Feminist Review Research Articles

“Activism is not a one-lane highway”: the digital modalities of Alliance for Choice and abortion decriminalisation

ABSTRACT In 2019, abortion was decriminalised in Northern Ireland (NI) after decades of campaigning against the almost-total ban. Abortion activists in NI used multiple tools for change, utilising a feminist law-making strategy that also encompassed ‘cheeky’ witnessing [Fletcher, R. (2020). Cheeky witnessing. Feminist Review, 124(1), 124–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778919896342] and movement-building alongside mutual-aid approaches to care. This paper outlines the significant contribution of alternative creative modes of dialogue from the insider perspective of core Alliance for Choice activists. The key element of the campaign towards decriminalisation in NI, was inspired and influenced by the global networks of abortion campaigns also utilising digital networks to challenge problematic abortion discourse with an abundance of creative content. It also required daily visual online output that complimented and coalesced the wider campaign, in a digital space that [Butler, J. (2018). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press] contends is a version of the public street. This paper offers a unique insight into the creative production and careful navigation required for campaigning towards decriminalisation in the NI. It examines the complexity of the digital space and its challenges and opportunities for abortion activists. It offers lessons for other campaigns against abortion restrictions and other social justice movements.

Gender in the Image of Female Characters in Andrea Hirata's Novel Padang Bulan and Cinta Di Dalam Gelas: A Feminist Review

Gender in the Image of Female Characters in Andrea Hirata's Novel Padang Bulan and Cinta Di Dalam Gelas: A Feminist Review

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Playing with Phantoms: Decoding the Ludic Language of Metal Gear Solid V

Playing with Phantoms: Decoding the Ludic Language of <i>Metal Gear Solid V</i>

The Uses of Mourning

The Uses of Mourning

Feminist Commemoration

Feminist Commemoration Jennifer C. Nash (bio) It is the time of anniversaries. WSQ celebrates its fiftieth anniversary at the same time that Signs and Feminist Studies—two other landmark journals in the field of gender and sexuality studies—prepare their anniversary issues. Academic feminism has moved to a period of commemoration, retrospection, and celebration. Feminist commemoration is often fraught, filled with celebrations of and anxieties about all that the institutionalization of academic feminism has achieved. If the stories we tell—to channel Clare Hemmings—often center on our field’s precarity, the existence and durability of a slew of feminist journals, including WSQ, is evidence of the labor of generations of feminist scholars. Those scholars worked to ensure that the precarity that marked earlier feminist publishing projects (see Kitchen Table Press’s history, for example) was replaced by the capacity of feminist publications to endure, to live on. And yet, a celebration of all that we have accomplished always requires reckoning with the uneasy relationship academic feminism has to the professional and the institutional. These commemorations require that we reckon with how an “outsider” intellectual project has become, squarely, part of the academy, with its own genre conventions, conferences, journals, and forms of academic disciplining. To be clear, I lament none of this; instead, I name it to dispense with the romance that academic feminism is an outsider field. My own interest in feminist commemoration always swirls around how we anxiously mark the power we have accrued (including fifty years of WSQ) and the power that we have desired, including our desires for (at least) fifty more years of WSQ, even as we recognize that moments of commemoration and of looking back also include the sense that we do not know what the future will hold, what form(s) this—or any—feminist journal will take [End Page 22] in the future. It is the fact that the future remains open that I think makes commemoration rich, exciting, edgy. As we remember, celebrate, champion, and mark the desire for a future, it is important—to me, at least—to name and recognize that as a Black feminist, commemoration always requires bringing our dead with us: naming, remembering, marking, and celebrating the names and contributions of the scholars whose intellectual labor made possible the spaces that we stand and write in. We “take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names,” as José Esteban Muñoz (1999, 74) reminded us, with a sense of the radical potential of mourning and celebration. We “take our dead with us” to remind ourselves that the space that we write in was forged with labor and love, in struggle, by myriad scholars, activists, thinkers, and writers who wanted one thing: for the work to continue. Here we are: writing, thinking, theorizing, dreaming. Jennifer C. Nash Jennifer C. Nash is Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography; Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality; and Birthing Black Mothers, all published by Duke University Press. She has published articles in journals, including Signs, Social Text, Meridians, Feminist Studies, Feminist Review, and GLQ. She can be reached at jennifer.nash@duke.edu. Works Cited Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Google Scholar Copyright © 2022 Jennifer C. Nash

