Women's Activism Research Articles

The Heritage of Emancipation: Collecting the (Invisible) Everyday

Participatory heritage mapping is one of the possible methods for valorizing emancipation practices as cultural heritage. Through the citizen science research project "HEROINES: Heritage of Emancipation - Empowering Roma Women through the Construction of Solidarity Networks", conducted by researchers from the Institute of Etnography, SASA, and the Faculty of Philosophy – University of Belgrade, in cooperation with Roma activists from Belgrade, Kostolac, and Pirot, the heritage of women's activism was defined as a distinct form of everyday life. Moreover, the research is based on the notion that women emancipation practices decisively affect the community's identity and areas of action. After providing a theoretical overview and presenting relevant examples of the process of participatory heritage mapping, this paper analyzes the potential of community mapping methods using the abovementioned example. Additionally, it considers possibilities for interpreting community heritage that, until now, has not been widely represented within official heritage institutions.

Voices for Emancipation: A Speech Act Analysis of Feminist Activism on Twitter

This study investigates the utterances of three foremost women activists namely Marvi Sirmed, Mahira Khan and Resham claiming to uphold the cause of women emancipation. This study endeavors to probe this phenomenon by employing the speech act framework proposed by Searle (1969). Attention has been drawn to this realm because the global trends are in the wake of subverting gender disparity in favor of gender equality. The nature of this study is predominantly qualitative however; it also attempts to quantify the utterances in the form of their percentages. The data was extracted from the tweeter handles of the women activists. A total of twenty-one tweets have been reserved by subjecting them to the lines of judgmental sampling. The findings show that representative speech acts are 61.90%, expressives are 23.80% and directives are 14.28% respectively. So this outcome clearly marks the fact that women activists for the most part are engaged in expressing their emotions and depicting the situation which exists around them. But their utterances lack the sense of direction and orientation. This study contributes in understanding the orientation of Feminism in Pakistan particularly the trends on social media which though offers a platform to speak yet offers no guidelines for the clear direction.

Feminist Politics, Coalition Building, and Movement Legacies: Abortion Rights Activism in Argentina since the 2001 Crisis

Around two decades after Argentina’s 2001 crisis, the abortion rights movement flourished, becoming a powerful force against obstacles to reproductive justice in the country and mobilizing massive numbers of people from all walks of life to successfully demand the legalization of abortion. The National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion was launched in 2005, but the seeds for several of its key features were planted during the collective action surrounding the crisis. This study draws on 105 qualitative interviews with abortion rights advocates, feminists, and activist women in a variety of organizations in Argentina, collected in different stages between 2002 and 2020, to examine how the events of 2001 influenced later organizing. The analysis reveals two central features of the Campaign that can be traced back to mobilization in the crisis: the legacy of a style of politics centered around broad coalition building with diverse constituencies that cross social categories; and lessons about how to advance focused and strategic goals while still engaging broad sectors of society. Broad organizing can be in tension with the narrowing of goals, yet grappling with this tension is necessary for inclusive and effective action. Argentina’s social movement experience shows how activists have managed to successfully advance the targeted cause of abortion rights without relinquishing their desire and efforts to “ cambiarlo todo” (change everything) so reminiscent of the spirit of the 2001 uprising.

Internalised misogyny and intragroup discrimination: a critical discourse analysis of anti-gender equality comments on Nigerian female blogs

ABSTRACT This study examines the discursive structures and strategies used by Nigerian female blog users to legitimise gender inequality. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of 253 comments from five Nigerian-authored blogs, the study complicates celebratory approaches that conceptualise digital spaces as places for marginalised women to fight against sexism since they unravel ideological conceptions within female ‘counter-publics’ that rationalise un-equal gender relations. This refutes the belief that the struggle against gender discrimination only involves binary categories such as ‘men versus women’ or ‘women versus patriarchy’, spotlighting the self-limiting role of women in gender activism. The study demonstrates that understudying intra-group discrimination helps to understand and define inequality within specific contexts. Specifically, othering, classifying and categorising are inherent meaning-making traits that define intra-group dynamics and must be embraced and studied as contextual peculiarities that aid the understanding of given socio-cultural practices. This research underscores the usefulness of CDA in unpacking the intersections of culture, ideology, identity and language within multi-layered counter-public discourse, highlighting implications in social justice campaigns and the attainment of gender parity.

