Feminist Practice Research Articles

‘Hitting at the heart of a massive problem’: articulating a democratic education through feminist practices of freedom and urban farm movements in Buenos Aires, Argentina

ABSTRACT This ethnographic paper navigates the intersections of feminism, urban farm movements, and democratic education at La Granja Puerta del Sol, a small farm near Buenos Aires, Argentina. Under the stewardship of Dani Ramirez, the farm resonates with the ethos of urban agriculture, while actively contesting gender norms and patriarchal structures. In parallel, it functions as a dynamic educational hub and platform for activist causes in their community. Utilising the theoretical perspectives of Michel Foucault's politics of freedom and Linda Zerilli's feminist practices of freedom, I analyze the farm's strategies in fostering sustainability, care work ethics, and collective decision-making. This exploration unveils how La Granja embodies feminist democratic education, underscoring the farm's potential to influence and reshape broader democratic education practices.

Feminist Theories and Activist Practices in Organization Studies

This piece reflects on the untapped potential of feminist theories and activist practices to address vital organizational issues and societal challenges such as inequality, sustainability and care for the environment. While we recognize and briefly review the progress on gender issues in organization studies achieved over the last decades, our focus is on identifying the critical and underutilized strands of feminist thinking offering fresh responses to these problems, including decolonial feminism, feminist ethics of care, posthuman feminism and ecofeminism. By way of illustrating our theoretical arguments, we discuss how five different papers recently published in Organization Studies address some of these issues, including the uncovering of hidden entanglements of power and performativity in a global bank and in the beauty industry by paying attention to body and affect, the underrepresented struggles of women in the Global South as they disrupt gendered practices through consciousness raising, contesting gender regimes at organizational social events and, finally, how the social media operate at the intersection of gender and occupation. We conclude by outlining future directions for research as we discuss the contributions of anti-racist feminist theory and decolonial feminist practice to completing the unfinished project of social change while making our scholarship more reflexive and inclusive.

Honoring the enslaved African American foremothers of modern women's health: Meditations on 40 years of Black feminist praxis.

This article analyzes 40 years of Black feminist scholarship, art, and grassroots activism dedicated to the lives and legacies of the "foremothers of American gynecology." Infamously, in Montgomery, Alabama, between 1845 and 1849, up to 16 enslaved women were exploited at a backyard hospital, some subjected to surgical experimentation by Dr James Marion Sims. He was a famous and world-renowned surgeon who died in 1883, with a reputation as "the father of modern gynecology." Sims achieved the medical knowledge that catapulted him into American and European fame, using skills gained from the exploitation of the enslaved women in his early career. Famously, three of these women are referenced by their first names: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey. This research asks: how have these important figures been remembered in 20th and 21st-century Black feminist scholarship, art, and grassroots community activism? Further, what are the broader impacts of this pathbreaking truth, reckoning, and reconciliation work?

Transnational solidarity in feminist practices: power, partnerships, and accountability

ABSTRACT In this paper, I offer a descriptive and normative analysis of the requirements for effective transnational solidarity between southern NGOs and their northern partners. Drawing on interviews conducted with staff members of Senegalese women’s rights NGOs and a private international development foundation, I contend that existing theories of feminist transnational solidarity cannot allow us to properly acknowledge the power asymmetries and obstacles to solidarity that these NGOs are facing. After assessing the divisions related to gender interests and limited resources that characterize this NGO-ized development landscape, I develop a partial theory of transnational solidarity that would center power asymmetries in order to address practical and political obstacles to solidarity. I argue that an effective account of transnational solidarity must include a commitment to disrupting global hierarchies of power as well as to building practices of accountability and attentiveness to power structures.

Hysterically y-ours: Reclaiming academic writing as a hysterical practice

Yet another hysteric! Can’t bear it anymore? Neither can we! In this text, we reclaim this highly derogatory term, “hysteric,” so often used against us, as women academic writers, to rewrite the gendered architecture of academic membership in organization studies. Performing hysterical writing interweaves affects, poems and reflections with feminist theoretical and methodological inspirations to challenge the masculine norms that marginalize affective, sentient, feminine and/or other, nonconforming, different bodies from academic texts. Specifically, drawing on Irigarayan mimesis as an activist feminist practice, we develop hysteria’s transformative, response-able potentials for writing, researching, relating and eventually knowing differently in organization studies. Our account contributes to burgeoning debates on writing differently particularly by situating the ethico-political potentials of écriture feminine for knowledge creation and resistance against epistemic oppression and violence.

