World Feminism Research Articles

Contrapunteo 1: Intersectionality and Genealogies of Third World Feminist Thought

Abstract In this essay, I define “Latinx” as a gender-inclusive umbrella term, as a descriptor that emphasizes queer feminist critique and community-making, and as a cultural identity emerging through difference as a connective tissue and vitalizing force. I begin by unpacking some aspects of the relationship between ideological subjugation and Latinx difference as a way of establishing the importance of multiplicity and fluidity to latinidad as a decolonial project in the United States. Discussing several examples of feminist theater, I trace the connections between Latinx and the philosophy of early generations of Third World Feminist thinkers. Specifically, I explore the importance of intersectionality to the emergence and meaning of Latinx.

Does Every Lesbian Have a Superpower that Makes Them Out and Not Dead by Suicide?: A Poetics against Standardizing Literacy Narratives

This essay, in three parts plus a conclusion, is a performance of US third world feminist praxis for our contemporary moment. Part one is a literacy narrative that resists generic convention. Part two uses conventions of academic writing to explore the damage that is happening to the field of composition and rhetoric due to the academic erasure of US third world feminist praxis. Part three is a gift. The conclusion is a manifesto to end the economic exploitation of students and teachers in our first-year writing classrooms. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction by Li Guo

Reviewed by: Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction by Li Guo Christopher Lupke (bio) Li Guo. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. Purdue UP, 2021. 273 p. The Chinese literary genre tanci 彈詞, a prosimetric form that mixes fictional narrative with poetry of various sorts, has been referred to in English translation as chantefable, plucking rhyme, or simply by its original Chinese term tanci or tanci fiction. It emerged in the late imperial era as the preferred medium of expression for literate women in China. Its mixed storytelling and singing structure suggests that it evolved out of an oral tradition. Long overlooked or dismissed as middlebrow, it has received little scholarly attention until recent decades. But in the past 30 years, and especially recently, it has attracted much serious scholarship, such as the Chinese-language book-length work of Hu Siao-chen, studies by Mark Bender, Maram Epstein, Yu Zhang, Lingzhen Wang, and others, as well as by Li Guo, this volume's author, her second on the topic of tanci. Guo's book comprises a lengthy, informative and sophisticated introduction, five main chapters--each devoted to the study of one tanci work—and a brief conclusion. As Guo indicates, the Chinese bibliographer Sheng Zhimei asserts that 538 novel-length tanci survive down to the present. Guo's rationale for selecting the five on which she focuses is to choose significant tanci that have received little to no scholarly attention in English. Of these five, one exists only in a handwritten manuscript in the Shanghai Library. Another has only recently been discovered, and Guo's discussion is its first such scholarly treatment in English. Having devoted her graduate research and first book to tanci, Guo presents these five tanci with the authority of a true expert—one of the leading scholars on the topic in the world. Her intimate understanding of the genre as a whole, her theoretical sophistication, and her exhaustive analysis of these five texts makes Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction an exemplary work of scholarship and a significant intervention into world feminist literary studies. It will be of great interest to any scholar who is curious about the development of literature written by women in Chinese but who does not have a knowledge of Chinese, and will assist Chinese [End Page 139] Studies scholars unfamiliar with the genre as well. It is not merely that tanci are mainly written by women. The themes of the narratives are deeply informed by the concerns of women and their status in late imperial China at a time when the onslaught of the Taiping and other rebellions, as well as the imperialist incursion of such military powers as the British, were posing a major threat to the millennia-long dynastic system and governmental structure. Additionally, the texts reflect the emergence of nascent global capitalism. Given these stresses, it stands to reason that the unprecedented social problems that Chinese people were confronting would surface in literature. Within these texts, traditional notions of gender roles, the established system of patriarchal kinship, as well as the relationship between subject and state were all called into question. And yet, as Guo demonstrates, the texts were doubly inscribed, which is to say that while genuinely subversive elements were at the center of these texts, they also depicted characters who ultimately returned to the fold, seeking readmission to the heteronormative hierarchies from which they initially strayed and rebelled. Among the theoretical reasoning that she draws upon, Guo turns to the notion of "spatialization" pioneered by Susan Friedman, who developed her ideas out of the writings of Julia Kristeva and Mikhail Bakhtin. "Spatialization" works on two axes, a horizontal and a vertical one. Guo sees Friedman's theory as fashioning a "horizontal" relationship between writer and reader and a "vertical" line in the space and time that the reader occupies. Space indeed does play a crucial role in most tanci, which frequently feature a woman who, in the disguise of a man, ventures out into the external world, leaving the domestic sphere behind. Guo also engages Nancy Armstrong's classic cornerstone essay "The Rise of Feminine...

