Feminist Demands Research Articles

Conceptualising Inclusion and Participation in the Promotion of Healthy Lifestyles.

The central tension in health promotion is between a public health policy presumption that healthy lifestyles have benefits at both the individual and societal levels and should be assertively encouraged, and liberal demands that states should maintain a stance of non-interference concerning private affairs. This tension is heightened when the engagement of marginalised or disempowered groups, such as persons with disabilities, women, or immigrants, enter discussions. This paper examines the concept of inclusion within the context of the promotion of healthy lifestyles, primarily sport and physical activity in community contexts. Using a form of ‘reflective equilibrium’, it explores a series of distinctions to evaluate critically different accounts of inclusion and offers a novel and somewhat radical approach based on re-interpretations and alignments of participation and hegemonic relationships.

Critical Feminist Law-Making: Imitative Spaces and Improvised Coalitions

ABSTRACT Feminists working in the law may experience tension between mainstreaming feminist ideas to make the everyday life of women better and maintaining a critical feminist method of law-making. Some (including myself) might at times feel pessimistic for the present, and future of, critical approaches to law. Mainstreaming feminist demands can be a powerful and effective method, potentially monopolising feminist engagements with law. In this article, I take this concern seriously by exploring the hope and possibility of an improvised coalition between mainstream and critical feminist approaches. To show this, I use the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, specifically its finding that gender-based violence constitutes a form of torture, as a methodical example of law-making. The result of this is an identification of an imitative space in which critical feminist law-making could maintain its possibility. I argue that the imitation embedded in both mainstream and critical feminist approaches to law, and the Court’s autopoietic method, could create this imitative space to safeguard feminist critical engagements with law. My analysis shows how feminist demands, mainstream or critical, carry the potential to activate an imitative space, where subversion becomes a possibility.

“I have always said that I am not a feminist, but…”: moderate feminism in the narratives of Finnish women journalists who entered the field between 1960 and 1990

ABSTRACT This article studies lived experiences of gender equality and feminism in Finnish newsrooms between 1960 and 1990. On one hand, the journalists I interviewed claimed they had reported on diverse social issues related to gender equality and feminism throughout their careers. On the other hand, they embraced the idea that the journalistic profession had achieved more gender equality in Finland than in other countries in the Global North and the Nordic region. Using narratives collected from 31 women journalists, I use this contradiction to problematise the relationship between experiences of gender equality and the desire to struggle for feminist demands in professional journalism. I do so by adopting the analytical approach of moderate feminism.

Justice Between Individuals: John Rawls and the Demands of Political Liberalism

John Rawls proposed A Theory of Justice ( 1971 ) aiming at building consensus in democratic societies. In the middle of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights movement, while Americans were strongly divided, Rawls’ political liberalism offered a method to build political agreement between people with different and conflicting values and interests, to preserve peace and other benefits of stable social cooperation. Fifty years on, while authors like Katrina Forrester (2019 a , b ) suggest moving on from the ideal of political consensus, other voices such as Catherine Audard (2019) remind us of the relevance of public reason in a world full of divisions. This paper builds a dialogue between these two influential authors to assess the legacy and relevance of Rawls’ political philosophy today.

A Contested Pill: Transnational Controversies over Medical Abortion in Germany, France, and the United States

In 1988, French pharmaceutical company Roussel Uclaf introduced Mifepristone (RU 486), a pill which medically induces abortion, but withdrew the drug one month later after severe protests. The abortion pill caused transnational controversies from 1988 to 1993. This article examines these controversies as a gateway to the entanglements between biomedical research, economic interests, and social protests in the last third of the twentieth century, as the American antiabortion movement initiated protests against the drug's French producer and its German parent company after its market release in France. The movement used boycotts against French products and utilized discomforting references to Germany's Nazi past to put pressure on pharmaceutical executives. In contrast, German, French, and American feminists and family-planners relied on transnational networks to enable medical trials and ensure the global distribution of Mifepristone. The article highlights how feminist demands for individual choice and public health concerns clashed with the antiabortion movements’ demands and entrepreneurs’ concerns about crude Holocaust comparisons. It shows that actors on both sides of the abortion controversy employed nonmedical arguments to influence scientific research and social movements acted on a transnational level to influence the market introduction of new biomedical advances.

Educating citizens to public reason: what can we learn from interfaith dialogue?