Sexuality, Gender, and the Colonial Violence of Humanitarian Intervention

Abstract Recent discussions of humanitarian intervention in international relations (IR) have often focused on the evolution of norms, and the development and contestation of the responsibility to protect (R2P) framework. While beneficial in tracing this process, most of these studies tend not to incorporate an analysis of colonialism, race, sexuality, or gender. While postcolonial studies of humanitarian intervention have done well to illustrate the relationship between humanitarian intervention and colonial violence, they still tend to neglect the study of sexuality and gender. Exploring how the sexualized, gendered, and racialized dimensions of colonialism can be incorporated into the study of humanitarian intervention, this paper proposes a queer approach. After exploring the valuable contributions of feminist scholarship, it suggests that the queer approaches of Nicola Pratt (“The Queen Boat Case in Egypt: Sexuality, National Security and State Sovereignty,” Review of International Studies 33, no. 1 [2007]: 129–44), Cynthia Weber (Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality and the Will to Knowledge. New York, Oxford University Press, 2016), and Laura Shepherd and Laura Sjoberg (“Trans- Bodies in/of War(s): Cisprivilege and Contemporary Security Strategy,” Feminist Review 101, no. 1 [2012]: 5–23) offer some distinct contributions that build upon feminist insights. Applying these to the 2015 House of Commons debate on airstrikes against ISIL, the paper suggests that queer IR can invigorate the study of humanitarian intervention with a framework that unpacks the simultaneously gendered, sexual, and racial dimensions of colonial violence.

A Response from JFSR

A Response from the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion Zayn Kassam (bio) and Kate M. Ott (bio) The Journal of Feminist Studies Religion (JFSR) was pioneering in its founding and yet, in order to sustain and be “recognized” in the academy, it often reified in its own practices the very categories and experiences that it sought to disrupt. In many ways, a peer review system is necessary to help authors achieve tenure, as is publishing in English. The journal has always published a diversity of authors, disciplines, and even materials, from poetry to teaching reflections, from Living It Out pieces to roundtables like this one. These “different” pieces are separate sections and do not fall under the same peer review guidelines. We, Zayn Kassam and Kate Ott as current coeditors of the journal, recognize the complexity of the both-and or yes-but approaches mentioned by many of the roundtable contributors related to the dual location of JFSR in the academy and for the broader feminist movement. If/since the journal no longer has to fight for legitimacy within the academy, what might we do to engage in more generative conflict, as West suggests, as we use the space of the journal and cultivate the JFSR board with a commitment to dismantle white supremacy, as Pritchard suggests? As Plaskow notes, change must begin with truth-telling and accountability. We agree with the many respondents who have called for even more of this as well as concrete changes. During our time as the journal coeditors, we have noticed ways in which white supremacy and Christian hegemony continue to influence the work of the journal and have actively sought or are seeking ways to reorganize the JFSR board and disrupt certain practices of the journal. We will name some of those here and look forward to opportunities to collaboratively address others with the JFSR board and in partnership with FSR units. First, narrow, Western assumptions about the definition of feminism show up in our review process now and in the past. They also affect whether authors understand the journal as a place to submit their work. The predominance of English, [End Page 83] and its embedded colonialism, is another barrier to becoming a transnational feminist publication. And the commitment to diversity is still largely signified by numbers and stuck in binary gender categories. As we consider the deep-seated role of Christian hegemony, we note that Zayn is the only Muslim participant in the roundtable. This reinforces how the journal board needs to shift its practices as it engages international board members, board members from various religious traditions, and Black, Latine, and Asian colleagues so we do not rely on too few individuals who are too busy and for whom JFSR is not a primary community. To resist the multiple forms and logics of racism, settler colonialism, and Christian hegemony, noted by many respondents, we recognize that multiple voices, experiences, and approaches are needed. This is why the JFSR board is collaboratively engaging these issues. Colleagues are working this year to robustly define feminism for reviewer guidelines and our public-facing description of the journal. The nominating committee will wrestle with a lack of trans and male-identified colleagues on our board in addition to considerations of disciplinary and racial diversity. Other groups will serve as mentors for emerging authors, and still others are developing structural ways to celebrate scholarship that exemplifies Black scholarly and antiracist commitments in the legacy of founding board member Katie Geneva Cannon. As coeditors, we have worked to revise editing practices for authors for whom English is not their first language, will pair up emerging authors with board members for mentoring on article writing, and expand the reviewer database to encompass broader worldviews. These practices fundamentally change the structure of traditional peer review that is defined by gatekeeping. Instead, JFSR commits to an antiracist, feminist review process, from invitations to submit to how feminism is defined to what resources an article receives. The key to this work is meaningful involvement by board members to ensure that diversity of scholarship, religion, and racialized experiences infuses the work of JFSR rather than remaining merely representational. We are thankful...