The role of female community AIDs activists in supporting people with HIV/AIDS through confidentiality and trust

An important element in dealing with HIV/AIDS is to disclose of its status to others. One of the problems faced by HIV/AIDS sufferers in disclosing their status is finding people they can trust, who can keep information about their HIV/AIDS status and not divulge it to other parties without their permission. Not many people can accept them without prejudice and stigma. This article discusses the communication efforts carried out by female AIDS activists in the community as co-owners who receive information from people with HIV/AIDS and subsequently become confidants and assist them in medical and psychological and social aspects. This study used a qualitative method. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with 9 Community AIDS activist women from 7 regions. The results of the study reveal the process of housewives transforming into community AIDS activists, how they get personal information about the status of HIV/AIDS and eventually become co-owners of information who eventually become confidants, have responsibilities and help people with HIV/AIDS in health, psychological and social aspects.

When Resisting Is Not Enough: The killing of Latin American Feminist Activists (2015–23)

ABSTRACT The article analyses an original database of 177 Latin American women activists killed that had some connection with feminist social movements from 2015 to 2023. A growing body of literature has focused on the killings of socio-environmental activists in Latin America and where they occurred. However, their activisms are under-researched, precisely because feminist social movements and activists have frequently been killed while advocating for women’s rights in the subcontinent. This article focuses on the circumstances, a few reasons portrayed in newspaper events, and the perpetrators of such violence. Based on a literature review, I argue that taking into account the recent narcodynamics of the region, it is possible to understand such violence within the context of drug-related violence, but also—and more likely—to consider those killings as political feminicides. Political feminicides are then examined largely through transfeminicides and peasant/communitarian activists.

Candles of Change: Nonviolent Resistance in Sudan

Overthrowing dictatorial regimes presents a formidable challenge, as these governments often maintain tight control over state mechanisms and media narratives; this paper explores the concept of nonviolent resistance, particularly within the context of the Sudanese revolution, utilising a qualitative research methodology and gathers qualitative data through interviews and focus groups with key participants in the Sudanese nonviolent movements. These include secondary data from online reports from civil society organisations of members of Resistance Committees and women activists. It also examines the tactics and strategies employed by nonviolent movements, including sit-ins, media campaigns, and the strategic use of the “butterfly effect,” demonstrating how small, coordinated actions can lead to significant societal change. The paper concludes with recommendations to strengthen civil society, enhance the capacity of Resistance Committees, and ensure women’s continued participation in the political process. These measures are essential for preserving the revolution’s achievements and supporting Sudan’s transition towards a more democratic and peaceful future.

Digital Advocacy Journalism’s Push for the Narrative Tipping Point of Singapore’s Capital Punishment

A narrative tipping point leading to the abolition of capital punishment will come from specific events and broader trends that move public opinion and the accompanying legal systems away from the justification for death penalties. Through Singapore’s independent digital journalist Kirsten Han’s reflection on her reportage and advocacy for the abolition of capital punishment in the republic, this paper seeks to highlight the role of digital advocacy in pushing for the narrative tipping point on the death penalty online. Against global trends of abolition, retentionist cultures on capital punishment remain resilient, particularly in countries that claim strong domestic support for authoritarian populist narratives of being “tough on crime.” Institutionally sustained and discursively binarized as “Asian values” against rights-based Western individualism and continuously reiterated by national leaders, Singapore’s policy on capital punishment is termed muscular retentionism. Contending with this dominance in cyberspace is Han’s affective emphasis on death row inmates facing imminent execution, particularly those condemned to death for drug trafficking. Using a partially autobiographical approach as the second author of this paper, she illustrates her experiences as a woman activist in Singapore, journeying with these inmates and documenting their experiences as part of the broader effort to move toward the narrative tipping point. Positioned against the largely impersonalized and instrumental justification of the traditional retentionist position established in the pre-Internet decades is Han’s rights-based emphasis on the sanctity of life. Receiving little attention in the republic’s mainstream media, cyberspace has oxygenated this perspective. Aside from facing legal and police scrutiny for her involvement in abolitionist campaigns, Han has also been subjected to misogynist ad-hominem attacks online from supporters of retention. Kirsten Han’s digital advocacy journalism poignantly sharpens the existing feminist critique in Singapore of the carceral regime with a more intersectional approach toward expanding the scope of the discussion to that of predominately male death row inmates. Her emphasis comes from the notion of difference feminism in considering the structural inequalities and power dynamics that render the more socially disadvantaged vulnerable to the regimes of punishment. Aside from being openly singled out and chastised by the state, it may remain difficult to determine the public impact of Han’s journalistic work. Nonetheless, through amplifying the otherwise invisible emotional states and voices of death row inmates and their families as individuals, she exposes the human cost in the regime of capital punishment and in the process inches Singapore toward the narrative tipping point.

