Feminist Sociology Research Articles

Reality of Women in Indonesian Society: A Feminism Approach

Issues regarding gender in Indonesia are still ongoing, which cannot be denied that the patriarchal system is still very strong. Feminist law is based on feminist sociology, feminist philosophy and feminist history expansion of women's attention later in life. At the end of the 20th century, there were many feminist movements seen as a splinter of the Critical Legal Studies movement, of which there are many in essence provides criticism of the legal logic that has been used, its manipulative nature and legal dependence on politics, economics, the role of law in forming patterns social relations, and the formation of hierarchies by legal provisions is not fundamental. Feminist theories often ignore women's contemporary position, focusing on women historical past or utopian future. Focus on praxis often about creating revolutions, egalitarian reforms, or cultural utopias. Much of sociology is based on what are known as individual relationships with the world as it is and as it is maintained.

Historiographical Distortion of R.A Kartini's Heroism in a Feminist Sociological Perspective

The historiography of R.A Kartini 's heroism is a choice of topic that is quite challenging to discuss because Kartini is the only heroine who is armed with ideas. By tracing the historiography of Indonesian heroes, it was identified that not many of them left traces for the next generation in the form of written ideas. The monumental work that makes Kartini unique is a book titled “Letters of Javanese Princess.” The book “Letters of Javanese Princess” became a new milestone in the struggle of Indonesian women to gain access to formal education. The method used in this textual research is critical hermeneutics. The critical hermeneutics method allows a broad interpretation of written texts accessed by researchers. The results show that the historiography of Kartini's heroic values tended to be distorted by her rhetorical value alone. The impact is the occurrence of cults and devotional attitudes towards personality. The content of historical knowledge based on monumental historiography is quite risky because cults and devotions are always final, making it unnecessary to re-dialogue their existence. This research can be positioned as an auto criticism of Kartini's heroic historiography by utilizing the paradigm of feminist sociology.

Gendered labor: Appearance management and the unequal extraction of effort and time among ambassadors

This article examines the gendered appearance management ambassadors do to properly represent states. Drawing on feminist sociologist theorizations of labor, and attentive to intersections with sexuality, class, and Western standards, the study shows the unequal extraction of time and effort from men and women as they manage their appearance in diplomacy. Theoretically, I argue that the gendered management of dress, hair, and adornments are better conceived of as labor than as habitus or capital. Empirically, the study focuses on appearance management among ambassadors posted to Washington D.C. 2018–2020. Relying on a wealth of data—an original time survey, ambassador interviews, and observations—the study makes three empirical claims about the diplomatic embodiment of states: (a) diplomatic appearance standards are largely gender binary, with male uniformity and female variation; (b) more time and effort is demanded from female than male ambassadors; and (c) diplomatic appearance standards demand gender labor that is inextricably linked with the management of sexuality, upper class conventions, and Western physical appearance norms for representing states. In short, individuals presenting as men or women (although apparently not nonbinary) may now represent states as ambassadors, but more labor is extracted from women in doing so.

Freezing for ‘unlove’: Declining fertility, heterosexual partnering and conflicting subjectivities among women pursuing social egg freezing in their 30s in Norway

This article discusses so-called social egg freezing among women in Norway. The women, single and in their thirties, link the desire to freeze their eggs to challenges with heterosexual partnering and the lingering threat of becoming ‘desperate’ due to presumed declining fertility. I show that ‘desperation’ stands for impulses, desires, priorities and strategies, which are in conflict with an ideal feminine subjectivity – the ‘strong independent woman’ – who is gender equal, autonomous, rational and self-regulating. At the same time, normative coupledom based on ‘true love’ remains at the heart of the women’s idea of an optimal way of life. Drawing on feminist sociologist Eva Ilouz’ theorisation of the effects of late capitalism on heterosexual dynamics and relationships, I show how egg freezing is pursued in order to retain and improve one’s ability for what Illouz calls ‘unlove’: to avoid and escape substandard relationships and prioritise autonomy and self-empowerment over a desire for attachment. I contend that, although in some cases (and/or for some time) experienced as empowering and an enhancement of gender equality, egg freezing remains an individualised, and largely ineffective, response to conflicts and dilemmas stemming from gendered paradoxes of late capitalist intimate normativity, where norms of ‘true love’ coupledom come into conflict with an ideal subjectivity of radical autonomy. ‘Freezing for unlove’, thus, also highlights the ambiguous effects of an individualist neoliberal feminism, which fails to adequately address material gender differences, and to problematise adjustment to a male norm as a strategy for gender equality.

