Feminist Ethics Research Articles

‘Never the twain shall cross’: scripts of children's play and adult desire in Barbie

Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023) is deeply invested in the liberatory and transformative potential of children's play. Children's play in Barbie is the site of self-actualisation for adult women, whereby the subversive potential of Barbie-play facilitates nostalgia, self-discovery and choice for the film's adult protagonists. This move towards self-actualisation is core to Barbie's feminist ethic, which I argue is a type of ‘commodity feminism’ that reasons that such female empowerment can be marketed and purchased. The invocation of the playing child throughout Barbie, accompanied by scant representations of actual playing children, is central to this ethic, performing what Jacqueline Rose calls a ‘mystification of the child’ as a product of adult desires and anxieties. In Barbie, children's play is a blank screen onto which can be projected adult female desires for self-actualisation, concealing concomitant anxieties about the role of capitalist patriarchy in this commodity-feminist project. Drawing on Robin Bernstein's conception of dolls as ‘scriptive things’, I explore how Barbie and its doll characters script forms of play. I demonstrate that the rhetorical power of children's play can be co-opted into feminism and corporate capitalism alike, and used to disguise the uneasy but often very profitable marriage between the two.

Nurses' Advocacy in Intensive Care: What Insights Can Nurses' Experiences During the Pandemic Reveal?

Patient advocacy must be understood as an ethical component of nursing practice that involves respecting and defending patients' rights and autonomy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the vulnerability of patients in intensive care units (ICUs) increased requiring that nurses advocate for those patients more than ever in a context in which changes in daily nursing practices of care imposed by the pandemic deeply impacted nurses' advocacy. In this study, we examined ICU nurses' patient advocacy during the pandemic, using feminist ethics as a theoretical lens. Twenty-five ICU nurses from Brazil participated in individual interviews. Our findings reflect that advocacy is a moral component of nursing identity. This moral identity represents the identity of nurses as a profession as it represents their values and responsibilities which are social in nature. Although the pandemic challenged nurses' advocacy practices these professionals had an important role to give voice to patients and to preserve their autonomy and dignity, strengthening patient-centered care.

Playing the Game Differently: How Women Leaders in Academia Are Challenging Neopatriarchy

AbstractDespite Australian and New Zealand Universities pledging to address gender inequities, the patriarchal history of universities continues to impact the careers of women in academia. Under-representation of women in senior leadership and a culture of masculinity can lead to a lack of resources for feminist leadership and a devaluing of women’s work. We investigate how women in academic leadership are playing the game differently, making strategic moves to navigate leadership in the neoliberal neopatriarchal academy. We explored the experiences of 22 women in academic leadership through online qualitative surveys and reflexive thematic analysis of the data, taking inspiration from Bourdieu’s work on habitus and doxa. Although women leaders were able to successfully make strategic moves to advance their careers, these were shaped by parenting status, race, culture, and age. The women’s leadership approaches were counter to the masculine doxa of the academic field, leading instead relationally. We do not suggest that there is a specific ‘female’ style of academic leadership, but that successful authentic leadership can be founded on a feminist ethics of care in contrast to neopatriarchy. Adoption of such approaches across the academy might unshackle academics across genders from their positioning in academic leadership hierarchies.

Education in the context of liberation ethics. The contributions of E nrique Dussel and Paulo Freire.

Education in the context of liberation ethics. The contributions of E nrique Dussel and Paulo Freire.

Imagining peace and enacting utopias in Puerto Rico

ABSTRACT Local groups in Puerto Rico are often described as being at the forefront of climate transformation. This article explores active struggles towards alternate futures, using a critical concept of utopia in a phenomenological study alongside women at a community organisation in Culebra, Puerto Rico. I use feminist ethics of care as a theory of knowledge to study how cognitive, embodied, and affective visions influence struggles towards utopian futures. The empirical study reveals how women experientially understand climate change through food, livelihoods, and identity in Culebra. They express and imagine futures through orienting dependencies towards reciprocal care; foster place-based belonging through collective relations; and envision alternatives through longing that intertwines past, current, and yet-to-come temporalities. This study contributes to knowledge production about transformation and peace, and underlines the importance of imagination as part of the politics of knowledge.