Feminist Worlding and World Cinema: The Case of Małgorzata Szumowska

Abstract This article discusses the concept of worlding in the cinema of Małgorzata Szumowska. Informed by philosophical theory of worlding and worldliness, by thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Gayatri Spivak, and the film theory of cinematic worlds, proposed by Daniel Yacavone, the project examines the function of cinematic world building and its potential connection to World Cinema and feminist filmmaking. Close analysis of Szumowska’s film The Other Lamb (2019) traces the role of monstration and mise en scène in creating emancipatory cinema.

Postcolonial and decolonial subaltern feminisms

ABSTRACT The encounter between postcolonialism and feminism, since the 1980s, has brought about important theoretical and political contributions to both fields, reverberating in the debate on gender to the present day. This article examines how the geopolitical division between North and South has influenced the global feminist debate, engendering a conflictual feminist discourse. This article intends to highlight the political dimension of conflict in those feminist representations brought forward by postcolonial and decolonial interventions, which denounce colonial dynamics inside the movement and question the scope of its representational capacity. I propose the term ‘subaltern feminisms’ to understand these internal dynamics, as put forward by Third World feminisms, in their postcolonial and decolonial diversity. I first explore the theoretical and political transformations that facilitated the encounter between postcolonialism and feminism. I go on to develop the concept of ‘subaltern feminisms’, proposing it as an analytical category that highlights the conflictual dimension within the global feminist agenda. I then argue that decolonial feminism assembles different Latin American subaltern feminisms by articulating and reinstating decolonization as a political project. Finally, I critically examines the concept of ‘coloniality of gender’ as a feminist contribution to the ‘decolonial turn’.

FEMINISM IN INDONESIA AND THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE MOHANTY’S “THIRD WORLD FEMINISM”

This research article presents the study about the analysis of feminism in Indonesia associated with the perspective of the term third world feminism in Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s essay. The condition of Indonesian feminism movement is analysed by considering the book of R.A. Kartini, meanwhile the third world feminism is analysed by considering the content of Mohanty’s essay. This study employs qualitative research method. In her essay, Mohanty explores the idea of the third world feminism that has been issued by the western feminists. The terms of first world feminism, third world feminism as well as the ethnocentric have been differentiated by them. The finding of this study shows that feminism in Indonesia has a long history and has contributed to the discourse of equality as a critical project that brings social change. The feminism movements in Indonesia have already created the emancipation awareness among the people. This feminism movements have provided a proof that it needs to avoid the same generalization of the condition of feminism among the non-western countries.

The Geopolitics of Women’s Issues: The “Private Sphere” Goes Global

Kristen Ghodsee’s revisionist take on the importance of socialist women’s activism was researched and written before the Covid-19 pandemic upended the world, but her observations seem even more compelling now. The Cold War rivalry of the late twentieth century fostered alliances between women from socialist countries and women from recently decolonized nations to advocate for a political economy that promoted social welfare and ecological sustainability. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, as women increasingly bore the brunt of the structural adjustment policies and neoclassical economic paradigms that obliterated social services and prized efficiency over social and environmental health, women from socialist countries offered another option—one in which state policies supported working parents and provided for basic needs such as health care and housing. Ghodsee clearly challenges the U.S.-centered liberal feminist depiction of this period, challenging the dismissal of state-sponsored women’s organizations and showing the many ways that the United States and rest of the NATO crowd lagged behind socialist countries on basic issues such as universal childcare and mothers’ pensions. But Ghodsee also challenges the narrative from postcolonial scholars such as Devaki Jain and Amrita Basu who focus on this period as a turning point for Third World feminists, without recognizing the important role of their alliances with Second World activists. Throughout the book, Ghodsee engages the extant scholarship, clarifying the stakes of her interventions into the historiography. Two more recent books, Joanne Meyerowitz’s A War on Global Poverty and Dorothy Sue Cobble’s For the Many, offer further evidence of how much historians gain by looking more closely at these collaborations across geopolitical divides.

