Feminist Spaces Research Articles

Forms of Resistance: Uses of Memoir, Theory, and Fiction in Trans Life Writing

ABSTRACTThis article examines the forms of writing that transgender (hereafter ‘trans’) people in North America, the United Kingdom and Australia have used to convey their experiences to a wider public, since the first sex reassignment surgeries were performed during the inter-war period. I will discuss how transsexual people first used memoir to counter sensationalistic mass media coverage, and then how feminist critiques of their works led to ‘post-transsexual’ theory, which deconstructed the conventions and clichés that the transition memoir genre had developed. These theorists suggested new ways to document gender-variant lives beyond a generalised desire for public acceptance and in response to social concerns: the policies of the gender identity clinics, who decided who could access medical services, and on what terms, especially the demand that patients ‘pass’ in their acquired genders and hide their histories; and the exclusion of trans people from feminist spaces, and gay/lesbian politics. The article concludes with a consideration of my own autobiographical writing, in a newspaper blog and a memoir, and how my practice responded to and attempted to change how trans people were expected to write about their lives.

Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism

The affects of transfeminine life and their relationship to the material conditions undergirding such life are undertheorized in transgender studies and queer studies. This creative and critical essay conceptualizes transfeminine brokenness through negative experiences and emotions, drawing connections between such negative states to transmisogyny and material precarity. The essay intends to politicize transfeminine brokenness for a radical transfeminism. It argues that the material basis of transfeminine brokenness involves the marginalization of the labor of trans women and trans feminine people within a radicalized and gendered division of labor under capitalism alongside transmisogyny within queer, trans, and feminist spaces and communities.

The production of emancipatory feminist spaces in a post-socialist context: organization of Ladyfest in Romania

Ladyfest – a Riot Grrrl feminist do-it-yourself festival – has been organized independently in cities around the world since the year 2000. The emancipatory spaces that activists at Ladyfest seek to cultivate through workshops, music, and art provide seeds of inspiration for transformative social change. The main strength of the festival is the capacity to strengthen networks. This article discusses how the idea for this festival arose in Olympia, Washington, expanded to other locations, and was later organized by young feminists in Romania. In 2005, young women in Timisoara organized the first such festival in their city with a community of women from both inside and outside of Romania, and held another festival in Bucharest in 2007. Retrospective interviews are used to unpack the meaning of such organizing in a post-socialist context with reflections on how feminism has changed in Romania over the past decade. Specifically, the analysis of this event offers insight on how the production of space can be used to catalyze interconnections between emancipatory feminist spaces, the mode of production, and flows of feminist knowledge and concepts.

“We Can Make Something Out of Anything”: Sally Potter's Thriller and London's History of Queer Feminist Film Spaces

The National Trust, a British charity founded in 1895 that manages heritage buildings and open spaces for the UK, is now running daytime tours of London's queer club culture from 1918 to 1967 (when the Sexual Offences Act decriminalized private homosexual acts between men over the age of 21), ending at a version of the Caravan, a queer-friendly members' club from 1934 recreated from police records and court reports. Further, the queer activists Sexual Avengers marked 2017's LGBT History month by placing unofficial “Queer Heritage” blue plaques on London landmarks, including one that commemorated the 1988 action against Section 28 in which four lesbians rappelled into the second chamber of the UK Parliament, the House of Lords. The fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Sexual Offences Act is being marked this summer by programming at the British Film Institute and other UK cultural institutions. With the National Trust also showcasing the portrait of the Lord Orlando, it is a time when queer histories are clearly entering the mainstream curatorial and cultural spaces and interpretations, making 2017 a productive time to offer a thick description of the complexities of labor, politics, and creative practice that may be smoothed over by this move. At the same time, current queer and feminist spaces in London (as elsewhere in the overdeveloped world) are encountering a recapitulation and intensification of the 1970s version of austerity and precarity that formed both the pretext and subtext of Potter's first film, Thriller (1979), making it an ideal text through which to examine these issues.

