Feminist Practice Research Articles

7Feminist Theory

Abstract This chapter provides an overview to central contributions to feminist theory published in 2022. It focuses on three topics around which many contributions congealed: (1) the relationship between transgender and feminist praxis; (2) ecofeminist approaches to violence; and finally (3) feminism’s entanglements with neoliberalism. The chapter outlines the contexts of the publications’ interventions and speculates about what might come next.

Practising Feminism for Social Welfare—A Global Perspective, Ruth Phillips

This book is a vital and thought-provoking exploration of the intersections between feminism and social welfare around the world. The author provides numerous examples and analyses that demonstrate how feminist perspectives have shaped social welfare policies and practices, and continue to do so. One of the strengths of this book is its global perspective. Whilst the author emphasises that the topics are discussed through the lenses of the Global South and Global North, the book goes beyond this simplified dichotomy, as evidenced by numerous examples from countries all around the world. It also shows how the feminist approach has played a crucial role in transforming social welfare policies and practices in complex and wide-ranging settings. This comprehensive perspective is particularly valuable in showcasing both the similarities and differences in feminist practices across different contexts, whilst also highlighting the impact of globalisation on social welfare. The book is divided into eight chapters that cover vital and highly relevant topics concerning (contemporary) feminism. It starts with an introductory discussion of the fundamental concept and different waves of feminism, then delves into the impact of globalisation on the interaction between feminism and social welfare, exploring how gender equality serves as a crucial indicator of human and economic development worldwide. Following that, the book addresses the pervasive issue of violence against women, examining the feminist actions that have been taken to combat it, as well as the many barriers that impede its elimination. The subsequent chapter is entirely dedicated to motherhood and explores the various ways in which social judgement, religion, morality, medicalisation, market mechanisms, social stigma and legal, economic, social and health systems impact women. The book then moves on to tackle the topic of reproductive rights, shedding light on women’s lack of autonomy over their bodies and the dire consequences of authoritarian and populist actions that derogate from realised women’s rights, such as contraception and abortion. In addition, the book examines the widespread issue of devaluing and ridiculing old age and the aggressive dictation of trends that demand women to remain ‘forever young’. This chapter is followed by an insightful reflection on how feminism has influenced the creation of legislative and general approaches to justice. Finally, in conclusion, the book offers the chance to learn more about the ongoing and most characteristic topics of the fourth wave of feminism.

“Beyond BAME, WOC, and ‘political blackness’”: diasporic digital communing practices

Abstract What forms of opacity and excess propel Black and South Asian digital diasporic feminist cultures of commoning and communing? This article explores digital expressions of retreat, refusal, remixing, and reclamation which are central to diasporic feminist practices. We analyze three illustrative digital practices via two vignettes: (1) Quote tweets and digital anonymity as expressions of subaltern excess; (2) diasporic meme culture as a callout praxis of refusal; and (3) digital opacity as feminist retreat and reclamation of time, interiority, and intimacy. Throughout our analysis we incorporate reflections on the contours of “diasporic feminist excess” and the parameters of public, private, and personal spaces. Overall, by extending the vocabularies of feminist commoning to include certain digital diasporic feminist practices, we conceptualize the fluid and fraught ways that contrapublic discourses move in, between, and beyond, digital publics.

Intersectional power struggles in feminist movements: An analysis of resistance and counter‐resistance to intersectionality

AbstractThis article develops an analytical framework to study the power struggles between majoritized women and minoritized women within feminist movements in relation to the adoption of intersectional practices. It employs a multi‐sided concept of power that takes domination and both individual and collective empowerment into consideration. The analytical framework encompasses the informal norms that foster resistance to intersectional practices by majoritized women, as well as the strategies and actions undertaken by minoritized women in order to challenge their subordination. The empirical analysis illustrates the mechanisms that create positions of marginalization among women, it stresses the role of the emotional dimension in transforming feminist practices, and it shows the importance of the intersectional wound. Moreover, in focusing on the processes that create difference, it avoids essentializing minoritized women. Building on interviews with activists from the Catalan feminist movement, the examination of intra‐movement power struggles considers multiple axes of inequality, including race, gender identity, sexuality, and ability.

