ABSTRACT Intersectionality has been at the centre of intense debate among feminist scholars. In this article, we revisit selected dimensions of this debate and argue that it is characterized by inadequate reflexivity regarding the centrality of context to intersectional analysis. Context here should be understood in its more radical meaning, implying that contextualization always implies adaption, rethinking and retheorization. Intersectional mechanisms and processes should thus be expected to unfold in ways that depend on the societal context. Thinking from this contextual perspective, we discuss men as intersectional subjects and the long-standing debate on the relevance of the concepts of race and ethnicity in Europe. We then move on to illustrate the centrality of context to intersectionality through an analysis of ethnic minority men in Denmark. We focus on three political and discursive constructions of ethnic minority men: The patriarchal adult ethnic minority man, the criminal young ethnic minority man and the male Islamist terrorist. We demonstrate that these constructions condition and shape the level of identities and social practice and that this plays out in a way that is dependent on context.

ABSTRACT This article critiques the western-centric limitations of Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics, a discourse long hailed as a beacon of hope in feminist and posthumanist critical theories, through a reading of two Chinese science fiction works, namely Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide and Lu Ban’s “Themis”. It argues that the cyborg’s liberatory potential is circumscribed by its entanglement with global capitalist and local patriarchal systems. While techno-hybridity promises transcendence, these narratives show that it instead reinforces oppression. The narratives further reveal that this co-option stems from the western epistemological framework that prioritizes technological domination and extraction, leading to ecological and social ruin. In response, decolonial hope emerges through radical refusal of the capitalist-patriarchal logic and epistemic disobedience. Ultimately, the novels envision planetary sustainability by turning to indigenous animist world views, reframing hope from technological transcendence to a collective praxis of co-belonging as a mode of introducing healing to a damaged Earth.

Feminist counter-monuments on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma transform commemoration into an ongoing practice of care, authorship, and resistance. Centering the Antimonumenta Vivas Nos Queremos—a grassroots installation created by Indigenous and feminist collectives, this study defines counter-monumentality as a feminist geography of persistence that reclaims urban space through embodied and affective labor. Methodologically, the project integrates rhetorical fieldwork, spatial discourse analysis, and feminist-decolonial interpretation to trace how color, inscription, and participation transform grief into public knowledge. The analysis unfolds across three modalities: first, it examines how practices of inscription and maintenance enact spatial justice by remapping colonial space into a participatory feminist cartography of care; second, it explores how linguistic and visual inscriptions generate grammars of resistance that transform writing into a material act of protest and relation; and third, it contrasts these vernacular practices with state-sanctioned monuments such as Tlalli and The Young Woman of Amajac, revealing how the rhetoric of coexistence often masks monologic power. Drawing from feminist rhetorical theory, decolonial geography, and scholarship on symbolic reparations, this paper contributes to feminist rhetorical studies by theorizing counter-monumentality as both method and critique—an embodied, affective practice through which marginalized publics reclaim authorship over memory and justice in space.

Abstract I call for an anthropology that confronts its own woundedness. Anthropologists often bear witness to suffering but rarely examine how our own grief, trauma, and institutional distress shape the affective tone of our work. Drawing on fieldwork with Runa (Quechua) women affected by forced sterilization in Peru and guided by my collaborator and elder, Hilaria Supa, I ask what it means to live and work within what bell hooks calls the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” without reproducing its psychic violence. Anthropology's emotional habitus conceals the toll of our labor, reinforcing distance, cynicism, and despair. In conversation with Indigenous and decolonial feminist thinkers such as Dian Million and María José Méndez, I propose an anthropology of healing grounded in acuerpamiento—an embodied ethic of reciprocity and shared vulnerability. Relation and interbeing are not metaphors but methods: practices that resist isolation and the heroics of detachment. Healing becomes both political and methodological—a way to sustain life, care, and accountability within our scholarship. Moving beyond the wound as the central analytic, an anthropology of healing insists on hopeful relation as the condition of transformation.

