Young Feminists Research Articles

NGOisation and generational divides in Serbia's feminist movement

This paper argues that NGOisation is a structural factor that fundamentally altered the field of feminist activism in Serbia during the 1990s so that new members of NGOs faced established hierarchies that favoured the older generation. Drawing on 14 in-depth interviews with young Serbian feminists from five key organisations, I conducted a narrative analysis that unearthed three main viewpoints. First, there is a perception that NGOisation makes “failing solidarity” possible – in relation both to other organisations and to younger members of the same NGO – but does not prescribe it. The ultimate culprit is therefore seen to be the older generation and leads to self-exclusion from activism, or at least a partial withdrawal. The second viewpoint takes a more understanding stance. The older generation's unwillingness to give younger feminists more space is regarded not as a choice but as a logical outcome of NGOisation. These younger feminists are neither disappointed nor angry, but they draw the conclusion that feminist activism needs to change. They therefore turn to a grassroots festival that gives them the sense of equality and ownership they need. Finally, there are also young feminists for whom neither NGOisation nor the generational divide are an issue. Their narrative suggests that there can be an absence of divisions as long as young feminists embrace the role of learners who strictly follow the line of their leader. Overall, this research shows the contribution NGOisation theory can make to generational analysis. It further highlights for the first time that generational divides exist within Serbian activism, but that they are not necessarily connected to NGOisation, and that there are also alternatives.

Conversation with FRIDA - Young Feminist Fund Activists from the Global South

Conversation with FRIDA - Young Feminist Fund Activists from the Global South

“I (Don’t) Want To Be Seen: A Performative Auto-Ethnography of the Young Feminist Artist in Public”

In this article, I bring together three auto-ethnographic vignettes, written between 2011 and 2014, that converge around issues of public space, feminist cultural production, technology, and physical exposure in Vancouver and Berlin. Drawing from performance studies frameworks, I position both the rituals of everyday life (like ordering an Americano from a coffeeshop in Vancouver) and moments of explicitly making an artwork (like collaborating on a performance for Vancouver’s LIVE 2011 biennale) as performative. What began as an attempt to read a Vancouver coffeeshop through a fairly straightforward, auto-ethnographic, de Certeauian framework during my Masters research evolved into a scene of sexual harassment and assault, and this article is both a trace of, and a testament to, the challenges that young women-identifying artists and scholars continue to come up against when they do their work in public.

“Your Young Lesbian Sisters”

Drawing on letters and essays written by teenage girls in the 1970s and early 1980s, and building on my historical research on same-sex desiring girls and girlhoods in the postwar United States, I ask how teenage girls in the 1970s and early 1980s pursued answers to questions about their feelings, practices, and identities and expressed their subjectivities as young lesbian feminists. These young writers, I argue, recognized that they benefitted from more resources and role models than did earlier generations, but they objected to what they saw as adult lesbians’ ageism, caution, and neglect. In reaching out to sympathetic straight and lesbian public figures and publications, girls found new ways to combat the persistent isolation and oppression faced by youth whose autonomy remained severely restricted by familial, educational, and legal structures.

Rethinking the Female Body: A Phenomenological Account

Throughout much of human history, the detachment of the mind from the body seems to be the conspicuous antagonism that permeates the Western philosophy. René Descarte's decisive premise « I think, therefore I am » usurped the body's role in rational thought, relegating it into a state where it has almost no relevance in philosophical discourse. As a result of this exclusion, women were seen as creatures of nature and emotion and therefore deterritorialized from the realm of the rational as their bodies are intrinsically associated with their identities which are much more likely to be marked by defectiveness. Because phenomenology is concerned with the lived experience of subjects, it serves as a major impetus for understanding subjective embodiment. In this vein, Maurice Merleau Ponty, a 20th century French philosopher, argues that the body is an essential agent in the world since it is the implied sine qua none for making any orientation when the subject perceives. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau Ponty dissects how embodiment is experienced by humans in a universal account assuming that the male body remains an asset of all types of embodiment. This paper juxtaposes Merleau Ponty and philosophy's deliberate omission of the female body. I claim that the superiority of the mind/reason over the body/emotion is used as a pretext to separate men and women. Drawing on Iris Marison Young's feminist phenomenology, I contend that Merleau Ponty's phenomenological account is so problematic since he merely reversed the binary while still maintaining the privileged status of the male subject. I call attention to the essential need to interrogate the sexual difference when addressing the issue of embodiment. Because bringing back the body to the philosophical interest seems to offer "an Archimedean point of stability” in a cultural condition where, according to Sarah Coakly, no "universal ‘grand narrative'” is plausible anymore, I reflect on the essential account of the liberating potential of the female body drawing on my moral convictions.

