Feminist Practice Research Articles

Narcofeminism and its multiples: From activism to everyday minoritarian worldbuilding

Sociology has a long-standing interest in the consumption of licit and illicit drugs, particularly as a feminist concern with scholars highlighting the ways in which drugs are used as regulatory technologies to control the conduct and subjectivities of women and other marginalised groups. This monograph flips the focus from a feminist sociological concern with drugs as a means of confining minoritised peoples, to explore what they can do as a feminist practice. Employing the drug-user activist concept of ‘narcofeminism’, it aims to rethink how drugs are conceived in sociology and chart their role in shaping selves and worlds. This article introduces the guiding philosophy of the narcofeminist movement as articulated in an interview we conducted with founding narcofeminist activists from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Threaded through the interview are vivid examples of the ingrained and overlapping hostilities that differentially constitute drug consumption practices for women and gender minorities, and the brave acts of resistance they perform in response. In introducing the collection, we foreground a key aim that has guided its development: thinking with the insights of narcofeminism, we have sought to address the complexities of drug use and to hold in focus its potentialities both in terms of its harms and benefits, risks and rewards and, importantly, to reflect on how people navigate these counterposing forces in their situated practices of drug use. We also discuss how the collection advances the sociology of drugs by bridging disciplinary divides and disrupting binary distinctions between licit and illicit drugs, volition and compulsion, pleasure and pain, and discourse and practice, among others. This article provides an overview of the contributions that comprise the monograph, highlighting how they grapple with the ethico-political commitments of narcofeminism to rethink drug consumption as a mode of living, capable of transforming social worlds.

Women in the Geographies of Marronage - Territorial Intimacy as a Freedom Strategy: The Case of María de Los Santos and Her Bonga

As a strategy for freedom, marronage has usually been narrated as an initiative of enslaved men who defied colonial power to escape oppression and produce territorialised societies away from slavery. Drawing on historical Maroon studies in Afro-Latin America, feminist geography, and communitarian feminist praxis on territorio cuerpo-tierra (body-land as territory), this article explores the role of Maroon-descendant women in the making and remaking of territories in the Colombian Caribbean. Records in the General Archive of the Indies, the General National Archive in Bogotá, the Historical Archive of Cartagena de Indias and the oral tradition of Maroon-descendant communities themselves are used to explain the place of women in struggles for territory in the context of violent land dispossession due to Colombia’s armed conflict. This article also demonstrates how the reparation process to claim back lost lands is also a women’s matter. We can understand this as an intimate and affective, almost invisible process, as in colonial times, by analysing the spatial practices of María de Los Santos, an internally displaced woman from the community of La Bonga in San Basilio de Palenque, a town of descendants of fugitives from slavery. These practices, understood through the work of an anthropologist from this community, Jesús Natividad Pérez Palomino, are intimate yet collective and mobilise both the tangible and intangible legacy of marronage to enable her and her people to endure.

A Aprendizagem Coletiva e em Rede Desenvolvida em Empreendimentos Formados por Mulheres da Economia Solidária: Uma Análise Pós-Colonialista Sobre uma Prática Feminista de Autogestão

Abstract This research arises from studies of women's management practices from the place of self-management within the scope of the Feminist Solidarity Economy Network (Resf) and, therefore, the term feminist practices of self-management was developed throughout the research, considering the practices that are performed in the Solidarity Economy (ES). The objective of this research is to identify and analyze one of the feminist practices of self-management observed in the field: the development of collective and networked learning. The main theoretical contributions used to mediate the discussion are based on studies of feminist management practices, on the perspective of substantive rationality, on studies on organizational learning and the post-colonialist view that adheres to the context of women in the SE. The data collection was implemented based on thematic oral history in semi-structured interviews with women from Resf and direct and indirect field observation between the years 2018 and 2021, recorded in field diaries. The perspective adopted for data analysis is critical discourse analysis. The results point to the following findings: (I) no hierarchization of the organization of learning practices; (II) intense exchange of information inside and outside the network based on reciprocal ties; (III) a form of learning that prioritizes experiences with a system of activities in which knowing is not separated from doing. For the women, knowledge is integrated and distributed in the life of the community, which necessarily requires the involvement that comes from the sense of belonging and mutual care that unites them.

