Feminist Responses Research Articles

Gendering democracy: feminist parliamentary responses to opposition against gender equality

ABSTRACT Gendering democracy in parliaments faces a wave of active opposition against gender equality by far-right parties and anti-gender movements in Europe. In this adverse context, advancing gender equality policies relies on discourses and practices that address this opposition. What are the feminist parliamentary strategies to respond to anti-gender far-right opposition? This article studies feminist responses articulated in the Catalan parliament, the most gender-sensitive regional parliament is Spain, from the entry in 2021 of the far-right party Vox through interviews with members of Catalonia’s parliament and analysis of parliamentary debates. Whilst parliamentary groups and individuals respond through coalition-building, rule-making, knowledge production, and everyday pragmatic engagement with the far right, the Parliament as an institution appears less responsive. We identify new categories of responses, such as institutionalization of gender equality and protection and support. The gender-sensitive Catalan parliament shows how the disruptive impact of far-right anti-gender opposition on parliamentary democracy and equality goes beyond its small representation, by triggering polarization that jeopardizes parliamentary debates on gender equality and pushes them outside the parliament. Yet, the strength of the institutionalization of gender equality and alliances and the role of feminist civil society and critical actors equip the parliament to counter anti-gender opposition.

A Comparative Study On Two English Versions Of Shen Congwen’s ‘Biancheng’ From The Perspective Of Ecofeminism

The struggle to create a life-affirming society intensifies as globalization expands, which can be seen from the 1970s, women all over the world were formulating ecological feminist response to environmental influence of “modernization” through the intersection between gender, feminism and environmental issues. Ecofeminism is at the intersection of women’s rights, environmental issues and the various forms of oppression, such as those affecting marginalized and colonial people, as well as the Third World nations by the Western industrialized countries. One of the major propositions of ecofeminism is to build a harmonious planet and to abolish sexism and patriarchy, rather than subject to dominance of men and hierarchy. It, therefore, advocates to deconstruct the patriarchal perspective and reconstruct a community based on ecology and feminism, in a way to cease the exploitation of nature and promote the liberation of women. “Biancheng” is a representative work of renowned modern Chinese writer, Mr. Shen Congwen, who adhered to his contemplation on humanity’s existence and tried to communicate the essence of honoring nature and life. He transformed “Biancheng” from a conventional geographical term into a profound exploration of the intrinsic significance of human existence and spirit, with a particular emphasis on a woman’s existence and her connection with nature. Such focus led me to approach “Biancheng” through the lens of ecofeminism. In light of the ecofeminism theory, this paper selects the two prominent English translations of Biancheng by renowned translators Gladys Yang and American sinologist Jeffrey C. Kinkley for a comparative analysis. It is divided into five parts: the first deals with delineating the main ecofeminist theories, the second probes into the previous researches on ecofeminism and translated versions of Biancheng, the third refers to the work analysis, the fourth parts explores how ecofeminism is translated and demonstrated in the two versions through comparative analysis and the last part comes to a conclusion.

Correction: Embracing the Useless and Refusing the Vertical: A Feminist Response to Adjunct Hell

Correction: Embracing the Useless and Refusing the Vertical: A Feminist Response to Adjunct Hell

“We Keep us Safe!”: Abolition Feminism as a Challenge to Carceral Feminist Responses to Gendered Violence

“We Keep us Safe!”: Abolition Feminism as a Challenge to Carceral Feminist Responses to Gendered Violence

Feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics in parliamentary contexts

ABSTRACT In the context of the prevalence of anti-gender politics in Europe, political institutions such as parliaments have become arenas of political struggles around gender and gender equality. While feminist scholarship has studied anti-gender politics, less attention has been paid to feminist responses to such opposition. The contribution of this article is to conceptualize feminist responses to anti-gender politics within political institutions, which we name feminist institutional responses. This conceptualization entails proposing a set of analytical categories for capturing forms of feminist institutional responses – namely, knowledge, coalition building, rule making, and everyday pragmatic engagement. We analyze 50 plenary debates on gender equality and two plenary debates on the State of the Union, as well as 135 interviews with members of the European Parliament and political staff during two terms that witnessed a rise in anti-gender politics, 2014–2019 and 2019–2024. The conceptualization of feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics in parliaments is important for identifying how institutional actors are countering the destructive potential of anti-gender politics and safeguarding parliaments as democratic sites for the advancement of gender equality policies.

