Feminist Spaces Research Articles

‘First I got one tear, and then I got a whole bunch’: fluidity and plasticine solidity in the world of Barbie

I consider the role of fluidity in Barbie (2023) as a mode of exploring femininity and ecological connections through embodiment. Barbie's relationship to fluid changes throughout the film. She learns to drink, learns to cry and thus, I argue in this article, slowly moves from plastic to flesh by opening into fluidity. Through attention to the fluidity inherent within the very definition of plastic, as well as the necessary taking in and leaking out of fluid exchange within the body, the plasticine world of Barbie, positions fluidity as a vital object of power within both feminine embodiment and feminist spaces. Using Barbie's relations with embodied fluidity through its plasticine solidity, I develop the notion of fluid relations to highlight the labour of our fluid interactions as well as their environmental tendrils. For feminist theory in the age of the Anthropocene, this article highlights the ways that biological, fluid relations take labour, leave traces, happen across shifting membranes and are both altered by and alter all they touch. Through this reading, I argue for a reinvigoration of our reading of bodily fluids in relation to a feminine excess within our embodied material world. But I also suggest that such a reinvigorated fluid reading must not forget our environmental relations: the fluidity at the heart of the plastic and the plastic at the heart of fluidity.

Between Refusal and Refuge. Queer Feminist Bookstore Savannah Bay

Feminist bookstores have played an important role in the creation of feminist spaces since the end of the 20th century. In the Netherlands, Savannah Bay is one of the last remaining in a previous network of feminist bookstores. This article explores how the bookstore manages to uphold its function as a feminist space while operating in relative isolation. The data used for this analysis consists of a series of interviews with volunteers working at Savannah Bay. This data is analysed via Bonnie Honig’s <i>Feminist Theory of Refusal</i> (2021), which<i> </i>connects three forms of feminist resistance within one arc of feminist refusal. Crucial to this arc is the circular movement where the women first leave the city, then organise a new way of living, and then return to the city to implement their ideas. By reading the experiences of Savannah Bay volunteers via Honig’s theory of refusal, this article analyses how the bookstore manages to uphold a feminist space while being embedded in a predominantly patriarchal public sphere. It demonstrates the complex ways in which Savannah Bay continuously negotiates its relationship to the customers and volunteers it caters for on the one hand, and a patriarchal public sphere which it seeks to reform on the other hand. Additionally, this reading extends and nuances Honig’s theoretical approach by relating it to empirical data, which raises questions about the conditions for fulfilling Honig’s feminist arc of refusal, and about the relations between the various moments on the arc.

Erotic Black Diaspora

“The Erotic Black Diaspora: From Your Hands to Mine” is a theoretical exploration of how the erotic informs Black feminist politics, kinship, love, and spirituality throughout the African diaspora. Through an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, history, African and African diaspora studies, women’s and gender studies, and Black queer studies, as well as archival research, a close reading of letters sent to Black feminist, writer, and poet Audre Lorde reveals how the erotic functions within Black feminist spaces, particularly in the late 1970s–mid 1980s. In using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, as she defines it in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” this paper argues that the Erotic Black Diaspora is a way of reading Black feminist love, language, and action. Recognizing the diversity within Afro-diasporic experiences, the Erotic Black Diaspora privileges the erotic (platonic and/or romantic) feelings and expressions across continents cultivated between same-sex-loving and queer individuals throughout the African diaspora. Positioning Black feminist archives, in particular correspondence sent between Black feminist foremothers, as a counter-archive to institutions of oppression informs one’s understanding of the ethics of Black feminist politics, love, spirituality, and community building.