ABSTRACT John Rawls’s political liberalism demands that reasonable citizens comply with the duty of civility, which limits the justification of state action to public reasons. However, many religious citizens in liberal democratic societies reject the exclusion of religious reasons from public debate. What can be done to encourage these citizens to endorse public reason? Rawls proposes the idea of reasoning from conjecture (RC), i.e. directly engaging with someone’s comprehensive doctrine and showing them that such a doctrine actually supports public reason. In this article, we argue that reasoning from conjecture faces serious objections and that interfaith dialogue (ID) provides a better and more effective tool to encourage religious citizens to endorse public reason. More specifically, ID provides support to public reason by (i) relying on the principles of equality, sincerity and self-criticism, which are also central to public reason; (ii) leading participants to de-parochialize religion; and (iii) promoting tolerance. Moreover, ID avoids the main objections faced by RC, which undermine the latter’s morality and effectiveness.

Richard Rorty and the Demands of Liberalism

In this article, I show that Richard Rorty’s unduly neglected normative political theory advances a far more distinct and demanding form of liberalism than is usually attributed to him. Attention to how Rorty understands solidarity—and its corresponding conception of public obligations—encourages analysis of his nonjuridical vision of liberal community. Through examination of his oft-ignored, revealing interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov and instructive comparison with the thought of Judith Shklar, I argue that, for Rorty, the sustainability of a liberal community requires an ethos of curiosity, whereby citizens feel moved to uncover and understand the personal experiences of cruelty and humiliation endured by others. We can make sense of this ethos and its demands of us through rethinking the idea of political conversation. This understanding of Rorty’s intellectual project not only enriches our appreciation of his complex political theory but also contests the meaning and implications of liberalism itself.

Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework

This article develops an account of demand-making and provides a novel framework for evaluating the demands and strategies of social movements. It explores three features of demands, arguing that they disclose social conditions, create constituencies, and set the horizons of the world that social movements seek to build. It does so by considering two feminist demands: the demand for wages for housework and for the socialization of housework. By revisiting revolutionary feminism in the 1970s, it contrasts two strategic perspectives articulated in debates about housework: what Selma James called the “perspective of winning” and what I call the “perspective of investment,” a strategy for change that sees short-term reforms as investments in long-term transformations. In light of this, I endorse the demand to socialize housework as apt for the contemporary care economy and show how my account of demand-making contributes to the political theory of social movements by clarifying movement demands for “non-reformist reforms,” such as defund the police.

How Is Collective Identity Possible in Democracies? Political Integration and the Leitkultur Debate in Germany

The quest for a common collective identity has become a challenge for modern democracy: Liberal demands for greater inclusion and individual freedom, aspirations for a strong and solidaric political community, as well as nationalist or right-wing populist calls for exclusion and a preservation of hegemonic national identities are creating tensions that cannot be overlooked. This article therefore formulates the central question of how collective identity can be possible in a liberal democracy. Based on a case study on Germany, it will therefore be examined whether Leitkultur as a model of political integration can serve in generating a functional democratic collective identity. The necessary benchmarks guiding the analysis will be defined beforehand from a systems-theoretical perspective, balancing inclusion and exclusion within three crucial dimensions: normative basics, historic continuity, and affirmative bindings. The results show that a static definition of a German Leitkultur would in the long run neither achieve functional inclusion nor be able to generate the necessary cohesion of a political community, especially regarding the second and third identity dimensions.

Would a Feminist Appropriation of the Kantian Thought be Possible?

It is one of the main allegations impelled by feminist theorists against Kant's philosophy that the subject Kant placed at the base of his understanding of rationality is masculine, a Westerner and belongs to upper/middle class. In fact, there is considerable supporting evidence to promote this claim for mainstream Western philosophy in general and Kant's philosophy in particular. On the other hand, while reckoning with the history of philosophy, and examining whether it is possible to break away from philosophical concepts and categories or not, is another matter of discussion. In this article, I try to focus on various possibilities that can reconcile Kant's philosophy with the demands of liberal feminism and an inclusive democratic participation principle. It is important that to discuss whether it is possible to make a new reading that can be reconciled with feminist demands by ignoring the misogynistic discourses in Kant's works, especially starting from the concepts of autonomy and personality. Today, many factors like traditions, prejudices, oppressive forms of government, etc. prevent women from taking part in public life as free agents and autonomously, and from being considered as “subjects with the status of rights”. Therefore, I argue that Kant's concepts such as autonomy, becoming a person and having the conditions for free action, do have something in common with feminist demands.