‘Gender critical’ feminism as biopolitical project

In the last few years, latent anti-trans sentiment within some corners of UK feminism has coalesced into a highly organised ‘gender critical’ movement that has seen considerable success in influencing policy and public debate. This article addresses ‘gender critical’ feminism as a lobbying movement, examining its orientation towards governance and power. It argues that the ‘gender critical’ movement must be understood as a biopolitical project indebted both to sexological work aimed at ‘normalising’ trans and intersex minds and bodies, and to 1970s feminist responses to this work. This project strives for the power to manage trans populations, both via direct surveillance of trans lives and indirectly, via attempts to counter the supposed threat to a broader cisfeminist population management project posed by trans identification.

Embracing the Useless and Refusing the Vertical: A Feminist Response to Adjunct Hell

Embracing the Useless and Refusing the Vertical: A Feminist Response to Adjunct Hell

Toxic Masculinity, Rage, and Activism in Chile and South Africa

In this videographic essay, I juxtapose two feminist responses to patriarchal violence and highlight their similarities by drawing from the insights of Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato. I compare the performance “A rapist in your path” (2019) by the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis with the documentary The People vs Patriarchy (2018) by South African filmmaker Lebogang Rasethaba and producer Jasmyn Asvat. Both works emerged within the context of the global #MeToo movement and attest to the ubiquity of gender inequality, rape culture and the creative outrage fueling societal transformation. The form of the video essay uses visible grid lines and text on screen to denormalize structures of patriarchal power and prompt viewers to critically think about the intersections of oppression and resistance. I take cues from Barbara Zecchi’s audiovisual language of the multiscreen that keeps audiences alert to challenge the naturalized mechanisms concealed by dominant patriarchal cinematic language.

Contesting Post-truth Chaos through Interdisciplinary Heterotopias

Abstract: Recent populist rhetoric and politics seek to undermine existing democratic institutions and efforts to make them more inclusive. Connecting new feminist scholarship that confronts the multidisciplinary implications of post-truth populist politics and discourse, especially for higher education, with exemplary heterotopic feminist responses to pandemonia over the past century, this essay considers how previous tactics might be recast to disturb and provoke the existing status quo, creating new strategies for countering contemporary anti-democratic practices.

Navigating the Intersection

In the evolving discourse of contemporary feminism, a critical intersection at the nexus of girlhood studies and the experiences of refugee and displaced girls is evident. We are witnessing unprecedented levels of such displacement because of conflict and climate change among other causes of instability, and this brings the challenges and the triumphs of girls on the move into sharp focus in feminist advocacy and scholarship. This Special Issue, Girls on the Move: Girlhood and Forced Displacement, Migration, and (Re)settlement, guest edited by Rosemary Carleton and Nesa Bandarchian Rashti explores some of the intricacies of this intersection and the articles as a whole advocate for a nuanced feminist response centered on the rights, needs, and voices of refugee and displaced girls.

Revisiting Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as a feminist response to McCarthyism

The present article introduces a feminist and political analysis of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, considering it a cultural response to McCarthyism. In order to do that, the article focuses on the importance Plath gives to the Rosenberg’s case in the novel and particularly in the relevance Ethel Rosenberg’s death sentence had to awaken a female consciousness for the women of the 1950s in America. The female body turns fundamental for a feminist struggle that Plath creates in the novel to deconstruct the imposed female roles that helped McCarthy control the private lives of the Americans. Sixty years after Plath’s death and its publication, The Bell Jar becomes a fundamental text for understanding contemporary feminist literature.

“We’re less noticeable to people”

In recent years, there has been significant attention paid to girls who are engaged in activism. When we look at who has been recognized for their activism, however, mainstream exposure to girl activists has primarily included teenagers and youth. Girls of the tweenhood age, for example, are also engaged in activism but their efforts go largely unnoticed or face patronization. Instead of being taken seriously, the activism of many tween girls is: (1) clouded by the constructed inherent innocence of childhood, (2) entangled with the construction of (white) tween girlhood as a time of frivolity and fun, and (3) marginalized due to the adult-centric nature of citizenship in Canada and the United States. As the very structures that would traditionally allow for adults to make their voices heard are not designed for the equitable participation of children, tween girls are required to participate in creative ways. This article, therefore, frames tween girls’ activism as citizenship and offers opportunities to both reconsider and validate these varied activist practices as legitimate democratic participation. Tween girls are already shaping their social, cultural, and political worlds, asserting that they belong and deserve to be seen, heard, and taken seriously. The lenses of societal and feminist responses need to be reoriented and refocused to see it.

