konuma sahip olan dijital platformlardır. Çalışma sonucunda, feminist dijital platformlar bünyesinde yürütülen çeviri faaliyetinde feminist bir bakış açısı temelinde feminist bilgi ve deneyim aktarımının öncelik kazandığı, alanın dilsel inşasının ise ana odak halini almadığı tespit edilmiştir.