Second-wave Feminism Research Articles

The didactic role of feminist art in metal music: Coven bands as a relational device for personal improvement and social justice

This article presents an analysis of the feminist artistic practices that some bands are adopting through metal music to show how their approaches are linked to a tradition in the history of feminist art. For this purpose, I addressed these feminist metal bands to demonstrate how their practices align with feminist and artistic pedagogies that evolved during the 1970s women’s liberation movement. I examine how artists, like second-wave feminist art groups, create an integrating framework that transcends the scope of art, managing to simultaneously convene and attend to various personal and social processes, based on a reflection substantiated on social group theory, feminist art, feminist pedagogies and ritual studies. Similarly, I highlight and differentiate their specific strategies by analysing their practices in order to understand, on the one hand, these feminist bands as a powerful relational device, which I have termed ‘coven bands’, and, on the other hand, the set of their practices as a didactic action of feminist resistance for personal improvement and social justice. Therefore, I will show how coven bands – whose name is a metaphor that evokes a gathering or circle of witches – are both a collective critical conscience and a multifunctional platform where several of life’s processes can be conjured up, such as relational learning, mutual help, psycho-emotional healing, creativity, empowerment and social action simultaneously.

Engaging women’s social concerns through the twenty-first century feminist art projects of three Nigerian women artists

In this paper, I review the histories of feminism and African feminism to highlight their influence on the evolving nature of women’s art practices in the West and Africa respectively. Women Artists in the West had begun deploying feminist rhetoric in their art at the onset of second-wave feminism of the 1960s. On the other hand, women in Africa began using their art to engender intellectual discourses on African feminist concerns as recently as the mid-1990s. Using the works of three Nigerian women artists, Ayobola Kekere-Ekun, Lucy Azubuike, and Fati Abubakar, I, therefore, explore how their themes challenge critical issues that affect women in Nigeria’s twenty-first-century contemporary realities. These artists are also from different geopolitical areas (west, east, and north respectively) in Nigeria. In analyzing their art, I also argue that their art may offer possibilities in affirming the relevance of African feminist art.

The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics by Frank Andre Guridy

Reviewed by: The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athleticsby Frank Andre Guridy David K. Wiggins The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics. By Frank Andre Guridy. Texas Bookshelf. ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. x, 418. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4773-2183-6.) I like this book very much. Frank Andre Guridy, utilizing a nice combination of secondary and primary source material, provides a very interesting and insightful analysis of sports in Texas and, by extension, in American culture more generally. Although some might be overwhelmed by its 353 pages of text and disappointed by its limited coverage of interscholastic athletics, the book provides important and detailed information largely about the role and [End Page 590]changing pattern of college and professional sports in the Lone Star State from the end of the Jim Crow era to the 1980s. I have no doubt readers of The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athleticswill gain a better appreciation of the large number of outstanding athletes and culturally significant sporting events that took place in Texas during a rapidly changing and tumultuous period in American history. Guridy covers some frequently told stories such as the integration of football at Southern Methodist University and the subsequent scandal that rocked its gridiron program, the well-known Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs at the Houston Astrodome, the enormous success of the University of Houston's basketball program popularly referred to as Phi Slama Jama, the football dominance of the University of Texas Longhorns, and the emergence and ultimate success of the San Antonio Spurs professional basketball team. He also examines some stories not as well known, including perhaps most important the origin and cultural significance of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. In the process, Guridy provides interesting details on the athletes, coaches, owners, and support personnel who contributed to the vibrant and nationally prominent sports programs in Texas. He furnishes significant details and background information, for example, on perhaps the greatest woman athlete of all time, Mildred Ella "Babe" Didrikson; the University of Texas's great running back Earl Campbell; Jerry LeVias, who integrated the Southern Methodist University football program; coach Guy Lewis, who masterminded the University of Houston's highly successful basketball team; oil tycoon Lamar Hunt, who co-founded the American Football League (AFL); Gussie Nell Davis, who led the highly skilled Kilgore Rangerettes drill team; tennis legends Rosemary "Rosie" Casals and Gladys Medalie Heldman; the Dallas Cowboys' famous coach Tom Landry; Texas Rangers owner Robert E. Short; and University of Houston football coach Bill Yeoman. Adding immeasurably to the effectiveness of the book is the fact that Guridy places sports in Texas in proper historical context and consistently draws connections to what was taking place in the industry on a national scale and how sport in the state both impacted and was impacted by larger societal changes and movements. Virtually every page of the book is filled with engaging details about the business side of athletics and how smart, wealthy, and imaginative entrepreneurs transformed how sports were organized, viewed, and financed. Guridy effectively connects sports in the Lone Star State to the larger civil rights struggle and explains how Black athletes increasingly found their way into intercollegiate and professional sports while still suffering the pangs of racial discrimination and being viewed as commodities in institutions still controlled largely by white men. Guridy also effectively connects sports in Texas to the second-wave feminist movement and illuminates how women athletes negotiated for better treatment while at once struggling to overcome the sexist views and gender stereotypes so rampant in a culture that continued to trivialize their efforts at bodily excellence and skill development. In all, there is much to recommend about Frank Guridy's The Sports Revolution. It is a nicely written, compelling, and thoughtful book that provides an awareness of and appreciation for the changing nature of sports in [End Page 591]Texas specifically and American culture more broadly. I expect it to have a long shelf life and to be of interest to those who want to learn more...