“In the Roar of the Machines”: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry of Witness and Resistance

To approach Zheng Xiaoqiong’s work is to confront issues of internal Chinese migration, global capitalism and income disparities, the contemporary Chinese poetry scene, geopolitics, the world economy, feminism, wage discrimination, and worker’s rights—all before one even addresses the most important part: Zheng’s own unique poetics. Although Zheng has published several books and her work has been enthusiastically received in China and in international poetry circles, her poetry has typically been viewed within a very narrow rubric, namely the category of “migrant worker poetry” and the identity-based appellation of “migrant worker poet.” This article approaches Zheng’s work through the lens of translation into English, and situates her and her writing within the larger literary and sociological circles in which she places herself. In so doing, this study attempts to provide a less restrictive and more nuanced view of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s oeuvre and overarching poetic aesthetic.

Toward QTPOC Community: A Theory in the Flesh, an Open Letter, a Closing Wound

Building on work by Ono, Calafell, and Simmons et al., who use the letter as autobiographical performance, this essay/letter explores trans and queer of color (QTPOC) community-building as rhetorically significant and ongoing labor. Using Moraga’s theory in the flesh, I draw from my own experience as a student of Third World feminisms and as a trans nonbinary queer Taiwanese American to query how QTPOC can address intracommunal conflict and harm. This application of intimate, interpersonal address also challenges the field(s) of rhetoric to reconsider the forms of writing given prominence as “rigorous” work as well as the implied audiences of those texts. What and how might we write if we prioritize the people we wish to call into community and the relationships we most value? How do we approach and evaluate work that centers one another’s survival? Although the open letter has become increasingly popular as a means of calling out, this essay spotlights the openness of this form, inviting responses that might facilitate community accountability and healing. Finally, this essay is a tribute to the QTPOC mentors and kin who have made my life possible, as well as to my QTPOC students, who give me courage to fight for worlds where we can all thrive.

Review: Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot, by Vivien Goldman

Review: <i>Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot</i>, by Vivien Goldman

Discourses on Conflict Women: Surfacing the Women in Marawi in News-mediated “Development as Discourse

Like myths in folklore, “development as discourse” constructs women. I argue that these representations of women, particularly in seven selected online articles produced by news media and development institutions about the recovery of Marawi City in the Philippines after nearly five months of conflict in 2017, obscure women’s genuine aspirations and actual participation in rehabilitation efforts. Using the lens of Third World feminism and postdevelopment thinking, I point out how these media discourses on development mythologize women. Parsing “development as discourse” is essential not only for exposing the contradictions in media representations of women but also for surfacing the possibilities of reinterpreting the myths. Critical writing and reading can demythologize and liberate conflict women and other silenced Others.

Вслед за Сюань-цзаном: о книге Э.А. Синецкой «“Путешествие на Запад” китайской женщины, или Феминизм в Китае»

The article is devoted to the problem of studying the history of feminism in China – from the activities of Christian missionaries to Chinese revolutionaries. The prerequisites and stages of the formation of the women's movement for their rights are considered on the example of the book “The Journey to the West” of a Chinese Woman or Feminism in China by Elvira A. Sinetskaya. This book actually presents the first for Russian science study of development of Chinese movement for women rights, as well as constitutes a try to describe its characteristic feature and to place it in the context of world feminism. The author begins from definition such core terms as “feminism”, “gender”, etc., and then considers the history of feminism beginning in China and possible causes of its appearance. She analyses an attitude to women in traditional Chinese society through the lens of family relationship, society and religion, which is viewed from historical perspective. The study is based on variety of sources, including fiction literature. E.A. Sinetskaya connects the first attempts of Chinese women to obtain equality of rights with spread of Cristianity, but in this paper another point of view on this problem is presented. Then Taoism gave equal rights and possibilities for its progeny regardless of sex and social status. In this religion one can find pantheon of female goddesses, etc. The issues of family and marriage, the right to education, the right to independent earnings and problems with the exercise of their rights by women are being raised in the article, it highlights the connection between the Chinese women’s movement and the problem of human freedom