Online public shaming as a feminist practice for social change, a double-edged sword for fighting gender violence: the case of the ‘feminist funa’ in Chile

This research investigates the political practices of online public shaming ( funa) with regard to gender violence in Chile and their ability to trigger feminist social change. The central argument is that funa, as a feminist practice, offers a problematic pathway to social change, which, despite contributing to denaturalising violence against women, does not address the structural causes of gender violence. Online public shaming, as a feminist practice and strategy for change, triggers critical moral and social dilemmas, generating a questionable feminist transformation. The research explores those dilemmas, presenting the advances and setbacks of this practice in current feminist movements globally and in Chile. It contributes to the reflection on feminist movements in terms of their ability to trigger social change.

Spotlight on discrimination at work: Italian actresses’ construction of digital spaces of feminist struggle

The article contributes to the studies of digital spaces and women’s action by analysing the case of Amleta, a collective founded during Covid-19 pandemic by a group of Italian theatre actresses. Using a digital ethnographic approach that combines data coming from Amleta’s Instagram account and in-depth interviews with content creators, this study considers how actresses employ digital spaces to challenge violence and discrimination in the workplace. By looking at actresses’ digital action, the study sheds light on the reinterpretation of #metoo narratives and on the construction of non-conventional digital spaces in the struggle for an equal environment in the cultural and creative industries. Given the centrality of informational activism and communicative labour for Amleta’s activities, we argue that knowledge dissemination becomes a political tool, both challenging the status quo and allowing women to move their experiences from an individualised understanding towards a level of collective awareness. The research accounts for how feminist practices can promote social change beyond branded uses of social media platforms.

Queer space making across greater Los Angeles: reimagining urban autonomy through collective care

This paper analyzes the lives of whom I call poli-creatives and how they reimagine space making and urban autonomy across greater Los Angeles through a queer and feminist praxis of collective care. Using women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, and transnational feminisms, this paper introduces the concept of mycorrhizal assemblages. As a theoretical and analytical tool, it draws from subterranean webs of mycelial fungal strands to conceptualize how poli-creatives use their work to navigate their everyday socio-political economic conditions by building interconnected spaces and nurturing local queer, feminist, working class, immigrant communities. Drawing on ethnographic observations and life-history interviews with five key poli-creatives, this paper discusses one kind of mycorrhizal assemblage rooted in informal spaces and practices; intimacy, trust, and vulnerability; and anti-surveillance and -policing. I show how these spaces do not depend on visibility and representation in public space, gayborhoods, nor the neoliberal state and formal institutions. Instead, I argue that although they are decentralized and ephemeral, they stay connected by a transnational and queer politics of local community building through DIY practice, holding spaces for embodied trauma, and divesting from institutional and settler-colonial state power. This study responds to the limitations within urban studies and discourses about queer communities by centering how poli-creatives use their transnational experiences, intimate communities, and embodied traumas and knowledges to lay down new soil for collective survival across greater Los Angeles and a future otherwise.

Anti-Racist Pedagogy as Activism: Cultivating Radical Healing and Liberation among Asian American Counseling and Psychology Students

The links between experiences of discrimination and mental health consequences have been well established among Asian Americans. Since the pandemic, anti-Asian racism and xenophobia surged, and the negative outcomes can be severe and long-lasting. Asian American mental health professionals can play an important role in addressing the mental health needs in the Asian American community. Feminist psychologists have long criticized the oppressive nature of traditional Western mental health practices. Strategies to promote liberation and radical healing among Asian American students are especially needed, given the challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that their needs are often overlooked due to the model-minority stereotype. This article offers critical consciousness–informed pedagogy as a form of anti-racist feminist practice to cultivate radical healing and liberation for Asian American students. Anti-racist teaching strategies include: modeling by counseling and psychology educators, challenging internalized oppression and teaching accurate history, building community and collectivism, cultivating solidarity with other communities, and supporting student activism.

Conclusion to Anti-Racist Feminist Practice, Advocacy, and Activism Special Issue

In this special issue, we sought to expand and extend the work of feminist and womanist therapists, educators, and activists beyond the Association for Women in Psychology 2021 conference—uplifting ongoing work toward anti-racism and liberation within a dual pandemic context. Contributors to this special issue detailed their work and recommendations in these domains across levels of intervention from the interpersonal to the structural. In this concluding article, we synthesize the throughlines of healing and action in contributor narratives and offer our final thoughts to advance anti-racist work taking place across a number of settings.

