Global Feminist Research Articles

Feminism against Beauty Standards in South Korea: Force Creates Resistance

This article explores about the resistance that women in South Korean made in regards to the unrealistic beauty standards that is projected for the Korean women in order for the to get a place in social involvement. Women in South Korea are marginalized, and although the population in women in South Korea is 49.93% in 2019 which is a balance number for both female and male, but their voices remain as minority within the society involvement. In regards, they are often isolated from important social and professional networks and subjected to the negative stereotyping of becoming a feminist. Women in Korea are ought to have the attributes of beauty standards or else, society would judge them and this is a sign that women are trapped with this kind of projection thus it become a barrier for them to grow themselves. Why beauty standards matter among women in South Korea and how global feminism influence women in South Korea to create a resistance against rigid beauty standards in South Korea? To explore this question, this study used qualitative method with phenomenology approach. Drawing on the concept of transnational feminism as well as feminist standpoint theory, this study expected to find the actions taken by the women in South Korea to oppress the idea of objectifying women into certain characteristic of beauty and the oppression of “pretty priviledge”.

REPRESENTATION OF FEMINISM IN THE MAIN CHARACTERS OF THE FILMS "MALEFICENT MISTRESS OF EVIL" AND "FROZEN 2"

Abstract: Fairy Tale films do not only show entertainment for the audience but also therepresentation of femininity that can affect the mindset of the viewers. The representation shouldevolve in line with the global feminist movement in order for the audience to have a realisticdescription of the condition of women in the current era. Research is needed to determine whetherthe transition is in line with the development of feminism waves and theories. This study usesfeminist theories and concepts of femininity as a reference. The primary data collection wascompleted using observation and secondary data was taken from the study of literature anddocumentation. Observations were accomplished by watching Maleficent 2, and Frozen 2 films. Thefinal analysis shows that the transition in the representation of femininity in Maleficent 2, andFrozen 2 films indicates equalities and emphasizes the rebellious side of woman.Keywords: Maleficent 2; Frozen 2; Feminism; Femininity, Representation; Equalities

What is American Feminist Foreign Policy? A Brief Analysis of the Representation of Women in American Foreign Policy Legislation, 1973–2020

As several countries (e.g., Sweden, Mexico, Canada) are claiming to practice a feminist foreign policy, interest groups in the United States are constructing their own templates for an American feminist foreign policy. However, this is not a new idea. The American government has a long and complicated history of claiming that advancing the status of women and gender equality are American foreign policy objectives.1,2,3 Before adopting this potentially problematic trend, we need to first analyze the history of how foreign women’s interests have been represented by the US government. In this article, I trace how members of the US Congress have represented the interests of foreign women in foreign policy legislation, based on a content analysis of bills introduced between 1973 and 2020. In my analysis of over four hundred bills, I describe five eras of women’s foreign policy and find that American foreign policy has consistently prioritized women’s roles in economic development. Other global women’s rights, such as reproductive health, freedom from violence, and political participation, seem to gain greater traction only when they serve domestic gender politics and/or strategic national interests. Thus, as American feminist foreign policy conversations unfold, scholars, activists, and policymakers need to explore how and why other human rights for women remain contentious in American domestic and foreign policy. I suggest that US support for UN global women’s rights policies (such as CEDAW), where foreign women have some authority over how their policy interests are represented, best reflects the principles of global feminism, which should guide claims of feminist foreign policy in any country.

Where feminists dare. The challenge to the hetero-patriarchal and neo-conservative backlash in Italy and Poland

This paper focuses on the public debate in Poland and Italy concerning the right to abortion in the contemporary rise of populist neo-conservative forces in Europe and of a global feminist movement. In both countries, the historical Catholic interference into women's reproductive rights and self-determination has been enforced by the renewed alliance of right-wing governments and pro-life groups to converge into a transnational “anti-gender war”. This represents a real backlash against women’s achievements over the last decades in terms of reproductive and sexual citizenship, which appears to be the battlefield for redefinition of western citizenship in times of global crisis. Although different genealogies, we identified a common framing of neo-conservative discourse, and of feminist claims and practices, as that of feminist strikes and social mutualism. In this perspective, we consider these practices as a normativity from below, arguing that feminist movement is addressing a new paradigm of citizenship.

