Feminist Theory Research Articles

Legalizing transphobia: from courtroom to legislature, how gender‐critical activism is hurting us all

AbstractThis article scrutinizes the strategic legal and political actions taken by gender‐critical feminist (GCF) scholars and activists aimed at curtailing protections afforded under existing equality law and criminal justice policies that safeguard transgender individuals against discrimination and victimization. Two prominent legal judgments are critically reviewed to highlight the phenomenon of crowdfunded litigation and to exemplify the ways in which the law can be (mis)used to shape public perceptions of trans identities and, consequently, how this impacts trans individuals’ full and equal participation in society. The subsequent analysis examines how the previous and current governments’ support of the GCF movement has led to newly proposed, and recently enacted, legislation and policies restricting trans rights and legal protections. The article concludes by reflecting on how these coordinated legal interventions detrimentally affect the emotional, physical, and social well‐being of trans individuals, while simultaneously contributing to a broader political narrative aimed at dismantling protections against discrimination and victimization for all marginalized groups.

From colonial legacies to inclusive futures: Transforming and reconceptualising early childhood education in Indonesia

This article presents a dialogue between Marek Tesar, Professor at the University of Auckland, and Yulida Pangastuti, a researcher and lecturer at Universitas Gadjah Mada, exploring the reconceptualisation of early childhood education in Indonesia. The conversation delves into the integration of indigenous perspectives, addressing global crises through education, promoting gender equality, and the theoretical foundations and critiques of ideas that shape contemporary early childhood education. The discussion emphasises the importance of incorporating local wisdom and values into educational practices, fostering environmental stewardship and resilience, and challenging traditional gender roles to create more inclusive and equitable learning environments. Theoretical insights from postcolonial and feminist theories demonstrate their critical role in deconstructing colonial legacies and patriarchal structures within education. The article aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on creating educational frameworks that respect and utilise diversity, promote social justice, and empower all children. Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives and practical strategies, this dialogue offers a comprehensive approach to rethinking early childhood education in ways honouring cultural relevance, sustainability, and equity.

Assessment of the Implementation of Policy on Anti-Sexual Harassment in a Nigerian University

Sexual harassment in universities undermines gender equity, safety, and learning. This study assessed the level of implementation of the anti-sexual harassment policy and the influence of implementation of the policy on gender protection of students and staff of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Nigeria. The study was hinged on the feminist theory. The feminist theory considers the plight of any person or people not just women, with a view to destabilizing systems of power and oppression, especially in an academic environment as in this context. The study adopted cross sectional survey research design. The population comprised of 450 students and 200 members of staff (100 teaching and non-teaching staff each) making a total of 650 participants, using a stratified random sampling to ensure proportional representation from the 10 selected faculties. Data was collected using questionnaires and gathered data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results identified gaps in initial awareness and understanding of the anti-sexual harassment policy among students and staff which constituted a setback for the implementation. It was equally noted that the policy development process lacked inclusivity, and implementation activities were perceived as insufficient. Since the implementation process was faulty, the policy has not been able to significantly achieve gender protection on the Campus. The students had uncertain views on the policy's impact, while staff had mixed opinions. The study recommended the need to strengthen policy implementation by way of improving communication channels, transparency, stakeholders’ involvement, and monitoring while punitive measures must be enforced when necessary.

Locating violence-resistant masculinities in sites of conflict

ABSTRACT Scholarship on conflict has been slow to recognise masculinities, often failing to address the impact of gender on men and boys. Even when masculinities are recognised in sites of conflict by feminist scholarship, they tend to be framed exclusively in terms of explicit norms around men’s use of violence or treatment of women. This has meant that alternative masculinities, which might be more amenable to peace, are often difficult to locate or fraught. Reflecting on conducting interviews on responding to political violence in Indonesia (Aceh and Central Java), this paper interrogates the methodological challenges of researching the diverse range of masculinities that might create pathways for disrupting violence. Three strategies are suggested for ‘locating’ violence-resistant masculinities while researching conflict (‘reading’ gender, strong objectivity and in-depth methods) and considering how researchers might avoid misinterpreting these masculinities in problematic ways.

Unpacking women’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic in India: a feminist analysis of mainstream print media

ABSTRACT This paper explores mainstream print media depictions of women’s work during COVID-19 and associated lockdowns in India. Specifically, it aims to understand perceptions of educated upper- and middle-class women regarding remote working arrangements during the pandemic. It delineates two broad themes that emerge from an analysis of selected articles in four national dailies; first, many women regarded these arrangements as mutually beneficial for women employees as well as their workplaces, and its counternarrative characterised by women having to juggle paid and care work with little support from the family, market or state. The paper then unpacks the arrangement of work from home that emerges in the media analysis and offers a critique of the simplistic and binary understanding of flexibility, choice, and agency sustained by the neoliberal and postfeminist framing of pandemic work arrangements. Our analysis provides a feminist critique of these dominant perceptions that invisibilise the complexity and heterogeneity embedded within women’s experiences. Finally, the paper reiterates the urgent need to consider the structural factors that undermine gender equality across work and home; and pushes for a rethink of neoliberal and postfeminist notions of ‘flexibility’, ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ through the intersecting lenses of gender, labour, care work, and time.