Radical care in displacement: Rohingya women’s activism amidst neoliberal humanitarianism and repression

ABSTRACT This paper examines the activism and care work of Rohingya women in displacement settings, focusing on grassroots efforts in Cox’s Bazar refugee camps and transnational advocacy by diaspora activists. Drawing on 43 in-depth interviews and applying a feminist ethics of care framework, we argue that these women's activism constitutes a form of radical care that challenges both neoliberal humanitarian practices and repressive state policies. Rohingya women activists forge networks of solidarity and empowerment that extend beyond conventional humanitarian interventions, providing emotional support and shared experiences that contribute to the social ecology of care for refugee women. Their grassroots work contests the neoliberal emphasis on individual self-reliance, instead highlighting the vital role of relational care in fostering collective resilience. However, these activists face significant risks from multiple sources, including state repression, community backlash, and online harassment. They employ strategies such as ‘strategic invisibility’ and digital activism to navigate these dangers. Despite the transformative potential of their work, it remains systematically undervalued, leaving activists vulnerable to burnout and depletion. By centering the experiences and agency of Rohingya women, this study reveals a complex landscape of resistance, care, and empowerment, offering insights into how refugee women create change amidst intersecting forms of oppression.

Response-able study: sketching ecologies for collective, affective and speculative practices in higher education

ABSTRACT This article engages Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s conception of ‘black study’ (2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.) as an enactment of a feminist ethics of response-ability. As such, this article inquires: how might ‘we’ conceive of study as a response-able practice of ‘collective knowing and doing’ (Haraway, D. J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.) through the confluence of thinking-with feminisms, posthumanisms, black studies, and affect theories? This article experiments with study as an ecological mode of engagement that affirms difference through the decentring of individual identity in favour of foregrounding co-constitutive relations. I do so by proposing response-able reading, sensing and storying as practices of study that might contribute towards new educational imaginaries for thinking and doing higher education differently.

The spatiality of Collective Autoethnography: Praxis of care and (co)becoming

The increased use of autoethnography in geography has proved to be a valuable methodology to ground theory in practice. This approach provides the researcher-participant with resources to place their personal experiences in broader socio-spatial dynamics. As a group of three Latinas, we engaged with Collective Autoethnography (CAE) to explore our experiences with racial exclusion in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. By sharing our counter-stories, CAE helped us to engage in an ongoing process of (co) becoming, without essentialising our experiences. Taking the feminist ethics of care lens, we explore the politics embedded in implementing this methodology and its transformative potential. We start reflecting about the impact of our positionalities in our decision-making. Then, we discuss how the purposeful weaving of CAE with critical frameworks helped us unpack the nuances of our experiences and amplify our voices as ethnic minority migrants in Aotearoa. Finally, we explore how CAE, as a participatory approach, can inform the multiscalarity of embodied practices and inspire structural changes, which are particularly relevant when dealing with race and ethnicity. As we co-created a ‘care-full’ space throughout the research development, we suggest that CAE can also be a ‘place’ of solidarity and transformation.

Feminist Epigenet(h)ics: Maternal Waters, Gestational Forms and Mitochondrial Eves in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution

This article takes Catherine Malabou’s provocative insistence on an alliance between plasticity and feminism to initiate an exploration of gestation and its representation in the context of the postgenomic age. I argue that Malabou’s attention to epigenetic schemas of life and becoming can inform and, in turn, be enriched by feminist film-philosophy which locates the maternal as an alternative schema of embodied subjectivity – simultaneously displacing essentialising over-reliance on gender/sex binaries without entirely metaphorising or abstracting the material processes which subtend bodies and their openness to difference. Drawing on recent feminist scholarship, including Ann Carruthers’s Fertile Visions and Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now, I turn to Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution (2015) in order to approach gestational bodies as a central site for both the violent subjugation of embodied life and a feminist ethics and aesthetics of affective relationality. Part science-fiction, fairy-tale and body horror, Hadžihalilović’s film responds to contemporary bio-genetic innovations: Malabou’s elaboration of the “phylogenetic remains” and “cellular potentials” that epigenetic plasticity reactivates guides my reading of its seething maternal waters, multiply directed gestational bodies and various forms of plastic co-becoming. As well as being exemplary of new epigenetic imaginaries, Hadžihalilović’s complex foetal/fertile visions illuminate how feminist-philosophical-artistic practices may elaborate an epigenet(h)ics of life – informed by past forms, present configurations, and open to future bio-possibilities.