Off the Beats and Track: Finding Historical Lesbian and Queer Women’s Feminist Spaces through Musicians’ Tour Schedules, Concert Flyers, and Correspondence

This article explores historical research methods used to locate lesbians and queer women, especially within American and Canadian contexts from the 1960s onward. It begins by discussing methods such as analyzing women’s and lesbian travel guides, directories, maps, periodicals, newsletters, newspapers, websites, oral histories, social media, archival fonds and collections. In particular, this article explores how utilizing lesbian and queer women musicians’ tour schedules, calendars, correspondence, and contracts for shows and appearances can be a valuable historical research method, especially for locating impermanent historical lesbian and queer women’s spaces off the beaten track. The article focuses on the Alix Dobkin Papers as a case study to explore aspects of historical lesbian and queer women’s spaces and demonstrate the utility of this historical research method beyond Dobkin. The papers of Alix Dobkin include business correspondence, fan mail, fliers and programs from concerts, subject files, t-shirts, photographs, and memorabilia. As Dobkin played an important role in the women’s music movement and toured regularly, her papers provide useful insight into historical debates about lesbian anti-racist politics, ethical consumption, community organizing, and transgender inclusion and exclusion.

Affective Ambush: An Autotheoretical Approach to Understanding Emotions as Useful to the Research Process

ABSTRACT This essay considers the use of emotions in life narrative research. Using autotheory the authors recount and reflect on their experiences of a phenomenon they are tentatively calling ‘affective ambush’, wherein during the course of research the researcher unexpectedly experiences significantly heightened affect—or ‘big feelings’—stimulated by research materials. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed, they position sites of affective ambush as feminist spaces of encounter that yield rich data accessible through embodied modes of enquiry such as autotheory and autocriticism. As such, in this essay they seek to trouble and problematise the dominant detached and ‘objective’ academic position, and investigate how moving outside of this paradigm has unique implications for scholars of life narrative, trauma and grief. They propose instances of ‘affective ambush’ as sources of affective information that, if integrated into the research process, can reveal new insights about the texts and subjects that we investigate as life narrative scholars.

Correction Notice to Di Lauro (2023)

The article “What’s in a woman?” authored by Cassandre Di Lauro (DiGeSt: Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, Vol. 10, No. , pp. 81-96, https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.85307), published on December 11, 2023 as part of the Special Issue “Varieties of TERFness” – guest edited by Mauro Cabral Grinspan, Ilana Eloit, David Paternotte and Mieke Verloo – included a number of details about the otherwise anonymized participants. Upon revaluation after the manuscript’s publication, the participants feared these elements could put their anonymity at risk, and requested corrections to be made to the article to safeguard their privacy. In recognition of polarized and at times even bellicose discourses on gender in contemporary feminist spaces, the Special Issue’s guest editors and DiGeSt’s editorial team recognize that only the participants themselves may fully assess the degree to which they might face unwanted attention by their description in an article. Hence, they have agreed on a post-publication correction to the article – which were enacted on April 5, 2024. Throughout the document, all details marked by the participants as potentially identifying information have been edited to further anonymize the community studied, and several line edits have been made to clarify the author’s descriptive intent. No further changes have been made to the article, and neither its substance nor its conclusions have been altered.

Frieda Wunderlich: Feminist research and activism in Berlin

In this article, we map the idiosyncratic social research career of Frieda Wunderlich during her years in Berlin (1884–1963). We recover elements of Wunderlich’s unique deployment of social data and her analyses that are emblematic of contributions she made and that have been previously overlooked. We highlight Wunderlich as she lived and worked alongside other women in Berlin who shaped discourse and practice on social protections during a unique moment in the Weimar era. As a scholar and practitioner, Wunderlich helped transform the significance of the relationship between economy and society by insisting on the primacy of humane labor conditions. Our research explores two elements of Wunderlich’s contributions in this context: (1) her efforts to integrate academic social research into public policy and (2) her participation in active, feminist spaces for new policy practices, politics and education. To analyze Wunderlich’s career in Berlin, we refer to three interrelated arenas where she made significant contributions: the German Association of Female Civil Servants of Welfare (1919–1933), the German Democratic Party (1925–1933), the German Academy for Women’s Social and Educational Work (1925–1933). In our exploration of Wunderlich’s scholarship and policy practice within these arenas, we situate her contributions alongside other women including Dorothea Hirschfeld, Hedwig Wachenheim, Cora Berliner, Gertrud Bäumer, Helene Lange, Marianne Weber, Hanna Meuter, Alice Salomon, and Hilde Lion. Recovering and bringing into conversation several figures, we find that theory and praxis concurrently informed Wunderlich’s career, as it did for many of the women around her.

