Feminist Studies Research Articles

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

Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin by Kimberly Theidon

Reviewed by: Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin by Kimberly Theidon Diana Pardo Pedraza Theidon, Kimberly. Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2022. 114 pp. On February 21, 2022, the Colombian Constitutional Court decriminalized abortion within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. This ruling is part of a vital wave of activism for greater reproductive rights in Latin America. The Colombian case follows important victories for the right to decide in Mexico (in the state of Coahuila, to be specific) and in Argentina, where abortion has been legalized for up to 14 weeks of pregnancy. In contrast to this reality are the recent Supreme Court opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade—the 1973 Court landmark decision that made access to safe and legal abortion a constitutional right—and the latest measures toward a near-total abortion ban by more than a dozen U.S. states, including Idaho, Texas, and Tennessee. These recent legal decisions have reignited crucial debates on reproductive justice, defined as the right to bodily autonomy—to decide whether to have children and raise them in a healthy, safe, and sustainable environment. As feminist activists have reminded us, these measures have historically, widely, and disproportionately impacted poor women and women of color, who experience more significant economic and logistical complications in accessing abortion, even in spaces where it is legal or regulated. This is the landscape of reproductive rights in the Americas that informed my reading of Kimberly Theidon's latest book, Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin, in which the anthropologist considers the "multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy, and childbirth unfold" (7) in times of war and postwar. A feminist ethnography of post-conflict based on three decades of fieldwork in Peru and Colombia, two countries embroiled in long-running internal armed conflicts, the book [End Page 915] explores the silenced and neglected outcomes of rape and sexual violence, the so-called "children born of war," and what these challenging conceptions may reveal about intergenerational and more-than-human markers and impacts of warfare. Through intriguing conceptual images such as "living legacies," "violent conceptions," and "situated biologies," Theidon offers a vocabulary for thinking about the harm caused by forced gestations, imposed parenthood, and toxic reproductive environments, highlighting the need for a framework of justice that attends to the different experiences, memories, and reproductive desires of women and moves beyond human exceptionalism. Building on a growing literature on the material and symbolic consequences of armed conflict in anthropology, feminist studies, and environmental humanities, Legacies of War contributes to a gendered theory of harm and reparation (for other studies on these issues, see Sánchez Parra and Lo Iacono 2020; Sánchez Parra 2018). The book draws attention to the competing rights regimes for children conceived in rape and their mothers, the oppressive weight of hegemonic maternal scripts and patriarchal biological and legal systems, and how warfare shapes and marks our more-than-human kin. Theidon's feminist and posthumanist analysis of violent circumstances of conception and childbearing in (post)war draws on Michelle Murphy's (2013) concept of "distributed reproduction." While Murphy is concerned with the diffuse spatial and temporal pathways of industrial chemicals that alter the reproduction of human and more-than-human lives, Theidon considers the harm and toxicity (re)produced by armed conflict in bodies, kinship networks, and rural landscapes. This distributed approach to reproduction, Theidon asserts, could help reduce "the efforts to govern maternal bodies" (81), as it attunes us instead to "the structural forces that shape reproductive outcomes" (81). It also "opens up the possibility of a politics of accountability and coexistence that is not grounded in an anthropocentric rights framework" (94). Theidon's gendered analysis of the human and more-than-human impacts of war and postwar places her manuscript in conversation with contemporary scholarship in anthropology interested in thinking about 1) the role of the ordinary and practices of care in the maintenance and interruption of cycles and repertoires of violence (Berman-Arévalo and Ojeda 2020, Terry 2017, Wool 2015, Das 2007), 2) the participation of natural environments in social and armed conflicts (Gordillo 2018, Kim 2017, Guarasci 2015, de Le...

An Interview with Ashwini Tambe, Editorial Director, Feminist Studies

An Interview with Ashwini Tambe, Editorial Director, Feminist Studies

The Doors She Opened: Honoring Rosemary Radford Ruether

This tribute to Rosemary Radford Ruether was presented in her honor at the Friends of Sabeel North America Conference, October 7, 2017. The editors at JFSR are grateful to Jane Dempsey Douglass for allowing us to publish it in honor of Rosemary's memory and generational significance to feminist studies in religion on her passing this May 21, 2022.