Feminist menstrual activism in South Korea (1999–2012)

ABSTRACTThis study begins with questions about the politics of menstruation that have been unspoken and neglected issues in Korean feminist history. Menstruation first appeared in social discourse in Korean society, raised by a few women’s groups in the midst of the new feminist movement. This study examines three activities of the movement: the “Menstruation Festival,” “Pad Up–Down Campaign,” and “Bloodsisters Solidarity” for evaluation as historical cases of Korean menstrual activism, 1999–2012. It considers the strategies and differences in sociocultural contexts wherein concerns about menstruation converge with the feminist agenda. Characteristics of menstrual activism in Korea surfaced in issues pertaining to women’s health advocacy, Young Feminist cultural feminism, radical feminism and eco-feminism surrounding the “alternative menstrual pad” movement. These processes of the menstrual activism of grassroots women’s groups are examined here and reveal that the dominance of consumerism and the androcentric, gender-discriminatory culture are related to the gender politics of menstruation in South Korea.

Alone Together

Alone Together Gardner McFall (bio) Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage Grace Schulman Turtle Point Press www.turtlepointpress.com 224 pages; Print, $17.00 Like a Marc Chagall painting, in which a couple is the focus, often floating between earth and sky, surrounded by other suggestive images, poet Grace Schulman’s memoir, Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage, keeps her long marriage to Jerome (Jerry) Schulman in focus, while incorporating other elements. Numerous pictures merge in her account: a picture of Greenwich Village in the fifties when Schulman came of age and the picture of a young feminist, informed by her mother’s teaching and Jean-Paul Sartre’s writing on freedom and choice, unwilling to be trapped in “the snare of family life.” She also depicts the literary landscape in New York City across her professional life as a professor at Baruch College (CUNY), director of the 92nd Street Y, and poetry editor of the Nation. However, it is Schulman’s picture of her marriage, forged early on, lasting a lifetime with a separation of more than a decade (during which time they still saw each other though they lived apart) that colors and connects the whole, yielding a compelling emotional resonance. The subtitle for Shulman’s book “Portrait of a Marriage” suits the author’s intent and accomplishment well. Epigraphs at the start of her book from Novalis and Marianne Moore, whose poem “Marriage” also inspires the book’s title, point the way. For Schulman, her felicitous meeting of Jerry in Washington Square leads to early love, a marriage proposal after the first week, marriage vows two years following, and a fifty-seven-year marriage shot through with joys, disappointments, and betrayal, and, finally, the pain of a beloved mate’s death in 2016. Schulman candidly explores the tensions within their relationship and the transcending power of love to mend fissures, enabling not only happiness, but, in some ways, a truer union. By example, the book seems to ask: what union is meaningful if it is not tested? While Schulman’s marriage is specific to her and while she makes no claims about marriage generally, readers may glimpse something familiar in her finely rendered account, especially the human reluctance to speak about difficult matters, even with the person to whom one is closest, and the joy, if lucky, to find marriage bonds strengthened over time. There’s no doubt that whatever challenges the pair faced (his infertility, the tragic death of Jerry’s mother in a car crash, and his continuing affair outside the marriage after they resumed living together), their mutual love and respect remained mysteriously intact. Grace and Jerry seem to have been perfectly suited to each other with respective professional goals and shared interests in music, travel, and friends. Raised on New York’s upper west side, Schulman’s development was informed by the company of her parents’ friends, including then director of MOMA’s exhibitions, Monroe Wheeler; Gotham Book Mart founder, Frances Steloff; and, most significantly, Marianne Moore, who became an influence in her life and whose comment on her girlhood poems is as funny as it is honest and kind: “The flawless typing shows the work to its very best advantage and is in itself is a great pleasure.” As a young doctor and researcher at Cornell Medical College who went on to groundbreaking research on the influenza virus and vaccine, Jerry impressed Schulman with “his intense gaze of an El Greco saint” and “his relentlessly inquisitive mind.” He was also her fiercest encourager, shielding her from rejection slips in the mail, listening to drafts of her poems, even promising to stay alive to see her accept the Poetry Society of America’s 2016 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, which he did. As she writes: “We cheered each other’s dreams.” The young woman who feared marriage and was conflicted after nursing Jerry through an early bout of flu (“Would I be tending this man forever, at the expense of my freedom?”) comes to see in tending him during his final years of illness that: “It provided a closeness I’d never had with anyone...