Feminist Development Justice as Emancipatory Praxis

Abstract This article offers a comprehensive overview of feminist development justice, a transformative framework designed to reduce global inequalities that is being advanced by the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law, and Development (APWLD). The piece aims to unsettle and expand mainstream development studies literature, which critical scholars argue remains plagued by Eurocentrism and ongoing colonial modes of knowledge production. Additionally, it advocates for more recognition and citation of the grassroots analysis and frontline praxis of progressive social movements in the Global South that are guided by emancipatory politics and feminist ethics. We begin with a synopsis of development studies’ lack of attention to the enduring consequences of race, colonial power, and imperialism, as well as highlight arguments being made about the radical potential yet qualified merit of knowledges generated by social movements. We then present readers with the concept of feminist development justice, the justice-based pillars on which the framework rests, and the political work of the APWLD. The article ends with a succinct conclusion on what is at stake vis-à-vis extractivism and the seemingly intractable “development” challenges at hand and how grassroots social movements can be rich sources to draw from regarding liberatory change and building better worlds.

Putting People First in Data Quality: Feminist Data Ethics for Open Government Datasets

ABSTRACTOpen government information systems offer great potential for advancing civic life and democracy, but they also reflect and reinforce the biases and systematic inequalities faced by members of socially marginalized groups. We present results from a critical data modeling project that uses a data quality framework to examine open datasets published by police departments in order to understand how data modeling choices shape the social impact of these datasets. Using an arrest record dataset published by the Los Angeles Police Department as a case study, we present we present results detailing the representation of racial data and the presence of children in the dataset. We argue that current data quality frameworks for open government data are insufficient for critical data studies due to an orientation around institutional and computational interests. Incorporating feminist data ethics into data quality analysis provides an approach to data quality that centers people and communities. We propose a definition for data quality of open government datasets based on an ethics of care that centers the needs of vulnerable populations and accountability of institutions toward their communities.

EXPRESS: Female Muslim Tourism and Familial Caretaking: Intersection of Gender and Religion

Underpinned by intersectionality theory, this study deciphered female Muslims’ tourism experiences associated with gendered practice of familial caretaking, which was amplified by Islamic cultural practices of huqooq-ul-ibaad representing collectivist welfare; males’ qawamum role as financial maintainer socialising females into caretaker and virtue ethics of akhlaaq reinforcing feminist care ethics. Religion influences ambivalent discourse of caretaking and tourism, involving positive and negative experiences of separateness and togetherness with family. Traditionally, familial caretaking is prioritised over tourism, while contemporary familial caretaking is executed through tourism (i.e., regular caretaking, tourism as form of familial care). Contemporary female Muslims are empowered through tourism to focus on self-care and gender equality in caretaking, which also emphasised alternative Islamic perspectives (e.g. Rabbatul-bait positioning as queen of the house unlike subordination). This study unveiled cultural similarities and differences in female Muslims from a religious-minority context. Tourism stakeholders are encouraged to accommodate cultural diversities and address caretaking constraints.

‘It’s a tiger instinct – that’s my baby!’: affective practices of care in parents’ educational activism

This article presents findings from a qualitative study exploring parents’ struggles over their children’s education. Drawing on affective practice theory (Wetherell 2012) and feminist care ethics (Fisher and Tronto 1990), we offer insights into the affective practices of care driving parents’ educational activism. We detail how parents’ activism is rooted in both powerful feelings of parental responsibility and wider, more altruistic concerns. We argue that parents’ activism disrupts the binary between altruism and self-interest, indicating instead they can be mutually constitutive of collective action; a complex form of affective practice we designate altruistic self-interest. Our analysis suggests parental activism can be a force for progressive educational change in which care for intimates and care for others coincide, but also that educational authorities might adopt a more care-full approach when making key decisions affecting children, families and communities.

Stochastic Publics: The Emergence and Ethics of AI-Generated Publics in Technical Communication

The concept of a public—a group of strangers drawn together through their mutual attention to a text—has historically been tied to the notion of human intentionality. The recent popularization of artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (such as ChatGPT) destabilizes this connection. When large language models generate text, they may inadvertently form stochastic publics—groups pulled together through the randomization of biased data patterns drawn from AI training material. This exploratory study draws on a three-phase dialogue with OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 to identify the risks of stochastic publics and suggest human-originated interventions grounded in feminist care ethics.