Wo∼Men and Leadership: Re-Thinking the State of Research on Gender and Leadership Through Waves of Feminist Thinking

Feminist thinking has contributed to changing views of women in society and in leadership positions. Yet women are still underrepresented in leadership, especially in key roles and at higher organizational ranks. In this commentary we examine the past, present, and future of leadership theories through a gendered lens, by considering them against the backdrop of feminist theory evolution. We first organize existing leadership theories according to four main feminist waves— gender reform feminism or “fixing the women” which corresponds with liberal feminism; gender resistance feminism or “the female advantage,” reflecting radical feminism; the gender rebellion feminism or “how is a wo(man) defined,” according to postmodern and intersectionality theories, and gender digital feminism or “hashtag and clicktivism revolution” that focuses on social media, cyber activism, sexual violence, and complex intersectionality. We further examine the implications and research findings of these theories for women and men in leadership. Second, we review the publications on gender and leadership in two exemplary journals publishing leadership research in the field between 2019 and 2022 and explore to which feminist wave the published works relate. We show that themes related to the first two waves of feminist thinking continue to be dominant in current leadership research and encourage moving into new terrains, utilizing current feminist thinking, in the study of leadership and gender. Finally, we raise awareness that in a gendered society, leadership theories may reproduce and reconstruct the existing social order and gendered arrangements, as well as map novel directions for future research.

Women Education as a Pre-Condition for Peace Culture in Nigeria

It is generally agreed that education is an instrument of change and development for an individual and the society, socially, economically, politically and technologically. A nation dominated with multitudes of illiterate women would definitely be retarded both economically, politically, socially, technologically and religiously. Women are the custodians of future leaders (the young ones). They care, nurture and nourish them and whatever knowledge, attitude and values imparted during this period determines to a great extent the personality of the child and his relationship with people. Consequently, to produce quality and reliable leaders with stable personality, the custodians (women) themselves must be stable, reliable and exposed in terms of quality and adequate knowledge of their immediate surroundings and outside world. This is only possible through education. This paper is pinned to the qualitative method of analysis, using the feminist theory. The paper finds out the imperative of women education as a pre-condition for peace culture in Nigeria. It concludes that women education, the family, society and country at large will be at peace as women are termed as “mothers of peace”. There is the need to re-focus the educational system in Nigeria to reflect on women education. Hence, the relevance of women education for the attainment of peace culture in Nigeria cannot be overemphasized, factors militating against peace culture and suggestions for its realisation are also discussed as the recommendations of this paper.

Between Inevitability and Surprise

Using personal trans narrative toward framing a transgender historical method, this essay describes the large-scale historical trends that have led to the present moment in the history of trans people, the way that the Internet provides a place for everyone to act as their own historians, and the potential insights that transgender auto-historiography offers to feminist and gender scholars. This essay is part of a PHR forum on the theme of “Personal Reflections on Feminist Historical Methods,” with additional essays by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Natalie Marine-Street, and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela. The forum is part of a larger PHR special issue, Feminist Histories.

From the Closet to the Center

The Amy Morris Homans Cotillion and Pre-Cotillion created unique and liberatory spaces for many lesbian and allied women attending the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD) convention between 1982 and 2014. In this article, we draw on feminist and queer theories to consider the multiple meanings embedded in Cotillion goers’ lived experiences. Memories of planning and participating in these events linger for attendees decades later. The impact of attending ranged from lighthearted appreciation to profound gratitude. The Cotillion events disrupted the oppressive status quo at the AAHPERD convention and within kinesiology in favor of community building, joy, and the celebration of lesbian identities. We explore the disruption of heteropatriarchal norms and the creation of alternative community spaces to learn better from the past and to help create liberatory futures for practitioners and scholars in kinesiology.

Decentering Food Pedagogies

In this collaborative essay, five gastrofeminists from various disciplines, mainly literature, anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, and diverse locations of Global South and Global North, share four collaborative experiments built around two axioms: to integrate experiences of students as gendered and racialized subjects in their experiential learning irrespective of disciplinary boundaries, and to integrate critical feminist scholarship that destabilizes ethnocentric notions around consumption, production, and distribution of food. Through the four collaborative experiments: students’ food voice, autobiographies, collective kusina, and food walks, the pedagogues bring embodied lived experience in conversation with critical pedagogy, expanding some of the foundational ideas of feminist pedagogy, especially of not treating theory, research, and experience as independent silos. Each of these collaborative experiments calls for a need to create dialogic space through a collaborative co-learning process and offers a decolonial reading of texts through recognizing the difference and diversity of our classrooms.

