Feminist Methods Research Articles

Archiving, exhibiting, and curating the history of feminisms in the global twentieth century: an introduction

ABSTRACT Following the ‘archival turn’ of the 1990s and early 2000s, scholars have understood archives as entwined in epistemic hierarchies of power. The study of gender and sexuality, alongside postcolonial approaches were central to this critical shift, advancing methods that both challenged the archive as a fixed entity of historical truth and broadened perceptions of where history is made. Queer and feminist historians have since drawn attention to the archive as a site of subject-formation and radical possibilities. Building on this foundation, this special issue offers fresh perspectives on the intersection of feminism and the archive. Situating feminism as practice, politics, and method, the contributions explore how archival and curatorial practices have shaped the history of feminisms, and how feminist methods have addressed archival lacunae. This introduction discusses the collected essays in the context of the historiographies of archiving, gender, and feminism.

Un/Making Pollination – Feminist Methods for Creating Ecosocial Imaginaries

ABSTRACT How to imagine other kinds of world-making when there is a loss of species; livelihoods are threatened, and lives are on the line? Stoddard et al. (2021) note that there is a lack of social imaginaries. Critical, creative practices act in a tradition of responding to complex questions by turning them into embodied inquiries and opportunities to imagine how things could be otherwise (Mareis and Paim 2021; DiSalvo 2022). The project Un/Making Pollination is a designerly response to the twofolded lack of pollinators and imagination. It is an exploration on how to approach more liveable feminist futures by relationship building across species, with a focus on plant-pollinator-human relationships. The authors give a critical account of choices in the creation of a series of posters and hand pollination tools as feminist methods of opening ecosocial imaginaries. These feminist ways of knowing and worlding are also methods of inquiring, making, giving form, using senses, connecting temporalities, spaces and bodies, getting attracted, lured in and touched by the making and unmaking of biodiversity. We articulate and perform references of feminist methods for combining knowledge production with everyday life that can contribute to imagining otherworlds.

Designing a Greedy and Earth-Devouring Cat: Towards a Critical Feminist Approach to Gamification

ABSTRACT In recent years, gamification has been widely implemented for sharing knowledge about, making sense of, and imaging futures. This article considers how gamification could be mobilised as a feminist method of futures. It presents a case study of making the idle game Square Cat in which a cat destroys and devours the entire earth. Much of the existing work on gamification examines games and gamified apps that have already been produced. The case study offers different insights into gamification practices by providing an account of the process of designing and developing an experimental game. Square Cat makes visible and bodily felt the ambiguous affective dynamics of the asset-driven logic of late capitalism, and how it shapes human-environment relations. It parodies the embodied habituation of repetition and reward feedback, dramatises idle games’ structure of accumulation, and rejects the narrative of linear progress. In so doing, it reworks the binary logic of game and asks to entertain a form of play where the relation between winning and losing, subject and object, becomes confounded, and where futures are multiple even as the game’s beginning and end appear predetermined.

Introduction to Creating Feminist Futures: Research Methodologies for New Times

ABSTRACT What role do and might feminist methodologies, with their prioritisation of ethical and political questions and interventions, have in creating futures? What kinds of futures are needed? What kinds of feminist imaginations should be cultivated, and how? What world-making practices might feminism (further) develop and/or invent? In the context of war, climate breakdown, pandemics, the resurgence of far-right politics, political upheaval and poverty, this special issue examines the role of feminist methods in creating futures that are desirable and necessary. This introduction to the special issue argues that feminism is especially well-equipped to examine and build new futures and that imagining and making different worlds can be helpfully understood as methods. We sketch out four key themes that we see as significant within the wide, varied and growing literatures on feminist futures and that are particularly important for the contributions gathered together here: non-linearity; interruption and refusal; world-making and speculation; collaboration.

A Confounding Discourse Analysis of Vietnamese Sex Workers' Talk in the City of Kaiyuan, China.

