ABSTRACT Violence against women is a pervasive global crisis, with an estimated one billion women affected in their lifetimes. To confront this issue, various feminist movements have employed a diverse range of protest repertoires, including demonstrations, rallies, and artistic interventions. While existing scholarship has advanced our understanding of the networks, strategies, and emotional dynamics within social movements, less attention has been paid to how artistic activism shapes experiences and interpretations of violence, particularly among marginalised women such as migrant domestic workers. To address this gap, this article explores the intersection of artistic activism, feminist advocacy against violence, and transnational mobility by investigating migrant domestic workers’ participation in One Billion Rising (OBR), a global campaign to end gendered aggression, in Hong Kong. Ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews show that through OBR, migrant women link their plight as domestic workers to the global feminist imagination and expand the framing of violence to hold accountable discriminatory migration policies; through public displays of visuals and corporeal practices, they breathe fresh life into their experiences of violence that hitherto had been confined behind the closed doors of their employers’ homes. Despite transformative possibilities, artistic activism is conditioned by participants’ intersectional identities, technological affordances, and the activism climate in the region. By focusing on artistic activism, this research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the varied practices and meanings that animate contemporary movements against gender-based violence.

This paper explores how lithium-powered low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, such as Starlink, create entanglements extending from the ground into space, reshaping Indigenous Lands, cosmologies, and sovereignties. While these constellations promise improved connectivity, their rapid replacement cycles produce space debris, obscure ancestral star teachings, and increase demand for lithium and water. Drawing on Indigenous epistemologies that situate Land and minerals as kin, this paper reimagines lithium not as a mere commodity but as a relational being whose journey into orbit carries responsibilities. Situated within intersectional Indigenous feminist technoscience, the analysis treats infrastructures as situated and power-laden, where extraction is co-constituted with planetary communication systems. It contributes to feminist technoscience debates by extending material-semiotic and accountability frameworks to orbital space, specifying design and governance obligations for sky-facing infrastructures. Methodologically, the paper offers a theoretical synthesis rooted in Indigenous science and technology studies, integrating technical literature on LEO satellites with concepts such as Land-as-relation, Place-Thought, and network sovereignty. Ultimately, this work advocates for a model of connectivity grounded not in frontier expansion but in care, consent, and responsibility towards more-than-human relations.

In this article, I explore the interwoven problematics of populationism and reproductive futurism. I engage Donna Haraway's slogan Make Kin Not Babies as an analytic to examine a multi-year case study of two climate activist groups in the United States and United Kingdom—Conceivable Future and BirthStrike, respectively. Both groups organized around how climate predictions were disrupting their reproductive plans and desires. Consequently, they became enmeshed in unrelenting populationism as people misinterpreted and misrepresented their work. As the organizers attempted to avoid populationist framings, they unintentionally reinforced the family as a counter-narrative, providing media outlets with personal stories of how climate change could threaten the reproductive orders of baby making. Thus, I attend to the reproductive politics in these groups' messaging to unearth subjectivities beyond the family and move towards multispecies flourishing. I argue that feminist technoscience can use Haraway's slogan, its celebrations and critiques, to confront the unavoidable entanglements between climate, reproduction, family, and population—the anticipatory logics and the personal, political, and planetary scales upon which these categories operate.

ABSTRACT This article explores the gender outcomes of political transitions by investigating gender politics in Hong Kong from the colonial era to the post-2020 period. By drawing on official documents, media reports, and empirical studies, this article illuminates the mutually constitutive nature of political processes and gender politics. It analyzes the complementary, but conflicting, relationship between feminist movements and pro-democracy activism during the pre – and post-handover eras and exemplifies the recent emergence of a patriarchal authoritarian gender regime, alongside the political transition, after 2020. In addition, it proposes the concept of the ‘politics of existence’ to capture how progressive women’s groups respond to the shifting political climate. This article argues that gender politics are inseparable from political processes and state-society struggles, as they can facilitate both democratic and authoritarian regime-building, while these processes also shape the trajectories of feminist activism, which faces the risks and opportunities arising within these sociopolitical (re)configurations.

This essay features a roundtable conversation between scholars working at the intersections of race and matter. It takes a dialectical and conversational approach to embody the methods of its contents. It speaks to the paradox of contouring a field that presses upon subject/object divides, questions and theorizes the boundedness of a liberal human subject and situates its analysis by recognizing relational positionality and citational generosity with other thinkers in the field. It asks: How might Asian American studies think matter differently? How might feminist science studies think race differently in regard to matter? As evidenced by contributors in this Special Section, racialized matter provides alternatives to the violences of racialization and its imbrication in racial capitalist histories of trade, technocultures, and environments. This roundtable opens entry points for those exploring intersections of feminist new materialisms, STS, and studies of race—from its entangled genealogies to its animating new directions. It asks, “How did we get here, and where do we go from here?”