Feminist Çeviri Aktivizmi: Türkiye’de Cinsiyet Eşitliği Anlatılarının Alıntısallık Üzerinden Yeniden Çerçevelendirilmesi

The feminist movement that flourished in the 1980s in Turkey was widely influenced by the Western second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. As a matter of this influence, translations/translators played an essential role in importing feminist epistemes mostly from the Western context into Turkish. Women’s Circle’s translations and the translated articles that were published in periodicals such as Yazko Somut the 4th Page catalyzed the dissemination of feminist ideas that would enable the transformation of hegemonic notions of women’s rights, gender roles and gender equality that were prevalent in the society at the time. However, aside from full-text translations, feminist activists often opted for more implicit ways of cross-cultural exchanges by making citations from foreign sources in the indigenous texts that they wrote for a local readership in Turkey. This study aims to problematize the translated citations embedded in indigenous feminist texts published in the 1980s from Mona Baker’s socio-narrative perspective (2006a), disclosing that feminist activists contested and reframed the hegemonic narratives on women and gender roles in Turkey by bringing in subversive counter-narratives, elaborated by prominent feminists, through these translated citations in a much more covert yet no less effective way than full-text translations. In this regard we examine Fatmagül Berktay’s article “Eşitliğin Ötesine…” (1985) that was published in the heyday of the new feminism in Turkey, contesting the long-established notion of gender equality through the translated citations it makes use of. Regarding citations as a mode of “translation activism” (Baker, 2006b; Tymoczko, 2010), we argue that these citational chains are shaped by and shape in turn the feminist positionality of the translator/writer to the past narratives and the newly emerging feminist narratives in Turkey.

Counterfactual Speculation

In the second wave of feminism it was enough to say that Antonia Dickson co-wrote History of The Kinetograph, the Kinetoscope and the Kineto-Phonograph (1895) with her inventor brother William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. But in a new moment, I utilize Catherine Gallagher’s concept of “counterfactual speculation” as a “thought experiment,” offering a fuller examination of the time between 1893 and 1896 when Antonia was involved in the experiments around the “projecting” Kinetoscope. “What if Antonia Dickson Had Invented the Kinetoscope?” raises the question of historical outcome, empirical evidence, and causality, offering a way around uncritical reliance on the traditions of historical narrative and testing a new methodology for feminism and film.