Kręte ścieżki feminizmu

The world feminism started in the USA with the women’s struggle for a better pay and working conditions. Transplanted to Europe, and subsequently to the Soviet Union by the communist Clara Zetkin, it promptly died out there, since Soviet women had been made equal with men as for their duties. From then on for numerous decades the aspirations of women, including female artists in Western societies, proved incompatible with the expectations of women within the ‘Eastern Bloc’. This gap was visible already during the role-assigning in WW II, as well as in the means of paying tribute to women’s heroism and their symbolic, or maybe allegoric functioning in social awareness, the latter shaped both by the propaganda and the media and art that came from men’s ateliers. In the post-WW II decades, until the late 1980s, the differences in the approach to goals and means between the conventionally-conceived West and East were still visible. This can be traced on the example of the oeuvre of Polish women artists and their activity in the decades following WW II. It was only after the transformation that Polish women artists-feminists joined in the international discourse, yet maintaining references to their domestic social and political realities, again different from the West, at the same time overcoming subsequent cultural taboos rooted in the collective hypocrisies.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Not No Rapunzel

Abstract In this article, Laura Halperin reads Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street as a disidentificatory, revisionist, and intersectional collection of fairy tales. Halperin builds on critical scholarship about The House on Mango Street and fairy tales and inflects a U.S. Third World feminist analysis by examining how the narrative draws attention to the ways gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class are entwined. Rather than view the text as an outright rejection of the dubious premises and promises provided by fairy tales—individualist, (hetero)sexist, classist, and racist ones—she argues that the book references such tales at length to highlight their widespread power while also challenging their problematic ideologies. The simultaneous engagement with and contestation of these stories are what makes Cisneros’s text revisionist and disidentificatory, and Cisneros’s attention to the particular concerns faced by impoverished females of color makes the text intersectional. The two tales with which Cisneros most explicitly engages are “Cinderella” and “Rapunzel,” and the two central images in her collection are shoes and windows. The House on Mango Street also references other stories and rhymes, including “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Peter Pan,” “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Little House, just as it invokes Mexican (American) folklore and Greek and Roman mythology. Cisneros’s mimetic repetition of these narratives underscores their pervasiveness and allure while critiquing the myths they advance.

World Cup euphoria and feminist vindications. The public space of Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City, in 1986 and 2019

La ocupación masiva del emblemático Paseo de la Reforma, en la Ciudad de México, durante el Mundial de Fútbol 1986, con el país atravesando una fuerte crisis económica, fue un verdadero detonante para la diversificación de las manifestaciones en dicho espacio público. Asimismo, consolidó este escenario como el epicentro nacional de reivindicación de los derechos y demandas sociales de los mexicanos. En pleno siglo XXI, en medio de otra crisis, esta vez de violencia generalizada contra la mujer, el Paseo vuelve a resignificarse, abarcando a sus elementos más emblemáticos y tangibles, como el Ángel de la Independencia. Así, los monumentos se han vuelto los soportes de grafitis que luchan por trascender lo efímero al mantenerse sus reclamos vigentes. Este artículo propone una revisión histórica a los momentos más potentes de apropiación de este espacio público en 1986 y 2019, tomando como principal fuente de consulta al periódico local La Jornada. La metodología planteada ofrece la reconstrucción de una crónica contada en tiempo real, verdadera contribución para entender cómo el estallido de la ocupación de las calles del año mundialista arraigó la apropiación del espacio público en los años subsiguientes. No cabe duda de que las euforias mundialistas ganaron para la sociedad la confianza de retomar las calles, coyuntura aprovechada desde entonces y vigente en las reivindicaciones feministas actuales.