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global Politics

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global Politics

From ‘hydrology of hope’ to ‘hydrology of despair’: a feminist review of Mushandike small-scale irrigation scheme in the semi-arid region of Southern Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT The physical and social environmental repercussions of large dam construction have pre-occupied development discourse for some time globally. Literature on dam projects focuses on the displacement of humans and wildlife from their natural habitats and the dam’s contribution to urban and industrial transformation. There is a dearth of literature on small dams and small-scale irrigation projects in communal areas. This article examines the status of Mushandike irrigation scheme, which was designed to transform the lives of rural people located in the semi-arid ecological region of southern Zimbabwe. We used ethnographic principles of data generation guided by a feminist theoretical framework to get to women farmers’ lived experiences. Mushandike small-scale irrigation scheme has been a ‘hydrology of hope’ for women farmers for many years. However, multifarious factors, both natural and human-induced, are turning it into a ‘hydrology of despair’. Although farming is still done from a business perspective, water stress due to an inefficient water and land allocation management system, linked to patriarchal ideological practices, has driven the irrigation scheme onto a difficult trajectory. The article recommends a paradigm shift in the irrigation scheme’s management to ensure that the original ethos – that irrigation farming is equivalent to formal employment – is re-adopted.

Interview with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley by Flatness for Feminist Review and Women’s Art Library, April 2021

In March 2021, Flatness, a long-running fugitive platform for artists’ moving image and network culture directed by Shama Khanna, met with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley over Zoom for an in-depth conversation about her work, transcribed below. Danielle is a digital artist whose practice includes building websites as sites of empowerment, in particular for Black Trans people. Danielle discusses types of gatekeeping that determine value and erase the presence of Black people from archives, technologies and markets. Through her work, she seeks to create a foundation for other Black Trans people to build upon, including making archives where they are not only centred but embedded in the fabric of her coding. She also shares her research into piracy and her dreams of hijacking capitalist business models to divert money from corporate monopolies in order to claim back power for the disenfranchised. I was interested to ask her about interactivity and how through her online works—blacktransarchive.com, blacktransair.com and resurrectionland.com—she is creating an alternative to the censorship and passive aesthetic activism promoted by social media platforms. We also speak about her non-linear approach to technology, reviving technologies to repurpose them for use by Black Trans people, as well as how she emphasises accessibility in her work and the importance of setting out terms and conditions as a way of holding people (and gatekeepers) to account.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Review: Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, by Genevieve Yue

Review: <i>Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality</i>, by Genevieve Yue

Privilege, Precarity and the Epistemic and Political Challenge of COVID-19

Much of my initial shock at lockdown was the result of a loss of privilege. As a middle class professional working mother and a transnational scholar, I have constructed a life based on movement and freedom. Yes, I have ties that bind me: I am a single parent and a recent migrant to London, meaning my support network is somewhat limited. But with money I have been able to secure childcare and my career has allowed me to live simultaneously across three countries on three continents. So suddenly being locked in a small flat in London with restricted movement and full-time working and caring responsibilities was unsurprisingly an intensely traumatizing experience (reflected in my blog piece for the Feminist Review – https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/resisting-the-violence-of-common-sense/). As the weeks have turned into months, my points of focus have shifted. On the one hand it has become much clearer to me that it was losing the illusion of constantly ‘moving forward’ that I was mourning: of not being able to escape, feel a sense of momentum and freedom, of planning and anticipating future adventures. On the other, as the world began to reopen slowly, I also became much more conscious of how being ‘locked down’ had actually been a privilege in itself. Not everyone had that luxury. Both in my local setting of south east London and in my research ‘fieldsite’ of Sri Lanka, it became clear that many had not been able to secure themselves at home – ordering food (and anything else they desired!) delivered to their door, avoiding all forms of public transport, working from home, doing home renovation, youtube workouts and taking up new hobbies. Reflecting on the question of privilege from these two angles, I wonder how the COVID-19 pandemic may provide an important moment to return to questions of solidarity, resistance and progressive politics. For many elites we see ourselves as the vanguard of struggles. Yet our impatience with the present (let alone the past!), reliance (conscious or not) on ideas of progress and experience of constant movement makes us ill-equipped to sit in an uncomfortable present and uncertain future. Do we have the necessary skills, tools and imagination to respond to this time? Meanwhile the realities of extremely disadvantaged and marginalised people are that they have never had the luxury of relying on a social, political and economic system to support them. As a result, while they have often been terribly affected, they have not been shocked that they would be affected. Instead they have found (sometimes subversive) ways to survive and organize, developed informal networks of support and creative forms of resilience.&#x0D; &#x0D; With this in mind, how might we rethink which agents and whose knowledge might be most valuable in this moment when trying to articulate responsive and transformative politics and practices? How might this allow for a richer understanding of not only the experience but also the possible responses to the precarity that has become a dominant contemporary reality? And how might new epistemic and political practices emerge that are not only more ethical but also more productive, radical and disruptive of the existing order?