Vietnamese female sex workers (VFSWs) cross the border into Kaiyuan City, Yunnan Province yearly. However, very little is known about both the health and psychological issues VFSWs experience. The objectives of this study were to explore the dominant discourses that emerged from the VFSWs' talk. The interviews occurred between May 2018 and June 2018 with 20 VFSWs who worked in Kaiyuan City, China. The English translated transcripts were analyzed using an eclectic feminist method of discourse analysis. Two discourses emerged. First, "Agency when working in Karaoke Bars and other Indoor Venues", and second, "Negative Impacts on Psychological Well-being and Other Problems from Migration." As for Discourse 1, the VFSWs positioned themselves as having agency over choosing their clientele as well as agency over what they were willing to negotiate with their clients to establish boundaries of their bodies. As for the Discourse 2, while there was a discourse of agency in their work there was also a contrasting, confounding discourse around the negative impact on psychological well-being and reports of stress as a migrant worker. Discourse 1 and Discourse 2 are confounding. When analyzed together, the discourses suggest that the impacts on psychological well-being may be more related to the migrant status of the women, supporting the notion of systemically influenced agency.

Thinking about Agency in the Formation of Tax Units: Commentary on Commissioner of Income Tax v. Indira Balakrishna, AIR 1960 SC 1172

Since income tax is levied on a progressive basis (depending on the income of each taxpayer), how we define the taxpayer or “tax unit” is of critical importance. In the 1960 ruling of Commissioner of Income Tax v. Indira Balakrishna, the Supreme Court was required to interpret and define a tax unit known as an ‘Association of Persons’ (AOP) which had no statutory definition under income tax law. In doing so, it made certain gender-based assumptions regarding the nature of economic activity taking place within the household. In the (rewritten) feminist dissent, Maithreyi Mulupuru challenges these gendered assumptions by adopting a different approach to the definition of an AOP. This article is a comment on the feminist dissent. I argue that the rewritten judgment recognizes the agency of the taxpayers by recognizing that economic intent sufficient to constitute an AOP can exist, not just in the taxpayers ‘coming together’ but also in them ‘staying together.’ In doing so, the dissent considers the female taxpayers not merely as passive recipients of property but as active agents exercising volition over their economic affairs. By a deeper engagement with, and a more contextual analysis of the volition question, both in the articulation and application of the AOP definition, Mulupuru’s dissent narrows the difference between the treatment of male co-heirs (taxable by virtue of their status as a HUF) and female co-heirs (taxable only upon specified kinds of action, as an AOP). At a broader level, the rewritten dissent demonstrates how an engagement with feminist methods is of value and vital even in seemingly neutral areas such as tax law.

Asking the Woman Question of Constitutions: Insights from Sri Lanka

What do we learn when we ask ‘the woman question’ of constitutions of the Global South? Constitutions worldwide are increasingly the subject of gender analysis, which rests on ‘asking the woman question’ to uncover the gendered implications of seemingly neutral constitutional provisions. But can gender analysis account for all forms of gender inequality in all kinds of constitutions? In this article, we place three lines of inquiry in conversation in responding to these questions: the feminist method of asking the woman question, dominant approaches to constitutional gender analysis, and the perspective(s) from the Global South. In doing so, we develop a way to understand how constitutions of the Global South are gendered in their design and operation, in ways that are perhaps distinctive. We use Sri Lanka as a case study to show how asking the woman question of Sri Lanka’s Constitution requires us to revise some fundamental assumptions about constitutions and to engage with laws, institutions and practices that are close to the constitution, but not usually considered within the constitutional remit. We argue that constitutional gender analysis needs to move beyond a focus on constitutional text and institutions to better address gender inequalities in societal institutions, such as the family, institutions relating to labour, religious institutions and the military. We describe these institutions as ‘proximate institutions’, by which we mean institutions that are close to the constitution, because of their role in constitutional governance and in the exclusion and subordination of women from it. We propose the identification and analysis of proximate institutions as a methodology that calibrates the issues of context that are critical for fully understanding the gendered nature of constitutions, in the Global South and beyond.

Afrika'nın ilk kadın başkanı olan Ellen Johnson Sirleaf'ın Açılış konuşmasının retorik analizi

This study intended to analyze Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s presidential inaugural speech as the first
 female president in African to see how she persuaded and convinced the people of Liberia on
 political, social and economic policies in an effort to make them believe in her content to
 consolidate power. Specifically, this study focused on rhetorical and persuasive strategies she
 applied in her speech. To achieve the intended goals, rhetorical discourse analysis methodology
 was used, and Ellen’s textual inaugural presidential speech was quantitatively analyzed by both
 Neo-Aristotelian and feminist methods of rhetorical analysis to discover, identify and describe
 how Ellen used rhetorical devices, rhetorical appeals and other rhetorical tactics. Results indicate
 that various rhetorical tactics were found in her speech, and were well applied which helped her
 to effectively accomplish her intended objectives as an orator.