Women as ‘space invaders’ in a gendered billiards hall: The male space and moments of change

This article takes inspiration from feminist sociologist Nirmal Puwar’s conception of ‘space invaders’, to examine the gendered dynamics within a billiards hall in suburban Shanghai. Drawing upon insights obtained via participant observations in the hall and interviews conducted with members of the college billiards society affiliated with the hall, the article not only identifies the nuanced forms of sexism operating within/through the billiards space, but also explores how the arrival of new types of bodies can introduce new dynamics to the landscape and engender possibilities of change. Ultimately, it outlines three interconnected dimensions or ‘moments’ of spatial mutation – positional displacement, embodied transgression and ontological disruption of the subject. Considering that existing critiques on gendered relations in billiards are limited to media releases, this study marks the first scholarly attempt to analyse the gender power dynamics within the realm of billiards.

Stereotipe Perempuan Urban dalam novel Kami (Bukan) Fakir Asmara Karya J.S. Khairen

The aim of this research is to identify the stereotypes attached to urban female characters and discuss the reactions of urban female characters to the stereotypes attached to the novel Kami (bukan) Fakir Asmara by J.S. Khairen. This research uses Feminist Sociology theory which links the analysis of literary works with social phenomena and realities. This research is literary study with descriptive methods. The data collection technique in this research was managed by reading the novel intensively, identified the data, and taking an inventory of the data into a data collection format. The data analysis technique is carried out through content analysis.Based on the research results, there are five negative stereotypes attached to urban female characters in novels. The purpose of these stereotypes is to give women the opportunity to reduce their movement. The two reactions found were a reaction of approval and a reaction of disagreement. These two reactions prove that the existence and voice of women is an effort to oppose patriarchy which is detrimental to women. These reactions are a symbol that women bravely show their identity.

Feminist Sociology and the Future of Work: A Tribute to Joan Acker and the AJS Special Issue on Women

Feminist Sociology and the Future of Work: A Tribute to Joan Acker and the <i>AJS</i> Special Issue on Women

Sociology of the body as an independent research direction: prerequisites for formation and subject field

In the contemporary society, under globalization, digitalization, urbanization and networkization, the body acquires new meanings, is included in new discourses and becomes a significant object of sociology. The article considers the possibility of sociology of the body as an independent scientific direction similar to such directions as sociology of medicine, sociology of sexuality, feminist sociology, sociology of sports, sociology of food and nutrition, sociology of aging, etc. The problem of the body has a long tradition of scientific research, and the author identifies the prerequisites for sociology of the body in various areas of social knowledge: philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and general sociology. The author describes four basic research fields in sociology of the body: body as an object of social control; issues of sex and gender; body as an object of consumption; body and technology - development of biotechnology and selftracking technologies. These thematic blocks of sociology of the body are not isolated from such related fields as sociology of medicine, sociology of sexuality, feminist sociology, etc. All directions in the sociological study of the body are interrelated; however, each of them, including sociology of the body, has its own research field. Thus, sociology of the body studies the body in all its diverse social manifestations; the body as an element of social structure and social action; mutual influence of the body and contemporary transformations, such as urbanization, globalization, digitalization, networkization, etc.; emerging social movements focusing on the construction of identity and of the individual corporal project. The body becomes a project that can/should be improved and promoted. The “formed” body reflects such life attitudes of the individual as a sense of style and taste, attitudes to health, self-control, etc. Thus, through the body, the individual creates one’s social representation and identity: the image of “I”.

Retrieving Materialism: The Continued Relevance of Dorothy Smith

In this article, I argue that Smith’s continued relevance coincides with more recent retrievals of Marx-inspired materialism. This materialism and the associated understanding of human beings—the social, language, and world people share in common—certainly do not capture all there is to say about Smith’s eclectic and expansive social theory. However, the material dimension distinguishes her work from many other feminist sociologies and results in her continued relevance as a thinker who brings to the table another way of doing feminist sociology. I illustrate this by showing how Smith’s Marx-inspired materialism and its associated understanding of language offer a productive and timely alternative to the feminist social theory of anti-categorical intersectional theory and new materialist theory.

“Meeting of the Lines”: Lessons from a Lived Labour Life

This paper is a personal reflection about ‘learning labour’ within the context of a twenty-year relationship with my late partner, Mary-Jo Nadeau (1965–2021). As an academic, self-identified labour geographer, I give recognition to a number of lessons that I learned from Nadeau, herself a feminist sociologist, anti-racist activist, and labour organizer. The paper borrows from a largely feminist inspired literature on academic relationships and how such relationships influence intellectual development and pursuits. The paper explores a number of questions including: How do these relationships work? Do they increase professional success? What is the intellectual impact on each other’s work, even if you do not write together? And also important, what are the effects of gender and other relations of power in such a relationship? The paper concludes that reflection upon engagements with intimate partners is something that geographers and other scholars should be more open to. Further such reflections must go beyond mere acknowledgement of the intellectual contributions of those who are too often rendered invisible in research processes to how such intimacies shape research and scholarship.