Confronting colonial violences in and out of the classroom: Advancing curricular moves toward justice through Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies

This article documents ongoing encounters with colonial violence throughout education by offering a glimpse into the ways I experience this as a racialized faculty member who teaches courses related to anti-Indigenous racism. It extends Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies and engages theorists who identify colonial violence as structurally embedded throughout education. This article advances curricular moves toward justice through Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies to explore the lessons that can be gleaned from teaching a graduate seminar on colonial violences in education. The course served as a pedagogical site for critical and unsettling conversations as students were prompted to reckon with their own positionalities as they relate to settler colonialism, consider how violence happening outside of classroom spaces is manifested and reproduced in schools, and think critically about educational responses to ongoing colonial violences. By enacting Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies, the course also became a site for liberatory praxis through the co-creation of an ethical space for engagement. The intention of the course was to prompt socio-political action beyond the classroom. Moreover, extending bell hooks’s sentiment that the classroom, despite its limitations, remains a site of possibility, Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies transcend classrooms spaces, as sites of resistance, to call for the change our current political moment demands.

Enacting Reciprocity and Solidarity: Critical Access as Methodology

ABSTRACT Drawing on the growing field of critical access studies, this article positions critical access as a research methodology that aligns with feminist praxis and disability politics. We begin by mapping our central concept in relation to literature on feminist disability studies, crip methodology, feminist methodology, and critical access. We then demonstrate critical access methodology in practice drawing on our collective research programs. Our first example comes from a workshop exploring citizen photojournalism as part of Stretching Our Stories and takes up non-linear and unverifiable journalistic accounts by disabled people. We follow this with an example from Practicing the Social, a three-day online artistic research and knowledge mobilisation event, which foregrounds the complexity of structuring pace and time. We conclude by suggesting that approaching critical access as methodology makes it possible to embrace moments of friction. Throughout this article, we argue that access, when taken up critically, becomes a transformative process that can contribute to the development of a feminist research methodology that supports research directed towards crip-feminist futurities.

Serving in Black spaces of the institution: A decolonial Black feminist autoethnography

abstract Black women serving in Black Culture Centres (BCCs) are often tasked with cultivating a safe space for Black students (Young 1986), yet may experience their own gendered racism from the same institution which they are supporting students through (Jenkins et al. 2021). As such, a decolonial Black feminist authoethnographic approach allowed me to be self-reflexive in examining day-to-day challenges as a leader; including the desire to incorporate feminist ethics of care such as othermothering into developing the safe space for Black students, while navigating the pervasiveness of racism and sexism experienced in the institution. Situating my experience as a tension, I seek to contribute to the research by examining how Black women BCC directors can embrace othermothering while also resisting capitalistic expectations of labour through a decolonial Black feminist approach to leadership. Findings from this study contribute to the emerging scholarship exploring the experiences of Black women in BCCs and provide an authentic understanding of the day-to-day work. Finally, strategies are provided for Black women directors who seek to incorporate a decolonial Black feminist praxis into their leadership as BCC directors.

In Relation or Nah? A Review of Black Trans Feminism by Marquis Bey

In Relation or Nah? A Review of <i>Black Trans Feminism</i> by Marquis Bey

Matter and Memory

Abstract This three-part essay first introduces Berlin’s anticolonial, Black feminist poetics through the work of May Ayim and Audre Lorde, whose poems “Blues in Black-and-White” and “East Berlin 1989” were written shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in response to racial attacks in a “reunited” Germany. Part I explores how these poetics and politics have influenced ongoing efforts to engage with the memory of German colonialism, xenophobia, and memorialization in public spaces. Part II moves the reader into close studies of two contemporary performance works by Afro-diasporic artists in Berlin who build on the Black feminist poetics explored in Part I. The first, Wayward Dust by Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, was an invited performance at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in August 2020. The second, untitled performance, by the group Black Art Action Berlin (BAAB), was uninvited, and took place in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum in October 2021. In Part III, the author discusses how these performance artists in Berlin have responded to institutional pledges to “decolonize” museums, by inverting expectations of Black performance and white spectatorship in this space. The author argues that they are important interventions for this contemporary moment of institutional reckoning that challenge expectations of Black labor and white leisure in the museum, and that they should be understood within the context of an ongoing creative struggle developed in transnational Black feminist praxis.

Anybody, Everybody, All the Time

Abstract In this conversation, Andrew Cutrone and Marquis Bey discuss Bey's recent monograph, Black Trans Feminism (2022) in the context of citation practices, black and trans feminist practice and theory, “radical-radical thinking,” and fugitivity.