Critical Race Theory and Questioning Whiteness: Young Feminists Speak Out Against Race and Class Privilege

Critical Race Theory and Questioning Whiteness: Young Feminists Speak Out Against Race and Class Privilege

Critical Race Theory and Questioning Whiteness: Young Feminists Speak Out Against Race and Class Privilege

Critical Race Theory and Questioning Whiteness: Young Feminists Speak Out Against Race and Class Privilege

Reclaiming culture, resisting co-optation: young feminists confronting the rising right

ABSTRACTThis article presents two case studies of young feminist resistance to the rising phenomena of fascisms and fundamentalisms. The first shows young feminists organising in Kenya, and focuses on the battle to repeal a colonial Penal Code criminalising homosexuality. The second, from Brazil, highlights how young Afro-Brazilian feminists are resisting attacks against their religions in a context of racism, rising evangelical fundamentalism, and a political shift to the right. The authors draw on the experience, analysis, and perspectives gained as three young feminists who work at the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), an international feminist organisation which, among other areas, puts emphasis on young feminist activism and feminist responses to religious fundamentalisms and fascisms.

A young feminist new order: an exploration of why young feminists organise the way they do

ABSTRACTThis article draws on FRIDA/The Young Feminist Fund's experience of young feminist activism. It explores a range of examples from around the world of how young feminists are reinventing and building different institutions based on new cultures of leadership, greater emphasis on the collective, and more holistic compensation for activist work. These strategies are needed in a world where progressive activism for social justice is under fire: not only from right-wing movements, but also from development that is seen widely as apolitical, yet fails to challenge patriarchal elites who benefit from inequality and poverty.

Young feminists working globally to end violence against women and girls: key challenges and ways forward

ABSTRACTDrawing from our experience as young feminists working with an emerging feminist advocacy collective focused on addressing violence against women and girls (VAWG), our article focuses on some of the key challenges young feminists face while advocating for feminist-informed programming in efforts to address VAWG in humanitarian and development settings. Drawing on our own experience as young feminists to prevent and address VAWG in a patriarchal world, we see ourselves as walking a tightrope. On one hand, our radical activism is instrumental in achieving a world where no one is left behind. Yet we are often told, in direct and indirect ways, to dial down the feminism, to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘intersectional’ with limited meaningful accountability to women and girls. We conclude by offering a set of recommendations aimed at advancing young feminist activism in VAWG work and retaining a feminist space that is political, while working in partnership with other movements and actors.

Young feminists’ creative strategies to challenge the status quo: a view from FRIDA

ABSTRACTYoung feminist organising is springing up in all corners of the globe – from Mexico to Morocco to Malaysia – powered by brave young women, girls and trans* youth who are creating the change the world needs. FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund – is a young feminist-led organisation that began in 2010. It aims to provide young feminist leaders with the resources they need to amplify their voices and initiatives as well as bring attention to their work. This article offers a view from four young feminists involved in FRIDA's work, sharing some of the innovative and creative strategies currently being used to challenge the status quo.

Repoliticising women’s rights in development: young African feminisms at the cutting edge

ABSTRACTTwenty-five years on from the UN Conferences in Cairo (1994) and Beijing (1995) with their radical vision of women’s rights – including sexual and reproductive rights – this article considers the challenges to women’s rights from the perspective of young feminists connected to FEMNET. It draws on recent research with FEMNET members, partners, allies, and staff at the secretariat in Nairobi, Kenya. The article has been developed through collaboration and feminist sisterhood with the ATHENA Initiative, a feminist collective working on gender equality, HIV/AIDS, and sexual and reproductive health and rights. The article reflects in particular on the role of young African feminists in reclaiming the women’s rights agenda from political actors who many of us consider to have hijacked the concept and language of ‘women’s rights’ and ‘gender equality’, to further different goals. These concepts have been depoliticised and professionalised, at a time when many of the rights of young women are increasingly under threat.