‘We Don’t want it to be like that for her again’: gendered leadership and online feminism in Australian politics and planning

ABSTRACTLearning from women leaders in Australia has gained attention as a national political issue since the election of Julia Gillard as our first female Prime Minister in 2010. In parallel with her period in office, a growth in feminist action and practice has been evident, in institutions and interventions such as ‘Destroy the Joint’, a group that agitates for an end to sexism and misogyny in multiple spaces. This article examines shifts in gendered leadership and activism, in online and offline spaces, especially with respect to learning from women’s experiences in leadership, and we consider the implications of gendered politicking on planning issues. Drawing on empirical quantitative and qualitative data from an online survey of nearly 900 Destroy the Joint participants, this article looks at some impacts of national female leadership on Australian governance and what people believe should happen to achieve gender equality, in planning and political representation contexts. We argue that discourses of power and gender produced a challenging governance context for Gillard that undermined her leadership achievements but that this sexism also helped inspire growing and active feminist spaces that seek gender equality.

The Emergence of Transfeminism in Russia

Abstract Trans* issues became visible in Russian feminist communities only in 2013. In Russia, transfeminism was not a reaction against the explicit exclusion of trans* people from feminist spaces; on the contrary, transphobia in feminism arose after an attempt to introduce transfeminism. Both sides currently borrow their arguments from texts by US authors, without significant adaptation to the post-Soviet context. According to the results of a survey conducted among Russian-speaking feminists, the acceptance of trans* people depends on social privilege and education, with more privileged and educated feminists being more conservative. On the other hand, the support for existing gender roles in Russian trans* communities is rather high, although it was shown to be lower than in the general population. Assaults from cisnormative feminists and trans* people, together with the tough political situation, make the survival of transfeminism questionable in Russia.

Closing the Gender Gap?: New Spaces of Cultural Memory Construction for Contemporary Female Authors in Portugal

This study is an exploration of feminist and non-essentialist, universal memory spaces for contemporary female authors in Portugal. It is based on the representations of four writers, Helia Correia, Teolinda Gersao, Lidia Jorge and Ines Pedrosa in academic, press and online criticism. This study shows how a national critical language that re-enforces gender normativity in categorizations that often only leave the outside position of ‘escrita feminina’ to the majority of contemporary authors is counter-acted in a world literary space, where women writers’ work is judged and valued through other ideological and socio-cultural lenses that make the emergence of different and differing ‘regimes of value’ possible. Press and online critical localities represent a more flexible, fluid and multi-faceted space, where critical contextualizations are constantly overwritten, preventing static categories that can then be ‘naturalized’. Authors themselves can influence press and online critical commentary in performative acts as well as through the creation of an authorial ‘online self’, which creates a counter-memory to the traditional contextualizations in a national field that follow normative constructions rooted in a patriarchal discourse. On the one hand, a traditional elitist critical approach can be observed in all media, academic, press and, digital, that often misreads and omits women’s literary projects. On the other hand, female and feminist spaces of alternative constructions of cultural memory are also present and traditional contextualizations co-exist with new classificatory mechanisms that give a more adequate representation to contemporary female authorship.

Problematizing Prostitution in Law and Policy in the Republic of Ireland

This article attempts to uncover the discursive practices that have framed recent debates on prostitution in the Republic of Ireland. As Ireland prepares to introduce Swedish-style laws, which criminalize the purchase of sexual services, we are particularly interested in interrogating the dominant construction of prostitution in recent policy debates and consultations. Taking these spaces as sites for the reproduction of discursive and material practices, we employ methods of critical discourse analysis through Carole Bacchi’s (1999) ‘What’s the problem represented to be’ approach to question: How is prostitution problematized in Irish law and policy? We argue the representation of prostitution in neo-abolitionist discourse in Ireland operates through gendered and racialized assumptions about sex workers and migrant women. The material consequences of this have implications not only for current prostitution law and policy proposals but also for wider feminist spaces in Ireland.