Affidamento as Curatorial Methodology: Feminist Approaches to Pedagogy and Curating in the Work of EMILIA-AMALIA

This article examines the possibilities of using the Italian feminist praxis of affidamento, or entrustment, as a curatorial methodology, arguing that it has the capacity to transform galleries into spaces where the generative potential of social differences is foregrounded – rather than repressed – and where intergenerational knowledge, and its attendant affects, can be shared. Reflecting on my role as a founding member of the feminist working group EMILIA-AMALIA, which, since 2016, has organized free film screenings, public talks, collective meals and writing workshops, I chart the ways Italian feminist philosophy has informed the group’s curatorial work and ask whether affidamento offers a model for pedagogical participation within the gallery that recognizes and validates the varied, and often conflicting, needs and desires of generations of feminist practitioners.

Malignant Care: Affects and Labor in Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé (2001)

Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé (2001) is about six women who meet in an express train’s compartment in southern India. One of these women, Akhila, is the narrator of the novel, while we hear the voices of the other women only when they narrate their stories in first person to Akhila. The way the women tell these stories one by one is in the spirit of empowering Akhila, who is portrayed as a woman bound within heteronormative ideas of coupledom and gender-based expectations of care labor within patriarchal families. The women also encourage her, by example, to question the accepted ethical model of feminist practice within an already unethical patriarchal structure of society. This encouragement happens, I argue, as they recount instances of the self-acknowledged unethical care practices through which they have affectively resisted different forms of violence within the upper caste, patriarchal, heteronormative family structure. These forms of violence are intersectional as they are based on overlapping identities of caste, age, and gender.

Reflexivity, embodiment, and ethics of care in rangeland political ecology: reflections of three feminist researchers on the experience of transdisciplinary knowledge co-production

Although there is a growing interest in transdisciplinary knowledge co-production approaches applied to rangeland political ecology, the research paradigms and methodologies still dominating this field of research leave little room for equitable engagement with research participants and genuine action-oriented research. In this article, we provide a reflection on new practices grounded in feminist studies of science and care ethic literature to orient transgressive and engaged transdisciplinary political rangeland ecology research. Feminist epistemologies call for reflection on who produces knowledge and how such knowledge is used and shared. Feminist practices, such as reflexivity, embodiment, reciprocity, and care, cultivate awareness of the power dynamics embedded in the research process and motivate researchers to counteract asymmetrical or extractive relationships when we identify them. We first introduce the scholarship that inspires key principles of our feminist research approach and then reflect on our experiences as researchers and as activists working with Spanish and Catalan networks of women pastoralists. Three research questions guide our reflective process: (i) how can feminist theories of knowledge co-production contribute to rangeland political ecology; (ii) how can feminist methodologies be applied in practice so that collaboration between women pastoralists, their organizations, and researchers is mutually reinforcing, care-full, and action-oriented; and (iii) what are the challenges and limitations of our experiences to foster transformation and emancipation in knowledge co-production processes?

Talking about sexual desire: Social work practice with marginalized young women

Feminist scholarship on young women's desire, sexual subjectivity, and agency, presents a challenge to social workers working with marginalized young women. These young women—positioned, and often governed by the intersectional impact of gender, social, and material inequality—often experience encounters of serious sexual abuse. Previous research indicates that in these situations, social workers tend to emphasize a discourse that equates sexuality and its expression with risk. This article explores rare examples of social work practice with marginalized minor women in Israel seeking to recognize and contextualize sexual agency and desire. Data was collected through individual and group interviews with 30 social workers, and from 18 social work reports. Our findings show that some social workers were able to engage with elements of sexual pleasure and subjectivity as expressed by their clientele, using three interrelated modes of practice. These examples present a way of opening new horizons for feminist practice.

Digital Archival Environments and Feminist Practice: A Review of Four Projects

Digital Archival Environments and Feminist Practice: A Review of Four Projects

Deprovincializing the Feminine/Feminist Cameroonian Nationalism of the 1950s: The UDEFEC and Pluriversal Black Feminism

Abstract: This article seeks to enrich the production of knowledge about Black feminisms by documenting the mobilizations of the Cameroonian nationalist activists of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, or UDEFEC, in the middle of the 1950s. I will center the contributions of African women to movements for women’s equality. To this end, I consider the emancipatory speeches and practices elaborated by female activists coming from rural zones within the frame of the reorganization of the nationalist public space in order to understand how their participation in the fight for liberation reveals a Black feminist practice. This approach outlines the contours of a political project as the vector for a holistic, equitable emancipation, focused on the margins and founded on the dismantling of the coloniality of gender and female citizenship, on the one hand, and the establishment of a democratic society that values popular sovereignty, on the other .