ABSTRACT For decades, women across the globe have struggled for political agency under intersecting systems of gendered domination. However, dominant feminist paradigms, including liberal feminism, postsettler/colonial feminism and many strands of Global South feminism, remain ill-equipped to address the realities of women living under military occupation, protracted conflict, settler governance and fragmented or absent sovereignty. These approaches assume access to state institutions, legal protection, or rights-based mechanisms of redress, assumptions that collapse in the Palestinian context. This paper argues that Palestinian women’s political experience emerges at the intersection of Zionist settler/colonialism, internal patriarchal structures and spatial fragmentation, a convergence that demands an alternative conceptual approach. It focuses on the contemporary feminist movement Tal’at and examines how Palestinian women confront patriarchal violence and settler/colonial domination without appealing to the state, liberal legalism, or recognition within dominant feminist paradigms. Tal’at does not seek inclusion within established feminist theories; it destabilizes them and exposes their epistemic and political limits. From this refusal emerges the paper’s central theoretical intervention, Feminism of the Besieged. The concept is rooted in embodied and collective resistance of feminism arising from siege, statelessness, militarized surveillance and precarity, where survival becomes radical political praxis and political agency is reimagined.

ABSTRACT This paper examines how plastic surgery becomes a neoliberal ‘happy object’ in contemporary South Korea by juxtaposing South Korean makeover television show Let Me In (2011–2015) with feminist activism Escape the Corset Movement (ECM). Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of happiness as a ‘promise that directs us towards certain objects, which then circulate as social goods’ (2010a, 29), I argue that Let Me In scripts happiness as a continually deferred reward that disciplines women into alignment with neoliberal ideals of self-optimization and moral virtue. In contrast, feminist protests against Let Me In and the subsequent rise of ECM refuse this promissory logic by inhabiting unhappiness as a critical stance that shapes contemporary struggles over autonomy and collective life. Bringing together makeover television and feminist activism, this paper demonstrates how happiness operates as an affective technology of governance that both secures compliance and generates the conditions for feminist refusal in contemporary South Korea. By tracing these affective circuits, the article reveals how South Korean women’s bodies become contested sites where happiness is continuously reproduced, refused and reconfigured.

A central mantra of aging centers on staying socially engaged – a prescription supported by numerous studies reporting how social engagement enhances well-being in later life. Research in this area has primarily focused on interaction with family and friends, paid work, and unpaid activities such as volunteering, while devoting less attention to involvement in organizations with explicitly political goals. Political engagement – particularly activism oriented toward social change – may not only shape communities but also transform how individuals experience and understand their own aging. This transformative potential may be especially significant for women, who are often devalued as they age beyond youth. To explore this possibility, we draw on nine semi-structured interviews with members of the Older Feminist Network (OFN), an organization established in 1982 in the United Kingdom in response to the mainstream feminist movement’s limited attention to older women’s issues. Consistent with prior studies of other women-centered organizations, we found evidence that involvement in OFN provided social interaction, as well as physical and cognitive activity, that can enrich well-being in later life. Our analyses, however, revealed that its impact extended beyond social connection: It fostered a sense of purpose through shared political commitments and reframed aging through feminist consciousness. By turning the focus from social to political engagement in later life, our study reveals how activism can provide women with an empowering perspective on aging.

"Old Events in the Southern City" unfolds from the innocent and adorable perspective of Yingzi, depicting the folk life and female images of the early 20th century, recording the joys and sorrows of women during this era. This era coincided with the critical juncture of old-new transition in Chinese society. Although the 1911 Revolution had overthrown the imperial system, the remnants of feudal rites still lingered, and the fusion of Eastern and Western cultures gave birth to new ideological sprouts. The book portrays female representatives such as Xiuzhen, Lan Yiniang, and Song Ma. This article focuses on female characters as the main analytical subjects, delving into issues such as the survival predicaments of women under the dual oppression of patriarchy and traditional rites in the 1920s and 1930s, the budding of subjective consciousness, and the latent resistance. It reveals the deep connection between women's fate and the changes of the times. By depicting the fragmented fates of women, this article expresses the living conditions and spiritual demands of women in the current historical stage, providing an important textual reference for understanding the modern women's liberation and offering practical insights for advocating gender equality.