In the flesh

The author incorporates her creative writing to share her untold experience of what Carole J. Sheffield would identify as sexual terrorism. She then engages in a candid dialogue with co-editor Patricia Richards, demonstrating the power of conversation as a feminist method. Inspired by their feminist imagination, they explore ways to construct meaning and produce knowledge beyond conventional, mainstream frameworks in sociology. In this intellectual praxis, they explore themes such as the aesthetics of resilience, poetry and creativity, non-mainstream epistemologies across disciplines (including but not limited to Anzaldúa’s theorizing on el corazón con razón and Fals Borda’s sentipensante sociology), authenticity and intellectual vulnerability.

GENDER MAINSTREAMING – AN ETHICAL FEMINIST CONSIDERATION

In this article I tentatively consider the notion of gender mainstreaming from an ethical feminist perspective. Underlying this is a tension, or paradox, between law's limits and law's potential, law's poetry, poetry's law. A few theoretical arguments come into play. Firstly, the multiple meanings of sex and gender are reconsidered. Thereafter feminist critiques against the notion of one feminist method as well as a feminist jurisprudence are combined with a critical perspective on the institutionalisation of human rights and the politics of law. I recall these arguments to inform my investigation into gender mainstreaming. Two aspects are considered: firstly, in light of the critical perspectives, the preference for gender mainstreaming instead of challenging from the margins; and secondly, how mainstreaming actually takes place. Relying on the notion of ethical feminism and concepts of “asymmetrical reciprocity”, “city life”, the “imaginary domain” and the “community of the ought to be”, I ponder ways of making gender issues noticed beyond and within attempts at mainstreaming.

Insurgent peace research: affects, friendship and feminism as methods

ABSTRACT Affect and friendship change the way we think about research (epistemology) and conduct research (methodology). This article accounts for affect and friendship as feminist methods in peace research. It argues that affective feminist conversations, practices and actions through friendship can drastically modify how we think about peace. Based on fieldwork conducted in Colombia (2019 and 2022) with female ex-guerrilleras from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (Farc-ep), it (1) draws upon the concepts of camaradería and being insurgent proposed by the women of the Farc-ep to (2) trace how affect and friendship can change the way we do peace research. Ultimately, the article proposes four aspects for the adoption of friendship as a method in peace research by: 1) deconstructing the linearity in peace research methods; 2) multiplying data collection’s methods; 3) including affects throughout the whole research process and 4) advocating for an insurgent peace research that vindicates long-term ‘transversal politics’ and translocal coalition-building.

Women’s (non) participation in sports: Gendered attitudes, biopolitics, and women’s perceptions of body and sports in Iran

Women’s lower participation in sports in Iran is perceived to be caused by broadly held patriarchal-cultural norms as well as the Iranian State’s regulation of women’s sports and visibility. This exploratory research uses feminist scholarship and qualitative methods to investigate the central factors forming women’s perceptions of sports participation and gender. Based on interviews with twenty-six women participants, the study revealed that essentialist beliefs among the participants attributed muscularity, strength, and excessive size to men, and delicateness, beauty, and thinness to women. We draw on feminist perspectives on body politics to explore women’s attitudes and explanations for (non)participation in sports. Discourses of appropriate femininity and gendered embodiment played important roles in these explanations. References to modesty, gender norms, and faith were peripheral in our findings on gendered aspects of physical activity and sports participation.

Gender, race and researcher positionality in decolonial surf tourism research: lessons from the field

ABSTRACT Current scholarship in the field of critical surf studies interrogates issues of gender, race and coloniality in global surfing tourism and culture. This literature focuses primarily on cultural discourse and tourism practice, yet has recently begun to examine researcher positionality in ethnographic and reflexive surf tourism research. As a novel empirical contribution to existing decolonial trends in surf tourism and intersectional surfeminist research, this article explores dynamics of gender, race and researcher positionality in conducting community-based participatory action research (PAR) in surfing tourism, through a year-long ethnographic project in Playa Hermosa de Cobano, Costa Rica. This contribution draws on discussions in feminist geography interrogating gendered and racialized dynamics in ethnographic and participatory research. Reflexive lessons from the field highlight the complexities associated with employing decolonial and poststructuralist feminist methods in critical surf tourism studies, particularly for white/white-assumed female-presenting researchers from the Global North working in Global South field contexts. These complexities include considerations of multiple researcher subjectivities related to postcolonial intersectional power dynamics in research team composition and throughout the PAR process.