Collaborative Writing as Bio‐Digital Quilting: A Relational, Feminist Practice Towards “Academia Otherwise”

In this article, we explore how quilted poetry as methodology, through the practice of collaborative writing, can help us to attune to and think with what is un/seen, un/heard, and un/spoken in our bio‐digital ways of working, as a way of resisting normative, exploitative practices in the neoliberal academia. We are a group of academics with different journeys and localities, connected by a common interest in the effects of boundaries, the dynamics of power, and the desire to do things differently. Drawing on our daily mundane encounters with/in both virtual and physical spaces of academia, including Teams meetings, Outlook emails, Google documents, and Miro board collaborations, we write quilted poetry with fragments of precarious matter: silences, messages, rhythms, feelings, and materialities. We attend to the entanglement of our bodies and their enmeshment in technology and share how bringing relational, feminist theories and the bio‐digital together has helped us to both materialise new patterns of relations and enact a more ethical approach to working in academia.

Being about It: Engaging Liberatory Educational Praxis

Engaging in liberatory praxis at times means operating outside of set or limiting boundaries. As such, this article is written in the first person to highlight both a praxis of freedom (outside of the status quo) and to show impact. It pays homage to elder educators in the process of (re)membering those who have paved the way for liberatory praxis and influence my personal educational philosophy presented here for guidance. Student voices are amplified in the process of highlighting ways that (re)searching, (re)visioning, (re)cognizing, (re)presenting, and (re)claiming are actualized to engender educational freedom across curricular content in a higher educational setting.

Fieldwork with the Dead and Other Considerations: An Interview with Ashanté M. Reese.

Joining in virtual conversation, Ashanté M. Reese and Sheyda M. Aboii explore their engagements with Black feminist praxis and theory in their ethnographic fieldwork and emergent projects. Marking the start of the inaugural Black Feminist Health Science Studies (BFHSS) Collaboratory in May 2021, this edited interview between a professor and graduate student addresses perspectives on what it might mean to work alongside others and attend to methods of Black life and Black livingness. Together, Reese and Aboii consider refusal as a careful balance between documentation and redaction in their work. They also discuss fieldwork with the dead through altar making, practiced memorialization, and strategic remembrance. Their exchange concludes with a return to Black feminist guides for storytelling, witnessing, and living. Among other thematics, this exchange highlights the creative potential of generous collaboration in BFHSS and the attendant vulnerabilities that create the "something that feels shared" vital to medical anthropological inquiry.

Care Living

My inquiries into the poetics of Jamaican women’s aliveness enter through the space of care ethics and the dimensions of my own poetry. In my work, I syncretize Caribbean feminist praxis, resistance, creativity, collective catharsis, spirituality, imagination, community, friendships, kinships, and knowledge. In this crucible of being, care ethics and aliveness are not simply experienced as forms of decolonial resistance. Nor are they reduced to a mere disruption of intersecting oppressions. Rather, they are resources, continuously connected within and around each of us, forming the basis of our flesh, blood, spirits, and dreams. While aliveness and care ethics challenge inter alia, our most chaotic, tense, and violent experiences, they also go beyond these forces to become deep expressions, of what I call, the poetics of Jamaican women’s existence, healing, and release. To develop this framework, I draw on Kevin Quashie’s (2021) exploration of “Black aliveness” (p. 1), to argue (in poetic form) that Jamaican women’s aliveness is not simply the antithesis to death, but that which can address vital questions about the ethos of Caribbean feminist theory and praxis. As Quashie explains, Black aliveness is “the invocation of a black world [and] is the operating assumption of black texts, a world where blackness exists in the tussle of being, in reverie and terribleness, in exception and in ordinariness. This black world is not one where the racial logics and harming predilections of antiblackness are inverted but one where blackness is totality, where every human question and possibility is of people who are black…. Since blackness cannot exist fully, humanly, in the world, we will imagine a world where the condition of being alive is of us. In a black world, the case of our lives is aliveness; not death, not even death’s vitality, but aliveness” (p. 1-2 &12). Guided by the above statement, I articulate this concept in the context of Jamaican women’s lives, illustrating how, through a poetic reflection on care ethics and Jamaican women’s aliveness we can “imagine a black world so as to surpass the everywhere and everyway of black death, of blackness that is understood only through such a vocabulary,” (p. 1). I argue that we can experience this through the, as Quashie puts it, “quality of aliveness notable in the worldmaking aesthetics of poems…in how those poems…can be read for what they tell us about our being: about how we are and about how we can be” (p. 2). The questions guiding my poetic inquiry are as follows: 1) What is the role of care ethics in the context of Jamaican women’s multiple acts of living? 2) How can the concept of “care” support and/or challenge our efforts to analyze the role of religion, ancestry, motherhood, land, and food in Jamaican women’s lives? 3) What are the possibilities of studying this association between care ethics and aliveness through poetry?