Introduction

Introduction Joseph A. Marchal (bio) One potential genealogy for this special section of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR) begins with a special session of the 2021 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Multiple program units (including the Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World section, the Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible section, and the LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics section) and status committees (including the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession and the recently established—if rather belatedly in comparison to other academic organizations—Committee for LGBTIQ+ Scholars and Scholarship) collaborated to recognize and reflect upon Bernadette J. Brooten's Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication (with the University of Chicago Press in 1996). The task required that many partners because of this work's immense influence and impact on the study of women, gender, sexuality, and enslavement, among other domains and topics in relation to both material and textual remains, history, and the ethics of interpretation. Given these themes and Dr. Brooten's innumerable contributions to both knowledge and community building, the session was critical and celebratory, lively and substantial in ways that strongly correspond with JFSR's historical interest in honoring influential feminist scholars and desire to think reflexively and prospectively about our scholarly pasts in relation to our presents and anticipated futures. Of course, in reflecting on such scholarly pasts, the contributors who have known Brooten the longest (Sheila Briggs and Angela Standhartinger, among them) explain how this project concretely, politically, and interpersonally began years, even decades, before the quarter-century publication date that partially inspired the session. Thus, the following contributions trace how Love [End Page 143] Between Women and Brooten's work within and beyond this book are part of longer histories of feminist, queer, and increasingly intersectional approaches to biblical, ancient Jewish, and emerging Christian materials. Yet to call Love Between Women just a book is a gross oversimplification. It was and is a phenomenon, likely because Love Between Women contains multitudes. As several of the contributors to this special section highlight, it is an incredible resource; its many different parts inspire and inform work in its wake. Its latter half is anchored by an indispensable commentary on Rom 1:18–32, in which Brooten meticulously examines the arguments in this notorious passage in light of the relevant interpretive frameworks and intertextual echoes. Just as importantly, though, Brooten also gathers, translates, and explains an unprecedented assemblage of ancient materials reflecting upon female homoeroticism in the ancient Roman world. In clearly and critically presenting a range of cultural sources, from erotic spells and astrological texts to medical treatments and manuals of dream interpretation, Brooten pressed beyond the "classical" (mostly elite, imperial, enslaving, and male) literary sources to provide multifaceted angles on these (still often depressingly kyriarchal) materials and the potential people behind them. Love Between Women, then, performs a massive mitzvah in providing essential context. It builds an archive and in doing so, gives generations of readers, "scholarly" and otherwise, a new, profound, and still unparalleled access to a matrix of sources on, about, and at times even from women in the ancient Mediterranean context. Yet the picture provided by this archive is far from rosy, and Brooten refuses to adopt either apologist or falsely idealizing approaches to the often disturbing materials within and beyond Paul's letters. Indeed, Love Between Women demonstrates how thoroughly Paul's letters and particularly the "bashing passage" of Rom 1:26–27 are conversant and concordant with most of the ancient kyriarchal ambiance that presumed and projected a fundamental asymmetry so that what counted as "natural" intercourse was only the penetrative use of a social and political subordinate by their superior. Brooten's work demonstrates, then, why and how histories of sexuality could, even should, also be feminist histories, attending to specifically gendered dynamics and differences. The broader project also cautions scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity against dismissing "religious" sources out of hand, particularly if one is at all concerned with the vast majority of people who lived distanced from the apex of kyriarchal power and privilege. For a great many...

Transnational Feminist Itineraries: Situating Theory and Activist Practice ed. by A. Tambe and M. Thayer