Flipping the Script: Lesbian and Ex-Lesbian Child Sexual Abuse Survivors' Narratives, 1978–2003

This article traces connections between child sexual abuse survivors' narratives written by lesbian feminists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and those written by Christian ex-lesbians in the 1990s and early 2000s. Many scholars have recognized the extent to which an anti-feminist countermovement led by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation stymied the gains of child sexual abuse survivor activists. But we have not yet examined the ways other opponents of feminism and lesbian feminism, in particular, weaponized child sexual abuse survivors' narratives in order to delegitimate lesbian identity. This latter response to the child sexual abuse survivors' movement was perhaps even more dangerous and effective in resisting feminist demands than the false memory movement's rejection. Embracing aspects of feminists' analyses of childhood sexual abuse crucially enabled Christian ex-gay and ex-lesbian leaders to portray their approach to sexual conversion as based in love, concern, and support for homosexuals and to frame lesbians as wounded, sympathetic, and in need of help. By couching their messages of conversion in therapeutic language that echoed earlier feminist arguments, ex-gay leaders increased the appeal and accessibility of their texts. As struggles against sexual violence have recently achieved a tremendous degree of public visibility, this history serves as a timely and sobering reminder that testimonies of sexual violence can serve conservative as well as liberating political purposes.

Feminist Demands in the Victorian Period The Novel “Jessie Phillips” by F. Trollope

The 1850s marked the beginning of the Feminist Movement. Feminism till that time had been an individual issue and even an indirect protest. After 1850, the Feminist Movement strengthened more and more and was bypassing the grievances expressed from time to time. There were a number of reasons for this: women's suffrage, women's admission to higher education, marriage and property laws, and the demands and prospects of unmarried women. These bold attitudes of this decade manifested themselves through three kinds of writing, controversy, and treatments. The basis of Harriet Taylor's observation was the report published in the New York Tribune on the "Convention on the Rights of Women" which called for equality in education, employment in industry and political rights. This American example of women's rights later influenced the Feminist Movement in England. It is interesting that Taylor's attitude was uncompromising. The novel "Jessie Phillips" is one of the first interesting novels that brings a benevolent story about the fate of stigmatized women, including elements of class consciousness and sexual policy.

Feminist Demands in the Victorian Period The Novel "Jessie Phillips" by F. Trollope

Feminist Demands in the Victorian Period The Novel "Jessie Phillips" by F. Trollope

Les procédures génétiques et intertextuelles de la pièce "Hélène ou la joie" de vivre d’André Roussin et de Madeleine Gray

The article discusses the genetic procedures used in the comedy by André Roussin and Madeleine Gray Hélène ou la joie de vivre [ Helena or the Joy of Living ], released in 1953. The play draws on the American novel The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine, published in 1925, and its French translation by Maurice Bec, entitled Hélène retour de Troie , published in 1927. Based on the available material, genetic procedures and intertextual relations, that connect hypotheses and hypertexts, were examined. On the basis of the analyzes, hypotheses and explanations are formulated, taking into account social changes and, consequently, possible shifts in the expectations of new recipients. The article aims to show the interest – of both texts and societies (American – at the beginning of the 20 th century, French – in the post-war period) – in some burning issues of this era, such as the situation of women and the demands of feminists, which emerge from these works.

Political Participation and Request for Change: The Role of Education

The article tests the hypothesis, based on the concept of post-industrial society that people with higher education will be more politically active, especially in the manifestation of the demand for change. For this purpose, the materials of the All-Russian poll, organized in March 2021 by the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are used to analyze the sociopolitical characteristics associated with political activism and the formation of a demand for change among different educational groups of Russians. The conclusion is made that, first, education in modern Russia does directly affect an individual's preparedness for political action: more educated Russians are more interested in the political life of the country and are more aware of their ability to influence the "rules of the game". Second, education does directly affect actual involvement in social and political activism. However, concerning conscious political participation, this effect relates not so much to everyday, regular, as to its extreme protest forms. Third, the education of Russians has no discernible correlation with the presence/absence of a liberal demand for change. In terms of meeting the minimum requirements for political participation, Russian educational groups currently correspond to the Western political science mainstream theory and the practices of developed countries. Nevertheless, the highlighted features of the political characteristics of Russians with higher and post-higher education (not all of the examined indicators are stable in dynamics, not all differences between educational groups are clearly expressed, and, in general, the participation of highly educated Russians in the political life of the country is rather formal) lead to the need for a more careful study of the findings not only of the Western scientific mainstream but also of alternative concepts of Third World researchers. In addition, it has been suggested that the emancipation of a group of highly educated Russians from the state is incomplete. Consequently, they are aware of their objectively central place and leading role in political life.