The (Beard-) Veil Also Matters on Facebook

Abstract This article discusses how the publishing of Syrian women’s photos on Facebook provokes controversy in Syrian Facebook communities, in the context of ongoing violent political upheaval. After the Arab uprising reached Syria in March 2011, Syrian men and women have been using Facebook extensively to fight for their rights. Yet, the photo of a young dead Syrian woman activist caused a heated debate on Facebook, because she was not wearing a veil. We argue that while gender inequalities, which are prevalent in Syrian society seemingly persist in cyberspace, we are in fact witnessing the emergence of what we call a “limping” mobile society. In this mobile society, authoritative notions of womanhood are challenged, whereas dominant understandings of manhood barely change. In explaining this, this article contributes to scholarly debates in the fields of gender and power in conflict and post-conflict societies as well as social media and gender equality studies.

Existence of Women Activists in Aceh Politics After the Helsinki MOU

The existence of women can be seen in the participation form in public dimension and politics is like the efforts to achieve peace in Aceh. The role of women activists not only in the times of conflict, but also in peacetime is a reality, however it still less exposed. Undoubtedly that the Acehnese women activist from time to time have played a big role. But in fact there are still less of Acehnese women that have opportunity to be active role in the government. For the politics only still have limited space to move. As well as the role in political parties, women only fulfill the political parties quota. This research aims to know the involvement of women activist in politics of Aceh and to know the role of women activist pasca MOU Helsinki in relations to the rights of engagement in Aceh politics. The result of research shows that the existence of Acehnese women in times of conflict until peacetime, really concentrates on the issues that related to women and fighting for the women’s right. Afterwards the role of Acehnese women activist is not only limited in the role of social program of humanity, but it already leads to the role of practical politics, hopes to sit down in the parlement to be born the policy and the regulation that set the protection of women rights and the women empowerment from every sectors. It is reasonable that Acehnese women put hopes on politics to change the fate of Acehnese women civilization now and in the future.

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.

Negotiating Islam and feminism: the political and social participation of Muslim women in Barcelona

ABSTRACT In secular contexts, the growing presence of Muslim women activists in the public sphere has challenged the stereotype that Islam plays an oppressive role in women’s emancipation and liberation. The relationship between secular feminism and religion is far more complex. This article explores how socially or politically engaged Muslim women understand, negotiate, and challenge secular feminist discourses and practices in Barcelona, Spain. Based upon 28 semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and participant observation of political events, this article identifies three different positionings towards feminism: (1) women who identify as ‘feminist’, (2) women who identify as ‘Islamic feminist’, (3) women who express ambivalence regarding both feminism and Islamic feminism. Far from being a static classification, these three positionings show the different dilemmas that women face over the course of their lives. I discuss the way they are the result of negotiations and ‘recognition gaps’ in feminist movements.