Beyond Law as a Tool of Public Health: Vaccines in Interdisciplinary Sociolegal and Science Studies

Research on vaccines in the law and social sciences skews heavily toward an instrumentalist approach to knowledge in service of vaccine promotion. Overcoming hesitancy and promoting vaccine acceptance have been major goals, but successful levers for behavioral change remain elusive. Research with constructivist approaches to vaccines from feminist sociology and anthropology has uncovered ethnographic richness to describe how vaccine debates illuminate inequalities in parenting and re-entrench patterns of racism and colonialism. There is considerable potential in science and technology studies approaches that take seriously the materiality and movement of vaccines in networks of production, finance, and global politics, though there are considerable methodological challenges for these research designs. This review charts the lopsided bibliography of law and social science research on vaccines, asking why scholars rarely move away from instrumentalist conceptions of law in the service of public health and, when they do, explaining what theoretical tools enable it.

Bullying, misogyny and feminist whistleblowing: An autoethnography of how Betsy's Box became a veritable “Pandora's box”

Feminist autoethnography helps us as to make good use of our varied life experiences. In this article, particular embodied experiences and emotions are employed to demonstrate how these life events and feelings are emblematic of wider political meanings and social trends. The author reflects on her early academic career - 50 years ago - and how as a young feminist sociologist, she experienced overwhelming emotions of dread, terror, and horror at what was playing out before her. Before the “me-too” movement, her intense reactions to various oppressive goings-on were often surprising to her as being new to working in a structured academic environment. She uses her experiences as a feminist working on the margins of non-feminist spaces, while telling the stories of her interactions in a hostile, misogynist environment. This is an autoethnography of how she was a whistle-blower on a particular male colleague by opening her own Pandora's box.

Gender Stratification and Feminist Sociology: Why East-Central Europe Needs More Quantitative Gender Stratification Research

Unlike in Anglophone sociology, the sociological analysis of gender inequalities in East-Central Europe has not yet reached the status of a prominent subfield in stratification research. To address the key societal challenges of this century in East-Central Europe, we argue that the region is in need of a strong development in gender stratification research and a greater use of quantitative methodologies. Such advancement would strengthen not only stratification research but also feminist sociology in East-Central Europe. It would also facilitate the transfer of professional knowledge in stratification and feminist studies to the public. Drawing on the classical concept of Weber’s ideal types, we further argue that gender stratification research, with its participation in academic and public debates, has the potential to not only reveal the differences in opportunities between males and females but also reduce such inequalities.

THE BEGINNING OF EUROPEAN FEMINIST SOCIOLOGY: HARRIET MAR-TINEAU

The relevance of the work is due to the problem of the emergence of such a well-known trend in modern science as feminist sociology. The article attempts to consider the beginning of the formation of feminist sociology in Europe. Based on the analysis of primary sources, the author reveals the contribution of the English researcher Harriet Martineau to the development of this direction. Her contribution to the development of sociology as a science is currently beyond doubt, since the name of this English sociologist is put on a par with recognized classical sociologists such as O. Comte, G. Spencer. Martino was one of those sociologists who drew attention to a different vision of social reality, namely the fact that women see the world differently than men, their thoughts and feelings are socially and culturally conditioned. Martino’s vision and approaches to the study of social issues are distinguished by originality and are based on his own numerous empirical studies. The author of the article made an attempt to trace the research logic of the English sociologist. If the first positivists were engaged in the search and justification of the laws of the stages of social progress, then for Martino one of the main tasks was to study social life in society in its concrete manifestation, everyday patterns of interaction between people formed in various cultural and historical contexts. The author shows that the work of the English researcher really allows us to talk about her socially critical approach to the study of society and the great im-portance of the problem of discrimination against women in modern society. Martineau’s sociology can be regarded as feminist, which marked the beginning of women's studies and the general socio-critical orientation of thinking in science, to some extent opposed to the sociological canon.

About the Contributors

Blu Buchanan is a university fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at University of North Carolina Asheville. Their academic writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and PUBLIC: A Journal of Imagining America as well as in edited volume chapters in Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis and Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era.Ryan Lee Cartwright is associate professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis. Cartwright's research focuses on disability, gender, and sexuality on the social and spatial margins. Cartwright's first book, Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity (2021), maps racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural United States, throughout the twentieth century, spanning genres from popular science to documentary photography to horror film. Cartwright's second book will examine how chronic illness came to be understood as a gendered, racialized “social burden” in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States.Juno Jill Richards is assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in women, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. They are the author of The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (2020) and a coauthor of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (2020).Tanya L. Saunders is an associate professor in language, literature, and culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Saunders is a sociologist interested in how the African diaspora throughout the Americas uses art as a tool for social change via decolonizing affect. They are also the director of the film project titled “Afro Feminismos em Cuba,” which is currently streamed on YouTube. They have published and lectured extensively throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. They are currently writing a book about Black Brazilian artivism and politics of liberation as a spring 2022 Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow at Harvard University.Marisa Solomon is assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her work focuses on how Black improvisation with waste's form and meaning upends environmental paradigms. She has published on the materiality of waste and anti-Black histories of urban planning and gentrification in the Journal of International Labor and Working-Class History. She is the codirector of the Black Atlantic Ecologies project at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Social Difference, where she is affiliated with the Earth Institute.Jennifer Tyburczy is associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display, won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBTQ Studies. Her scholarship can also be found in Women and Performance, Radical History Review, QED, Signs, Feminist Formations, Text and Performance Quarterly, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and the anthology Queer Nightlife. Tyburczy is currently completing her second monograph, “Queer Traffic: Sex and the Performance of Free Trade.”