Situating #MeToo: a comparative analysis of the movement in Catalonia and Portugal

Since its re-emergence in 2017, the #MeToo movement has been adopted across the globe. #MeToo has a transnational dimension, transcending its initial US context and placing international issues alongside national concerns. This article aims to contextualize and situate #MeToo, providing a critical review of the movement in two local contexts – Catalonia (Spain) and Portugal. The analysis is grounded on empirical observations on social media, drawing as well on previous scholarship on the topic produced both internationally and in the contexts of study, and on the engagement with relevant national media sources. By focusing on national expressions of #MeToo in Portugal and Catalonia, this article explores how #MeToo took shape in (and was shaped by) the local contexts and existing feminist practices. It presents the different temporalities and dynamics of the movement in these two contexts, exploring the roles of both social media and traditional press in the local developments of #MeToo, and also briefly exploring the local legislative implications of the movement. This article thus presents #MeToo as common and easily recognisable frame used in local contexts to approach different issues of sexual and gendered violence, yet flexible enough to allow for national specificities.

“Doctors Aren’t Familiar with Your Tissues”: Self-Examination and Feminist Health Activism in 1970s Canada

This article explores the impact of self-examination as a tool of feminist resistance, an act of preventive health care, and a site where mainstream and alternative health models were debated in late twentieth-century Canada. In the early 1970s, a range of women’s health groups increasingly turned their liberationist critiques towards the structures of mainstream medicine, and the self-exam became a vehicle that allowed women to push back against what they cast as the systemic power imbalances involved with the traditional doctor-patient relationship. Both breast and pelvic self-exams became staples of the women’s health movement as feminists encouraged women to take health care into their own hands, both figuratively and literally. As the decade progressed, breast self-examination transformed from a niche feminist technique to a relatively commonplace preventative health practice, increasingly discussed within popular women’s magazines across North America. Pelvic self-examination remained more controversial as the practice was denounced by a small but vocal group of Canadian physicians, resentful of lay incursions into medical practice. Drawing on women’s magazines and feminist newsletters, archival files from Canadian women’s health centres, and debates about self-examination in national newspapers, we reveal how shifting narratives about women’s liberation, responsibility for preventative health practices, and medical authority intersected in the feminist practice of self-examination.

Instagrammable feminisms: Aesthetics and attention-seeking strategies on Portuguese feminist Instagram

This article presents an exploratory analysis of feminist practices on Portuguese Instagram, questioning how online feminisms are represented on Instagram, in light of its conventions, aesthetics, and popularity logics. Starting from a theme-oriented dataset – collected using the hashtags #feminismoportugal (feminism Portugal), #igualdadedegénero (gender equality), #naopartilhes (don’t share it), and #portugalmaisigual (a more equal Portugal) – this research analyses 294 posts, created by 101 users. Combining a qualitative close reading with the use of digital tools for visual analysis, this article explores how these Instagram feminist practices look like, what dynamics they encompass, and how they relate to the aesthetics and popularity logics of Instagram. Within this plural hashtag landscape, the aesthetics of online feminism goes beyond the dominant cultural imaginaries that link Instagram to photographic content, with long written text emerging as a key site for sharing feminist knowledge – both in captions and in graphic compositions. These graphic compositions have become part of the popular cultural imaginary of a feminist ‘genre’ on Instagram, combining Instagrammable aesthetics with educational content for accessible informal learning. Yet, feminist practices on Instagram are also subjected to the dominant social media logic of popularity, leading to a strategic mobilisation of attention to seek visibility and engagement, albeit to limited success.

CONSIDERATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF FEMINISM WITHIN THE POSTCOLONIAL AND POSTCOMMUNIST FRAMEWORK

This article presents some ideas on the future of feminism starting from the postcolonial/ postcommunist framework, based on similarities in the decolonisation and respectively transition periods in what regards approaches to gender and feminist practices, with a special interest in India and Romania. Some of these refer to belonging to the neoliberal paradigm and necessity to disrupt it, by strengthening the bottom-up work of the nongovernmental organisations, encouraging alternative knowledge systems and giving a voice to so-far silent members of society and non-human others, while focusing on a feminist ethic of care and using the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity for change.

Curating #blackgirlquarantine.

This autoethnographic visual essay narrates a Black feminist praxis of ancestral collage-making within my curation of #blackgirlquarantine: an exhibition of blackwomxnhealing in the wake of 20201 (BGQ). I detail my spiritual, affective, and embodied journey of stretching collage art to make room for memorializing the lives of Black womxn and girls who are no longer here to tell their stories. I write at the intersection of healing, memory, and mourning, and merge a Methodology for the Black Feminist Sacred2 with visual anthropology and digital humanities to read creative rituals of digital altar work as text.

Experts, activists, and girl bosses of the nuclear apocalypse: feminisms in security discourse

Having long been regarded as irrelevant to the high politics of foreign affairs, feminism and gender equality have in recent years gained increased attention in international security debates, including discussions about nuclear weapons policy. Several governments have adopted official feminist foreign policy postures, international security institutions have launched inquiries into gender equity and representation, and a myriad of security actors have enthusiastically embraced the language of women’s empowerment. Mapping the various modes of purported feminist practice on display in the nuclear policy field, we find that being “pro women” has become a sought-after rhetorical asset on both sides of the nuclear weapons debate. Reflecting wider trends in the corporate world, constituents of the nuclear weapons industry have increasingly embraced liberal feminist language and workplace diversity goals. These practices, we suggest, have helped challenge the perception of the nuclear industry as overly masculine, aiding recruitment to, and overall political legitimation of, the nuclear weapons enterprise. This development is significant because it functions to undercut the association between feminism and opposition to nuclear weapons, thus complicating efforts to advance arms control and disarmament through feminist interventions.

‘We bring in each other's wisdom’: liberatory praxis and political education for Black lives in Philadelphia

ABSTRACT Education is a central aspect of social movements' ability to build individual and collective participation in political struggle. But, how do these processes of learning and consciousness take place? As Choudry (Choudry, A. 2015. Learning Activism: The intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. University of Toronto Press) argues, it is important to examine the intellectual life of contemporary social movements, their various forms and pedagogies of learning and knowledge production. In this article, we examine the role of ‘political education' in the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) global network. Rather than create educational spaces separate from the movement itself, BLM Philadelphia organisers approach political education as deeply embedded within a radical organising culture that focuses on integrating abolitionist principles within movement activities. Through in-depth interviews with BLM organisers, we find that practices of political education are built into the fibre of organising where activists ‘bring in each other's wisdom', cultivating a radical and organic culture of community support and intergenerational knowledge-making. We hope these findings contribute to a more expansive understanding of ‘political education' within Black social movements, building on Choudry’s call to centre the knowledge production and intellectual biography of contemporary social movements.

From labelling weakness to liberatory praxis: a new theory of vulnerability for disaster studies