Biography and biofiction: Seeking women’s voices from nineteenth-century Australia

From the mid twentieth century, second-wave feminism prompted interest from both historians and novelists in recovering the voices of women from the past. Where only sparse archival records were extant, a revised practice of biography was necessary, but differences arising from disciplinary approaches have led to debate on how this is best achieved. This essay analyses two contemporary publications that draw attention to lesser-known women’s experiences in colonial Australia: Melissa Ashley’s The Birdman’s Wife (2016) and Kiera Lindsey’s The Convict’s Daughter (2016). Marketed as fiction and biography respectively, these two texts nonetheless use similar techniques to recover the voices of these women from the archives and to share their stories with broad audiences: Immersive research; imaginative interpretation of documented records; character development through dialogue, emotions, thoughts and sensory details; use of literary techniques of imagery and dramatisation as signposts of fictionality. Through these techniques, and despite their generic differences, Ashley and Lindsey’s works evoke a powerful sense of their female subjects’ experiences and inner lives.

‘The beginning of feminism’: the RCAE Study Centre and feminism in Albury-Wodonga in the 1970s and 1980s

In March 1972, the Riverina College of Advanced Education opened a Study Centre in the border-town of Albury. Reflecting on her return to study as a mature-age student in 1973, former student Eileen Clark stated that it was ‘the beginning of feminism’. Leading histories of the Australian Women’s Liberation Movement often pay scant attention to the stories of regional and rural women. Using original oral history recordings and the Charles Sturt University Archive, I explore the role of the Study Centre in bringing feminist principles to Albury-Wodonga. In doing so, I challenge the metropolitan-centred gaze of popular memory surrounding second-wave feminism in 1970s Australia.

Second-Wave Women's Movements as Foreign Policy Actors: Assessing Canadian Feminist Interventions before 1995

AbstractThis article addresses second-wave feminist interventions in Canadian foreign policy debate with reference to two analytic streams: (1) political science and international relations (IR) perspectives since the late 1990s that stress the formal decisional aims of advocacy and the role of transnational networks in pressuring reluctant governments and (2) sociological approaches that underline movements’ cultural as well as statist dimensions and the significance of their domestic political strategies. Examining engagement by the Voice of Women (VOW) in nuclear weapons debates and National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) in free trade controversies confirms sociological expectations of campaigners’ varied claims and contributions and the importance of their political rootedness in Canada. Consistent with political science and IR arguments, the study finds NAC paid growing attention to international political opportunities in 1990 and following. The conclusion considers implications of the analysis and directions for future research.

Review: At Home in the World: California Women and the Postwar Environmental Movement, by Kathleen A. Cairns

Kathleen Cairns’s At Home in the World: California Women and the Postwar Environmental Movement is a good book that adds new names to the long list of engaged citizens trying to right environmental wrongs in the mid-twentieth century United States. The book’s intention is to highlight the political activism of a handful of white, middle-class and elite women working to preserve California’s unique ecosystems.The book begins with the 1950s activism of several prominent women who sought to clean Southern California’s air. The book then turns northward to San Francisco and Sylvia McLaughlin’s campaign to save the San Francisco Bay. The next two chapters similarly focus on activists who anchor the history of efforts to save two other ecosystems, the Nipomo Dunes and the Santa Monica Mountains, respectively. In each chapter, Cairns deftly illustrates the ways in which these women “knew how to play the game” of formal politics and how they mobilized their socioeconomic connections to powerful men to achieve their aims. There are interesting details about the strategies the women utilized (from knocking on doors to letter-writing campaigns to attending county planning meetings). The “feminine warriors” that Cairns describes were not overly radical or creative in their efforts, but they were mostly effective at achieving changes that would have long-term benefits on California’s ecosystems (both marine and land).Cairns doesn’t do much to connect the mid-twentieth century activism (strategies and even causes) to that of the Progressive Era female reformers, and that’s curious as these California warriors borrowed much from their foremothers in the songbird conservation and the National Park advocacy campaigns of a half century before. The book is highly accessible in terms of style and vocabulary and thus could be widely assigned to learners from high school through undergraduate college level in classes about environmentalism and even second-wave feminism. While Cairns admits her subjects are all well-connected women with plenty of access to time and resources, her analysis falls a bit short in places. She seems not to want to discuss the ways in which these women’s classed positions contributed mightily to the pollution and shrinking open space they abhorred. Despite some of the weaknesses of the book, however, the research is sound and the activists that Cairns’s work highlights deserve to be in the historical record and now they are.