Reclaim, resist, reframe: re-imagining feminist movements in the 2010s

ABSTRACTThe study analyses the intersection of youth movements and feminist movements that has emerged in India since the 2010s. Focusing on five movements and campaigns, the study analyses the commonalities across them in terms of their mobilisation, methods of protest, and their goals. With their sites of mobilisation spanning online and offline spaces, these movements have had significant impact on public discourse on women’s rights and bodily autonomy, and systemic inequality and discrimination against women in university spaces. The study argues that we are currently seeing the real-time development of a wave of young feminist movements in India that is distinct in its methods and spaces of mobilisation, protest strategies, and membership, and has rapidly grown from feminism ‘lite’ into one that is highly political and conceptually nuanced in the face of significant backlash from oppositional forces as well as potential supporters.

Young Feminist Activists in Present-Day China: A New Feminist Generation?

This article studies post-2000 Chinese feminist activism from a generational perspective. It operationalises three notions of generation— generation as an age cohort, generation as a historical cohort, and “political generation”—to shed light on the question of generation and generational change in post-socialist Chinese feminism. The study shows how the younger generation of women have come to the forefront of feminist protest in China and how the historical conditions they live in have shaped their feminist outlook. In parallel, it examines how a “political generation” emerges when feminists of different ages are drawn together by a shared political awakening and collaborate across age.

Performing Loitering: Feminist Protest in the Indian City

Why Loiter is a performative, feminist protest group based in Mumbai. Using strategies developed from the 2011 book of the same name, Why Loiter brings women together in public spaces to loiter as a way to normalize the sight of women taking pleasure in doing nothing. The group is part of a growing movement of young feminists using performative protests to reclaim public spaces for women.

Early activism and work arrangements of young feminists in Mexico City

ABSTRACTThe study investigates the relationship between the activism and later work life of young Mexican feminist activists in the context of social movements’ institutionalization and the precarious employment situation. Using the biographical narratives of fifteen feminists in Mexico City who were core activists during the period of high mobilization of the abortion rights movement from 2007 to 2009, this study aims to answer two questions: How does activism impact contemporary activists’ work life in an era of professionalized and institutionalized social movements? And how do their feminist identities and practices differ according to the workplace? The results reveal that (1) young feminists joined women's movement institutions through their activism, although those employment opportunities were unstable, and (2) they used reflexive strategies to manage their feminist identities amidst the uncertainty and to reconcile their work life conditions and their feminist activist identities.

Movilizaciones y oportunidades políticas en Nicaragua. Un debate desde el feminismo

En este texto se abordan las estructuras que ofrecen oportunidades políticas en Nicaragua y a partir de ellas se analizan los procesos de repolitización de los jóvenes. Se discuten las repercusiones de la despolitización electoral y de la repolitización sandinista, y la ausencia de oportunidades para las mujeres. Existen tensiones y posibilidades para la juventud, que no se identifica con el proyecto sandinista actual aunque reconoce la Revolución Sandinista como un referente importante. Se parte de un trabajo etnográfico realizado en tres ciudades,Managua, León y Chinandega, durante las elecciones presidenciales de 2016, y de entrevistas con jóvenes feministas.

“Stumbling Upon Feminism”

In this article, we discuss a case study of a feminist society in a girls’ secondary school in England, highlighting how teenage girls use social media to combat sexism. Considering the recent growth of feminist societies in UK schools, there is still a lack of research documenting how young feminists use social media’s feminist content and connections. Addressing this gap, we draw on interviews and social media analyses to examine how girls navigate feminisms online and in school. Despite their multifaceted use of social media, the girls in our research undervalued digital feminism as valid or valued, in large part because of dismissive teacher and peer responses. We conclude by suggesting that schools need to cultivate social media as a legitimate pedagogical space by developing informed adult support for youth engagement with social justice-oriented online content.