Insider‐allies: The precarious politics of men in identity‐fluid feminism

AbstractAcademic and activist conversations about the position of men in feminism often operate under the assumption that women are the movement's key beneficiaries and men are privileged outsiders lending their support. I use 59 interviews from a broader project on feminist and LGBTQ+ activism in the United States to illustrate how men's orientation to feminism is shaped by whether social movement organizations adopt what I call woman‐centered or identity‐fluid politics. While woman‐centered politics treat men as allies whose intentions must be vetted by women, identity‐fluid feminism imagines men as insiders with their own independent investment in the movement. I argue that the tension between these two models of identity politics gives men a liminal “insider‐ally” position within feminism. Although feminist men are given a tentative authority to speak for the movement, the persistence of woman‐centered understandings of feminism means men's insider status is contested, especially when they dominate feminist spaces, compromise women's sense of safety, and seek leadership.

“A male feminist walks into a bar, because it was set so low: The pedestal effect and the economy of gratitude in feminist spaces”

AbstractMen in feminist spaces often find themselves the recipients of disproportionate gratitude and attention—along with other persistent effects of male privilege that I have elsewhere termed the Pedestal Effect—despite this running counter to both prevailing feminist ideologies and the desires of the men themselves. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild described a similar economy of gratitude wherein low expectations led to heightened valuation of married men's household contributions, smuggling inequities from the wider society into the marriage and inhibiting progressive change even if both parties desired a more egalitarian partnership. By applying Hochschild's framework to interview data from 52 men and 12 women active in the field, I show that the same process explains the troubling continuance of male privilege in feminist spaces: while interviewees of all genders problematize the imbalanced economy of gratitude and many have attempted specific counterstrategies, it nonetheless persists in importing inequalities, undermining men's accountability, and inhibiting desired progressive change. This suggests that the economy of gratitude may be a ubiquitous interactional process that reproduces inequalities across a wide range of social contexts. I emphasize that the economy of gratitude is in fact intersectional, not only gendered, and introduce the idea of a “low bar” to more fully account for the broad range of social influences on expectation‐setting.

“White feminism ruins the party again”: a case study of the rise and fall of the My Favorite Murder Facebook fan group

ABSTRACT This paper employs digital ethnographic methods to explore the Facebook fan group for the popular podcast My Favorite Murder. We argue that the My Favorite Murder podcast and Facebook group, while providing a potentially unique feminist online space for its members in its early days, quickly devolved into a toxic space rife with conflict and ultimately destroyed by white-centred feminism and white supremacy. We explore failed gatekeeping practices in relation to other Facebook podcast fan groups that have met a similar demise. Finally, we question whether truly inclusive anti-racist feminist spaces can exist in capitalistic models of media production and consumption.

Contesting gender: young women and feminist generations in gender-based violence services

ABSTRACT Activism and service provision around gender-based violence (GBV) are often young women’s first entry point into feminist movements. Definitions of gender and GBV, however, are increasingly contested within feminist spaces, with often exclusionary consequences for how survivors of violence are supported. Drawing on the findings of online and in-person interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Serbia and Italy, this article documents young activists’ efforts to broaden the category of gender within feminist organizations and questions whether the frame of feminist generational conflict, prevalent both in the literature and in public discourse, can explain the ensuing tensions. It argues that narratives of generational conflict, despite being frequently deployed by activists themselves, obfuscate a genuine struggle to redefine the subject of feminism and extend feminist solidarity to trans women and other marginalized groups. Different feminist praxes, as seen in the two case studies, can either trigger acts of generational disidentification and disengagement or foster spaces of intergenerational exchange and discussion. Paying attention to the work that intergenerational conflict narratives are doing, and the work they are preventing, can help uncover and explicitly address the tensions currently permeating feminist spaces towards a more inclusive and expansive feminism.