En estado de resistencia: la reciente narrativa hispanoamericana de mujeres

The world is living times of social and political unrest and the feminist demands have gained strength and vigour in different spheres of life, including the literary and cultural world. This article echoes this moment and explores the female authorial constructions, from concepts as communalism (according to the ideas of Cristina Rivera Garza), sisterhood and genealogy. To that end, the article gathers some proposals from the anthologiesTsunami —name under which the publishing house Sexto Piso published in México (2018 and 2020) and then in Spain (2019) the three compilations— and Avisa cuando llegues (2018), Chilean anthology that compiles writings related to the proliferation of women on the public space.

Trade Liberalization and Labor Demand Elasticities: A Firm-Level Analysis of Pakistan’s Manufacturing Sector

The study investigates the linkage of trade liberalization and labor demand elasticities in Pakistan. The panel data are used by selecting 13 industries in Pakistan's manufacturing sector for the years 1995-1996, 2000-2001, and 2005-2006. The Pooled OLS technique is applied to get the estimates at an aggregated level and disaggregated levels. Overall findings support the positive relationship between trade liberalization and labor demand elasticity in production workers but in the case of non-production workers, the findings show the weak relationship between trade liberalization and labor demand elasticity. The study is also furnished with some policy recommendations.

Renouvellement du personnage de la sorcière dans le roman pour la jeunesse

There are many publications on witches both in children’s literature and in scholarly essays. Mona Chollet’s Witches, the Undefeated Power of Women explains that the word has become an emblem of feminism. This article offers a comparative analysis of several recent novels, based on the latter’s thesis, whose aim is to examine how the witch character is constructed, how the authors treat historical data (healer witch, witch-hunt, stake, etc.) and how they renew this character regarding certain issues (identity, transmission, emancipation, etc.). Are the witches of children’s novels carrying feminist demands for young readers?

Aborto no contexto do movimento feminista: comparando Brasil e Uruguai

O presente artigo pretende realizar um estudo comparativo sobre o aborto no Brasil e no Uruguai, a partir da perspectiva do movimento feminista, sendo este entendido como um movimento social. Nesse sentido, a escolha dos países destacados para o estudo proposto guarda relação com a ideia de comparar a atuação do movimento feminista em ambos, para avaliar a consequência de tal atuação na posição que cada país adota quanto à permissividade legal e social do aborto. Os países eleitos para a compa-ração feita acabam se aproximando sob o ponto de vista das disputas territoriais que en-volveram seus respectivos colonizadores, o que viabiliza a pesquisa, pois embora o estudo comparativo se baseie, sobretudo, no estudo das diversidades, não se comparam duas situações absolutamente diferentes, nem inteiramente idênticas. A hipótese testada é a seguinte: o modo como o Brasil e o Uruguai encaram o aborto tem uma ligação direta com a diferença na atuação dos movimentos feministas dos dois países. O método eleito para a construção do artigo foi a pesquisa bibliográfica, uma vez que, a divisão do texto acaba dialogando com esse método, a partir do objetivo geral de compreender a evo-lução do que já foi publicado a respeito da permissividade do aborto, no contexto da atuação do movimento feminista no Brasil e no Uruguai. Nas considerações finais é reto-mada a proposta introdutória do artigo, chegando-se à conclusão de que a hipótese levan-tada é parcialmente verdadeira, tendo em vista que a dinâmica dos movimentos sociais normalmente atua com a resistência de contramovimentos, e, no caso específico dos paí-ses cotejados, a formação histórica deles e o grau de secularização de cada um influen-ciou fortemente no atendimento ou não da demanda feminista pela permissividade do aborto. Com isto, não necessariamente a diferença quanto à atuação do movimento fe-minista nos dois países é o que caracteriza o entendimento diametralmente oposto que eles adotam com relação à permissividade do aborto.

‘Together we stand’: coalition-building in the Italian and Spanish feminist movements in times of crisis

We analyse coalition-building in feminist mobilisations in times of crisis in two similar cases: Spain and Italy. Based on social movement literature, we develop two key arguments. First, in austerity-ridden scenarios, connecting socio-economic grievances and feminist demands is key for the feminist mass mobilisations to follow. Second, anti-austerity struggles must resonate across different dimensions of coalition-building, both within the feminist movements and across feminists and other actors, such as LGBTQ collectives and anti-austerity challengers. The data used throughout the article come from semi-structured interviews with activists in Italian and Spanish feminist grass-roots organisations. Our results suggest that times of neoliberal crisis may present opportunities not only to advance the feminist agenda, but also to foster alliances within the feminist milieus and between feminists and other relevant collective actors. These alliances might well extend beyond the period of greatest hardship.