Ethnic Feminicide

This paper explores the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls epidemic in Washington State and how the state has failed to address the issue, underlining its complicity and impunity. It takes into account that this epidemic is part of a global crisis of femicide, drawing specifically on the Latin American term, feminicidios, or feminicide, the gender-based murders of women and the state’s impunity in these cases. This paper then names another form of femicide, ethnic feminicde, arguing that the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls epidemic falls under this crisis because of the underlying systemic racism and sexism in state institutions. This paper uses the indigenous methodologies of reframing and intervention, as described by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, to explore this epidemic, reframing it into a transnational feminist issue, not just and indigenous issue, and asking how Washington state, and America as a whole, can intervene, with indigenous leaders taking charge.

Resilience is a feminist issue: A response to Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and the Politics of Resilience in the context of Britain during the coronavirus pandemic

This article responds to Angela McRobbie’s latest book Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (2020) which is a characteristically feminist, state-of-the-nation account of intersections of gender, media and culture in neoliberal Britain. It first situates the book in the context of McRobbie’s larger body of work in the field of feminist media and cultural studies, before then going on to address some of the issues that arise from essays themselves, thinking in particular about the notion of ‘resilience’ in relation to our year (and counting) spent living through the Covid-19 pandemic, and how some of the issues McRobbie deals with have taken on new levels of urgency in the context of the coronavirus crisis. The principal focus of my response is McRobbie’s interrogation of the extent to which and the ways in which working class women (especially those of colour) have been deleteriously impacted by the logic of neoliberalism that continues to operate under the ideologically disingenuous banner of ‘resilience.’