Holding ourselves to account: The precarity dividend and the ethics of researching academic precarity

This article uses critical reflexivity as a method to document and analyse the ethical dilemmas that emerge when researching academic precarity across the permanent/precarious divide. With our project on long-term academic precarity as a case study, and as people who experienced long-term academic precarity, we take as the starting point other researchers’ silences on their positionality and about who does the work in the production of research on academic precarity. Although our small, unfunded project was driven by feminist ethics and transformative feminist praxis, there were some ethical issues we did not foresee, nor could we resolve. We focus on three main ethical dilemmas that arose as moments of discomfort, triggering extensive reflection and discussion: (1) authenticity and subjectivity, (2) disclosure of employment status and (3) complicity in and benefit from the precarisation of academic work, or what we term the ‘precarity dividend’. The article seeks to push the boundaries around how researchers hold themselves to account in the process of knowledge production. We suggest that precarity and especially the precarity dividend must become an inherent ethical consideration in all social scientific research design. It is a call for social researchers to make explicit – in writing, in ethics reviews and in presentations of their work – the labour process and labour conditions of all those involved.

On the Ethics of Mediating Embodied Vulnerability to Violence

Media ethics has long been haunted by the question of representing human beings’ vulnerability to violence. While journalism and photojournalism have an obligation to report on the realities of violence and suffering in the world, the “spectacle of suffering” is fraught with ethical dilemmas. In this essay, I seek to theorize the ethics of vulnerability to violence in media representation. As a starting point, I argue for the politics of embodiment as a generative process that constitutes differential vulnerabilities. I move then to consider the way embodied vulnerabilities play out in the media, as exemplified by recent events such as the Black Lives Matter and MeToo movements as well as in times of war, from Vietnam to, more recently, Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. This leads to considerations of spectatorship: who looks and who is looked at? How are these relations of gazing related to the vectors of social and geopolitical power? Are images of embodied vulnerability simply media spectacles that reinforce power hierarchies, or are they powerful prosocial messages that might mobilize humanitarian activism? To address these epistemic questions, I propose that the feminist ethics of care encompasses an invitational rhetoric that can guide media praxis. Care ethics is aligned with various religious epistemologies, and because of that, I argue for it as an umbrella framework that has application in a variety of national and cultural contexts.

BYSTANDERS, JEWS, AND HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

ABSTRACTThis article revisits the vast historiography on everyday life in Vichy France to address the moral questions and historical claims implicit in the bystander category. It addresses how historians conceive the relationship between bystanders and Jews, arguing that they implicitly erase the structural violence between the two groups by reproducing the liberal ethics implicit in the slogan “never again” in their own method—and in spite of their commitment to a boundary between history and memory. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial and political theory, it suggests that the category, if rethought, might account for popular complicity in genocidal violence.

Legacies of dignity: Remembering Drucilla Cornell

This essay engages Drucilla Cornell's thinking about ethical feminism, dignity, and intergenerational responsibility in the wake of her passing in December 2022.

Exploring possibilities for a feminist ethic of collective care in suicide research

Suicide is a major public health concern responsible for around 700,000 deaths globally every year. In response, researchers worldwide seek to understand suicide and suicide prevention, primarily using quantitative methods. As such, the development of qualitative methods tailored for the complexities of working with participants, for whom the primary ethical concern occupying researchers and ethics committees alike is whether taking part in the research will increase suicidal distress and contribute to a greater risk of dying by suicide, is in its infancy. Seeking to address this gap, in this article, I draw on feminist research methods to explore the unique design considerations and challenges faced when doing interview-based, qualitative suicide research. I argue that qualitative suicide research must resist risk focussed approaches to ethics, and instead reframe our ethical decision-making to centre a feminist ethic of care, drawing on Brannelly and Barnes’ concept of “care-full” research practices. Central to this reframing is recognition of the ways in which reciprocal relationships between researchers, research participants, and research institutions are inherent to qualitative research, meaning that no single research actor can be thought of in isolation from the other, necessitating a relational approach to our feminist research ethic.

Critical geographies of disaster, and the geographical imagination

This paper combines assemblage theory, feminist ethics of care and decolonial theory to build on recent work in disaster studies that seeks to address the systematic and intersectional inequalities that underlie the emergence of disaster. We argue that Western logics of “risk” do not always have traction with communities, and so researchers must “stay with the trouble” in engaging with tensions between lifeworlds. We suggest that geographical imaginaries provide a means to analyze the diverse ways of being and knowing that are involved in this process.