Gender War Research Articles

“Joss is (no longer?) Boss”: three layers of cancelling in the joss whedon fan community

ABSTRACT Over the past few years, and in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, increased attention has been devoted to the practice of “cancelling:” the withdrawal of support from someone whose values, action or speech are deemed unacceptable. While social justice advocates see cancelling as a tool advancing equality and inclusion, the pejorative term “cancel culture” has quickly earned a contested status and was used by opposers to warn against a “takeover” of “woke” values. The Joss Whedon fan community, centered around a creator celebrated for advancing feminist agendas in popular culture, is an intriguing site within this broader controversy. The aim of this study is to explore how fans navigate the ambivalences inherent in cancelling a previously-valued creator, and the tensions between promoting liberal values and protecting objects of fandom. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with Whedon fans and former fans, we propose a framework conceptualizing cancelling as consisting of three layers: cancelling the emotional relationship towards the creator, cancelling his works, and promoting cancelling as an ideological choice. The framework is helpful in understanding the broader tensions inherent in the practice of cancelling, in the context of culture and gender wars.

Mapping the Landscape of the Manosphere within the Analytical Framework of Wave and War

In this paper, I aim to adopt two conceptual frameworks as a latticework of perception to read the complex and multifaceted situations in contemporary Korean society. First, I will explore whether the metaphor of feminism as a fluid wave is a suitable analysis for understanding feminism as a complex of various bodies, forces, energies, materials, desires, and thoughts, and how the anti-feminism backlash counters the fluidity of the fourth wave of feminism with the territoriality and solidity of macho tribalism. Second, I will examine whether the spread of material-discursive practices based on misogyny within the male-centric online ecosystem (manosphere) in the backlash against feminism can be read as a gender war. Considering that war is a network of human and non-human assemblages and an entanglement of material and symbolic elements, I will analyze the technologies of the gender war based on misogyny and female antagonism through Michel Foucault’s war model. Through this analysis, I aim to map the current landscape of feminist movements and theories in Korea confronted with the frontlines of misogyny.

Gender Wars? Diplomacy as a Depolarizing Practice in International Politics of Gender and Sexuality

Abstracts To what extent is diplomacy a depolarizing tool of international society? This article proposes a novel theoretical and empirical focus on depolarization in international politics of gender and sexuality. It operationalizes the concepts of polarization and depolarization and integrates them with Self/Other theory in international relations. It puts forward an argument that the logic of diplomacy is, although not unequivocally, compatible with the logic of depolarization. The claim and the application of the framework are illustrated with a case study of gender equality and LGBT+ rights diplomacies in Poland. Based on the empirical findings, the article contends that diplomacy is primarily a practice of depolarization.

“Gender wars” and populist politics in South Korea

The 2022 South Korean presidential election campaign saw populist politicians, especially conservative parties, leverage gender conflicts and misogyny to attract young male swing voters. But there has been limited scholarly attention to the connection between gender and populist politics, particularly in South Korea, with research primarily focused on women's voting patterns, their political party representation, and on populist politics in the US, Europe, and Latin America. Existing research identifies that common strategies employed by populist politicians include anti-feminist discourses, reference to crises in masculinity, and appeals to emotion and affect. This paper examines how South Korean populist politics has utilized gender conflicts since democratization, considering the evolution of ‘gender wars’ in the South Korean context. It specifically delves into the strategies employed by conservative populist politicians from the People Power Party (PPP) during the 2022 election campaigns. These strategies, although similar to those of right-wing populists in Europe and the US, emphasized three key issues unique to South Korea: compulsory military service, low fertility rates, and the dismantling of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. This South Korean case contributes significantly to academic discussions about populist politics and gender, contextualized within the local political, social, and cultural context.

Gender wars and cancel culture in academia: Umut Özkırımlı in conversation with Laura Favaro

The Oxford English Dictionary defines cancel culture as «the action or practice of publicly boycotting, ostracizing, or withdrawing support from a person, institution, etc., thought to be promoting culturally unacceptable ideas». Though accurate, this definition is incomplete since cancel culture goes way beyond boycotting or ostracizing. It includes a wide spectrum of sanctions, spanning from public naming and shaming, censorship and job loss to intimidation and outright attacks in the form of verbal and physical abuse. This article discusses the mechanisms and negative impacts of cancel culture in academia by focusing on the case of Laura Favaro, who was ‘cancelled’ after publishing an article on the findings of her research on academia's ‘gender wars’. The concerted attempts to silence certain – particularly feminist – perspectives on sex and gender have severe and wide-ranging implications for researchers and the scholarly endeavour as a whole, contributing to the toxic atmosphere created by the neoliberalisation of university.

"He is just Ken:" deconstructing hegemonic masculinity in Barbie (2023 Movie).