“Reader, I Grew Up”: Rewriting Jane Eyre after 9/11

ABSTRACT American cultural and political presentations of 9/11 often resort to the easily recognizable narrative convention of Bildungsroman, intensifying the nostalgia for an illusory, ideal past before the crisis. Evoking the classic novel Jane Eyre as well as the history of its reading, Patricia Park’s Re Jane and Susan Choi’s My Education disrupt the narrative scheme of initiation, destabilizing and questioning the popular way of understanding growth in connection to the experience of 9/11. Both novels’ engagement with feminist ideas enables them to stage different ways of imagining a continuation over the temporal and spatial rift that 9/11 created in American popular imagination. Furthermore, as the protagonists of the novels are presented as products of American military and political imperialism in Asia, writing their multidimensional subjectivity into being has significance for positioning America in the international world. This global feminist perspective not only retrieves complex feminist history but also introduces broader global networks within which to regard the stories of 9/11. This article examines the particular ways in which My Education and Re Jane problematize and experiment with different modes of storytelling and argues that such narrative projects have multilayered implications for narrating 9/11 today.

Towards a ‘Vedic Feminine Renaissance’

The sense of justice and equity towards women is considered among the best indicators that reflect the socio-cultural development of a civilisation. The position and status of women, as reflected in literature naturally serves as a test to gauge the sensibilities and cultivation of each associated age. It is matter of general agreement that the feminine ideals of womanhood during the early Vedic age remain exalted and exemplary. The Vedic narratives elevate the ephemeral spirit of womanhood, which progressively lost its sheen in successive stages.
 While the contemporary feminine polemics consistently unravel unhackneyed theories, generic in nature, we are lacking in such an orientation which targets specifics of local, regional and traditional culture. Feminists in India are no exception, and have largely adopted the theories of Feminism emanating from the discourse of the West. The Indian Vedic repository contains instances which testify the epitome of womanhood at its best. However, the Indian ethos of feminism imbedded firmly in the Vedic roots remain largely inaccessible in the contemporary feministic theory. The need for adapting ‘global feminism’ to the ‘classical Indian taste’ remains an unobserved concern.
 This paper explores the possibilities inherent in the study of classical mythic literature and their potential for stimulating ‘local theories’ of feminism in India through a study of selected feminine ideals present in the early Vedic narratives. Can study of ancient Vedic literature inspire a reawakening in Indian feminism, just as the study of classical Greek literature did for the West during Renaissance in Europe - is a question, this paper seeks to address.

Essential for what? A global social reproduction view on the re-organisation of work during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT COVID-19 has shaken a foundational pillar of global capitalism: the organisation of work. A pivotal dimension of such re-organisation has been the classification of work as essential or not. This article explores the concept of essential work using a global feminist social reproduction perspective. We show that the meaning of essential work is more ambiguous and politicised than it may appear and, although it can be used as a basis to reclaim the value of socially reproductive work, its transformative potential hinges on the possibility to encompass the most precarious and transnational dimensions of (re)production.

Introduction: Symposium on Serene J. Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic

ABSTRACT This symposium brings together commentaries on Serene J. Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic from Linda Martín Alcoff, Sunaina Arya, and Olúfẹ'mi O. Táíwò with a reply from Khader. Khader’s book aims to develop a conception of feminism that is both universalist and anti-imperialist. Central to this feminism are (a) the idea that the normative core of feminism is opposition to sexist oppression and (b) the idea that the role of normative concepts in transnational feminist praxis is a justice-enhancing, or nonideal theoretical, one. Khader resists the universalism/relativism framing of debates in global feminisms and argues that opposition to sexist oppression can be detached from the values and social ontology of what she calls ‘Enlightenment liberalism’. She asks whether the values that are most often accused of being vehicles for Western imperialism, namely autonomy, individualism, and gender role eliminativism, are necessary for feminism at all.

The changing politics of beauty labour in Indian cinema

ABSTRACT This essay analyses the changing politics of beauty labour and female body image in Indian cinema. It begins by discussing how beauty, a social capital for women, is a measuring rod with which their bodies are both assessed and objectified. It claims that cinema being a visual medium demands some aesthetic capital from actors, and the beauty of leading ladies portrayed on screen often adds to the spectacle. Focusing on mainstream Bollywood films produced especially over the last two decades, this essay examines narratives upholding the beauty ideal both as a cinematic necessity and also as a plot point. Tracing developments in cinematic representations of female beauty, it then examines select postmillennial films (both mainstream Bollywood as well as regional productions) to suggest that a maturing trend in representing female bodies is emerging in Indian cinema where instead of the prettified heroine one increasingly encounters protagonists who refuse to agonize under beauty labour. Finally, it argues that owing to global debates and critical feminist interventions on female body image, a radical shift is palpable in postmillennial Indian films which showcase women who either reject or redefine the politics of beauty labour.

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

Despre creierul femeii și alți demoni. Antologia textelor publicistice, Sofia Nădejde, (ediție îngrijită de Maria Cernat și Adina Mocanu) Editura Paralela 45, Pitești, 2019.