Since the 1990s, global health policies have prescribed breastfeeding as an ideal and primarily positive practice essential to child survival and maternal health. In Nigeria, infant feeding policies have largely drawn on these global frameworks in promoting exclusive breastfeeding as a strategy against infant mortality. A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF BREASTFEEDING POLICIES AND PROMOTION IN NIGERIA: Grounded in feminist ethics of care and the Ubuntu philosophy, this critique examines the contradictions between breastfeeding policies and maternal realities in Nigeria. The analysis identified the following: (1) a universalist approach in global and Nigerian breastfeeding policies that assumes breastfeeding is ideal and positively experienced by most mothers. (2) policies place breastfeeding at the top of the invisible hierarchy of infant feeding and pathologize normal maternal experiences by framing exclusive breastfeeding as ideal, and positive in most cases thereby marginalizing the challenges and costs many mothers face. (3) unaddressed gaps between policy directives and structural conditions in Nigeria such as underdeveloped social amenities, insufficient maternity leave laws and cultural realities, reinforce gender inequalities, erode maternal autonomy and influence breastfeeding practices. The gaps between breastfeeding policies and maternal realities in Nigeria highlight the need for policies discourse that are grounded in considering the challenges mothers face in breastfeeding. The review suggests ways to move beyond frameworks that treat infant care as solely a mother's responsibility by emphasizing the essential role of support in infant care. Not applicable N/A.

Black women's embodied intersecting systems of oppression: A systematic narrative review of body image and maladaptive eating behavior.

By taking Korean glass skin as a global bodily aesthetic and cultural object celebrated for its “purity” and “transparency,” this essay engages interdisciplinary artist TJ Shin’s multimedia installation Universal Skin Salvation (2018) and visual artist LaRissa Rogers’s ceramic installation Of eaters and the eaten (2023). Through a close reading of these works, I explore how glass skin as a global bodily aesthetic rubs up against ongoing Cold War legacies of disability, injury, and contamination that racializes Asian bodies as toxic, opaque, and otherwise inscrutable. How does the animation of glass as beautiful Asian matter figure into a genealogy of Asian/American material and racial consolidation that spans porcelain to plastic? I juxtapose Shin’s and Rogers’s response to these lines of inquiry with histories of epidermal wounding—namely, severe burn damage and scarification widely sustained by soldiers and civilians alike throughout the US military’s extensive use of napalm during the Korean War. By paying attention to the multiple textures and forms of Shin’s and Rogers’s works—from homemade gelatinous skin creams (Shin) to oozing, candied brown sugar (Rogers)—I attend to how a critical beauty studies lens might interface with feminist science and technology studies’ concerns of interdependency and shared vulnerability, and, in so doing, find unlikely alliances in foregrounding embodied knowledges and entangled relations of power.

Normative healthy aging frameworks promote later-life wellbeing through the maintenance of functional ability, moralizing autonomy, productivity, and sexual fitness, rendering disability, interdependence, and non-normative sexual lives signs of decline. How, then, do older women with disabilities experience sexual and reproductive health in later life? Drawing on six in-depth interviews with disabled women aged 50 to 63 in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic and informed by intersectional feminist theory, we trace how sexual and reproductive health was managed amid health system strain, as intersecting ableism, ageism, sexism, and racism shaped whose needs were prioritized, deferred, or dismissed. We identify three interrelated sites through which this management unfolded: first, sexual inactivity during lockdown as a self- and medically prescribed risk management practice that affirmed identity and safety while deepening loneliness and desexualization; second, the devaluation and deferral of routine sexual and reproductive health care (e.g., cervical and breast cancer screening and menopause-related concerns); and, finally, hysterectomy amid pandemic triage protocols, where medical gatekeeping converged with racist histories of reproductive injustice to enact medical and colonial dispossession. We argue that sexual and reproductive health management during COVID-19 illuminates how aging with disability is lived through relations of care and constraint.