Review Essay - At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror

I remember my first reading of the inspiring anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1983) at the recommendation of a university professor. This anthology, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, gave voice to the feelings of displacement I encountered as a Filipina migrant to a settler nationstate like Australia. Although I read this book twenty years after the first edition was published, the stories, poetry, and illustrations etched across its pages spoke of what I was never encouraged to admit as a Filipino immigrant to Australia: that is, being a racialised female was something that merited acknowledgement, not derision, apathy or effacement. The anthology was a call to arms that deployed a communal invitation to stand up, speak out, and redress the ongoing colonial and imperial acts of violence that reduced ‘women of color’ as ‘less than’, even within supposedly pro-women feminist spaces. In her chapter, ‘Speaking In Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers’, Anzaldúa begins with ‘Dear mujeres de color’ (women of color) (1983: 165), already positioning this anthology as a text that negotiates and challenges the normative English-language centrism of the academe and white, western feminist spaces.

This is What a Feminist (Space) Looks Like: (Re)conceptualizing Women's Centers as Feminist Spaces in Higher Education

By sharing an honest, thoughtful dialogue about how their different identities affect their experience of feminism and feminist spaces, Z Nicolazzo and Crystal Harris model duoethnographic dialogue—a type of dialogue across difference that has the potential to be a catalyst for transformative student learning.

New Activist Subjects: The Changing Feminist Field of Kolkata, India

628 Feminist Studies 40, no. 3. © 2014 by Srila Roy Srila Roy New Activist Subjects: The Changing Feminist Field of Kolkata, India The nationwide protests in the wake of the brutal gang rape and murder of a twenty-three-year-old student in New Delhi in December 2012 have renewed debates about feminism in India.1 While the nearunprecedented display of public outrage was for some a welcome sign that feminism is alive and well in an Indian context, for others it signaled the absence of a genuine women’s movement that was able to give voice and direction to such public anguish. The latter sentiment has in fact long prevailed among women’s rights activists observing the major transformations to feminist politics in the wake of India’s globalization. Such activists have viewed these transitions as signaling the decline, if not the death, of the Indian women’s movement (hereafter, IWM) in the face of the “coopting” forces of the state, the market, and the project of neoliberal development.2 Discussions about Indian feminism in its current 1. For two recent views on this highly publicized gang rape, see Poulami Roychowdhury,“‘The Delhi Gang Rape’: The Making of International Causes,” Feminist Studies 39, no. 1 (2013); and Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar, “India’s Winter of Discontent: Some Feminist Dilemmas in the Wake of a Rape,” Feminist Studies 39, no. 1 (2013). 2. While “feminism” is a contested term in India with many women and activists rejecting the label and its (negative) associations with Westernization and elitism, “IWM” has been employed as an analytical category to indicate “a sum of campaigns and issues of importance to women.” Samita Sen, “Towards a Feminist Politics? The Indian Women’s Movement in Historical Srila Roy 629 “third wave” are invariably motivated by generational narratives about the loss of the radical edge of the IWM.3 . Nostalgic narratives among older feminists continue in spite of contrary empirical evidence such as the largely spontaneous mass protests around the Delhi rape.4 Against the common narratives of loss, this essay considers some of the wider changes in feminist political mobilization in India through a situated consideration of its actors, especially its most recent entrants.5 There are few studies on the contemporary phase of the IWM, and fewer still that explore the dynamics of this phase and the agency of its subjects through thick ethnographic examination. In what follows, activists’ stories are employed to provide a situated sense of the subjects who inhabit and negotiate new feminist spaces as well as the discursive, if not inherited , ideas of feminism itself. Such new feminist spaces include queer feminist ones, which have been partly enabled by the activism of the IWM, not least through the large-scale mobilization around the repeal of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (the antisodomy law introduced by the British in 1860).6 Indeed, as Mary John notes, at a time of increased “self-questioning about the future direction of feminist struggles [in Perspective” in The Violence of Development: The Politics of Identity, Gender and Social Inequalities in India, ed. Karin Kapadia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2002). For an early exploration and defense of the use of “feminism” in the Indian context, see Nandita Shah and Nandita Gandhi, The Issues at Stake: Theory and Practice in the Contemporary Women’s Movement in India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992). 3. The wave metaphor has frequently been used in the Indian context, with Rajeswari Sunder Rajan delineating three “waves” that constitute the IWM as such: the immediate post-independence period of the 1950s and 1960s, during which time there was little organized activity in the face of a liberal faith in the institutions of the state; followed by the activism by the new autonomous women’s groups in the 1970s and 1980s; and the current period of consolidation and retrospection. See Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 4. See Srila Roy, “Melancholic Politics and the Politics of Melancholia: The Indian Women’s Movement,” Feminist Theory 10, no. 3 (2009), 341–57. 5. See Clare Hemmings, Why Stories...