This book review aims to highlight the significance of retreiving the long ignored contributions of Sofia Nadejde’s to the progress of understanding gender inequalities that are deeply rooted in our culture. Through the careful work of reshaping the original texts published between 1881-1885 in Contemporanul. Revista Științifica și Literara, Maria Cernat and Adina Mocanu bring new insights into the genesis and the evolution of local feminist thought by critically situating it within the global feminist movement.

Jahaji-bahin feminism: a de-colonial Indo-Caribbean consciousness

ABSTRACT This essay examines the trope of jahaji-bahin consciousness through a de-colonial feminist lens to highlight the ways in which Indo-Caribbean women claim a sense of identity and belonging in the Caribbean while resisting colonial and patriarchal stereotypes, social marginality, and gender anomie in circumscribed spaces. What is the scope of jahaji-bahin consciousness as a form of de-colonial feminist thought? How does it engender localised forms of resistance to colonial and patriarchal forms of oppression within the Anglophone Caribbean? How are the silenced voices of Indo-Caribbean women given form and texture within these self-generating paradigms of feminism to create an important global south feminist positionality? These questions will be explored in the Anglophone writings of Indo-Caribbean authors Ramabai Espinet and Gaiutra Bahadur.

Building a Global Feminist Alliance for Peace in East Asia

In an era of vacillations between threats of a nuclear war and promises of peace breakthroughs in East Asia, this article takes examples from public campaigns of women’s peace groups—such as Women’s Peace Walk, Women Cross DMZ (the Demilitarized Zone), Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, and PeaceWomen Across the Globe—and argues for feminist scholarship to take an interdisciplinary approach and, in particular, to fuse peace studies with cultural studies, political economy, and global geopolitics. Doing so requires an examination of the history and the scope of the military-industrial complex, its relationship with finance capital, its bonds with governments and political parties, and its business patterns in relation to wars and conflicts all over the world. It also is crucial to sow the seeds of reconciliation and peace into the daily life of ordinary people. Thus, historians, cultural workers, educationists, writers, and scholar activists of different areas must undertake long-term sustained work for reconciliation and peace at the grassroots level as well as networking at the regional and global levels.

Camouflaged Histories

Lei Yan 雷燕, whose artistic practice was shaped by a decades-long career in the Chinese military, began a period of transition through participation in a 2002 restaging of the Communist Red Army’s 1934 Long March as a multi-sited international art project. Her resulting encounter with US feminist art icon Judy Chicago raised questions about the potential neocolonial influence of global feminist art. The work Lei subsequently produced performs an autoethnographic excavation of the sociohistorical categories—woman soldier, military artist, and woman artist—that made her as both artist and woman. She works from within a national representational corpus, subjecting it to various experiments to reveal the fields of violence it has enacted from the Sino-Vietnamese War to the Great Sichuan earthquake. Lei Yan’s meditation through photography upon national, revolutionary iconography evolved into soft sculpture objects in cloth and paper. Their arrested ephemerality decenters the human subject, drawing attention to haunting absences in conventional stories of art, feminism, and nation. In comparison with the monumental work of Ai Weiwei 艾未未, who also created pieces in response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Lei’s art serves not to admonish but to bring back into consciousness lost lives and camouflaged histories.

Understanding the Challenges for Bangladeshi Women to Participate in #MeToo Movement

A series of events in October 2017 led to the initiation of an unprecedented global feminist movement over various social media platforms, where using the hashtag #MeToo (or some variants of it), women across the world publicly shared their untold stories of being sexually harassed. We conducted an anonymous online survey (n=180) and an interview study (n=30) to understand the participation of Bangladeshi women in this movement. Our study concurs that while Bangladeshi women, who are regular users of social media, supported the spirit of this movement; did not participate in it, even though they had many bitter experiences. Our analysis shows that their non-participation was largely influenced by a cultural difference, patriarchy, perceived futility and lack of hope, and a reliance on alternatives. We discuss how our findings of women's use of technology platforms, which is conditioned and limited by male-dominated and conservative Bangladeshi society, relates to the broader issues in feminism that the GROUP community is interested in.

The Tongues of the Locas

Moments of deep crisis destabilise artistic autonomy, as such autonomy usually relies on arts’ submission to the laws of the markets. When markets collapse, like they did in Argentina in 2001, artistic production is emancipated from the duties of money-making. This is the moment when original, ‘amateur’ artistic practices emerge that find another social and political function, in which writing is not contained by the rules of business. In contemporary Latin America, trespassing the limits of artistic autonomy is not a decision of the artist but rather a material condition of production. This article analyses three moments in which a post-autonomy literature emerged as a formation of a minoritarian, queer language of the locas: Brazilian poesia marginal (1970s), the Argentinian independent publishing projects Belleza y felicidad and Eloísa Cartonera (early 2000s), and the recent global feminist activist movement Ni una menos.