Sublimations and Shadows: Sexual Politics of Ibadan Modernism in Black Orpheus

This paper argues that genealogical ties exist between the “national-masculine” literary tradition that characterized the sexual politics of the Ibadan modernist arts journal Black Orpheus and the homosocial environments of the colonial boarding schools and university system of Nigeria. Within this flagship journal, a certain form of short story thematized social issues and forms of violence commonly associated with Western second-wave feminism and frequently siloed under the category of “women’s issues.” These included general sexual violence, abortion, and rape. The symbolic handling of these forms of violence within Black Orpheus is notable because it marks a sharp departure from similarly gendered issues within contemporaneous market literature and stands in contrast to social concerns raised by African women writers who were the male authors’ peers. Like the authors of market literatures, these texts do not engage women as rounded subjects capable of speaking their own minds. Yet unlike market literatures, these texts flatten womanhood in order to engage in performative acts of solidarity, allyship, and/or sympathy with figures of womanhood, especially—and ironically—related to issues surrounding women’s bodily autonomy. In short, these works allowed male authors to construct fictionalized women and fictionalized male voices to speak for and of them.

Women Detectives in Detective Fiction: A Formula Analysis on <em>Dublin Murder Squad</em> Series

This paper studies the formulation of two women detectives in Tana French’s work, Cassie Maddox and Antoinette Conway, in the Dublin Murder Squad Series by exploring the hard-boiled fiction conventions which underlie the formulation of Tana French’s two female detectives. The objective of this study is to determine how French innovates the hard-boiled fiction conventions in the formation of her women detective characters, Cassie Maddox and Antoinette Conway. By employing formula analysis as theorized by John G. Cawelti (1976), the results of this study show that French innovates the hard-boiled formula in four aspects. First, French innovates the hard-boiled formula by expanding the concept of marginality from economic class to gender and race. The second innovation is the substitution of the hard-boiled convention which emphasizes on masculine toughness with resistance to patriarchal control. Third, French re-established the relationship between the detective and the character femme fatale. Their similarity of female experiences and perspective with the femme fatale makes these women detectives not only reveal the femme fatale as a murderer, but also the motives and scenarios behind their acts. Finally, French also innovates the antithetical nature of the hard-boiled detective’s presentation by offering a ‘feminine’ path to justice. These observations show that French’s innovations on hard-boiled conventions on her women detectives are the extensions of the women investigators in the antecedent feminist revisions of the hard-boiled stories which are heavily influenced by the second-wave feminist values. However, Tana French also inserts her own commentary on the new variants of female character shaped by the new post-feminist discourse which separates her women detectives from those in the antecedent feminist hard-boiled revision series.

Teaching intersectional rhetorical criticism with second-wave feminist music

Intersectionality is core to contemporary feminist rhetorical criticism. It is also a complex concept with great potential for promoting social change by shifting discourses about identity in the public sphere. Therefore, communication scholars have a vested interest in teaching the basics of intersectional criticism to undergraduate and graduate students across the humanities, especially in upper-division undergraduate communication courses that deal with rhetorical criticism, feminist rhetorical theory, women and or gender studies, social movements, critical cultural studies, media studies, or other related topics. I recommend teaching intersectionality as an analytic framework for rhetorical criticism with second-wave feminist music. The unit begins by briefly overviewing the key goals and rhetorical tactics of second-wave feminists. Students then read intersectional criticism of second-wave rhetoric and criticism of rhetorical theory that fails to consider the intersectional experience of identity. The unit culminates with students working in groups to conduct an abbreviated rhetorical criticism of popular music associated with the United States’s second wave of feminist movements. The abbreviated rhetorical criticism asks students to analyze the embodied and situated components of musical argumentation. They present their findings to the class in a multimedia presentation that engages many sensorial and rhetorical possibilities, much like music does. Courses Rhetorical Criticism, Feminist Rhetorical Theory, Women/Gender Studies, The Rhetoric of Social Movements, Critical Cultural Studies, Media Studies. Objectives In this unit, students will learn how to analyze second-wave feminist rhetoric through an intersectional lens using musical case studies. First, students will study the history of second-wave feminist movements. They will then read about the core tenants of intersectional thinking before exploring how rhetorical critics use intersectionality as an analytic framework. Next, students will engage popular music with feminist messages that emerged during the second wave in an abbreviated rhetorical criticism textured with historical context and focused on embodied experiences of musical appeals. They will present their findings in a multimedia format for their classmates. By the completion of this unit, students should learn to apply intersectional theory to an analysis of a musical rhetorical tactic and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of that tactic.