Scholars have consistently explored Barbie in various contexts, often subjecting it to critical analysis. However, the release of the Barbie 2023 Movie has shifted our focus from Barbie to Ken, marking the first occasion when Barbie has provided a platform for exploring representations of masculinity both in the patriarchal society and in popular culture. This article aims to investigate how the 2023 Barbie movie deconstructs symbols of hegemonic and toxic masculinity and its performative aspects within the framework of (post)feminist discourse. It examines how the movie satirically employs symbols of traditional, hegemonic masculinity to challenge normative masculine ideals prevalent in our patriarchal society. The movie -through its popularity- significantly contributes to mainstream postfeminist media culture, creating a platform where discussions on masculinity, its associated crises, and the broader gender wars, along with their existential ramifications, become unavoidable. Exploring the ways masculinities are problematized and contested within postfeminist media culture, I argue that Ken, within this narrative, is positioned as the latest icon of postfeminist masculinity, symbolizing a critical juncture in the ongoing discourse on gender roles and identities.

Gender Wars: Two scholars excavate the origins of today’s trans backlash

Gender Wars: Two scholars excavate the origins of today’s trans backlash

Correction to ‘The Gender Wars, Academic Freedom and Education’ by Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan (2021)

Correction to ‘The Gender Wars, Academic Freedom and Education’ by Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan (2021)

Gender, Sex and Freedom: Testing the Theoretical Limits of the Twenty-First-Century ‘Gender Wars’ with Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray

Many Global North contexts are experiencing conflict in feminist discourses between supporters of trans and gender diverse self-identification and self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists who consider this to undermine feminist goals. We argue that the channelling of contemporary feminist discourse into defensive and oppositional channels has foreclosed the space for more nuanced and future-oriented, utopian thought around freedom from sex/gender, limiting the prospect of developing a coalition of actors focused not on difference, but rather on commonality. Putting classic feminist works by Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray into dialogue, we consider an alternative approach to freedom premised on an ontology of potentiality combined with acceptance of the materiality of the binary gender hierarchy, that nonetheless remains utopian and open-ended, demonstrating the capacity to transcend these impasses and potentially overcome these divides.

How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea by Sandra Eder

Gender is having a moment—still. Sandra Eder’s comprehensive and compassionate history of gender comes as the concept remains deeply embattled. On the one hand, feminist and queer critiques of gender binaries have opened up cultural space for myriad gender variations. Gender-bending, gender-fuck, and the ‘new androgyny’ have mainstreamed the dismantling of rigid identity categories. On the other hand, there is a furious backlash: physical violence and legislative attacks against LGBTQ+, and particularly transgender, communities; censorship of so-called gender theory in classrooms; and cruel harassment by anti-transgender activists of children’s hospitals who perform gender-affirming medical care. The gender wars, waged for decades, are all the more reason that How the Clinic Made Gender is a welcome and powerful contribution to histories of gender. Eder, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, joins other scholars, particularly Joanne Meyerowitz, in telling her ‘uneasy origin story’ of how the ideas of gender and ‘gender role’ emerged and were put into medical practice in the mid-20th century. Focused on the Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Eder historicizes her account within the complicated rise of a therapeutic society and the shifting cultural landscapes of sex, gender, and sexuality.

Realism’s Gender Wars: Masculinity Effects in Late Realist Fiction and Contemporary Reality TV

Abstract Who owns The Real in realism, and what difference does gender make? Countering monolithic (and often dismissive) notions of realism, this article recognizes divergent signifiers of the real. Its particular concern is the war between realisms coded as feminine and those coded as masculine—between what Frank Norris belittled as “the drama of a broken teacup” and the drama of a man battling to survive in the wild. Juxtaposing Jack London’s Klondike fiction with today’s survival reality TV shows, I see these as similar efforts to put a masculine stamp on the real. In my reading of the History Channel’s Alone (2015–present), however, a Londonesque realism of moose-killing is challenged by a realism of the daily, non-dire, and domestic. Alone’s oscillation between these modes recalls that Ur-text of literary realism in which a violent, shipwrecked man sets about reinventing the household arts.“A realism of the nondire is just as authentic—its sociable, homemaking women and men just as credible and worthy—as a realism of men in mortal danger.”