Since its release, Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke has often been interpreted within the frameworks of ecocriticism and feminism, but existing studies often neglect its implicit power structures. To overcome this limitation, this paper employs Gayatri Spivak's postcolonial feminist theory to critically reread the film. Through an analysis of the three main charactersLady Eboshi, San, and Ashitakathis paper finds that: Lady Eboshi's "female utopia," Tatara, is actually based on the plunder of the forest, and her discourse replicates the imperialist logic of conquering the "other"; San, as a "cultural hybrid" rejected by both humans and beasts, is trapped of being a "subaltern," and her resistance is assumed as irrationality by the dominant discourse; while Ashitaka's mediator role implicitly contains the "savior" narrative criticized by Spivak, weakening the subjectivity of female characters. The study shows that there is a complex relationship of oppression in Princess Mononoke, and Spivak's theory can help reveal this relationship.

Abstract This article examines the 2017 Urban Local Body (ULB) protests in Nagaland as a pivotal moment in the struggle over gender, custom, and constitutional rights. The push for 33% reservation for women in municipal governance was reframed by tribal bodies as a threat to Naga identity, with Article 371(A) invoked to justify exclusion in the name of cultural sovereignty. Drawing on Indigenous feminist theory, legal critique, and activist narratives, the article explores how patriarchal institutions strategically deploy custom and constitutional exceptionalism to resist gender equality and how Naga women navigate this contested terrain through both resistance and negotiation. While the election of two women legislators in 2023 and over 100 women in the 2024 ULB polls mark important breakthroughs, they risk being reduced to symbolic victories without accompanying structural transformation. This article argues that genuine gender justice in Nagaland requires a fundamental shift beyond mere inclusion within existing power structures, advocating instead for a reimagining of governance rooted in relationality, accountability, and Indigenous feminist ethics that positions Naga women not as exceptions but as central to democratic and cultural futures.

ABSTRACT In 1998, Her Interactive began publishing computer games intended for a market of girls ten and up based on the long-running Nancy Drew franchise. These games cited widely from women’s and girls’ culture to construct feminized spaces in which girl players could feel at home, while also promising to put the world within reach through references to unfamiliar and enriching cultural resources. This essay considers how these games reinforce hegemonic whiteness and racial hierarchies through the way players are made to move through, occupy, and feel at home in feminized game spaces. I argue that in recreating spaces historically associated with white feminine culture, Nancy Drew games were familiar, welcoming, and empowering primarily to white girlhood and thus reinforced white feminine spatial orientations—even as they represented a contrast to the masculine spaces most often seen in games at that time. In analyzing Nancy Drew games, this essay brings together feminist analysis of girls’ game spaces with game studies approaches that focus on race and postcolonial critique to demonstrate the specific ways that whiteness can be reinforced in domestic, intimate, and feminized spaces not through character representation, but through the privileged modes of white feminine spatial orientation they enable.

ABSTRACT For decades, women across the globe have struggled for political agency under intersecting systems of gendered domination. However, dominant feminist paradigms, including liberal feminism, postsettler/colonial feminism and many strands of Global South feminism, remain ill-equipped to address the realities of women living under military occupation, protracted conflict, settler governance and fragmented or absent sovereignty. These approaches assume access to state institutions, legal protection, or rights-based mechanisms of redress, assumptions that collapse in the Palestinian context. This paper argues that Palestinian women’s political experience emerges at the intersection of Zionist settler/colonialism, internal patriarchal structures and spatial fragmentation, a convergence that demands an alternative conceptual approach. It focuses on the contemporary feminist movement Tal’at and examines how Palestinian women confront patriarchal violence and settler/colonial domination without appealing to the state, liberal legalism, or recognition within dominant feminist paradigms. Tal’at does not seek inclusion within established feminist theories; it destabilizes them and exposes their epistemic and political limits. From this refusal emerges the paper’s central theoretical intervention, Feminism of the Besieged. The concept is rooted in embodied and collective resistance of feminism arising from siege, statelessness, militarized surveillance and precarity, where survival becomes radical political praxis and political agency is reimagined.