왜 《인천여성미술비엔날레》는 지속가능할 수 없었는가?

While the Incheon Women Artists" Biennale (2004-2011) was recognized and listed in the directory of world biennials in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of the New Art Worlds (2013) along with three major Korean biennials such as Gwangju, Busan and Seoul, it was nevertheless suspended. It is not surprising that the latter three major biennials continued given the fact that their host cities promoted and supported the events with stable funding and staffs. Incheon"s biennial garnered press and attention but it failed to survive the precarious political and social climate. This paper examines the ways in which Incheon Women Artists" Biennale appeared, its reception, and some of the reasons the first women artists" biennale was suspended despite the general positive response from the outside Korea. The Biennale was initiated by female artists in 1996 who despite their struggle as women to maintain family life, pursued opportunities to found a forum for women artists of various backgrounds. Triggered by the birth of the Gwangju Biennale in 1995, the Incheon Biennale was not only the outcome of local women artists"s efforts but also a potential site for "global feminisms" in an era of subalterns. However, the Biennale abruptly lost its funding and did not survive after 2011. One of the reasons is that from its inception, the Biennale was hardly endorsed by the local male population who aggressively and overtly expressed antimony. They disagreed that women could represent the city of Incheon in the name of a biennial. The second reason was that the Korean elite feminist artist sector refused to participate in the Biennale arguing that the Incheon women artists were not "feminist" enough. The third was the ongoing conflict between artists" organizations which accidentally publicly posed the Incheon Biennale artists as being on the far right. Finally, the heavy reliance on governmental funding brought about the biennials" cessation as it fell victim to the unending change in the political cycle that effected the organizing committee members" loyalties.

‘I’ve Put a Yule Log on Your Grate’: Lynette Roberts’s ‘Naïve’ Modernism

In this article, I suggest that Lynette Roberts develops a ‘naïve’ modernism that emphasizes tropes of folk art, home-made craft, and creative labour as a therapeutic response to war and a means of carving out a public role for the woman writer in the post-war world. Bringing high modernist strategies down to earth through an engagement with localized rural cultures, she strives to bridge the divide between the public and the private in order to open up a space for the woman writer within public life. As part of my discussion, I draw on Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s contention that literary style—conceived broadly as ‘attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness’—is crucial to modernist writers’ attempts to think in—and beyond—the nation. Embracing a liberating openness to experience and ‘amateurish’ passion, Roberts’s ‘home-made’ style challenges imperial constructions of nationhood centred in authority and control with a more collective, constructivist, improvisatory concept of belonging (Roberts 2005, p. xxxvi). Probing the intersections between folk art, national commitments, and global feminist projects in British modernism, I investigate how a radically transformed ‘naïve’ subtends the emergence of a new kind of feminist modernism, rooted in concepts of collective making and creative labour.

The intercultural Bildungsroman as a platform for a hybrid feminist epistemology in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990): The (im)possibility of a unified feminist movement

This article analyzes Lucy (1990) by Jamaica Kincaid in terms of the intercultural Bildungsroman basing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s characterization of the coming-of-age genre. Focusing on the relationship between the characters, it highlights the tension between contrasting feminist views. Seeking to emphasize how an intercultural vision contributes innovative perspectives on society, this paper argues that the eponymous protagonist of the novel has to find a way to reconcile the American culture with her Antiguan culture in her own feminist and postcolonial terms -an intercultural perspective. On the one hand, the relationship between Lucy and Mariah—her employer—reflects a tension between second-wave and third-wave feminism, which, the heroine eventually reconciles opening up the path for a unified vision of the feminist movement. Lucy’s postcolonial vision, in particular, is similar to that articulated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. On the other hand, the strain between Lucy and her mother is related to the heroine’s endorsement of second-wave feminist views as articulated by Betty Friedan and other feminist theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. In general, this novel develops an important vision for the global feminist movement.

The Employment of Public Mural Design in Serving Feminist Issues in the Egyptian Society: an Educational and Practical Experiment With a Group of Students From the 4TH Level at the Mural Painting Section in 2018/2019; Exhibition: Graffiti… No for FGM

The Employment of Public Mural Design in Serving Feminist Issues in the Egyptian Society: an Educational and Practical Experiment With a Group of Students From the 4TH Level at the Mural Painting Section in 2018/2019; Exhibition: Graffiti… No for FGM