Poetic Negotiations: Salad Bowl Feminism in Selected Poetry of Fehmida Riaz, Pat Mora and Joan Loveridge-Sanbonmatsu

The research attempts to evaluate the depiction of women's oppression in specific postcolonial contexts at the hands of the interlocked power pattern formed by manifold factors like patriarchy, class conflict, religion, ethnicity and imperialism in the selected poetry of the renowned Pakistani poetess Fehmida Riaz, the Latino American Poetess Pat Mora, and the Japanese poetess Sanbonmatsu. It applies the theory of Postcolonial Feminism to bring to the fore the oppression of postcolonial women at the intersection of gender, class, race, religion and culture, hence, offering a critique of Western Feminist discourse and its slogan of sisterhood, which tends to erase heterogeneity in women's situations across the globe. The theory of Third World Feminism as well as the portrayals in these poetic compositions from a variety of postcolonial social formations, highlight the fact that postcolonial women are not a monolithic and archetypal suffering category as presented in Western discourses; instead, their resistant agency and subversive subjectivity also stands at the center of their creative writings.

Shifting education reform towards anti-racist and intersectional visions of justice: A study of pedagogies of organizing by a teacher of Color

ABSTRACT Background: Social movement scholarship tends to focus on macro-level processes of movement emergence, overlooking the day-to-day groundwork of marginalized social movement actors who contribute to and sustain large-scale action. Contributing to this gap in literature, we develop the construct of “pedagogies of organizing” to illuminate the micro-level dimensions through which social movements for educational justice emerge. Methods: Drawing on audio/video recordings, field notes, and artifacts as data, we examine the micro-interactional processes through which a teacher of Color, as union organizer, facilitates common cause and identity among teachers, students, and working people as social movement actors in the 2019 Los Angeles teacher strike. Findings: Our analysis details how broad-based social movements and teacher union’s organizing strategies influenced his practices. Guided by ethnic studies and third world feminism, this teacher simultaneously engaged multiple contexts—sometimes at tension with one another—to (re)create organizing strategies that sustained collective action and (re)centered anti-racist intersectional visions of educational justice. Contribution: We argue that this teacher’s culminating practices concurrently re-shaped and re-imagined present and future education reform efforts, and discuss how expansive possibilities of educational justice within a neoliberal context are embodied by teacher-activists of Color who critically and innovatively enact everyday organizing practices.

Palestinian Women’s Agency

As explained by Ellen Fleischmann, “crucial to understanding Third World feminisms is a notion of agency which works not through the logic of [gender] identification but through the logic of opposi...

Развитие гендерных исследований в мире и в Азербайджане

The large-scale development of gender research in the world took place in the 1960s. These studies in the post-Soviet space made serious changes in the world view, philosophy and social knowledge, which experienced a deep crisis after the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist methodology. In philosophy, a new era of postmodernism began, in which gender studies, along with synergy, ecology, a culture of peace and other non-classical directions, laid the foundations for the newest directions of knowledge. The development of the «second nature» - culture until today permanently carries out the process of segregation of women and men, establishing temporary norms of their behavior, consolidating certain values, in general worldviews of the two sexes, which differ significantly from each other, sometimes reaching a polar opposite. In this regard, gender relationships and roles often fit into the pattern of binary opposition, widely represented in historical types of knowledge, in different social and humanitarian sciences. In this context, it is possible to imagine an initial, somewhat simplified definition of gender, which should be understood as the scientific and philosophical direction of research into the totality and characteristics of the behaviour, roles and values of men and women in each particular society. The paper attempts to reconstruct the nodal moments of history, theory, methodology and practice of gender philosophy development in the world and Azerbaijan. The method of research in the article is selected historical and philosophical analysis. The scientific novelty consists in reconstruction of the stages of transformation of world feminism into gender research, summing up the results of the first stage of gender research development in Azerbaijan and determining the essential features of its second stage. The author believes that the first phase, which was educational and feminist, has now been completed. On the basis of the analysis undertaken, it is stated that the forthcoming second stage in Azerbaijan will involve a shift to a gender approach and a study of men ‘s issues, with a view to determining the necessary procedures for the establishment of true gender equality.