Reviewed by: Transnational Feminist Itineraries: Situating Theory and Activist Practice ed. by A. Tambe and M. Thayer Yoly Zentella Tambe, A. and M. Thayer, eds. Transnational Feminist Itineraries: Situating Theory and Activist Practice. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Transnational Feminist Itineraries is an edited volume of feminist-focused writings that connect solidarity and the shared and diverse goals of universal movements within the context of confronting and countering violence and injustice against women. The volume is appropriate for academics, researchers, doctoral students, and those well versed in analytical writing and terminology. It is not for the general lay reader. The expertise of the editors, Tambe and Thayer, is evident in the assemblage of writings. Both editors are active in women, gender, and sexuality studies. [End Page 446] Tambe is also associate professor in sociology studies at the University of Mary-land, College Park, and educational director of Feminist Studies, a journal of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship in the United States. Thayer is associate professor in sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is affiliated with the Center for Latin America, Caribbean, and Latino Studies. Transnational Feminist Itineraries is a platform for voices discussing complex issues, both existing and emergent, outside Euro-American power spaces. Here, transnational is not perceived as "elsewhere" but instead as globally inclusive, a collective vision working toward a consistently just future for the female gender. The collection of articles in this volume reflects a gathering of scholarship with settings in North and South America, Africa, Australia, and Asia. This collection continues decades of evolving transnational feminism thought, adding to contemporary analysis and activism in the field. Seeds of thought reach back to the Women's Worlds Conference in Brazil, 2017. Arranged thematically in five sections, writings describe problem areas in the lives of women and girls that challenge the reader. Each section includes articles addressing connecting issues, contexts, and spaces. For example, in section four, Intractable Dilemmas, Naples and Bernstein's article, "Reproductive justice and the contradiction of international surrogacy claims by gay men in Australia," addresses conundrums embedded in the desire by gay men for parenthood, and its relation to women's reproductive rights free of exploitation within the surrogate role. Naples and Bernstein clearly describe the need to recognize the privileged status of those seeking commercial surrogate services, in this instance, gay men in Australia. These are key observations, because of the glaring persistence of "neoliberal, racial, class, and gendered inequalities" (169), within a gay rights issue, and reflect in this setting commonly found problematic thought and behavior. In an effort to protect their own interests and survival, actors espouse through their actions the sentiment justice for some but not for all; the interest of one superseding another. The strength of this volume is in its raising awareness through academic discourse of feminist perspectives on various issues crossing boundaries and multiple populations. However, because of the academic nature of the volume, a necessary question arises; will such valuable thought be translated in lay language? The ideas presented need to reach grassroots populations if concrete change is to take place. How will the contradictions presented by Naples and Bernstein trickle down to individuals in the general gay male community eager [End Page 447] to form a family? The question continues: Is the trickle left in the hands of activists exposed to the Naples and Bernstein article or similar writings? Is it possible for the dilemma of fatherhood and commercial surrogacy to be housed in slender, cheaply produced volumes, made freely or inexpensively available, a la Rius (Eduardo del Rio)? (Rius, a Mexican intellectual and political cartoonist, produced simply stated yet acutely written and illustrated books for a general readership addressing crucial political concerns and erroneous myths perpetuating a state of subjugation for the Mexican masses.) Additionally, the Middle Eastern feminist perspective is absent in the volume. One wonders how, for example, the perspectives of Palestinian women living under the occupation would link to the theories and activism described in this volume. And how would their views coincide with Jewish Israeli women's feminist perspectives? Perhaps this would be a space in which to build empathy and solidarity. This is a volume for academics immersed in...

Is the Transnational Female? Revisiting the Gender Metaphors of Global Connection

This essay takes up a rhetorical leitmotif in feminist studies of global political economy: theorizing the gender of geopolitical forms. Gender metaphors have revealed the systematic devaluation of scholarship deemed “too local” to constitute globalization theory, unveiled the bourgeois family romance animating modern nationalisms, and exposed the futility of depending on the modern state to adjudicate in women’s favor. Following in this tradition, I ask “Is the transnational female?” in order to illuminate both the sociological feminization of actors and institutions that move across national borders as well as the symbolic feminization of the qualities associated with transnationalism, namely flexibility, adaptability, and connectivity. These qualities make transnationalism subject to what Anna Tsing describes as the frictions of other trans-processes, notably translation, transgression, and transformation. Using an empirical case study from Uganda, I will argue that because the transnational circulation of women’s and sexual minority rights concepts depends on their translation by locally situated actors, they are fundamentally constrained by the national political contexts within which these actors work. In theorizing this case, this essay expands contemporary feminist analyses of the rise of the global Right to show how sexism and homophobia cross not only national borders but political ones as well, emerging, at times, under the very banner of women’s rights.