Re-fashioning feminist subjects: authors’ conversation

In this conversation with Samantha Pinto, Simidele Dosekun and Srila Roy trace the ways that gender and sexuality are both highly local and deeply transnational in the current landscape of neoliberalism. Dosekun's Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture looks to beauty industry and practices in Lagos to explore the tension between self-construction and media representation in a world of savvy consumption and complex audiences for women's embodied lives. Roy's Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India looks to two activist organisations representing very different forms of feminist praxis and appeal to the state in contemporary India that both reproduce but also confound neoliberal logics of governmentality. Dosekun and Roy, using ethnographic methods, leave feminist theory undone by their counterintuitive and even ambivalent critical moves that refuse to rest on well-worn binaries and critiques within neoliberalism. This piece is a conversation meant to draw out powerful connections between the challenging, field-changing work of these two scholars, as well as the specificity each brings to their intellectual practice of feminist theory.

Performing Everydayness and Feminist Aesthetics

As a Colombian scholar and artist, the author of this essay interrogates feminist aesthetics and artistic practice in a choreographic mode; improvising to see where movement takes her. This first impulse creates the space for performing writing and opening the space of creation. The movement starts at home, immersed in everydayness, aided by poetry and the analysis of the work of three other contemporary Colombian artists who also start at home in their artistic practice. Here, home is also a reference to all the artists’ (including the author’s) place of birth: Barranquilla, Colombia. The aesthetic philosophical tradition comes into play against the backdrop of the ideas presented by Simone de Beauvoir in her seminal The Second Sex (1949), who urges women in the middle of the twentieth century, to transcend, to fight against immanence. The works of Clara Gaviria, Raisa Galofre and Jessica Sofía Mitrani accompany the author’s journey while she arrives at the realization that it all starts with the need to transcend the quotidian while using, precisely, the apparent banality of such everyday things and tasks. Through the created art objects, the author creates an essay about, around and beyond artistic feminist practice and aesthetics.

The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda: Feminist Practice and Pedagogy. Edited by Colleen Kennedy-Karpat and Feride Çiçekoğlu

Agnès Varda (1928–2019) made fifty-four films and installation works over the seven decades of her prolific career, from her first film in 1955, La Pointe courte, to Varda par Agnès in 2019, and for several decades she was the only French auteur to identify unequivocally as a feminist. Since the 2000s, Varda’s position has shifted significantly both in terms of her placement now firmly within the canon of the new wave and French auteurism, and within academic scholarship and on teaching programs, where she is now a staple presence. This book, compiled from the proceedings of a conference on ‘Agnès Varda’s Sustaining Legacy’ that was due to be held in Istanbul in 2020, but moved online, marks another turning point in how Varda’s work is perceived, taught, and engaged with critically. The book is divided into four sections: ‘Creation’, ‘Connections’, ‘Environments’, and ‘Teaching Varda’. The final section, on pedagogy, invites participants to reflect on their experiences in the classroom and is a welcome addition to Varda studies. It provides both an essential toolkit for anyone considering putting Varda on their syllabus and fascinating insights into the dynamics of different pedagogical settings — ranging variously from film practice to theory, from digital environments to onsite teaching, from school to university, from the UK to the US, to Australia, from ‘Abu Dhabi to Seoul’, as Seung-hoon Jeong writes. Varda veteran Sandy Flitterman-Lewis reminds us that Varda herself placed extraordinary value on encountering and learning from others, so it is fitting that her films are so utterly teachable, as the contributors to this volume confirm, and that the section on teaching is the most substantial, with ten essays, occupying over half of the book. Throughout the volume, the overall ­question — how to sustain joy in Varda’s legacy — is met with nuanced and perceptive analysis. The collection offers new perspectives, not least through critique, for example in Jennifer Stob’s illuminating essay on Varda’s formalist feminism, in which she argues that Varda both ‘reveals the patriarchal structure that collapses representational space and the feminine’, and ‘confirms and reproduces its formalist myth’ (p. 20). Negar Taymoorzadeh’s interview with Ali Rafie, Iranian theatre director and actor in L’Une chante l’autre pas and Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1977 and 1976), probes the orientalist tendencies of Varda’s gaze as well as raising questions about her working ethics. New connections are also forged, for example through Ruken Doğu Erdede’s analysis of Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) using the framework of Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory’. Existing but under-explored connections are brought to light, as in Zizi Li’s essay on the relationship between Varda and American filmmaker Shirley Clarke, who appeared in Lions Love… and Lies (1969). Whilst readers expecting the environmental issues usually associated with ‘sustainability’ might be puzzled by the title, this collection is nonetheless an indispensable tool for Varda teachers, scholars, and fans, and it delightfully fulfils the task of sustaining and renewing Varda’s legacy.