The Private Sphere in Citizenship Education for Deliberative Democracy: The Liberal and Feminist Arguments against Public-Private Dualism

One of the challenges in substantiating deliberative democracy as a normative theory is the educational challenge of how to cultivate civic virtue, especially mutual respect and civility, in children. The cultivation of civic virtue is not limited to school education, but is also an activity related to family education. However, liberal theorists who advocate the theory of deliberative democracy, based on the dualism of public and private, have limited their discussions to the issue of civic development in the field of public education. This article proposes to understand and compare the many competing theories on public-private dualism, particularly in liberal and feminist spaces. Beginning with an analysis of the work of liberal theorists such as David Archard as well as Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, and moving on to that of feminist theorists such as Susan Okin, this article examines competing theories on education in school and in the family, to whom the responsibility of education belongs, and where feminist and liberal thought enlighten these debates. This article will clarify the theoretical tendencies and principles of liberal arguments aimed at overcoming the public-private dualism in education, and present a strategy for overcoming the challenges that this theory encompasses by seeking reference points in feminist thought, especially with attention to conception of relational autonomy.

Curating the history of POWES and Feminist Psychology in the UK: In conversation with Rose Capdevila

Rose Capdevila is a Professor at the Open University whose research interest focuses on gender in digital spaces, taking a critical feminist and poststructuralist approach to her research. Rose is currently working on a longer-term project with colleagues Katherine Hubbard (Surrey) and Lois Donnelly (Worchester) exploring the History of Feminist Psychology in the U.K. At the 2022 POWES Conference, Rose presented her keynote speech entitled ‘If I could turn back time’ which curated and reflected on the history of POWES and Feminist Psychology within the U.K., in which she discusses some of the work she has been doing with Katherine and Lois. As someone who missed the POWES 2022 conference, Rose and I organised an email interview to (digitally) discuss her keynote and covered areas beginning with Rose’s history with POWES, the evolution of her keynote research and some of the interesting findings from the work, concluding by considering the important work that can be done in feminist spaces and importance of memorialising feminist knowledge and contribution.

Moving toward Radical Love in Organizing Spaces

Moving toward Radical Love in Organizing Spaces

TERF or Transfeminist Avant la Lettre?

Abstract French lesbian author and theorist Monique Wittig's early contestations of woman as the subject of feminism have played an important role in gender studies in both anglophone and francophone spaces. Since the mid-1990s, French lesbian studies scholars and queer theorists alike have looked to her to anchor their contestations of normative sexuality within a French tradition and counter some of the universalizing aspects of Anglocentric queer theory. As a result, polarizing debates have sprung up over interpretations of Wittigian political lesbianism, typically focusing on divergent readings of her theorization of sex and gender between radical lesbians on the one hand and queer theorists on the other. However, far less attention has been paid to the implications of such debates for transgender studies. Since she has been claimed by trans-exclusionary radical feminists as well as by queer and materialist transfeminists in France, her legacy serves as a rich site through which to understand how the ideological conflicts between those groups relate to feminist history. Taking as a point of departure the appropriation of her name by the anti-trans group Résistance Lesbienne (Lesbian Resistance) that took over the 2021 Paris Pride March, this article fleshes out the implications of her work concerning the place of transgender people, and especially transgender women, in feminist spaces. Ultimately, it is her complexity that makes her a crucial figure for transgender studies insofar as she elucidates French “gender-critical” feminism and its transfeminist critics.