Navigating victimhood: Women’s life writing and activist memory in Turkey

Owing to its gendered connotations of powerlessness, passivity and lack of agency, victimhood is an uncomfortable category for many veteran women activists from the left-wing revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Based on an empirical study of the autobiographies of women activists in Turkey, this article is framed by the activist turn in memory studies, which has shifted scholarly attention away from victimhood, trauma and suffering towards social movements and memories of struggles. It considers a form of ‘activist victimhood’ as an identity under construction. The article shows how veteran female activists in Turkey navigate this category and transform it for strategic purposes. Memories of imprisonment and state-inflicted violence have legitimised women’s speaking out and have opened up a space for the circulation of women’s life stories. The article describes how activist women through autobiographies navigate the gendered positions historically attributed to them, adapting as well as challenging them.

“Exploring Gender and Identity in 20th-Century Literature: Feminist Perspectives in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber”

This research investigates the themes of identity and gender in twentieth-century literature, with an emphasis on the role of feminism in Doris Lessing's The Brilliant Notebook )1962) and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979). The research aims to examine how the two writers question and dismantle conventional gender roles, featuring the impact of women's activist ideas in molding female identity inside the setting of the sociopolitical changes of the 20th 100 years. The objectives are to examine the women's perspectives introduced in every text, research the depiction of female independence, and investigate the crossing point of gender, power, and personality in the account structures. The methodology is a relative scholarly examination, using women's activist and gender theory structures to examine the texts. Essential sources, including the two books, are broken down closely by optional academic deals with women's activist scholarly analysis. Key subjects like female freedom, the disruption of man-centric designs, and the rehash of personality are investigated through character development, narrative techniques, and imagery. The outcomes show that both Lessing and Carter utilize their attempts to challenge regulating gender builds, with Lessing's The Brilliant Notebook focusing on the fracture and remaking of female identity, and Carter's The Bloody Chamber utilizing Gothic and fantasy themes to scrutinize conventional gender roles. The conversation underlines how each creator adds to women's activist artistic talk by offering complex, nuanced depictions of ladies who explore, oppose, and eventually reshape the jobs forced upon them by man-centric culture. This study concluded that Lessing and Carter, through their specific strategies, offer tough women's dissident assessments that continue to reverberate in contemporary discussions on gender and identity. Their novels feature the phenomenal ability of writing to test gender principles and advance feminist ideologies. Keywords: Gender, Identity, Feminism, The Golden Notebook, The Bloody Chamber

Activating Ecocentrism: How Young Women Environmental Activists Produce Identity on Instagram

ABSTRACT The fresh face of much of today’s environmental activism is young and female, particularly visible through movements such as School Strike for Climate (SS4C). Given the pressing need for embracing and broadcasting ecocentric ways of communicating, identifying, and behaving in these times – when impacts of anthropogenic climate and environmental crises are increasingly apparent – the ecocultural discourses such activists produce for public audiences are of utmost importance. The present study illuminates ways leading young women activists produce ecocentric identities within their principal online channel of public communication, the social media platform Instagram. We identify six predominant values central to these activists’ ecocentric identities: collective over individual action, intersectionality, climate optimism, corporate and political responsibility, ethics of care, and more-than-human connection. We also illustrate ways activists operationalize these values via three main material-symbolic identity activations: holding governments and industries accountable and responsible for their role in the climate crisis; creating inclusive, diverse communities; and fostering emotional responses to the more-than-human world. While activists under study also produce their ecocentric identities in the physical world – for instance, through on-the-ground protest leadership – their online identity production communicates shared values and actions in intimate, powerful, and potentially transformative ways to mass global audiences.

The Black (W)hole of Dysphoria

This essay returns to Evelynn Hammonds’s field-changing essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” with a focus on the labor of knowledge production under fraught institutional conditions, characterized in this essay as languaging. The simultaneous desire for and impossibility of accurate language to describe racialized, gendered, and sexual subjectivity drive Hammonds’s essay as well as a number of other key texts in Black feminist sexuality studies. This essay (re)introduces the diagnostic category of dysphoria to speak to this paradox: here, dysphoria describes the affective and psychic condition of institutional illegibility and fungibility for racialized and gendered people. Using the analytic of dysphoria to characterize and connect the political economy of Black feminist knowledge production and the life narrative of A. Dionne Stallworth, a Black trans woman activist, this essay directs urgent attention to the simultaneously material, spiritual, psychic, and affective dimensions of self-, knowledge-, and world-making.