Anti-Oedipus: Metaphysics and method

ContextThis article is a philosophical reflection on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis and its relation to clinical practice. It draws on Guattari's clinical practice at La Borde as well as his philosophical collaboration with Deleuze, particularly their co-authored work Anti-Oedipus. First published in 1972, the book was written in the wake of the May, 1968 upheavels in France and focuses, in particular, on the interconnection between psychoanalysis and capitalism. The author is a philosopher working at the intersection of philosophical history and politics from within a Deleuzian framework. While Anti-Oedipus was seen as the liberatory, theoretical underpinning for some political movements in Europe and South America, it has also been deployed by Accelerationist theorists to intensify capitalist hegemony. Later works by Deleuze and Guattari, such as A Thousand Plateaus, counsel more prudence. This shift in tone has raised interpretive issues, as well as issues of praxis. Thus, while it remains clear that Deleuze and Guattari are arguing for liberation and the creation of the new throughout their work, the means of pursuing this remain underdetermined. ObjectivesThis article has two primary objectives. This first objective is to show that Deleuze and Guattari's critique of Oedipus arises out of Guattari's clinical practice. This critique of Oedipus is in line with Deleuze's critique of the history of philosophy and necessitates the creation of a new metaphysics to ground not only clinical practice but thought in general. The second objective is to show what method Deleuze and Guattari propose for replacing psychoanalysis. A method they call “schizoanalysis.” MethodQualitative. A single case study is used as an illustration and framework to organize the explication of Deleuze and Guattari's argument in Anti-Oedipus. ResultsThe critique of psychoanalysis creates space for a new, liberatory praxis. The fundamental principles of schizoanalysis are outlined. InterpretationsThe primary limitation of this study is that it is focused entirely on theoretical foundations. Future work would need to incorporate an analysis of empirical data, not only in relation to the history of La Borde Clinic and its outposts but also of current therapeutic regimes.

Feminist Pedagogies on the Front Lines: Struggling Against a Mine, Struggling Against Patriarchy

In 2018, residents of the Vayots Dzor region in southern Armenia began occupying the entrance to a gold mine owned by Lydian International, at Amulsar mountain, to halt operation. At the forefront of this struggle were not only local men, but also many women who identified themselves as feminists from the capital city of Yerevan. Although feminism is marginalized as a political praxis and discourse in the country—including within leftist and progressive circles—feminists are on the front lines of various larger political struggles. Through ethnographic research within feminist and environmental struggles in Armenia—in which I was situated as a researcher, friend, and comrade—I found that feminists instructed those within and outside of larger political struggles on the importance of gendered understandings of social, political, and economic relations toward their transformation. This pedagogical work was necessary for their ability to do political work as women within these larger movements. I draw on Paulo Freire’s work on pedagogy to discuss feminist forms of pedagogy as praxis. I call these dialogical pedagogy, political pedagogy of the self, and reproductive pedagogy, and argue that each offers possibilities of feminist praxis within and beyond environmental struggles in a context of feminism’s marginalization.

On the paradoxes of feminist praxis

SummaryThis essay is part of a forum on Srila Roy's (2022) book, Changing the Subject. I suggest that Roy's book offers a way to sit with the paradoxes of feminist praxis by engaging with its everyday messiness and conflict. I read Roy's book through the lens of my research with sex worker activists in India, focusing on how Roy's attention to ambivalence helped me to rethink my analysis. Through ethnography, the book shows how her interlocutors strategize creatively under disempowering conditions, challenging narratives of loss and depoliticization in feminist movements. Finally, I reflect on questions the book raises about the practice of feminist research.

Introduction to Anti-Racist Feminist Practice, Advocacy, and Activism Special Issue

This special issue draws together Black feminist, womanist, mujerista, and anti-racist approaches to theory and praxis. Authors provide recommendations and guidance toward liberatory approaches to psychology, therapy, activism, and healing. The collection builds upon presentations and conversations that took place at the Association for Women in Psychology 2021 virtual conference about how to best work toward a more just, anti-racist, and liberatory world as feminist and womanist therapists in increasingly difficult social contexts. The articles provide important herstories, testimonies, analyses, and promising actions. Together, these works invite readers to join together in imagining and enacting radically inclusive paths to healing and collective liberation.