Choosing Threat, Embodying the Viral

Choosing Threat, Embodying the Viral

Politics of containment: disruptions and interventions

In this essay I consider three interrelated aspects of comfort feminism, to consider and unpack its potential use beyond the critique of comfort feminism itself. First, I approach comfort feminism as always intimately implicated in additional affective labor for non-white bodies. I then identify these non-white bodies as geo-bodies: geographically produced subjects/objects. It is a body that is always produced as a disruption to, or an impingement on, the geography and politics of an implicit normative whiteness that is both overt and covert, even in more progressive spaces, including feminist spaces. Ultimately, I consider what pleasure there might be in disrupting the normative despite the (triple) labor geo-bodies do, especially in contemporary politics. To do this, I turn to two separate, but interrelated incidents—one public, the other personal—to extrapolate my approach. In engaging with these examples, I consider the notion of discontainment—where the unhappiness (discontentment) from the disciplining (containment) results in the refusal of both—as a form of radical possibility for the geo-body, especially when occupying spaces—political, geographic, raced, and gendered—not intended for them. By focusing on the interrelated aspects of comfort feminism, my hope is that these negotiations between comfort/discomfort and containment/discontainment may potentially open interesting ways to rethink the relationship between space, race, affect, and politics.

POWES is pronounced “feminist”: Negotiating academic and activist boundaries in the talk of UK feminist psychologists

The Psychology of Women and Equalities Section (POWES) of the British Psychological Society (BPS) accounts for much of the feminist action in British psychology and beyond. In this qualitative study, we use discursively informed thematic analysis to examine a set of eleven in-depth interviews to explore the everyday experiences of feminists within academic spaces in and around the discipline of psychology in the United Kingdom. Three research questions addressing the boundary between activism and academia; the provision of support; and differing approaches to knowledge production were investigated. Our findings highlight the role of POWES as a feminist community as well as the conceptual importance of notions of home, work, and fun. Moreover, the paper examines the ways traditional conceptions of scientific rigour continue to haunt feminist spaces, as does the invisibility of emotional labour. Overall, our findings indicate that the place of feminist academic communities remains vital to sustain critical thought and action: having an intellectual “home” is pivotal to the survival of feminist psychology as well as feminists in psychology.

Community gardens as feminist spaces: A more‐than‐gendered approach to their transformative potential

AbstractIn recent years, research in urban agriculture (UA) initiatives has adopted a more critical and transdisciplinary approach, proposing that UA enables shifts in socio‐economic, community, environmental and urban paradigms. Following this critical agenda, this paper draws attention to the multi‐scalar transformative potential that participation in community gardens (as a form of UA) can provide to volunteers, informed by a feminist approach. Firstly, we review the literature on the diverse gendered benefits, and degrees of empowerment women have experienced from working in community gardens, both individually and collectively. Examples from the literature review are informed by concepts from feminist geographies that support the exploration of community gardens as sites of embodied, relational and multi‐scalar experience. Following that, we expand the discussion to review opportunities community gardens offer individuals to gain greater awareness of symbolic forms of oppression, and envision alternatives for social change, drawing on feminist geographies in ways that move ‘beyond gender’. These benefits are mostly informed by conscientisation, decolonial and feminist political ecology approaches. Finally, the paper suggests that community gardens can be conceptualised as feminist spaces, given their fluidity and capacity to enable critical perspectives in volunteers, which may result in alternative forms of political action. The paper concludes with suggestions for further critical research on UA spaces.

Gendering Outcomes: Different Paths, Similar Outcomes: An Analysis of Cross-Generational Biographical Consequences of Activism in Feminist Spaces

This article analyzes different paths leading to similar outcomes across three age-cohorts of activists in three feminist spaces in Italy. It addresses three challenges in the literature on biographical outcomes. First, it brings forward the methodological problem of recognizing crossing-points, which define a before-and-after in the activist's life course. Second, it improves the ways in which gender and sexuality are discussed in terms of biographical outcomes. Third, this empirical study elaborates the time in movement and the generational aspects of biographical outcomes, emphasizing the radical challenge of the younger cohorts and the long-term effects on the older cohort. This article suggests that only by deep case study, which incorporates different feminist spaces, we are able to better understand the gendered and generational biographical outcomes of feminist movements. These results can also be insightful for the analysis of other types of collective action outcomes.