Taking Feminist Pornography Seriously

It has been argued that an adequate feminist response to sexist pornography demands not just efforts to eradicate sexist beliefs, but also aesthetic counter-intervention at the level of taste. This view motivates support for feminist pornography. This paper takes the feminist pornography suggestion seriously by unpacking difficulties for the project. I begin by spelling out two views about what makes feminist pornography feminist: the ‘content view,’ and the ‘context view,’ and discuss what I take to be existing arguments for the latter. I then present two objections to the context view: the first focuses on how we characteristically interact with pornography (as a masturbatory aid), the second challenges the value of authenticity upon which much feminist pornography rests. If these arguments are correct, then there are serious flaws with feminist pornography as it is commonly conceived. I close with a brief suggestion of an alternative approach rooted in feminist solidarity.

A Conversation on Feminism, Ableism, and Medical Assistance in Dying

This article explores the recent expansion of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in Canada and its negative implications for women with disabilities. In 2021, the government extended MAiD to people with disabilities who are not dying, which the authors contend is a modern form of eugenics. Structured as a conversation and deploying a systemic, equality-based feminist analysis, the article tracks the shifts in scope and justification for MAiD through judicial and legislative developments, the overwhelming opposition by organizations representing people with disabilities, and the failure of feminist organizations to support their disabled sisters. The authors articulate a feminist response to the expansion of MAiD to address this troubling silence. After Isabel Grant sets out the foundations of Track 2 MAiD, Janine Benedet develops a critique of the concepts of autonomy, choice, and privacy as used by MAiD expansionists to justify these premature deaths. Elizabeth Sheehy explores some of the structural issues that affect the impetus for MAiD: women’s poverty, the medical profession, the gendered nature of caregiving, and men’s violence. Isabel Grant demonstrates the particular dangers for women of the extension of MAiD on the basis of mental illness, as evidenced by data from other countries. Catherine Frazee describes what a truly intersectional feminist approach to MAiD demands of more privileged feminists and concludes the conversation with a call for feminist solidarity.

Feminist cites: A review of feminist relations to and citations of the canon

What is a feminist citation of the canon in the study of religion? This article reflects on a triangular conversation in Ingie Hovland’s research between Hovland herself, Henny Dons (the Protestant feminist she is studying), and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In broader terms, Hovland uses this as an example of the triangular conversations that are convened in the study of religion between scholars, the people or texts they study, and academic canons. The article wrestles with three big questions: why one cites, who one cites, and how one cites. The author reviews a range of possible feminist responses to these questions and, in conclusion, argues for a feminist citation practice that claims the canon.

The #metoo Movement in India: Emotions and (in)justice in feminist responses

This article will enhance and complicate existing debates on the #metoo movements internationally and in India. This will be done by focusing in particular on the feminist debates and responses to LoSHA (List of Sexual Harassers in Academia) in India, an online list naming alleged sexual harassers from academia. This was first released in the public domain in October 2017 and caused much division and strife within feminist movements, including intergenerational conflict. The article will address the underexplored role of emotions in the #metoo movement in India, and attempt to theorise this more widely in the context of ‘justice work’, particularly in the context of epistemic and procedural (in)justice models. It will address how different forms of feminist resistance can be and should be conceptualised within a general context of epistemic injustice.

Contesting feminism: pedagogical problems in classical Hollywood cinema, feminist theory, and media studies

ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore the pasts and futures of teaching and researching classical Hollywood cinema in feminist media studies. After outlining some of the problems associated with Laura Mulvey’s influential work on the male gaze, I consider subsequent feminist responses to Mulvey’s work. In particular, I focus on the attempts by post-Mulvey feminist film scholars to reject in their critical practice Mulvey’s conclusion that classical Hollywood cinema is anathema to feminist progress vis-à-vis media representations of women while accepting the theoretical premise that classical Hollywood cinema is inherently misogynistic and patriarchally corrupt at its core. On this point, I discuss the controversial clashes between male and female scholars over this disjunction between theory and criticism. With reference to the films of Otto Preminger, I demonstrate the probative value of an inclusive feminist media studies praxis in which, on the one hand, theory informs rather than distorts criticism, and, on the other hand, male and female scholars are able to assess the contributions—past, present, and future—of men to the project of feminism.