Revisiting Women's Piety Movements in the Indonesian Context

The current Islamic studies literature focusing on women’s expression in Indonesia remains understudied. It still presents a scholarly challenge for current Islamic studies to address the issue of ideal expressed space for women. This mainly includes women’s positions and roles in society and their concerns about public issues. This gap often becomes a source of criticism, especially from the feminist perspective. The latter believes that dogmatic religious understanding restricts women’s roles in public space. Addressing this puzzle, this paper aims to analyze how Islam affirmatively can address women’s expression as individuals and members of social groups. This paper employs critical discourse analysis by cultivating theoretical frameworks such as the debate between feminism and Islamic understandings of women. It also draws data from fieldwork, conducting in-depth interviews with women activists and academics. The findings of this study show that the need for inclusive public space for women to express their concerns while keeping their Islamic faith is imminent. This need could also expand women’s concerns to broader contexts such as interfaith dialogue. By focusing on three different Islamic women's movements, this paper further investigates how these three movements build up their expressed spaces and their impact on society.

Activist work is care work: conceptualising resistance in Indonesia and the Philippines through feminist ethics

This article draws on interview data collected in 2021 from Indonesia and the Philippines to argue that activist work should fundamentally be understood as care work. The first part of the article advocates for a novel inductive theorisation of intersectional care ethics in social movement studies and activist-centred research. The second part of the article utilises this conceptual framework to discuss the paramount role of women in grassroots activist spaces both on the frontlines and behind the scenes. The stories of resistance by women activists, which comprise the core of this article, help to illustrate how the patriarchy and other structures of power may simultaneously be subverted and reproduced in grassroots community spaces.

The Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, Prostitution and Pornography: The British Black Women’s Movement and Sex Work, 1970s-1980s

In recent years there have been some noteworthy attempts to remedy scholarly silences on the Black women’s movement. The issue of sex work, however, is only mentioned in passing despite the so-called ‘sex wars’ preoccupying the white feminist scene at this time. Grappling with the methodological issue of silence on multiple interconnected levels, this this article attempts to fill this gap by interrogating how, and indeed whether, activists in the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) approached issues of sex work. It asks why these activists rejected the interpretation of sex work as work taken by their contemporaries in the sex workers’ rights movement. It firstly proposes that Black woman activists made a conscious decision to remain silent on issues of commercial sex, dismissing prostitution, alongside other issues of sexuality, as the ‘luxury’ preserve of white middle-class feminists that were distinct from, rather than integral to, Black women’s ‘survival’. Piecing together activists’ increasing but piecemeal discussions of pornography from the early-mid 1980s, the second section of this article demonstrates how activists analysed pornography and prostitution as part of a historical tradition of the sexual exploitation of Black women. In doing so, it proposes that their approach to commercial sex was fraught with contradiction – they viewed prostitution, an issue with real-life implications, in symbolic terms. Overall, it argues that Black woman activists to turned a blind eye to the tangible implications of prostitution legislation for Black women as they navigated tensions and challenges around post-war British racism, respectability politics and the gendered legacy of colonialism. Together with work on the experiences of lesbian women, it raises questions about which women were welcome in the movement, reminding us of the need to push scholarship on Black women’s history beyond the act of recovery.

Why Women Exit Politics: The Case of Two Grassroots Activists in a Slum in New Delhi

This article investigates why it is so difficult for women to succeed in politics in India, and it analyses this from a grassroots perspective in a slum in New Delhi. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research, I explore and compare in-depth the political trajectories of two women activists and examine why, despite being successful leaders of women and allied with male political ‘godfathers’, they have ended up leaving grassroots activism altogether. I show that both women were first pulled into political activism by NGOs working on women’s empowerment, that both later allied with male politicians to help draw ‘the women’s vote’ and that both women’s respective success largely rested on their concern with so-called women’s causes. However, neither of them was able to build up their own patronage networks, which is necessary to gain an independent political standing in politics. They remained dependent on their male political mentors and on family support; losing one or both of these instigated their respective exits from activism and politics.