Uniform choices: elastic feminism and rhetoric surrounding the 2020 Olympic “pantywar”

ABSTRACT Through a critical-rhetorical analysis of women’s uniform activism that went viral surrounding the 2020 Olympic Games (held in 2021), this article builds on existing feminist scholarship regarding the ideological correspondence of postfeminism and popular feminism within gendered economies of visibility. By giving primacy to the notion of personal choice, women activist athletes (and the media coverage of them) employed postfeminist discursive practices in service of a popular feminist agenda. While the foregrounding of “choice” stretched the reach of their feminism, allowing it to shapeshift to please a variety of audiences and gain notice, its deployment also functioned to undermine their political commitments. Presenting the concept of “elastic feminism” to characterize this tension, this essay explores the power and pitfalls of prioritizing the rhetorically flexible logics of choice.

Gastrofeminism

Gastrofeminism traces the centrality of food within diverse feminist narratives of agency and resistance. This manifesto introduces the theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological scope of Gastrofeminism to rethink feminist genealogies, legacies, and new embodiments of a radical future. It calls for a reckoning of both established and emerging feminist engagements with food, consumption, and culinary practices. This introduction underscores conjunctures where feminist methodology and pedagogy intersect in variegated social, cultural, and historical settings to engender dialogues on food, eating, and culinary practices. It emphasizes everyday acts of negotiating feminist boundaries and subverting dominant perceptions of food. Furthermore, it contests the practices whereby food is used to reproduce social norms and hierarchies. Gastrofeminism remaps the boundaries of gendered relations through food practices in sites of conflict as well as everyday resistance to gendered norms of domesticity through technological innovations around cooking, eating, and representation of food. This manifesto assembles feminist scholarship and pedagogies committed to pushing the boundaries of traditional food studies and taking it into new, inclusive directions. Gastrofeminism spans across disciplines and praxis to engage with sensory documentation of food, gendered forms of intimacy, appetites and embodiments, food memories, affects, and nostalgia, new feminist pedagogies, foodways, ecosystems and sustainability, and food access, conflict, and social justice.

Notes on the Future Possibilities of Engaged Anthropological Research: Why Decolonizing Anthropology Needs Black Diasporic Feminist Theory and Methodologies

Notes on the Future Possibilities of Engaged Anthropological Research: Why Decolonizing Anthropology Needs Black Diasporic Feminist Theory and Methodologies

Inhibitions to Sexual and Reproductive Care of Somali Immigrant Women Living in the United States of America and South Africa: A Postcolonial Feminist Theory Reflection

Inhibitions to Sexual and Reproductive Care of Somali Immigrant Women Living in the United States of America and South Africa: A Postcolonial Feminist Theory Reflection

Living the liquid life: Gender, precarity, and journalism in the post-#metoo era

Abstract Despite a long-standing trend of increasing women in the profession, masculine norms and gender inequality persist in media work. During the #metoo movement, Swedish journalists launched the #deadline campaign, shedding light on the connection between gender and worsening working conditions. Increasing demands for flexibility have institutionalised temporary contracts, eroded job security, and expanded job precarity, with women and young journalists disproportionately affected. In this article, we explore gendered journalistic precarity and systemic inequalities, challenging the assumption of professional homogeneity in the field of journalism. We conducted 23 interviews with Swedish journalists on temporary contracts, applying a feminist analysis to understand how power dynamics affect their experiences. Five years post #metoo, gender issues have faded from professional discourse. However, the interviews reveal continued gender discrimination and harassment, exacerbated by factors such as age, class, and position in the labour market.

“I got given all these keys”: a photovoice study examining master and alternative narratives and nonbinary identity formation in London’s queer communities

Background Nonbinary people may rely on queer communities to resist cisnormative erasure and shape their sense of identity. However, transnormativity within queer communities may repudiate nonbinary identities. The Master Narrative Framework informs our understanding of how cis- and transnormative narratives are negotiated within queer communities, but no study has yet applied this framework to specifically study nonbinary identity formation. Better understanding of nonbinary identity formation is a key task for clinicians and researchers to offer appropriate care to these populations. Aim The study aimed to understand trans + intra-community processes and their impact on nonbinary identity formation, exploring dominant master and alternative narratives and developing further recommendations for research in this under-studied area. Methods Grounded in a constructionist framework and feminist theory, the study used photovoice. Ten nonbinary individuals were trained on photovoice and participated in focus groups and interviews. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Results Findings identified four prevalent master and alternative narratives: The different one: master narrative of imposters; and the three alternative narratives of To be queer is to reject the norm; To be nonbinary is to appear androgynous and To be queer is to go out. Participants’ identity shifted and took shape in response to their lived experience of these narratives; however they resisted the pressure to present an unchanging identity. Discussion Results were presented in light of previous findings. Further research is warranted on nonbinary identities that looks beyond deficit-based understandings and nuances processes of identity formation and narrative creation.