Feminist solidarity: no boys allowed? Views of pro-feminist men on collaboration and alliance-building with women's movements

The field of men's pro-feminist organising continues to build global momentum. Boys and men are both capable, and interested, to take action to support the feminist movement. This article explores the experiences of five men active in pro-feminist organising, focusing in particular on their ways of building solidarity and alliances with women's rights networks. The current context of men's pro-feminist organising and the ways in which alliances are being forged with women's rights networks will be explored, demonstrating a diversity of approaches. The challenges are many, particularly as women's rights networks find themselves in a hostile funding climate, and ‘men's rights’ groups continue to delegitimise women's rights and deny the existence of gender inequality. Despite these challenges, pro-feminist men's organisations are employing strategies to enhance relationships with women's rights networks, and ensure their efforts retain feminist at the core. The importance of self-reflexivity and listening for pro-feminist men to operate in feminist spaces will be stressed, as well as to build broader coalitions and create additional resources for gender equality work.

Chick Lit in the Undergraduate Classroom

Chick Lit in the Undergraduate Classroom Cheryl A. Wilson (bio) "Readers call a book good when they find it useful," asserts Charlotte Templin in her study of literary pedagogy and the canon, "The Male-Dominated Curriculum in English: How Did We Get Here and Where are We Going?" She continues, explaining the politics behind such value judgments, "Instead of asking 'How good is it?' we must ask 'Good for what?' or 'Good for whom?' Judgments about quality are not the objective property of texts, but are contingent: they are the political judgments of individuals and, as such, a function of their tastes, interests, and beliefs."1 The genre known as "chick lit," a category of contemporary women's fiction that emerged in the 1990s with works including Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, has been plagued by such judgments and has sparked much debate in the popular press. This debate tends to take issue with two aspects of the genre, its status as literature and its relationship to feminism, and the recent infiltration of the academy by chick lit has further intensified these concerns. Nonetheless, the genre has begun to make inroads with the publication of a handful of critical articles, Caroline Smith's Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Contemporary Women's Popular Fiction (2007), and Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young's critical anthology Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction (2006).2 The very questions concerning literature and feminism that make chick lit problematic for scholars and cultural critics, however, make the genre quite suitable for the undergraduate classroom, particularly for those instructors committed to feminist pedagogy both within and beyond women's studies classes. Indeed, as Brenda Bethman notes in "Chick Lit 101," where she lists a handful of faculty who use chick lit in their classrooms, along with their course titles, "Slowly, however, the study of chick lit is gaining popularity among Women's Studies scholars."3 The inherently interdisciplinary nature of the chick-lit genre and its connection to critical discussions about literature and feminism provide a variety of creative and interactive teaching opportunities, while also creating [End Page 83] the sense of "relevance" that bell hooks identifies as essential to the feminist classroom when she asserts that teachers need to be willing "to acknowledge a connection between ideas learned in university settings and those learned in life practices."4 bell hooks articulates her theory of feminist pedagogy in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom and acknowledges the difficulty of reaching students in a postfeminist world: "Right now teachers and students face new challenges in the feminist classroom. Our students are no longer necessarily already committed to or interested in feminist politics."5 hooks and many other theorists also emphasize the need for feminist classrooms in which student perspectives are validated, multiple approaches are employed, and patriarchal value systems are deconstructed.6 Ultimately, these writers argue, any classroom can be a feminist classroom. Chick lit, a genre characterized by "resiliency and adaptability," can certainly facilitate the creation of dynamic and interdisciplinary feminist spaces within an undergraduate curriculum. 7 With its primarily white, middle-class, heterosexual heroines, much chick lit, including the texts discussed here, Bridget Jones's Diary and Confessions of a Shopaholic, seems to jar with feminist pedagogy's commitment, as articulated by hooks, to "cultural diversity, a rethinking of ways of knowing, a deconstruction of old epistemologies, and the concomitant demand that there be a transformation in our classrooms."8 In addition, as Ferriss and Young point out in the Chronicle of Higher Education, chick lit embodies generational conflicts among women: For some of us who identify ourselves as feminist professors, the concerns of young women represent a betrayal—not only of our academic work, but of our life's work. Why are they worrying about their appearance more than their education? Dressing for sex, not success? Understandably embittered at the rejection of their most cherished ideals, many professors prefer to ignore or dismiss students' concerns—and certainly prefer not to teach the literature they believe glorifies what they so strongly resent.9 However, for Brenda Bethman chick lit provides an opportunity to bridge that gender gap: "While we may...