"We Can't Keep Painting Over Our Problems": Murals, Social Media, and Feminist Activism in Ireland

"We Can't Keep Painting Over Our Problems":Murals, Social Media, and Feminist Activism in Ireland Rachael A. Young (bio) On 26 July 2016 eighty protestors gathered in the space in front of Dublin's Project Arts Centre. Dressed in black "repeal" jumpers and blue face paint, the group chanted "What do we want? A woman's right to choose!" while holding up photographs of a red heart with the words "Repeal the 8th" written inside. The photos replicated a mural that was painted over the previous day. Activist Andrea Horan had commissioned popular street artist Maser to paint the pro-choice mural, but Dublin City Council announced that the artwork lacked necessary permits. Project Arts Centre director Cian O'Brien was forced to paint over the image, leaving a plain blue wall where the mural had previously resided. But this censorship could not remove Maser's artwork or the idea it represented from the public sphere. Indeed, Irish feminists and activists refused to allow the mural image to be forgotten or erased. Standing in front of the protested space in Temple Bar, one activist argued, "You can paint over the mural. You can cover us up, but the problem is not going away. We're still here. It's not going away with a little bit of blue paint."1 Refusing to be "painted over" anymore, Irish feminist activists and their allies used murals to create both a physical and digital space [End Page 320] to discuss and advocate for women's issues during the repeal movement. This article considers how murals created a forum-like space, both corporeal and virtual, and allowed Irish citizens to interact with feminist issues and debates in their daily lives. Many academics have discussed how art has created a dissident space for feminist activists, exploring how Irish women have created and navigated these spaces to challenge an oppressive patriarchal system.2 In this article I will build on this work, specifically exploring how contemporary feminist murals in Ireland integrate and combine physical and digital space. Replicas of Maser's mural spread across Ireland, creating material locations in which viewers could physically insert themselves into the abortion debate while simultaneously allowing people a digital method to claim the issue as their own via personal social-media accounts. This amalgamated space allowed people to interact with Maser's mural, and through it the repeal movement, in a personal and continual manner. In using both physical murals and their socialmedia interactions, Irish feminists successfully helped to repeal the Eighth Amendment and created a precedent for feminist activism to use street art to engage with other issues concerning female bodies, including the subjects of sexual violence and body positivity.3 This article will examine four murals that all engage with Irish women's struggle to end patriarchal control of the female body. I begin with two pro-choice murals, Maser's 2016 Repeal the 8th and the 2018 Savita by Aches. I then analyze two artworks by street artist Estr, the 2018 work Not Asking For It, which addresses the topics of consent, sexual violence, and rape culture in Ireland, and a 2019 mural depicting singer Lizzo that aims to combat the stigma of shame [End Page 321] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Maser's Repeal the 8th mural after being painted over. The HunReal Issues, (@HunRealIssues), Twitter, 26 July 2016, 12:58 pm, https://twitter.com/HunRealIssues/status/757545602825748480. surrounding female bodies and sexuality by embracing body-positive ideals. Building upon the success of Maser's work, I argue that each of these murals created a combination of physical and digital space that was used by Irish feminist activists as a new tool to challenge patriarchal authority over women and their bodies. Feminist Activism, Street Art, and Social Media: Parallel Functions of Creating Space The 2020 themed issue of Feminist Review concerning abortion in Ireland begins with a familiar feminist cry, a refusal to apologize for creating space "to express the injuries involved in the everyday experience of living as a woman in Ireland's 'police state.'"4 One method...