Response

Response Bernadette J. Brooten (bio) Thank you to Joseph Marchal, who organized this special section, to the respondents, each of whom has taken such care in engaging my work, and to the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion for publishing it. First, a word about the time in which I wrote. Jennifer Glancy and Mónica Rey have observed that, when I published Love Between Women in 1996, same-gender marriage was illegal. Beyond that, same-gender sexual contact itself was actually a crime in many states until 2003. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the United States Supreme Court overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, a 1986 Supreme Court case, and declared that a Texas statute criminalizing consensual same-gender sex between adults was unconstitutional under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.1 As this goes to press, the constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy is at risk, which could mean turning back the clock on same-gender marriage and other hard-fought rights.2 [End Page 191] When New Testament scholars discussed Rom 1:26–27 at all, many assumed that Paul was speaking hypothetically about sexual relations between females: "For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse with females, were consumed with passion for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error" (NRSV, slightly altered). I vividly recall speaking with a fellow, male member of the Society for New Testament Studies, who insisted to me that sexual relations between women did not exist in Paul's world, that Paul was simply hypothesizing such relations. Similarly, one well-known feminist theologian in Germany, speaking about my plans to write this book, once told another German feminist theologian, "I don't know any lesbians," to which her friend responded, "You know me." Silence. I cannot stress enough how wonderful I feel seeing more junior scholars working to interpret some of the same texts and artifacts about which I wrote and introducing new ones into the discussion. While writing about some of the more obscure texts, I felt as if I were excavating by drilling through ice in Antarctica, with no other experienced scholar in sight. I did, of course, discuss these sources with talented research assistants Denise Kimber Buell, Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, Caroline Johnson Hodge, and many others. But how encouraging it is now to be able to communicate with each of you in this panel, and to read of other interpretations, such as in Joseph Marchal's Appalling Bodies.3 Marchal deeply engages a broad range of ancient sources, proposing new meanings of being a receptive erotic partner. Angela Standhartinger has outlined some of the difficulties that I faced in the 1980s in Tübingen with Hans Küng, who opposed the very subject of the research. Numerous German feminists, LGBTQ+ individuals and groups, and simply fair-minded persons supported my work in numerous ways. I want to single out for special mention my friend of over four decades, Sheila Briggs, who spent countless hours with me in long-distance phone calls between Claremont, California, and Tübingen, counseling me on how to fight for the academic freedom necessary to write this book. Thank you, also, Angela Standhartinger, for mentioning my early work in addressing anti-Judaism within feminism and some of my other experiences and initiatives in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. I am thrilled about all that has lasted and grown since the meaningful years that I spent in the lovely small city of Tübingen. Thank you, Mónica Rey, for highlighting Love Between Women's contributions to women's history. I set out to establish that people in the Hellenistic and [End Page 192] Roman Mediterranean world knew of female homoerotic desires and acts. This largely involved studying male fantasies, some of them bizarre and distorted. I did, however, also find fragmentary evidence for women's history. Now, some people are not interested in history. That's all right. Not everyone has the same interests. Some think that a desire to write...

The representation of Thatcher's Theatre in Caryl Churchill's "Top Girls" : A social feminist study

Carly Churchill has a rare position within British contemporary’s post-war dramatists. She is perhaps the most innovative and elusive writer of her age, an ardent advocate of women’s equality and rights. The socialist feminist ideology of Churchill is indeed unquestionably the best of the postmodern society. Churchill lives under Thatcher’s leadership, and she is among the leader who, not just in her nation but across the western world, transforms the cultural and social landscape of the state. This pivotal event appears as a backdrop for Caryl Churchill to challenge how a competent lady in the patriarchal system has risen on the social ladder and what she does for women and the society in her era. This study aims at knowing how Thatcher’s theatre has depicted in Caryl Churchill‘s Top Girls . The work tries to set the effect of Thatcher on women and society in the period of her role as a prime minister of Britain and how her legacy makes citizens be successful in their jobs, but hates everyone around them, including their friends, coworkers, and even their families. The study hypothesizes that Churchill was affected by Thatcherism in her era and this influenced her style of writings. The paper starts with an Introduction of the Top girls play and Thatcher's regime , then follows the methodology of the study and the discussion comes afterwards and it ends with a conclusion that points out the results of discussion.