Engaging the World as Onna and Religious Minority: Second-Wave Feminism and Christian Social Activism in Japan during the 1970s

This paper examines Japanese female Christians’ writings published during the 1970s in a Japanese ecumenical periodical, Gospel and World, to explore their relationship to second wave feminism in Japan, ūman ribu, as a religious minority’s complex way to engage politics and other Asian women. These feminist Christians are an example of women located in-between colonizers and the colonized as well as among the racial and religious majorities and minorities of the time; illuminating their activism allows us to consider effective and discursive forms of engaging women, politics, and religion. On the one hand, Japanese Christian feminists expanded their sense of agency both by relocating the oppression of women in the church within the larger issues of Japanese colonial legacy and by reimagining social justice within sacred space. On the other hand, their lack of reflection on race and their reliance on the majoritarian identity of onna (middle-class Japanese women) blurred their vision and invitation to activism around “pan-Asian solidarity.”

Reflections on Applying Institutional Ethnography in Participatory Weight Stigma Research with Young Women

Inspired by consciousness-raising practices of North American second-wave feminism, Dorothy Smith developed institutional ethnography (IE) as an alternative to established sociology, which she argued objectified people and their experiences. Instead, IE begins from an embodied standpoint to examine how local phenomena are coordinated to happen by ruling relations from afar. In this article, we present methodological insights from our experiences of applying IE, informed by principles of participatory research, in Alberta, Canada to examine the challenges young women (aged 15–21) in larger bodies face while navigating their everyday lives. We begin by exploring current discussions in the burgeoning field of IE, including how IE’s social ontology aligns with participatory approaches to research. Contextualized by our public health backgrounds, we then describe how we used IE to study how the work of growing up in a larger body is socially organized, interpreting work generously as any task requiring thought and intention. Between March-December 2019, we conducted 14 individual interviews and facilitated 5 working group meetings with a subset of interview participants. Discussions during the working group meetings were structured by an adapted critical analysis framework to prompt participants in questioning taken-for-granted assumptions around weight and health. As part of this working group, we developed knowledge mobilization materials (infographics and an open letter) for parents, educators, and healthcare providers about how to navigate weight-related issues with young people, grounded in participants’ experiential knowledge. We specifically reflect on how IE was a valuable tool for addressing four principles of participatory research central to this study: go beyond “do no harm”; provide opportunities for giving feedback; create space for critical engagement; and bring knowledge mobilization to the fore. Overall, our experiences suggest value in IE as a pragmatic, flexible approach to public health research, offering unique methodological tools which keep research participants in view.

Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture by Eli Bromberg

Reviewed by: Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture by Eli Bromberg Golan Moskowitz Eli Bromberg. Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 206 pp. White and conditionally white American Jews have long straddled conflicting and uneven associations with white privilege and with victimhood predicated on antisemitic accusations, including the accusation of sexual perversity. Addressing this precarious position, Eli Bromberg's Unsettling is, in the best possible way, what its title suggests. Moving from Sigmund Freud to Ruth McBride Jordan, it is indeed unsettling to revisit public associations of Jews with incest, but it is also enlightening, as the author convincingly argues. More specifically, it is enlightening to consider the stakes that some have held and continue to hold in maintaining a particular collective image of American Jews vis-à-vis such accusations. These stakes, Bromberg demonstrates, are predicated on a harmful and outdated racial logic. Driving his study is the claim that premodern stereotypes about Jewish incest persist in postmodern American culture yet actual cases or accusations of Jewish incest have been rendered publicly unspeakable. This unspeakableness is due, on the one hand, to the accusers' fear of being deemed antisemitic, as well as due to the efforts of white Jews invested in maintaining social privileges by working against ongoing stereotypes of Jewish perversity. Through incisive, deeply researched case studies considered from multiple perspectives, Bromberg skillfully aligns this ongoing dynamic with discourses on sexual assault, patriarchy, racism, and white supremacists' unfounded characterizations of Jews as sexual deviants. Unsettling suggests sinister implications about dominant American cultural attitudes toward "off-white" minorities, the latter compelled to pursue impossibly spotless collective images as requisites for basic social dignities afforded to whiteness. Bromberg repeatedly addresses this latter point, emphasizing the ways in which incest reads as "not white," despite its appearance across all communities, and thus how it becomes a locus of anxiety and projection for those competing for social resources historically reserved for whites. In Jewish incest allegations, Jewishness may be a crucial factor to consider, this book asserts, not because of [End Page 198] any existing link between Jewishness and incest, but because the invocation of such a link promotes anxiety-driven behavior that carries potential harm in the name of securing white privileges. Such behavior includes the projection of sexualized prejudice onto others and the enabling or downplaying of misconduct within those Jewish contexts in which incest has in fact occurred but may not be recognized. Bromberg uncovers Henry Roth's editorial correspondence and unpublished drafts, for example, to show how the latter uses the invented figures of a Black prostitute and a group of young Black rapists to deflect from his own incest confessions in Mercy of a Rude Stream (chapter 5). To mobilize his argument, Bromberg introduces the useful concept of "Jewish community protective politics," a phenomenon described as "collective mainstream social anxiety about white Jewish male vulnerability to antisemitism" (2). This phenomenon results either in the public defense of accused white Jewish men, or in their "secular excommunication" (5), the disassociation of those men from authentic Jewish identity, as observed in second-wave feminist writings on Freud as a universal Victorian patriarch, rather than as a Jewish one, contrasting, on the other hand, harmful Jewish feminist depictions of Black masculinity (chapter 1). Some may leave this study with questions about its characterization of Jewish community protective politics. How, more precisely, is this phenomenon structured? Is it a Foucauldian politics of collective self-policing through the diffusion of self-consciousness and unspoken codes of conduct? Is it an explicitly organized set of agents coordinated in relation to the dominant culture? Is it something else entirely? Regardless of this potential ambiguity, Bromberg's examples convincingly connect the attainment of successful white masculinity with the likelihood of absolution from sexual misconduct accusations. Freud's status as a universal patriarch oriented toward white society, for example, facilitated the reframing of white Jewish male sexual misconduct cases into cases focused instead on the "hysteria" of their victims, some of whom were Jewish women without access to the same social protections available to their male counterparts. Similarly and more recently, while Woody Allen...

Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man by Michael Pitts

Reviewed by: Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Manby Michael Pitts Ezekiel Crago Manhood Revised. Michael Pitts. Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man. Lexington, 2021. 174 pp. $95 hc, $45 ebk. Michael Pitts's Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fictionis a book that needed to be written. It sheds light on a body of work underappreciated for its critique of hegemonic masculinity and its effects on society. Pitts traces the development of this critique over several decades as it evolves along with feminist discourse, becoming more intersectional and historically situated. He argues that "gender and national identity are mutually constitutive concepts" (1), using Todd Reeser's theory of a "gendered nation" (7). The novels analyzed in the book help to question how these concepts and identities are produced using a feminist utopia as a lens. This is a "critical utopia, for feminist writers seeking to critique masculinities in ways not available to them by realist fiction" that limits utopian imagining, instead "imbuing it with revolutionary feminist reframings of the good society" in which these writers imagine "the transformation of masculinities" (4). Pitts begins his exploration with novels published in the early 1970s that were "utopias directly opposing normative masculinities, [and] they outline the changes masculinities must undergo for the better, feminist society to be realized and, while challenging essentialism and the overlooking of race and sexuality within feminist circles, generally reflect second-wave feminism" (8). The first chapter discusses Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You(1971), a novel that offers the presumed sf audience of young men a cautionary tale about toxic manhood. It traces the transformation of a man who ascribes to hegemonic patriarchy, telling how he learned to perform and identify with a healthier, feminized masculinity that cares for others rather than only himself. He begins as an exploitative, rapacious bully who, through his encounter with a feminist utopia, develops empathy and compassion along with an ethics of care. Pitts argues that this novel represents the possibility of men learning alternative masculinities. The second chapter moves on in the decade with an analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed(1974). This novel poses the ever-present danger of hegemonic manhood by showing how enticing capitalist patriarchy is for [End Page 190]men, offering privilege and power to the violent, dominating manhood it validates. This book, according to Pitts, usefully shows how vigilant men must be to avoid performing this version of manhood through the novel's depiction of a man raised in a feminist utopia with no division of genders who is seduced by a society similar to the contemporary US, which offers power over others. The third chapter examines Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time(1976). Pitts notes that this novel crucially pivots from a focus on men to a story about a Latina woman, depicting how she must navigate systemic racism and patriarchal authority in both domestic and institutional medical settings, contrasting this with a feminist utopia in a possible future. This future is threatened by another possibility presented as a hypermasculine future that further subjugates women, rendering them into commodities to be rented by wealthy men. The novel is intersectional in its exploration of subjugation and offers a choice of futures between feminist and hypermasculinist. The fourth chapter discusses Octavia Butler's X enogenesistrilogy (1987-89), expanding on the discourse of intersectional feminism with a post-apocalypse protagonist, Lilith, a Black woman rescued by an invasive extraterrestrial colonizing species to enable them to breed a new hybrid species of humans and Oankali, as they call themselves. These novels, as Pitts explains, radically reimagine gendered and racialized social positions after our contemporary society has been eradicated by nuclear war. Ultimately, they posit a possible feminist utopia founded by Lilith's hybrid child, a non-binary human/Oankali/Ooloi who plays the role of a third crucial sex for reproduction of the species and mediates sexual contact between male and female. Throughout the series, Lilith and her brood must struggle against holdout groups of patriarchal authority, often by defending against violence while at the same time navigating their subjugation...

A Much-Needed Voice of Resistance

A Much-Needed Voice of Resistance

From The Hidden Face of Eve to AWSA Activism to Tahrir

From <i>The Hidden Face of Eve</i> to AWSA Activism to Tahrir

Processual Aesthetics and Feminist Trouble

Within the landscape of current feminist comics production in the Nordic region, Rikke Villadsen is a comics artist notable for works that challenge gendered sexual norms through genre play and visual pastiche. This article explores how Villadsen’s style of comics-making draws on processual aesthetics, a term offered and explored in conversation with Villadsen’s comics and queer theory. Villadsen’s work brings central tenets of second-wave feminist thought into the contemporary context of feminist body politics, resulting in tensions on and beyond the pages of her comics. The article discusses the ways Villadsen’s comics enact feminist trouble through representations of transgressive sexuality, gender roles, and the materiality of the comics as physical objects.

Reproductive rights, othered women, and the making of feminist documentary in Latin America

ABSTRACT Cine Mujer was the name of two feminist film collectives, one founded in Mexico (1975–1986) and the other in Colombia (1978–1999). Sharing the same name but with no ties between each other, these collectives produced films that provided different representations of women, politicized personal experiences and domestic spaces, and promoted processes of consciousness-raising. Broadly, this article looks at the Cine Mujer collectives as part of a larger phenomenon that, although informed by second-wave feminism and the New Latin American Cinema, can be better understood within the singular complexity of Latin American women’s movements. Specifically, it analyses two documentaries, Cosas de mujeres (1978) and Carmen Carrascal (1982), produced by the Cine Mujer collectives in Mexico and Colombia, respectively. Drawing on Laura Marks’ work on hybridity, excess, and haptic visuality, this article explores the relation between modes of production and representation in these films and positions them as emblematic examples of a formative moment in Latin American feminist documentary. By emphasizing the emotional and sensorial appeal of these films, this article also attempts to expand what is understood by political cinema.