Critical Feminist Law-Making: Imitative Spaces and Improvised Coalitions

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

Feminist Methods, Methodology and Interpretations on Displacement and Livelihood Issues: A Study of Women Tea Plantation Workers, North Bengal, India

Feminist Methods, Methodology and Interpretations on Displacement and Livelihood Issues: A Study of Women Tea Plantation Workers, North Bengal, India

Erziehung feministisch denken

Abstract Thinking Education in a Feminist Way The article asks how education can be thought in a feminist method. At this point, the relationship between education, feminism, politics and theory is introduced. Starting from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s demand on mothers to be subjects and from a stated unequally gendered relationship of care, feminist perspectives on education are outlined (Simone de Beauvoir, Jessica Benjamin, Luce Irigaray, Regina Becker-Schmidt). The article’s aim is to discuss the possibilities and limitations of feminist education.

Feminist Yöntem ve Dezavantajlı Gruplar: Dom ve Abdal’ları Anlamak

This study presents the methodological discussion of the fieldwork of the project named “’Being educated is a distant dream to us’ Dom and Abdal Children’s Education in Turkey: The cases of Antep and Urfa”. Focusing on the processes that make it difficult and easier to reach the participants in the field, this study analyses the situations that play a role in the insider/outsider positioning of the researcher in the interviews held with a “fluid” method. While the power relations between the researcher and the participant are handled with an intersectional perspective, the dilemmas in researcher’s role to providing of well-being of participants in projects conducted with disadvantaged participants are discussed through feminist ethic. Although there are many studies on disadvantaged communities such as Dom and Abdal in Turkey, there are not many studies focusing on methodological discussions. Aiming to fill this gap in the Turkish literature, this study will propose to researchers who focus mostly on Gypsy/Nomadic communities working in precarious and low-income jobs, to refer to feminist method discussions. Since, the feminist method provides an understanding ground that will enable the researcher to realize the hierarchies in the field, the instability of "privileged" positions, and the subjectivity of the participants.

A Feminist Stylistic Analysis of Anti-feminist Poetry in English and Arabic

Language plays a major role in all aspects of life. Communication is regarded as the most important of these aspects, as language is used on a daily basis by humanity either in written or spoken forms. Language is also regarded as the main factor of exchanging peoples’ cultures and traditions and in handing down these attributes from generation to generation. Thus, language is a fundamental element in identifying peoples’ ideologies and traditions in the past and the present. Despite these facts, the feminist linguists have objections to some of the language structures, demonstrating that language is gender biased to men. That is, language promotes patriarchal values. This pushed towards developing extensive studies to substantiate sexism in language. The main question is: is language really sexist? This study employs a feminist stylistic analysis to investigate these theories, and takes the anti-feminist poetry as a springboard for that, for it addresses multiple issues objected to by feminism. The model adopted in this study is Sara Mills’s (1995) Feminist Stylistics which analyzes different structures of language that oppose feminism; English and Arab modern anti-feminist poetry is the genre that is investigated in this study. Besides, this study aims at revealing the societies’ inherent views about women along with investigating the feminist essential claim; that language is sexist. This is done by conducting both qualitative and quantitative analyses on the data. The current study has concluded that language in its pure form is not sexist; rather sexism is a personal and well as a societal attitude. Furthermore, there are certain items, especially in English, that can be regarded since English does not have a feminine form on its own; still, such items can always be avoided and other neutral items can be used instead. Finally, this study recommends that a feminist practical approach is required to track and omit gender bias in language from school books as it has a major effect on the ideology of society. It also recommends to developing a feminist method to raise the awareness against the indirect forms of sexism that plague literature.