Building civic education: The contribution of the interfaith women's movement in Indonesia

ABSTRACT Contemporary scholarship suggests that global feminist movements striving to end violence against women and girls have spurred an improvement in its media representations. Nollywood, Nigeria’s film industry, serves as a notable example of how local filmmakers are incorporating global feminist principles to challenge entrenched stereotypes and portray women’s empowerment. However, these changes are insufficiently explored in scholarship. This study examines how select Nigerian films portray violence against women and girls (VAWG) and seek to challenge societal attitudes towards it with empowering narratives. Through textual analysis of three films – Citation (2020), Dry (2014) and Stories by Her (2021), five recurrent themes were identified: institutional commitment to justice for victims/survivors, acceptable and unacceptable approaches to justice, voicelessness versus repossession of voice, and societal apathy versus complicity. The study highlights the potential of films for effective storytelling and social change.

This article qualitatively compares the processes that led to women's suffrage in Japan, France, and Italy after the Second World War, identifying both commonalities and differences. In all three cases, existing regimes collapsed due to the war, and new political systems allowed women to gain the vote. To explain cross-country variation, the analysis focuses on three factors: the direct influence of occupying powers, women's suffrage movement and parliament, and the partisanship of decision makers. The comparison highlights the central role of war and regime collapse, showing that while both were important, regime collapse played a more decisive role in enabling women's suffrage. The study uses quantitative analysis, covering 1850–1950, to examine broader conditions for suffrage establishment, confirming the key role of regime collapse.

ABSTRACT The contemporary media landscape is marked by a paradox: while feminist empowerment discourses circulate widely across popular culture, they coexist with escalating misogyny. These tensions are shaped by postfeminist and neoliberal feminist sensibilities that increasingly forward individualised solutions to gender inequality while sidelining collective feminist action. As such feminist discourses shape how gender is understood and experienced, it is essential to examine how feminism is negotiated in contemporary media culture. This study therefore analyses various feminist issues in the controversial teen drama series Euphoria. Drawing on critical textual analysis, we show that the series criticises both postfeminist and neoliberal feminist ideals of empowerment through postmodern critical techniques such as irony, parody, hyperstereotyping and self-reflexivity. However, these critiques remain ambivalent: Euphoria exposes gender inequalities, yet viable structural alternatives are rarely articulated. In the absence of solutions, escapism emerges as a central narrative pattern. Through fantasy sequences and narrative complexity, the series positions escape as the only imaginable response to the unattainable demands of neoliberal feminism. Read against a broader conjunctural climate marked by crises, disillusionment and anti-hope, escapism signals a structural impasse within the contemporary feminist media terrain, where critique persists but collective feminist action appears increasingly out of reach.

ABSTRACT This article presents an exploratory study of the communication practices, both online and offline, used by feminist associations and informal collectives in Portugal. Drawing on 63 valid responses to a national survey, it provides a snapshot of how feminist actors navigate communication in a hybrid media landscape, focusing on self-reported practices and preferences. Findings reveal a strong reliance on social media platforms (particularly Facebook and Instagram) alongside the continued use of email and offline tactics such as public demonstrations and coalition-building. This hybrid approach reflects the adaptability of feminist actors to evolving media logics, while also inviting critical reflection on the structural constraints and exclusions these practices may reproduce. The article contributes to feminist media and communication scholarship by contextualizing Portuguese feminist practices within broader historical trajectories and transnational currents, highlighting communication as both a strategic tool and a contested arena of power, resistance, and visibility

ABSTRACT This article examines the cultural impact of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests on Feminist CCIs (feminist creative and cultural organisations). Through contextualising these responses within pandemic precarity in London, this paper shows how the heightened digital character of BLM generated new pressures for Feminist CCIs to show they were responding to the global events, and in the right ways. By foregrounding a conjunctural analysis of how feminist organisations responded to these digital and branded landscapes, this paper brings scholarly research on digital feminist activism, intersectionality, and practices of monetisation into conversation with debates around woke-washing, BLM performativity, and corporate activism. The paper shows how the wider cultural conditions of “cancel culture” intensified the digital practices of Feminist CCIs, and how incentives to present “good” intersectional feminist politics, as well as fears of “getting it wrong,” governed these online activities. Further, this analysis homes in on the commercial pressures for Feminist CCIs to monetise their work during the wake of BLM and pandemic precarity. The article shows how Feminist CCIs simultaneously critique but also engage with— and indeed economically benefit from—corporations and brands in relation to anti-racism and social justice.