How can universities promote academic freedom? Insights from the front line of the gender wars

AbstractThe UK Government's Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is currently progressing through Parliament. The bill is designed to strengthen free speech and academic freedom in higher education, in response to what former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson describes as ‘the rise of intolerance and cancel culture upon our campuses’. But is there really a crisis of academic freedom in British universities?To see that there is, say Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan, we need only look at the contemporary reality of suppression of debate on sex and gender. The evidence they catalogue of suppression of research, of blacklisting, harassment and smear campaigns, of no‐platforming, disinvitations and shutting down of events, is incontrovertible. The recent experience of scholars and students wishing to discuss the material reality and political salience of sex makes complacency about academic freedom a luxury we cannot afford.Suissa and Sullivan set out a powerful argument for the role of academic freedom in pursuing truth within the academy and developing democracy beyond it. They effectively counter attempts to narrow the scope of academic freedom so as to render it compatible with no‐platforming. And they lay out a series of practical steps administrators can take to ensure that universities are places where an expansive and pluralistic intellectual climate prevails.This is a timely and compelling intervention in a vexed but urgent public debate. For their clear‐sighted diagnosis of where and how academic freedom has been eroded in our universities, and for their judicious account of what must be done to rebuild it, Suissa and Sullivan deserve a wide and attentive hearing.

Corrections for ‘The Gender Wars, Academic Freedom and Education’ by Suissa & Sullivan (2021)

Corrections for ‘The Gender Wars, Academic Freedom and Education’ by Suissa & Sullivan (2021)

Establishing networked misogyny as a counter movement: The analysis of the online anti-Istanbul convention presence

We now live in an age of unhidden gender wars where direct violence occurs within online and offline spaces. These online spaces on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram become venues for attacks on gender and woman’s rights, as well as its intersection with race and ethnicity. Such online hate expressions and networked harassments channelled towards women provide clues for us, social scientists, to understand the underlying dynamics/nature of misogyny. In this paper, by studying the online misogynistic narratives developed around the Istanbul Convention as a counter movement, I aim to highpoint the conservative and polarizing discourses that frames gender-based violence as acceptable in Turkey. More specifically I show how Twitter can be used as a platform for anti-feminist and misogynistic groups, aiming violence and hostility directly at women and their rights. As these tweets illustrate, the right-wing populist and anti-gender discourses and conservative and authoritarian politics, are being implemented on many fronts and social media is one of them.

“Never Battle Alone”: Egirls and the Gender(ed) War on Video Game Live Streaming as “Real” Work

From 2018 to 2021, the “egirl” witnessed a radical shift from her origins as a sexualized slur in online gaming. Through critical discourse analysis of news media of this period, this paper interprets this transformation within two primary phenomena: (1) the growth of women game influencers who reclaimed “egirl” slurs in their self-branding and (2) the launch of “Egirl.gg,” a platform for paid gaming companions. I argue that live streaming platform Twitch.tv, and the expansive ecosystems of labor its demand from streamers, were integral to this re-authorization of who can play as themselves in a patriarchal gaming culture. Here, I extend Ergin Bulut’s framework of “ludic authorship” to delineate how stakeholders in game streaming industries masculinize the cultural labor of “authenticity.” The ambivalent embrace of “egirling” via streaming cultural logics further complicates the work of women gamers who must work harder to realize careers in platformed entertainment.

Gender Wars and Sexuality Education in 2021: History and Politics

Gender Wars and Sexuality Education in 2021: History and Politics

Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality: Gendering War and Politics in Cuba

Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality: Gendering War and Politics in Cuba

The Gender Wars, Academic Freedom and Education

Abstract Philosophical arguments regarding academic freedom can sometimes appear removed from the real conflicts playing out in contemporary universities. This paper focusses on a set of issues at the front line of these conflicts, namely, questions regarding sex, gender and gender identity. We document the ways in which the work of academics has been affected by political activism around these questions and, drawing on our respective disciplinary expertise as a sociologist and a philosopher, elucidate the costs of curtailing discussion on fundamental demographic and conceptual categories. We discuss some philosophical work that addresses the conceptual distinction between academic freedom and free speech and explore how these notions are intertwined in significant ways in universities. Our discussion elucidates and emphasises the educational costs of curtailing academic freedom.

Woman as the Other—Interpretations of the Gender Wars in “A Woman on a Roof” from the Perspective of Existential Feminism

Doris Lessing is one of the Nobel Prize winners and “A Woman on a Roof” is such a famous short story of hers. In the patriarchal society, women are in the lower status, but the woman in the story struggles bravely to fight against the male power. During her fighting, the woman has doubts and hesitation, but she finally forces the three males to put off their prejudice. This paper focuses on how the woman strives for her own rights, and talks from the perspective of Existential Feminism, taking the main male and female characters in “A Woman on a Roof” as examples, so as to explore women’s self-survival in the dualistic society. Through studying her feminist thinking in the short story, the paper points out that the woman finally transforms her role from the Other to the Subject and then she is in an equal position with the three males. Though the two genders does not reconcile with each other as it seems to be with the purification of rainwater in “A Woman on a Roof”, the woman has made a big progress in the pursuit of her own transcendence.

The Gender Wars and Academic Freedom

The Gender Wars and Academic Freedom