In the US and global medical systems, research has shown that black women, generally, disproportionately experience higher rates of maternal and infant mortality due to implicit bias and systemic anti-black racism. Accordingly, black women, including doulas and midwives, continue to rethink alternative practices grounded in African epistemologies to advance birthing, healing, and wellbeing within black communities. This article conducts a transnational black feminist analysis of the birthing epistemologies and healing practices of African and African diasporic women (AADW) in the diaspora, particularly in the US. We frame birthing as a critical site of black feminist intervention for theorizing wellbeing as AADW return, physically and epistemologically, to Africa to reclaim and repurpose ancestral knowledge. Our analyses show that AADW use birthing as a radical site for: sharing knowledge reciprocally, enacting transnational communal black wellness, refusing epistemic erasure, trusting black women’s knowledge of their bodies, and reclaiming African ancestral identities. We argue that the multidirectional relationships between Africans and diasporans demonstrate the transnational exchange of gendered birthing knowledge, prompting new approaches to diaspora scholarship and rethinking gendered wellness in transnational Blackness. Theoretically, we draw from black and African feminist standpoint theories and African epistemological concepts such as Ubuntu and Omoluabi, which necessitate communal interconnectedness and responsibility. These frameworks allow us to frame “return” as multidirectional and shared epistemological encounters grounded in the oral histories and experiences of the AADW drawn from the US, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania. Within the discourse of return, our work offers new insights into how African birthing epistemologies are translated into contemporary wellness practices and emphasizes gendered reciprocal connections between African diasporic communities. It expands black and African feminist discourses by integrating birthing traditions and maternal wellness as critical yet underexplored sites of decolonial praxis.

For many people in the Global North, climate crisis renders reproduction a fraught issue, prompting questions about whether it is right to bring more people into a rapidly deteriorating world. Feminist theorists have written variously about this issue, with many arguing for multiplying forms of kinship that are not based on biogenetic connection. Adoption is often offered as an example of such alternative kinning practices. This article reports on interviews with Australians who are not parents, aged 24–35, about the connections between climate crisis and reproduction, and their thoughts and feelings about having children in the future. Many participants mentioned the idea that instead of conceiving and birthing children, they might adopt or foster and/or argued that others should do so rather than have ‘their own’ children. The article critically explores the figures of adoption as an ethical solution to the problem of overpopulation in our participants’ accounts of reproduction and in feminist academic literature. We argue that both propagate unrealistic and potentially harmful tropes in the wish for solutions to serious personal and political dilemmas.

Women were living without peace and rights and without the right to live on this earth. Women lived as if they were enslaved without knowing who they were and performed rituals and ceremonies. The Women India Association in particular was the first organization to be formed in Tamil Nadu. The Women's Indian Association has been very proactive in liaising with Indian women's organizations abroad. In this way, the conditions of women abroad were adjusted to the conditions in India and they directly witnessed the plight of women in India. These women's organizations not only carried out struggles for reformist ideas but also received lessons and did much socially minded work. They created libraries, education, councils, hospitals, etc. and worked there. This manuscript critically examines the trajectory of women’s rights violations in rural Tamil Nadu from 1921 to 2011. It explores the intersection of caste, patriarchy, and socio-politicalmovements, highlighting both systemic oppression and resistance. The study draws on historical records, feminist scholarship and regional movements to contextualize the lived realities of rural women. Keywords: Women’s rights, Caste, Education, Violations and Gender Hierarchies

ABSTRACT Anger is crucial for activism, social movements and, as history testifies, for access to democratic participation. Anti-racists and feminist scholars have demonstrated how anger moves subordinated subjects closer to activism. In sharp contrast to this, the governing of people with intellectual disabilities has been, and still is, intertwined with silencing their voices and feelings, i.e. through institutionalisation and lobotomy, and obstructing them from taking part in democratic processes. Engaging with anti-racist and feminist theories of anger, this theoretical article shows that, as part of the denial of political citizenship, people with intellectual disabilities are encouraged to be happy and content, and not angry or demanding change. To challenge contemporary ‘anti-anger ideology’, social workers need to actively engage with conflicts around who is included in and excluded from democracy. This, in turn, can open up possibilities for social change.