Globally, there is a strong trend toward liberalizing safe abortion laws, with Africa leading in expanding legal grounds for safe abortion over the past two decades. Despite this progress, Nigeria still maintains restrictive, century-old abortion laws. Given Nigeria's alarming contribution to maternal deaths and unsafe abortions, this paper examines empirical evidence on the factors influencing abortion policy changes in African countries.The study utilised scoping reviews, which involved a search of databases - Web of Science, Scopus, JSTOR, PubMed - that yielded 8793 records. After screening for relevance, only 14 studies were included in the review, which focused on factors and processes of abortion law liberalisation in African countries. The study found the following factors vital in influencing liberalisation in most African countries: scaling-up awareness through research, medical society engagements, women's movement, the transnational influence of international human rights norms, and multi-stakeholders coalition. Drawing from the lessons of other African countries, liberalising Nigeria's abortion laws and providing accessible safe abortion services can significantly reduce unsafe, illegal abortions. To achieve policy reforms, researchers, advocates, and other stakeholders must strategically navigate Nigeria's murky abortion policy space collectively and strategically.

Abstract This article explores female revolutionaries’ political subjectivities during what is popularly known as the December Revolution. Young women played an especially important role in the revolution in ways that challenged prevailing political and social norms concerning what is considered ‘appropriate.’ Women’s peaceful protesting was seen as so threatening that their bodies came under attack, and were sidelined in the political settlement. Building on original interview data with female revolutionaries and feminist activists, this article suggests that the revolution and the subsequent backlash served as a significant force in creating a generational consciousness where young revolutionaries started to think of themselves as ‘feminists’ and distinct from the older generation of activists. Their emerging feminist reimaginations, now disrupted by war, are intimately entangled with the dismantling of the heteronormative, militarizing Arab-Muslim state-building project in Sudan and exposed how political elites, regardless of ideological belonging, have patriarchal dividends, including the historical women’s movement.

ABSTRACT This article examines how anti-gender politics shape feminist organizing in Turkey, highlighting both constraints and strategies of resistance. Drawing on 21 interviews with feminist activists in Istanbul and Ankara, and informed by social movement theory, it shows how state-driven policies curtail visibility, institutional access, and political influence, while simultaneously prompting new practices of resistance. Localized activism and intersectional alliances, and adaptive repertoires of contention sustain mobilization under authoritarian pressures. The findings argue that reactive and proactive forms of resistance operate as intertwined dimensions of feminist agency, offering new insights into how movements contest anti-gender backlash in constrained political environments.

Globally, gender mainstreaming and LGBTIQ+ inclusion remain marginal concerns in teacher education. This study investigates how these issues are discursively constructed and implemented within the elementary teacher education programs of two Chilean universities—one public and one private—in the wake of the 2018 feminist movement and recent constitutional debates. Through documentary analysis, focus groups with preservice teachers, and photo-elicitation interviews with faculty and gender office directors, the case studies examine institutional, curricular, and pedagogical discourses. A reflexive thematic analysis, informed by post-structural feminist and queer theories, reveals two distinct institutional approaches: the public university adopts a “diagnosis-solution model,” framing gender and sexuality diversity as socio-educational variables affecting learning. In contrast, the private university employs a “human rights-based approach” grounded in social justice advocacy. Despite curricular constraints and neoliberal pressures, teacher educators in both contexts demonstrated a commitment to non-sexist and anti-homophobic/transphobic education, employing pedagogies of embodied learning, evidence-based teaching, and human rights advocacy to foster personal transformation among future educators. The findings underscore the pivotal yet precarious role of feminist and queer faculty in driving inclusion and highlight the need to move beyond tokenistic or depoliticized approaches to challenge dominant narratives of gender and sexuality in teacher education.

The rise of anti-gender and far-right actors threatens feminist, anti-racist and LGBTQIA+ politics. While responses to these forces are being researched, the affective dynamics of parliamentary resistance remain underexplored. This article examines how affect shapes feminist resilience to anti-gender politics in Spain’s National Parliament, foregrounding the affective dynamics of parliamentary debates, which are especially relevant to understand because anti-gender actors weaponise emotions against feminism. Building on Ahmed’s ‘sticky affects’ and Bargetz’s ‘feeling politics’, we propose the concept of ‘sticky feeling politics’ to explore how affective parliamentary dynamics shaped by anti-gender politics attach feelings to gendered and racialised bodies, and how feminist members of Parliament (MPs) feel, navigate and contest these. Drawing on 12 debates and 22 interviews with MPs, staff and allied organisations, we trace practices of embodied resilience, solidarity and political rationality. The article advances scholarship on the affective life of institutions, showing how feminist actors foster affective political resilience within hostile terrains.