The Two Subalterns: Perceived Status and Violent Punitiveness

From the mid-twentieth century, state and public conceptions of deviance and crime control have turned increasingly punitive (Hallett 115; Hutchinson 138). In a Western context, criminal justice has long been retributive, prioritising punishment over rehabilitation (Wenzel et al. 26). Within that context, there has been an increase in punitiveness—understood here as a measure of a punishment’s severity—the intention of which has been to help restore the moral imbalance created by offending while also deterring future crime (Wenzel et al. 26). Entangled with the global spread of neoliberal capitalism, punitiveness has become internationally pervasive to a near-hegemonic degree (Sparks qtd. in Jennings et al. 463; Unnever and Cullen 100). The punitive turn has troubling characteristics. Punitive policies can be expensive, and increased incarceration stresses the criminal justice system and leads to prison overcrowding (Hutchinson 135). Further, punitiveness is not only applied unequally across categories such as class, race, and age (Unnever and Cullen 105-06; Wacquant 212) but the effectiveness of punitive policy relative to its costs is contested (Bouffard et al. 466, 477; Hutchinson 139). Despite this, evidence suggests public demand is driving punitive policymaking, but that demand is only weakly related to crime rates (Jennings et al. 463). While discussion of punitiveness in the public sphere often focuses on measures such as boot camps for young offenders, increased incarceration, and longer prison sentences, punitiveness also has a darker side. Our research analysing discussion taking place on a large, regional, crime-focused online forum reveals a startling degree and intensity of violence directed at offenders and related groups. Members of the discussion forum do propose unsurprising measures such as incarceration and boot camps, but also an array of violent alternatives, including beating, shooting, dismemberment, and conversion into animal food. This article draws on our research to explore why discussion of punitiveness can be so intensely violent.

Master Suppression Techniques and Gender Stereotypes as a Means to Discredit Female Leadership in the Media Representation of a President. A Case Study (Argentina 2011–2015)

&lt;p&gt;Este artículo se centra en la representación mediática de Cristina Fernández de Kirchner en las portadas de la revista semanal Noticias durante su segundo mandato como presidenta de Argentina, 2011–2015. A través de una revisión feminista de la evidencia documental, este texto tiene como objetivo determinar los patrones más prevalentes en el uso de técnicas de dominación y estereotipos de género en los medios de comunicación, discutiendo la representación de mujeres políticas en narrativas visuales y escritas, ya que generalmente ésta refuerza los estereotipos de género, perjudicando la imagen pública de las candidatas y representantes femeninas. Los resultados muestran cómo cinco estereotipos de género identificables (el líder narcisista o la diva frívola; la viuda solitaria frente a la viuda malvada; la mujer hipersexualizada o descontrolada; la mujer mentalmente enferma o desequilibrada psíquicamente; y la mujer insopor­table) interactúan con siete técnicas de dominación complementarias (hacer invisible; ridiculizar; retener información; doble constreñimiento o doble castigo; culpar y humillar o avergonzar; objetivar; violencia, fuerza o amenaza de fuerza) para rechazar, subestimar o burlarse del liderazgo político femenino.&lt;/p&gt;

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Open Sapce: Contemporary Feminist Discourses and Practices within and across Boundaries: An Interview with Avtar Brah

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Feminist Review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version BRAH, A. and CLINI, C., 2018. Contemporary feminist discourses and practices within and across boundaries: an interview with Avtar Brah. Feminist Review, 117 (1), pp.163–170 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0079-2.

Open Space: Feminism in Transnational Times, a Conversation with Christine Delphy: An Edited Transcription of Christine Delphy and Sylvie Tissot's Public Talk at the LSE

This article is an edited transcription of Christine Delphy’s public conversation with Sylvie Tissot, held at the LSE on 10 February 2016, and organised by the LSE Department of Gender Studies and Feminist Review. Christine Delphy first addresses, by way of a critique of French universalism, her more recent engagement with the anti-war movement and against the prohibition of the Islamic headscarf in France. She then discusses her lifelong theoretical work, from the conceptualisation of gender as denaturalising sex and the ‘principle of partition’ in the 1980s and 1990s to the invention of materialist feminism in the 1970s. The article opens with an introduction to the life and work of Christine Delphy and closes with a transcript of the Q&As.