Thirty Years and Counting

In this article I share some of my experience of arguing for and doing auto/biography with reference to some of my research and writing interests and concerns. I reflect on how for me auto/biographical work highlights, and celebrates, the political aspects and responsibilities of both the process and the product of research. I show how my own ways of working in this way is part of a feminist sociologist tradition and how my own experience has led to different and creative ways of working which can be significant in terms of impact both in and outside of the academy. In an attempt to provide some examples of my own place in the construction of the knowledge I present some of my creative auto/biographical work in the areas of non/motherhood and food sharing between friends and acquaintances.

Remembering, Learning, and Envisioning as the Work: A Conversation with the Editors of Black Feminist Sociology

Remembering, Learning, and Envisioning as the Work: A Conversation with the Editors of <i>Black Feminist Sociology</i>

Between the Personal and the Political: On Marianne Wex's Let's Take Back Our Space

Abstract From 1972 to 1977 the West German artist Marianne Wex (1937-2020) undertook an extensive photographic research project that eventually was published as a book: Let's Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1979). Both visual analysis and homeopathic demonstration of the patriarchal state's performative effect on somatic physical expression, the book is as much a work of renegade feminist sociology as it is a work of photo-conceptualism. This essay performs an archaeology of Let's Take Back Our Space, reading it in the context of contemporaneous aestheticopolitical discourses, including feminist autodidacticism.

Intellectual manifestos of modern feminist sociologists

The article is devoted to the analysis of the sociological work of famous researchers — Ann Oakley, Donna Haraway, Shulamit Firestone and Judith Butler, who worked within the framework of the feminist paradigm in sociology, which interprets social phenomena and processes from a femininocentric point of view. The work of these women sociologists has become a kind of intellectual manifesto — a written statement of the scientific principles of the feminist trend in sociology, based on the belief in the constant discrimination of women in all spheres of social life.Ie author analyzes the works of a bright representative of the liberal-reformist trend in feminism, Ann Oakley, whose scientific work is divided into four areas: “sex and gender”, “domestic work and family life”, “childbirth and medicine” and “sociology proper”. Exactly E. Oakley is considered the ancestor of the concept of “gender” in sociology. She divorced the concepts of “gender” (gender) as an unshakable biological attribute and as a cultural determinant that determines the conceptualization of “masculinity” and “femininity”.The article pays enough attention to one of the founders of cyberfeminism — a trend in modern feminist thought associated with the study of cyberspace, the Internet and information technology — Donna Jean Haraway, whose greatest fame was brought by the “cyborg theory”. A cyborg is a being whose borderline position at the intersection of the boundaries between nature and culture, body and mind, sex and gender, fact and fiction, serves as an argument for denying biological sex as a determinant of gender inequality in culture and society.A significant place in the article is occupied by the figure of Shulamit Firestone, one of the founders of radical feminism. Her works, based on the fusion of ideas borrowed from Marxism, feminism and psychoanalysis, carried out a subtle scientific analysis that allowed linking the structures of gender inequality and economic stratification, as well as environmental degradation and the policy of scientific knowledge. In a style that later became a hallmark of feminist works of the 1970s, Sh. Firestone showed clear and internal links between the generally accepted expression of heterosexuality, “forced femininity” and the institutionalization of gender inequality.At the end of the article, the author turns to the work of Judith Butler, a representative of poststructuralism, a specialist in the Jeld of phenomenology and theory of gender, who opposes the existentialist vision of the problems of personality and being, culture and general human physiology, the interdependence between gender and sexual relations.In general, the works of modern theorists of sociology and at the same time feminist sociologists have set new fields of sociological search, these feminist sociologists call for the construction of a new model of society, up to the establishment of a “new gender order” at the macro and micro levels of social life.

Uncommon Sense: Care, with Bev Skeggs [Audio podcast episode

Feminist sociologist Bev Skeggs on why our society should be built around the concept of care, way beyond one-on-one relationships. Plus: What's the harm in self-care? And has Covid-19 taught us anything?