Novel Hilda: Image of Women Sexual Victim Violence (Gender and Feminist Study)

This study discusses the study of gender and feminism in a novel Hilda by Muyassarotul Hafidzoh. A novel that talks about the lives of survivors of sexual violence who struggle to get justice for themselves, fight trauma, and efforts to empower women within the scope of Islamic boarding schools. The purpose of this study is to analyze the study of gender and feminism in the novel Hilda, as well as to see the image of women who are victims of sexual violence. The research method used is descriptive-analytic with reference to the approach of feminism. The analytical knife used is the study of feminism and gender criticism. From the results of the study, it can be seen that Hilda is a representation of survivors of sexual violence who has experienced social discrimination, including expulsion from school, stigma, stereotypes, marginalization, violence, multiple traumas. The image of women in the figure of Hilda is depicted as a strong, intelligent character, and as a survivor of marital sexual violence, she also deserves to feel, because survivors are not unholy creatures. The image of pesantren can be categorized as an educational institution that is safe for women even in recovering past trauma by providing them with religious and social knowledge

Review: Latina Lives, Latina Narratives: Influential Essays by Vicki L. Ruiz, edited by Miroslava Chávez-García

Review: <i>Latina Lives, Latina Narratives: Influential Essays by Vicki L. Ruiz</i>, edited by Miroslava Chávez-García

Feminist Ecologies

In times of devastating ecological crisis, where can we find a route map to collectively halt current trends of destruction? In this review, we examine feminist studies’ recent contributions to activism and theorizing regarding extraction, emerging ecologies, and multispecies justice. By bringing in salient research from the fields of feminist political ecology, ecofeminism, and decolonial/anticolonial feminisms, we point to the ways in which feminist thought and action has opened up spaces for recognizing, envisioning, and making life-affirming ecologies rather than extractive systems of destruction. We refer to the former as emergent and emancipatory ecologies, that is, ecologies always in the process of becoming and capable of defying and subverting oppression based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, caste, ability, species and other forms of discrimination—and, thus, capable of protecting and defending life and living worlds.

Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research. Edited by Maryanne Dever. [Review

Originally published as a special issue for Australian Feminist Studies (volume 32, March–June 2017), this collection of writings poses a direct and thoughtful response to emerging discourse on feminist archives. It emphasizes community-focused, distributed, decolonized, and postcustodial archival approaches for many interdisciplinary and community uses and for community self-representation. Editor Maryanne Dever spends little time recounting the basic tenets of feminism or of archives and instead brings the reader directly into the challenge of the moment—interrogating the how and why of disruptive feminist advocacy and of practices that could crack open archival futures. Presented as 12 chapters by 17 contributors, it reads first and foremost as a work targeted at an interdisciplinary scholarly audience newly engaging with archival theory. First published in 2017, the writings, of course, predate the pandemic, #MeToo, #BLM, and the broader 2020 movement for racial and social justice and so only indirectly call for antiracism, reparative practices, and digital access equity. Nevertheless, in many ways, they presage those clarion calls by insisting the larger academic world must better engage with archival theory for a more just, equitable, inclusive, feminist future.

The Impact of the Woman in two Selected Novels of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Kate Chopin's The Awakening

The study deals with the impact of women writers who used feminist studies as a medium for advocating improvements and support for women's unequal roles in society. The study concerns two female writers, they are Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. They show that women conquered barriers to achieve control and independence before getting married. In Kate Chopin's The Awakening, the protagonist has changed her attitude toward the mother's role as well as the wife in a traditional Victorian marriage. She refuses the assigned positions. By closer analysis of the general perception of women writers and the popular concepts used by Chopin and Bronte to demonstrate the narrowness of patriarchal culture and its absence, the novels raise awareness about women's exploitation and help to create a road to women's long overdue emancipation and gender equality, concerning their fundamental human rights to freedom during this time. The study sheds light on similarities between the two novels, which portray Victorian society.