Feminist philosophy and the problem of intelligence analysis: standpoint, measurement, and motivation

ABSTRACT How can feminist epistemological methods contribute to the task of intelligence analysis? Feminist work widens the lens of what constitutes politics, enabling analysts to incorporate new variables and events into their analysis. In addition, feminist epistemology’s emphasis on reflexivist methods can help to provide a ‘360-degree view’ of problems by incorporating the insights of those who are the subject of analysis. Knowledge is co-created by considering how participants themselves attach meanings and labels to their actions. This approach helps to guard against researcher bias and aids researchers in identifying their blind spots. Feminist methods are also helpful when asking ‘queer questions’ where either the subject of an inquiry or the answer to a query might be poorly specified, ambiguous, or resistant to labeling. They are thus of utility when exploring ‘mysteries’ rather than puzzles, in the words of Gregory Treverton. This essay expands on these three arguments regarding the utility of feminist epistemological methods and finally provides a case study, showing how feminist epistemological methods are of particular utility in examining the phenomenon of female suicide bombers, including making predictions about this activity and describing the motivations of those who participate in it.

Review: Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US, by Anna Piela

Countless academic research projects discuss the perennial niqab bans that pop up in various Western municipalities, addressing the legality of these policies as well as the media coverage. However, the voices of the women who choose to wear the niqab are rarely heard. Anna Piela attempts to rectify this research gap by centering on the personal experiences of women who wear the niqab in the United States and United Kingdom, two contexts that are also underdiscussed with the hyper-focus on niqab bans in France and Canada. Building on Piela’s training in gender studies and feminist methods, Wearing the Niqab relies on extensive interviews, in which the women share their own faith narratives and the various reasons they have for wearing the niqab.Chapter 1 provides important context to how the British and U.S. media misrepresent niqabi women with a critical discourse analysis of nearly a hundred articles. Piela finds two common frames in the coverage of niqabi women: “paternalistic feminist,” or helping the women who are assumed to be oppressed; and “security discourses” around fear of what is hidden under the niqab. In response to these stereotypical portrayals, chapter 2 analyzes how niqabi women express themselves through digital media spaces, often using humor, intimacy, and authenticity to come across as less threatening. This chapter could employ media and religion theories a bit more in terms of how the women use media to make accounts of their religious lives.While the background chapters provide useful foundations, Wearing the Niqab is groundbreaking when it begins to highlight Piela’s extensive interviews and observations in chapters 3 through 5. Chapter 3 is one of the highlights of the book, as Piela concentrates on the religious act of wearing the niqab. Feminist scholars trained within a secular-liberal context have a difficult time conceiving of wearing the niqab as a gesture of agency, but Piela frames the women’s discussion around wearing the niqab as acts that are about inhabiting, not resisting, norms. In this chapter, the women articulate their view that wearing the niqab is a form of submission to God’s will, a way to emulate the Prophet and his followers, an act of worship, and a way to grow closer to God. The secular-liberal framing of the niqab as purely a repressive cultural act fails to account for these religious motivations.Building on the theoretical work of the previous chapter, chapter 4 examines the distinct formulation of agency in secular contexts. For instance, women may have religious motivations for wearing the niqab but within the “secular-liberal discourses” (91) of the United States and United Kingdom, it might be more advantageous to consider arguments about rights and freedoms. While the women often utilize narratives of choice, this can sometimes backfire when the courts often protect religious actions that are requirements.Finally, chapter 5 analyzes the racialization of Muslims and misogyny in Islamic communities and wider society. Muslim women who wear the niqab, especially those who are Black, often face intersecting forms of oppression because they are hyper-visible in the niqab but also experience misogyny and racism. This chapter analyzes the complexities of race in ways that studies of Islam too often ignore. For example, Black Muslim women sometimes find the niqab protects against anti-Black racism, whereas White Muslims are perceived as foreign and threatening when they wear the niqab. Piela also discusses the strategies that niqabi women deploy to deal with discrimination and appear less threatening in public, such as showing that they are “engaged” in their surroundings or always being friendly and helpful. When the women face more serious public harassment and violence, they develop strategies to determine safe and unsafe spaces to wear the niqab.Despite the challenges of researching the relatively unorganized group of women who wear the niqab, Anna Piela offers an insightful analysis of the experiences, negotiations, and narratives of niqabi women. Starting in the opening chapters, the book might capture the reader’s attention more effectively if it featured the material from Piela’s interviews with niqabi women and ethnographic accounts. Moreover, sections that discuss online advocacy would benefit from deeper analysis of the role of digital media in creating space for religious expression. With that said, this book offers an original contribution to larger conversations on religious practices within liberal-secular public spaces, personal narratives of religious meaning, and feminist studies of agency.