Feminism in South Africa today: Have we lost the praxis?

abstract This Focus tracks some of the changes in feminism(s) in South Africa since the early 1990s, making the argument that institutional politics have depoliticised feminist politics to the extent that a feminist praxis has been lost. Three different impacts on feminist politics are analysed: institutionalisation, transnational organising and populist rhetoric. It is clear that a feminist praxis as developed by radical feminist scholars as a way of life has become seriously weakened in South Africa. A feminist praxis is the internalisation of feminist theoretical principles to the extent that these principles are used to guide feminist action and turn spaces into feminist spaces. It also means that a feminist will locate herself in a space as a feminist. A feminist praxis is the pursuit of a feminist consciousness that becomes a political practice.

“How Does Change Happen?” Deliberation and Difficulty

Theoretically, feminists ought to be the best deliberative democrats. However, political commitments (which this author shares) to inclusiveness on issues of reproductive health and gay and lesbian rights, for example, create a boundary within feminism between those committed to the “feminist consensus” on these issues and women activists who share some feminist commitments, but not all. This article offers theoretically and empirically informed suggestions for how feminists can foster inclusive deliberation within feminist spaces.

Advocates, Adversaries, and Anomalies: The Politics of Feminist Spaces in Gender and Development

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways that politically minded feminists create and sustain spaces for feminist practice within Canadian development contexts despite institutional, ideological, and economic constraints. This research contributes to a much-needed reassessment of feminist engagement with Gender and Development (GAD), ultimately seeking to determine whether and in what ways GAD can become a political force for progressive social change. The article demonstrates that politically minded feminists are present within mainstream Canadian development organizations and are attempting to push the boundaries of mainstream GAD processes to embrace feminist projects, values, and commitments. However, building allies through connections with women's movements is crucial for feminists to make mainstream development more amenable to feminist goals, values, and principles.

Making a space for women: Student conferences as an example of feminist staff-student interaction in the university

This paper addresses the question of how to integrate women's issues more fully into the academic curriculum which, because it remains male-dominated, discourages women students from finding their voice and asserting deviant perspectives. It argues strongly for providing feminist spaces within mainstream courses where women students and teachers can explore and celebrate their experiences and viewpoints. It suggests that these spaces can be created by means of student conferences, that is, conferences targeted at student audiences at which staff and students interact in non-hierarchical ways. The main body of this paper is a report on the specific example of two such conferences held in the German Department of the University of Leeds between 1993 and 1994.