Gender and Literature: A Feminist Study in A Collection of Short Stories Rokat Tase' by Muna Masyari

This study aimed to reveal the gender injustice experienced by female characters using feminism theory, focusing on gender inequality from Mansur Fakih. The object of this research was a collection of short stories Rokat Tase' by Muna Masyari by taking five samples from twenty short stories population. This study uses a qualitative method, namely research that examines the condition of natural objects, where the researcher is the key instrument of the research. This research was a review study. Then to analyze the data, the researcher used the descriptive method. The results of this study indicate that there are gender injustices such as marginalization, subordination, stereotypes, violence, and the workload experienced by female characters in Muna Masyari's collection of short stories Rokat Tase. In addition, there are traditions and rules in the household and the domination of men over women, which causes women to be powerless.

Clitoral Anatomy in the Feminist Literature: Vagina obscura: An anatomical voyage (2020) and Clitoral Conventions and Transgressions: Graphical representations in anatomy texts, c1900-1991 (1995).

O'Connell et al. proposed that the vestibular bulbs be renamed the "clitoral bulbs" because of their consistent relationship to the clitoris and inconsistent relationship to the vestibule. Normally such proposed esoteric changes in anatomical nomenclature would get little notice by anatomists, yet alone the general public; however, many subsequent articles and books placed this change in the context of centuries of male anatomists and physicians downplaying female sexual anatomy and sexuality. Most prominent is a 2022 book by Rachel Gross, Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. Here we review this "Anatomical Voyage" and find author bias in omitting/including erroneous facts in this book. We also present a critique of a 1995 article that appeared in Feminist Studies; Graphical Representations in Anatomy Texts, c1900-1991. This article, which has been repeatedly cited in the clinical literature, asserts that between circa 1950-1980 anatomy textbooks purposely eliminated depicting/labeling the clitoris in illustrations because the authors of the textbooks were reflecting societal norms that de-emphasized the importance of the clitoris. Unfortunately, the methods used by Moore and Clarke are not replicable; and further, their conclusions were not justified because of clear bias in their description and depiction of the anatomy sources they review.

Gendering Sweden's nuclear renunciation: a historical analysis

Abstract Contemporary developments in international affairs underscore the need for successful outcomes in the field of nuclear disarmament. However, feminist scholars have shown how linkages between masculinity and nuclear posturing continue to make disarmament appear as a policy of the weak, associated with emasculation and/or feminization. In this article I show how a feminist study of Swedish nuclear history has the potential to complicate, and disrupt, such linkages. Analysing a broad range of primary sources through a discourse analytical lens, the article shows how Sweden (re)constructed a white masculine self through its nuclear renunciation and disarmament engagement in the 1950s and 1960s. The article contributes with new insights about how gender, nuclear renunciation and disarmament interact; how lessons from the past can inform our understanding of disarmament dilemmas in the present; and the policy implications of such an analysis. Arguing that such knowledge is crucial for imaginative and transformative disarmament policy in the present, the article concludes that to reach a world free from nuclear weapons, it is crucial to expose, and challenge, those power relations that contribute to sustain a gendered and racialized nuclear order.

Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice ed. by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert

Reviewed by: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice ed. by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert P. Watson Koobak, Redi; Tlostanova, Madina and Thapar-Björkert, Suruchi (eds). Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice. Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2021. xvi + 265 pp. Illustrations. Figures. References. Index. £120:00; £36:99; £33:99 (e-book). By bringing together the postcolonial and the postsocialist, until now addressed separately in feminist studies, this anthology aims to open the way to new sets of political questions with the potential for impacting global change. [End Page 591] Postcolonialism is rarely addressed through postsocialist perspectives, which have typically been concentrated on East European and post-Soviet countries. Moreover, as the book observes, after the Cold War feminists in Eastern Europe tend to engage with postcolonial discourse to the extent of describing their location as the internal other of Europe, while feminists from the global south are reluctant to engage in a critical discussion of postsocialism. Instead of abandoning past and present versions of socialism, the book contends, postsocialism should be productively rethought. The book is composed of eighteen chapters ranging from interviews and conversations to straight single author texts. The chapters traverse themes such as disability, gender, sexuality, migration, the EU and racism/whiteness. The diverse group of twenty-eight contributors includes activists, artists and scholars from a range of scholarly backgrounds. Chapters are organized under three headings: intersections/opacities/challenges, which represent broad axes for thinking between the postcolonial and the postsocialist. The first section considers intersections in terms of the interactions of cultures, epistemologies, ideologies and human conditions within modernity/coloniality. The second interrogates normative understandings of opacity with the aim of extracting the idea’s potential for resistance, while the third part grapples with the challenges posed by the complicity of feminisms in upholding a racist European imperial project. In her chapter on postsocialist precarity, Jennifer Suchland explores the ways in which East European and Eurasian postsocialism relate to the history of colonialism. Looking at postsocialism as a global condition, postsocialist precarity involves the defunding of public services, the promotion of austerity and of profit over wellbeing, as well as the criminalization of protest. Suchland encompasses postsocialist and decolonial critiques of power with the aim of exposing the hidden Eurocentrism in critical postsocialist theorizing. She offers a decolonial reading of precarity by analysing two images — Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga and an image of a sex-trafficked person — uncovering how hidden eurocentrism can be carried forward in the discourses around them. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora’s intention is to bring back socialism as a way of framing analysis. They raise unasked questions such as: how is Eastern Europe racialized in complex ways through the commodification of bodies? How does such racialization complicate notions of US racial formations? What might be the implications for postcolonial theory? In her interview with Manuelā Boatca, Madina Tlostanova notes the way in which a new postsocialist feminist subject is abandoning past and present socialist phenomena, and the scale of the challenge of engaging feminists from the global south regarding this issue. Boatca identifies this as coloniality of knowledge, which produces categories such as Second versus Third World which come to constitute a field [End Page 592] within which competing political interests are played out. Deconstructing colonial categories is prerequisite for making transverse connections. In other chapters, Lidia Zhigunova discusses the racial status of Circassians who have become the epitome of ‘whiteness’ in US racial discourse yet who are branded as ‘Blacks’ in Russia together with other ‘Caucasians’. Tjaša Kancler pushes for a radical approach to analysis that interrogates or leaves behind Western-derived meanings of gender. Maria Mayerchyk and Olga Plakhotnik, writing on post-Maidan Ukraine, argue that ‘uneventful activism’ can help forge futures that can avoid the trap of nationalism, capitalism and colonialism, even at a time of war. Angéla Kóczé in conversation with Petra Bakos reflects on developing a critical race feminist agenda sensitive to the specific characteristics and needs of Eastern European Roma communities. Alyosxa...

미국-멕시코 국경지대 여성주의 연극의 이해

This paper is the first result of the project ''Understanding of the Feminist Theatre on the US-Mexico Borderlands'' and presents from a theoretical perspective and in an introductive manner the US-Mexico borderlands as a field of constant hegemony struggle and the study of postcolonial peripheral feminism as a new perspective in feminist studies. Suggesting the “ethical violence” (Butler 2013) and “mechanisms of ignorance, rejection and insult” (Honneth 2011) are also a key cause of conflict in this region, this paper also introduces the existence of female playwrights who use theatre as a means of resisting ethical violence and fighting for the recognition of identity in this “transnational and heterogeneous space” at the US-Mexico borderlands.

PESQUISAS SOBRE GÊNEROS E SEXUALIDADES NA EDUCAÇÃO: TENTATIVAS DE VER, REVER E ‘TRANSVER’ O MUNDO

This article aims to describe research carried out within the Group of Studies and Research in Sexualities, Education, and Gender (Gepsex) at the Faculty of Education of the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS). The researches are theoretically-methodologically based on gender studies, sexuality studies, feminist studies, cultural studies, and Foucault's assumptions, from a post-critical and poststructuralist perspective. We sought to think the research based on fragments of poetry by Manoel de Barros to discuss issues such as the deconstruction of unique truths; resistance in daily life and in doing research; the transience of scientific knowledge; questioning the meanings of language as the production of realities and subjectivities and thinking about the micro at the expense of metanarratives.Keywords: Research. Genre. Sexuality. Education.