PurposeVulnerability is a label and a concept that is widely used in disaster studies. To date the meaning has been quite limited and implied “weakness”, with criticisms arising periodically but not halting vulnerability's reproduction. In this paper, the authors offer a new theory of vulnerability for the field, suggesting that complicating the concept can create space for liberatory discourse and organising.Design/methodology/approachThe authors draw from diverse understandings of vulnerability to generate new conceptual ground for disaster scholars. The authors explore the relationships between power and agency and autonomy and social hierarchy with regards to how vulnerability is considered within neoliberal democracies. The authors also outline ideological responses and the political actions that follow.FindingsThis exploration is underpinned by dissatisfaction with the way that vulnerability has thus far been theorised in disaster studies. Using the analytical framings provided, the authors hope that others will build on the idea that so-called “vulnerable” people, working in solidarity and using intersecting frameworks of anti-racism, anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism, can undermine the risk-creating norms of the neoliberal state.Originality/valueThe authors argue that the dominant framing of vulnerability in disaster studies – and usage of the vulnerability paradigm – provides political traction for neoliberal social projects, based on notions of humanitarianism. The authors make this claim as a challenge to the authors and the authors' peers to maintain reflexive scholarship and search for liberatory potential, not only in vulnerability but in other concepts that have become normative.

“Cruel optimism” in the universities: A discursive‐deconstructive reading of promising promotional projects of gender equality

AbstractThe article illuminates how gender inequality in Ireland's higher education sector continues to be constituted at policy and at local institutional levels as a problem that requires ‘fixing the women”. It analyses two gender equality projects' discursive materials targeting female academics in Irish universities, showing that while these projects embrace elements of feminist praxis and critique, they ultimately propagate “cruel optimism”. They do this by exhorting women academics' subjectification to burdensome practices of strategizing, self‐auditing and self‐promotion, lured by the promise of awards that only a few will attain. Presented are two cases of what we call “promising promotional projects” that we have encountered in our work in our university. We use the term “projects” to refer to time‐limited, bounded interventions that respond to “gender equality” as a field of government, where problems have been diagnosed and where practicable and pragmatic solutions are seen to be required. Our discursive‐deconstructive reading of these projects' discursive materials highlights how gender equality projects target women for “promotion” through mobilizing gendered technologies of the self.

Queertopia’s New World Order: Simon Nkoli’s Legacy in Queer Black Nightlife Spaces in Johannesburg

This article explores the concept of queer utopia, drawing from Muñoz’s writings on queer futurity, from Simon Nkoli’s embodiment of the struggle for queer utopia through organising with GLOW and in spaces of militant joy like Pride marches, and from modern queer Black feminist interpretations of nightlife spaces in Johannesburg. Through a close reading of a queer Black nightlife event in 2021 called Queertopia, this article argues that queer Black feminists are embodying queer utopia through nightlife, even in the midst of the manifold crises of COVID-19 and late-stage racial capitalism and cisheterophobia. By linking practices of healing and nightlife in these events to resistance to racial capitalism and cisheterophobia, and particularly lifting up queer Black people involved in activism and social movement and cultural organising work, these parties continue the lineage of Simon Nkoli’s work towards dignity and joy. They exist as experiments in queer Black feminist practice, particularly through growing bonds and emphasising relationality between organisers and attendees of these parties, and focusing on healing, dancing, and dreaming in collective space. This article ultimately argues that these nightlife spaces are practices, in the legacy of Nkoli’s activism and analysis, of embodying resistance and queer Black visibility, and ultimately of imagining utopias where queer Black people can fully thrive.

The House That Deconstruction Built: Can Post-Structuralism Inform A Liberatory Social Work Praxis?

Social work praxis has long been in conversation with feminist praxis and has more recently been informed by an anticolonial feminist praxis that aims to center theorizing, activism, and service delivery around individuals and communities considered “most marginalized.” While this “most marginalized” class may be deemed newly worthy social service consumers this framing reinforces extant settler colonial hierarchies of power and oppression by constituting new classes of “deserving” and “undeserving” social service recipients. This article explores how the feminist organizing, scholarship, and activism of the past decade—specifically around the #MeToo movement and trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) wars—have impacted social work praxis and laid bare the dualistic binds of a post-structuralism that has been consumed and recast within neoliberalism as demobilized identity politics. By examining these limitations, questions are raised regarding next steps for a social work praxis concerned with justice, transformation, and liberation.

Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave by Lara Campbell, Dawson Michael and Catherine Gidney (review)

Reviewed by: Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave by Lara Campbell, Dawson Michael and Catherine Gidney Nancy Janovicek Campbell, Lara, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney, eds.–Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022. 324 p. Feeling Feminism is a fascinating collection of essays about second-wave feminist activism in Canada because it centres the very thing that has been used to justify women’s exclusion from politics for centuries: emotion. Drawing on feminist political theory that rejects the dichotomy of emotional feminine reaction and rational masculine reason, the editors explain that the essays are not about ‘emotional’ women but, rather how women “used emotion for control” (p. 18). Informed by affect theory and the history of emotion, the essays examine diverse organizations and actions to demonstrate how women mobilized their emotions to challenge gendered inequalities. Following critical race theorists (in particular bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patrician Hill Collins, and Gloria Anduzula), the essays demonstrate that emotions can be productive because they create activist communities based on shared experiences. But emotional bonds among activists can also be exclusionary; to be a useful lens for analysis, historians must be aware of how emotions are shaped by hierarchies of power. The essays are attentive to how bonds of connectedness forged in passionate activism often shame those who do not meet—or may reject—activists’ ideals and imaginations of equality. [End Page 200] A central theme of the book is that emotions are both individual and public. Contributions by Whitney Wood and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh use letters to examine women’s emotional responses to maternal health and potential threats to their children’s health. Drawing from her research on pain in childbirth, Wood examines letters mothers wrote to Grantly Dick-Read, who promoted “natural childbirth” to counter the medicalization of childbirth in the postwar era. Women expressed pride that they had endured the pain of childbirth, shame if they did not, and anger if they believed that unwanted medical intervention had robbed them of the experience. Krasnick Warsh uses mothers’ “fan mail” to Frances Oldham Kelsey thanking her for preventing thalidomide from being approved in the United States. She argues letters to well-known people is a unique epistolary form because the intent is to direct action. Individual letters produced collective anger about male control over childbirth and the threat to children’s health fuelled the women’s health movement. Activism entails a range of emotions, often simultaneously, because of the various gendered and racialized life experiences of organizers. Essays by Kevin Brushett and Josette Brun et al. examine women working in male-dominated spaces. Using the Company of Young Canadians (CYC) to reassess the origins of the second wave in the New Left, Brushett argues that the burnout and isolation that CYC women experienced informed their feminist practice of understanding the connections between the personal and the political. Disempowerment in a male-dominated environment helped them envision a different way of doing politics based in developing a nurturing community. Using the 1981 Women’s Journalists’ Conference in Quebec, Josette Brun, Laurie Leplanche, and Sophie Doucet examine the emotional tension in the discussions about succeeding in a male-dominated profession based on competitiveness while trying to adapt the profession to accommodate women’s familial responsibilities. While proud of their accomplishments, women at the conference also talked about the shame, guilt, and embarrassment caused by time away from children. Alienation and isolation were common experiences in women-only groups, too. Funké Aladejebi examines black teachers’ anger and frustration in the Federation of Women Teachers’ Association of Ontario. Her analysis of white women’s inability to hear black women’s discussions of racism within the profession demonstrates how hierarchies of emotions could exist within a group and also for the need to centre race in affect theory. Sarah Nickel draws on Dian Million’s theorization of “felt knowledge” to examine a range of emotional responses in British Columbia Indigenous women’s activism and argues that “political work is emotional in nature, just as emotions are, in fact, labour” (p. 74). Activists mobilized mourning, exhaustion, and loss to make critical interventions into the colonial legal...

Feminisme dan Keadilan Reproduktif: Mempersoalkan Aborsi Berdasarkan Pengalaman Aktivisme HKSR

In Indonesia, abortion is categorized as an illegal and criminal act. Even though abortion due to medical indications and rape are exempt from criminal status, access to legal abortion is still almost impossible. Therefore, discussion about legal abortion and safe abortion cannot be done separately, for the criminalization of abortion is one of the factors behind unsafe abortions. Through focused discussions with 20 women activists representing civil society organizations who advocate for gender justice and SRHR in Indonesia, this research aims to document and reflect critically on the situation of reproductive injustice in the issue of abortion in Indonesia using a feminist lens. Building this research within the framework of reproductive justice thinking based on feminist praxis, we selected women activists as our informants. SRHR activists are the closest to and the most involved subjects in the feminist praxis of promoting reproductive justice, particularly on the issue of abortion