Domestic violence is still ranked among the most pervasive but complicated human rights and socio-legal problems throughout the jurisdictions. Conventionally viewed as violence against women, the concept has gradually come to include the victimization of men also, thus provoking the gendered underpinnings of domestic violence policies. The present paper represents a critical legal and socio-empirical appraisal of the problems of domestic violence and its impacts by comparing the issues related to the male and female victims. It discusses the conceptual framework of domestic violence, its physical, emotional, sexual, and economic aspects and appraises conflicting theoretical approaches, e.g., the feminist theory, the patriarchal theory and the gender-neutral family violence theory. The paper examines both the international legal system, the UN and tools used to address the issue, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the domestic legal framework in India, specifically the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act and provisions of the Indian Penal Code. The structural asymmetries found in legal recognition, enforcement mechanisms, and remedies available to male and female victims are determined using doctrinal and comparative analysis. In addition, the paper assesses psychological, social, economic, and legal impacts of domestic violence on both sexes, including the problem of under-reporting, social stigma, regarding the misuse debates, and institutional bias. It claims that gender-specific legislation came as a remedial measure against historic discrimination; a degree of balancing is, however, required in light of changing social realities, which guarantee both substantive equality and inclusion. The paper ends with recommendations to enact limited legal changes, enhance institutional protective measures and the need to adopt a rights-based model in which domestic violence is seen as a human issue that cuts across the fixed gender dichotomies. Keywords: Domestic Violence, Gender Neutrality, Male Victimization, PWDVA 2005, Gender Justice, Socio-Legal Consequences, Indian Legal Framework.

In this article, the editors introduce this special issue of Women and Therapy on the application of intersectional feminism to topics of parenthood and mental health. Included is discussion of the history on parenting and how mothers in particular have been valued, stereotyped, oppressed, and pathologized. The authors also review multicultural feminist theory, and diverse shifts in parenting across identities and choices. A summary of the articles included in this special issue are provided, including topics such as medical discrimination, postpartum mental health, as well as parenting from across diverse racial-ethnic and sexual identities.

ABSTRACT This paper attends to the rhetorical and discursive constructions of gendered violence in Ghanaian digital culture surrounding the prospective nomination of women on Ghana’s ORAL task force – Operation Recover All Loot. As a charged rhetorical site of gendered and epistemic violence against women’’s acumen, this study unravels the deployment of meritocratic logics, ornamentalism, claims of intellectual ineptitude, tropes of competency, and tokenistic rhetorics to delegitimize women’s inclusion in high-stakes political offices in Ghana. Grounded in African Feminist Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study evinces how public rhetors mobilize androcentric narratives on X to frame women as quintessential distractions and illegitimate political actors within anti-corruption initiatives. These discourses further establish a colonial gradient of neoliberalism, that constructs the political sphere as result-driven and inherently masculine, while co-naturalizing women as concerned with matters of beauty and aesthetics. The study calls for decolonial interventions nested within Indigenous public pedagogy and social media collective authorship for change.

ABSTRACT This article discusses the need to mentor women faculty of color on how to achieve and maintain work – life balance. We present a critical analysis of the emerging literature on mentoring women faculty of color using the frameworks of critical race feminist theory, womanist theory, and social identity theory. We examine the challenges associated with mentoring these women to help them achieve work – life balance, and we describe several existing mentoring models. Most importantly, we offer several concrete programmatic solutions to address the lack of mentorship for women faculty of color that emphasizes how to achieve and sustain work – life balance. We close with a conclusion that discusses the implications of this research for education, public policy, and practice.