Anti-Asian Violence and Abolition Feminism as Asian American Feminist Praxis

Abstract: Anti-Asian violence during the pandemic has been largely framed by mainstream media as an individual response to the pandemic and reduces anti-Asian violence to "hate" toward Asians, therefore justifying increased use of law enforcement and carceral punishment of individuals committing hate incidents. Additionally, some members of the Asian American community advocate for policy changes and collection of hate crimes statistics that rely more on carceral punishment. Other members of the Asian American community argue that hate crime statistics and legislation do not provide systemic changes necessary to address anti-Asian violence. Specifically, Asian American abolition feminists are challenging mainstream narratives that isolate violence to conversations of racism alone and calling for the abolition of the carceral system that is historically and inherently responsible for violence against Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) communities and women. This paper addresses carceral solutions to anti-Asian violence and the opportunities of abolition feminism as an Asian American feminist praxis to challenge violence against Asian Americans. Focusing on survivor-led movements and responses to violence in its multiple forms, I discuss how abolition feminism may be necessary for redressing anti-Asian violence. I also consider how Asian American abolition feminism can achieve truly liberating, transformative solutions and healing to violence through an abolitionist and decolonial feminist praxis that centers and engages with Indigenous Pacific Islander communities.

Review of Abolition. Feminism. Now

Review of Abolition. Feminism. Now Barbara Ransby (bio) Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie's Abolition. Feminism. Now., Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022 Written by four of the sharpest and most respected scholar activists around, Abolition. Feminism. Now. gives us a powerful genealogy of the feminist roots of the twenty-first-century abolitionist movement and its urgent call to action. Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth E. Richie have the cumulative experience that covers a great swath of contemporary radical movements. The amalgam of that work, over many decades, deeply embedded in the work of many organizations, collectives, campaigns, and networks, has led all four coauthors to the place of "abolition feminism." In this book, they trace their collective journey and acknowledge all the "co-conspirators" they have embraced and worked with along the way. "Abolition feminism," the book reminds us, is both a "mode of analysis and a political practice." It insists that an end to state or interpersonal violence cannot occur without a larger feminist politics of justice, and conversely, feminists cannot rely upon oppressive carceral institutions to make women, LGBTQ, and especially trans folks, safe or free. The three major sections of the book address three questions implicit in its title: Why abolition? Why feminism? Why now? Abolition of prisons and the apparatuses of the prison industrial complex is what the new anti–state violence movement calls for. Why abolition? This book insists that reforms alone cannot end the harm caused by policing and prisons. Making nicer, kinder prisons and nicer, kinder police just has not worked. Reform after reform has failed, and even the more robust reforms have been co-opted. The very logic and purpose of the "punishment industry," as Angela Davis calls it, is to harm, coerce, violate, and diminish those with whom it comes into contact. Moreover, the system doesn't do much to heal or help the survivors and victims of harm either. The only real solution, Abolition. Feminism. Now. argues, is [End Page 227] the dismantling of prisons and the building of alternative mechanisms to ensure safety and accountability. The "building" aspect of abolition is underscored by the authors. They are not ignoring the importance of safety, but rather demanding that we think beyond guns and cages for ways to realize it. Holding up Black Youth Project 100's "Building Black Futures" campaign, and its corollary demand, "Invest/Divest," abolitionists have consistently foregrounded the need to allocate more resources for health care, affordable housing, quality public education, and jobs as critical ingredients for crime and violence prevention. They quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who insists abolition has never been only about "absence" but also about "presence" of critical resources and alternatives. Violence prevention is better than violent punishment, for everyone involved, and a plethora of restorative and transformative justice programs point to repair and healing as more ethical responses to "crime" than jails and prisons. In the case of poor and working-class women and femmes of color, often police intervention results in those women and femmes being further traumatized, jailed, or killed, even when they are the ones initially reaching out for help. The cases of Marissa Alexander, CeCe McDonald, Eisha Love, and Chicago's Bettie Jones are only a few examples. Why feminism? The introduction traces the roots of abolitionist politics to a number of feminist thinkers and feminist-led organizations from Critical Resistance (CR) to INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence. CR was formed in California in the early 2000s in response to the growing and insatiable prison industry in the state and nation. A feminist politics was there from the beginning, insisting on a holistic approach: inclusion of incarcerated women and the families of incarcerated men and women, and a feminist analysis of violence as systemic and not simply an amalgam of individual cases. The Color of Violence conferences hosted by INCITE built upon this feminist praxis. They insisted that violence against women and femmes was not simply a domestic issue but had to be understood in the context of state violence, settler colonial violence, and violence caused by wars and occupations, as well as economic violence. Their perspective, as...