Of Birds and Breastfeeding: Augustine and Feminist Concerns about Kenosis

AbstractThe doctrine of kenosis has kept a low profile in studies of the early church. Yet the biblical idea that Christ “emptied himself” was taken up not only by proponents of kenoticism in the nineteenth century, but also—inevitably—by early Christian thinkers as they interpreted Philippians 2:5‐11, a crucial passage about the identity and spirit of Jesus Christ. Augustine, for example, references kenosis repeatedly across his writings. The notion of kenosis has also been a tenacious thread in the tapestry of feminist theological reflections over the last twenty years. This article weaves these strands together, arguing that three emphases of Augustine's account help to address concerns that feminist theologians have raised: his explication of kenosis as utterly unique and only analogically imitable; his description of kenosis as always additive; and his characterization of kenosis as an irresolvable paradox. This essay develops Augustine's emphases in conversation with recent feminist scholarship—drawing, along the way, on his surprising appeal to the behavior of mother birds and maternal breastfeeding—to suggest some new vantage points for appreciating how the Christian doctrine of kenosis can promote flourishing, for the subject as well as the object of self‐giving love.

The Command of Jilbāb in the Quran: Between Symbols of Piety and the Issue of Women's Exclusivity in Public Spaces

This research is motivated by the fact that several cases have been found where veiled women experience marginalization both in society due to their style of veiling (niqab) and in the workplace. This is certainly contrary to the intent of the Qur'anic verse prescribing veiling, which is meant to protect women. Therefore, this study aims to re-examine the Qur'anic verses that discuss jilbāb by considering the inclusive space for women in the public sphere. This research uses a phenomenological approach, intertextual method, and Margot Badran's Islamic feminism theory. This study finds that the interpretation of the jilbāb verse shows a trend that the essence of the jilbāb is to protect the dignity and honor of women, with various interpretations of its form. Some interpret jilbāb as a cloth covering the head of a woman, while others see it as modest clothing. Initially, the protection prescribed by the jilbāb was understood internally as a command to cover the 'awrah. However, as cases of marginalization against veiled women have emerged, the jilbāb can now be understood not only as protection through covering the 'awrah but also as protection of women's rights legally and socially. Therefore, this study does not justify the marginalization of veiled women for any reason.

Modernity of Women Subject in Eka Kurniawan’ Cantik Itu Luka (2002): A Study of Post-Colonial Feminist Literary Criticism

This study aims to dismantle the narrative of the female subject’s modernity which was built by the author as a representative of a social group or class. In order to achieve this objective, the researchers used qualitative approach, which prioritizes data quality to data size. The data in this study is the novel Cantik Itu Luka by Eka Kurniawan, and other information related to the research topic. Then, the data were analyzed using binary opposition deconstruction and postcolonial feminism theory. Data analysis focuses on the narrative structure of the text and its ideas regarding colonial discourse and the narrative construction of the modernity of female subjects, as well as the author's historical and sociological context in relation to the text. The results show that the construction of the female subject presented in the text Cantik Itu Luka (2002) is a woman who is resistant to the discourse of modernity. In the context of colonial discourse, the female subject is a woman who participates in the rebellion against patriarchal cultural oppression and globalization. The discourse of modernity built by Eka Kurniawan is that women are required to maintain their national identity amidst the commotion of global culture. The construction of the female subject in the text is an ideal formed by male critical intellectual groups to represent and advocate women who have difficulty getting space and position in the social order.

The Institutionalization of Feminism in the Romanian Academic and Intellectual Sphere

The present research aims to explore the institutional history of feminist disciplines and the trajectory of their inclusion in the Romanian academic curriculum, as well as in the intellectual space from the late 90’s to the present day. The adoption of feminist theories has been limited by two impediments that have made their curricular inclusion difficult and their circulation in Romania quite sporadic: firstly, the subject has been rejected and boycotted by a moralising conservative public discourse and secondly, their critical disciplinary implication has posed problems of institutional acceptance due to suspicion of leftist bias. The paper aims to analyse the public debates concerning feminism, compared to a form of totalitarianism, in Romania, on the one hand. The second part has in view to define the import channel of feminist studies in Romania, along with the difficulties that hindered the first feminist scholars and activists’ efforts to disseminate the discipline in post-communist countries. The liberal ethos with conservative nuances of the Romanian academic space and the public intellectuals’ anti-communist positions remain responsible for the poor representation of feminism in Romania, as its impiety towards feminist theories has to do with the protectionism of dominant, conservative discourses.