No Woman is an Island: The Politics of Loneliness, Spare Rib and The Women's Liberation Movement, 1969-1993

In this article we examine how loneliness is a political emotion that has played a crucial role in the formation of grassroots feminist networks and print culture, generating new ideas about collectivity. We frame feminist consciousness-raising groups and publications as infrastructures of loneliness that allow women at once to recognise isolation as a political condition and to cut through that isolation by forming social networks with other women in a local and national context. This article contributes to an emergent body of scholarship that uses affect theory as a lens through which to analyse the circulation of feeling in feminist periodicals, as well as in feminist movements more generally. The article explores how the women's liberation movement developed experimental responses to loneliness, as well as more commercial ones, which, if less overtly political, were also central to expanding terms of belonging as they critiqued the loneliness induced by the privatised heterosexual family unit. We turn first to consider the small group networks that were connected through Shrew in the early stages of the women's liberation movement and subsequently to the print networks fostered by Spare Rib to examine the interlocking forces of grassroots and commercial feminist responses to loneliness. The article analyses the possibilities and limitations of this politicisation of loneliness, insofar as feminist networks at once generated new radical forms of intimacy that allowed women to question the role of the nuclear family, and created their own structures of exclusion, especially for Black British and British Asian women who consequently formed their own groups and publications. We argue that our understanding of loneliness must be situated in relation to the material and psychic resources that generate structures of inclusion and exclusion. At a time of ever-increasing social atomisation and proclaimed 'crises' of loneliness, this article adds historical depth to our understanding of feminist networks and demonstrates the importance of sharing the feeling of being lonely as a way of forging new forms of communality and togetherness.

Threading a decolonial feminist response to COVID-19: One community psychologist's reflection on the assemblages of violence.

To challenge and interrogate the assemblages of violence produced by racial capitalism, and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, community psychologists must engage in a transdisciplinary critical ethically reflexive practice. In this reflexive essay, or first-person account, I offer a decolonial feminist response to COVID-19 that draws strength from the writings of three women of Color decolonial and postcolonial feminist thinkers: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Sylvia Wynter, and Arundhati Roy. Through their writings I share my reflections on the sociopolitical moment associated with COVID-19. Of importance, I argue in support of engaging a decolonial feminist standpoint to understand the inequitable and dehumanizing conditions under COVID-19, and the possibilities for transformative justice. I offer this reflexive essay with the intention of summoning community psychology and community psychologists to look toward transdisciplinarity, such as that which characterizes a decolonial standpoint and feminist epistemologies. Writings oriented toward imagination, relationality, and borderland ways of thinking that are outside, in-between or within, the self and the collective "we" can offer valuable guidance. The invitation toward a transdisciplinary critical ethically reflexive practice calls us to bear witness to movements for social justice; to leverage our personal, professional and institutional resources to support communities in struggle. A decolonial feminist standpoint guided by the words of Anzaldúa, Wynter, and Roy can cultivate liberatory conditions that can materialize as racial freedom, community wellbeing, and societal thriving.

Pemahaman Hadis Sutrah dalam Shalat: Tanggapan terhadap Kaum Feminis yang Keberatan dengan "Binatang dan Wanita itu Sederajat"

This study aims to discuss the hadis about understanding the sutrah in prayer. This research is a qualitative method by literature study using the syarah hadis methods. The results and discussion of this study include the definition of the sutrah, the types of sutrah, the provisions of the sutrah, the editorials of the hadis in the sutrah, and feminist responses to the traditions of the sutrah and their explanations. The results of the study explaining the distance between people who pray and the sutrah, the size of the height of the sutra, the sutrah in Indonesia, how to prevent people passing in front of the mushalli, and cancel the prayer if there is no sutrah. The results also found that the sutrah or barrier in prayer does not have to be in accordance with what has been mentioned above. What is clear is that these objects can prevent someone from passing in front of people who are praying. The distance between the person who prays and his surah is that there is sufficient space for prostration. The forms of Sutrah or barriers that exist in Indonesia are shaf and prayer mats. The opinion regarding the prohibition of walking in front of people praying is still a difference of opinion among the schools of thought.