Review: Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley, by Monica De La Torre

Review: <i>Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley</i>, by Monica De La Torre

Resurgent Education as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

Abstract: In this paper, we describe and analyze the ways in which we center the importance of kinship and relationality in an Indigenous education seminar. Throughout the seminar, we invite Indigenous teacher candidates to turn inward to see, learn from, and teach about the brilliance of their own lands, languages, and communities. We view our work as thinking with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's beautiful vision of resurgent education. We do this work in collaboration with Tuxámshish Dr. Virginia Beavert, Yakama Tribal Elder, who serves as a mentor in our program. We focus on three key points that advance our vision of resurgent education as decolonial feminist praxis: 1) Relationality is power; 2) Land is a nurturing teacher who constantly extends power to us; 3) Creating space for resurgence requires challenging colonial relations of power. We conclude that our project is a form of decolonial feminist praxis and invite our feminist colleagues to see themselves as part of and responsible for this vital work.

A Multiplicity of Selves-in-Coalition: A Decolonial Feminist Witnessing Through Autoethnography

Abstract: This article offers a specific methodology: an autoethnography of decolonial feminist witnessing to invite the reader into the world of the praxis of navigating institutional spaces recognizing where these entrances and departures are imperfect, messy, violent, and filled with resistance. The author offers examples of coalitional work through local and transnational experiences that were fostered through survivance in colonial systems. Recognizing how multiple institutions shape people's lives, this article highlights lived exemplars where the author traverses academic and legal institutions. The author reflects on witnessing in the courts as a legal expert witness. The role of narrative and witnessing is central to a decolonial feminist praxis; therefore, the author reflects on a state-wide consortium to end violence, where opportunities to narrate stories were facilitated in a performance. To conclude, the author reflects the self-in-coalition as a response to the material violence of coloniality in institutions.

Desire as an Idiom of Liberation: Black Feminist Praxis in Toni Cade Bambara and Alice Walker

Responding to critics like Kevin Quashie who call for increased focus on the intimate over resistance in Black culture, this article examines the centrality of desire as a Black feminist praxis and a trope of intimate justice. It reads Toni Cade Bambara’s “My Man, Bovanne” (1972) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) as arguing that the foundation of justice for women is rooted in the notion of desire. The article first offers an understanding of desire that is rooted in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Judith Butler. Then it looks at the way Hazel in “My Man, Bovanne” asserts her desires against the external pressures of her children regarding how she should behave. Turning to The Color Purple, the article analyzes the way traumatic pressures on Celie empty her of a sense of self and ability to desire until she finds healing in a community of women. This solidarity in turn empowers Celie to heal others around her.

A journey of a Black Woman’s Archivist: Phyllis Ntantala, Margaret Walker and Queen Mother Moore’s quest for a Pan-African Liberation

ABSTRACTPhyllis Ntantala (7 January 1920–17 July 2016), anti-apartheid writer, political activist, educator, and mother, encouraged me to become a Black Woman’s Archivist. A Black Woman’s Archivist excavates and preserves the stories of black transnational women whose works create, impact, and contribute to multiple black radical movements. By using a portraiture methodology, I share the history of Africana women like Phyllis Ntantala, while highlighting my relationship to her and other Africana women’s experiences in Pan-African Liberation struggles. Phyllis’s story led me to my initial experience with the archive, which expanded my research on Africana women’s roles in Pan-African Liberation struggles. Her work encourages my current research on Margaret Walker (7 July 1915–30 November 1998), African American writer, political activist, mother, and educator who created the Conference of African Affairs in 1971 at Jackson State University that advocated against various forms of colonialism. There is also Queen Mother Moore (27 July 1898–2 May 1997), Pan African Leader, founder of the Reparation Movement, political theorist, mother, and educator. Emergent themes like anti-apartheid advocacy, education, and literary activism connect these transnational women. They contribute to a black feminist praxis and leadership within African Liberation Movements despite the normalcy of heteropatriarchy.