feminist studies
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2021 ◽  
Vol 2/2021 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Anna Kisiel

Marian MacAlpin, the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, is a “marvellously normal” (Atwood 207) young woman. However, at one point—coinciding with the acceptance of her partner’s marriage proposal—something goes utterly wrong. Her body, in an act of revolt, refuses to accept more and more food; it becomes an increasingly independent, as if exterior entity. While trying to fight off this impenetrable rebellion, Marian comes to face social norms she is supposed to comply with as a woman, finding them indeed indigestible. Written in 1965 and published in 1969, The Edible Woman touches upon issues that are still relevant for the contemporary reader. This article examines Margaret Atwood’s novel within the framework indebted to the recent shift of feminist studies towards fragility: a notion that no longer has to entail mere passivity or surrender. Aiming at an exploration of the theme of a fragile corporeal protest, this article juxtaposes the revolt of Marian’s body with such tropes and categories as fluidity and containment, abjection, agency, and becoming in order to trace the dual nature of corporeal resistance presented in the novel.


Islamology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Laurance Janssen Lok

The book under review is authored by Ludovic-Mohammed Zahed (b. 1977), a French scholar of social psychology and the founder of Homosexuels musulmans de France, an association for gay and queer Muslims in France. With his work Zahed, who identifies as a feminist, gay Muslim and holds a position of an imam in an inclusive mosque in Paris, seeks to contribute to the expanding body of academic work that engages with issues of gender and sexuality in Islam. As his sources of inspiration, he names Islamic feminist scholars Fatima Mernissi (e.g. 1987; 2003) and Amina Wadud (1999; 2008), as well as a prominent scholar on sexual diversity in Islam, Scott Siraj Kugle (2010; 2013). If Islamic feminist studies have already evolved into an established field that has its roots in the 1980s, topics of homosexuality and non-binary gender identity in Islam have begun attracting scholarly interest only relatively recently. Particularly in the last decade, there has been a visible growth in the number of published works that have engaged with these topics from theological, sociological, and historical perspectives (e.g., Roscoe & Murray, 1997; El-Rouayheb, 2009; Habib, 2010; Shah, 2018). Challenging the premise that homophobia and misogyny are in compliance with Islamic ethical values, Zadeh’s book clearly draws on the arguments developed in these trailblazing works.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Helena Moreno

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to make visible the connections libraries have to carceral systems and how library workers replicate carceral behavior through care.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses interdisciplinary research methods in the fields of library science, criminology, feminist studies, Black studies and abolition to examine the role of libraries as locations of carceral care.FindingsLibraries, through their history and funding as well as their roles within society as educators and social service providers, have the components necessary to act out carceral care; libraries by extension can and do participate in forms of carceral care.Originality/valueThere has been much work on carceral care in the fields of social work and education, but to date, there has been little to no scholarship on how libraries work within the landscape of carceral care. This article builds upon the work of others to help understand how it applies to libraries.


Author(s):  
Diane Wong

Decolonial and feminist studies scholars have long recognised the intricate ways in which the personal and academic are deeply interwoven and that the co-production of knowledge is essential for social transformation. This article examines the cultural organising of the Chinatown Art Brigade, an intergenerational collective of artists, activists, writers, educators and practitioners driven by the fundamental belief that cultural, material, and aesthetic modes of production have the power to combat gentrification. Specifically, I situate the collective within a longer lineage of Asian American cultural organising in Manhattan Chinatown and draw from years of movement-based research as a member of the collective. Incorporating personal reflection and interviews conducted with brigade members, this article speaks to how the themes of power, temporality and affectivity show up in movement-based research. How can we think more capaciously about academic and non-academic collaboration, to push the boundaries and explore new possibilities that honour the time, expertise and trauma of directly impacted communities? In reflecting on my work with the Chinatown Art Brigade, I discuss the nuances of intergenerational co-production of knowledge and interrogate how a feminist ethics of promiscuous care can uncover new possibilities for collaboration between cultural workers, organisers and movement-based scholars within and beyond the neoliberal academy.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Charles

In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion, Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient


2021 ◽  
pp. 096673502110554
Author(s):  
Gurmeet Kaur

Tara is both a Buddhist and Hindu deity. She is widely worshipped in the esoteric branch of Buddhism: Vajrayana. Even in the exile, Tibetan refugees follow the practice and rituals associated with Tara. Lamentably, she has been given an auxiliary and secondary role in comparison to male deities. Various feminist scholars have begun to look at aspects of society through the lens of gender. They have been at the forefront of studying gender roles and its psychological consequences for those who try to abide by them. In religious studies, especially in Asian context, many of these discourses are difficult to perceive because they were unconsciously appropriated as truth by the people of the society in which they circulated as an inviolable aspect of the worlds or as nature. This study is an attempt to examine the representation of Goddess in various ancient texts as essential to the study of the divine feminine. This hybrid study merges traditional Indology with feminist studies, and is intended for specialists in the field, for readers with interest in Buddhist, and for scholars of Gender studies, cultural historians, and sociologists.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 118-124
Author(s):  
Dr O. T. Poongodi

One of the sparkling stars in the galaxy of Indian writers, Gita Mehta is the brightest. Her novels are written with Indian perspectives and they are explorations of the tension generated by the east-west encounters. Her novel A River Sutra is a colourful fictional account of India that mirrors Indian history and culture. It connects Indian mythology with various depictions of love in its many aspects. It told through a pen-pusher and his encounter with six pilgrims on the banks of the Narmada. In Western Feminist studies, the woman is always portrayed with a quest for freedom from the urban exploitative society to nature. It is appealing to determine that this concept receives a new dimension in a different cultural context. In this novel, Mehta has shifted her focus from the interactions between India and the west to exploring the diversity of cultures within India. Gita Mehta uses the Narmada as the thread, which holds together the main story and the six sub-stories. The present paper discusses in detail the theory of eco-criticism and it aims at highlighting an understanding of various terms like green studies and nature studies, as well as describes in fair detail, the different subfields of eco-criticism, namely, Cultural ecology, Eco-feminism and Gyno-Ecology.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 130-145
Author(s):  
Emilia Nodżak

The present study is theoretically located in the field of critical feminist studies of the representation of women in the mass media. It discusses the ways in which working women characters construct and express their occupational identity in selected American primetime TV dramas of the early 21st century. The observed strategies, which range from highly restricted self-expression to unbridled sartorial liberty, appear to be heavily correlated with the prestige of the presented occupations and their levels of masculinization/feminization. Moreover, the self-limiting sartorial choices of high-achieving professional women, frequently containing their femininity, result from the competitive nature of prestigious yet traditionally male-gendered occupations. However, it is also pointed out that working women are generally depicted as determined to accentuate the physical aspects of their femininity regardless of the established dress code or traditional gendering of their occupations. Thus, the sartorial choices made by the female characters at the workplace serve in the analyzed TV shows as symbolic manifestations of women’s growing confidence as players on the job market in their own right.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (20) ◽  
pp. 11157
Author(s):  
Andrea Vera-Gajardo

The low participation of women in STEM fields is well-known and has been well documented around the world. Closing this gap plays a central role in achieving a more equal society and thus sustainable development. The gender gap in STEM must be understood as a complex problem which can be explained through various factors (cultural, economic, and social) and therefore requires the efforts of different disciplines and actors. This article proposes that the hegemonic masculinity theory together with the concept of belonging, understood from the point of view of feminist studies and cultural studies, can contribute a necessary conceptual framework for understanding the causes behind the gender gap in engineering.


2021 ◽  

Feminist studies have rejected the assumption according to which gender violence is an individual or private issue that has to be primarily approached from a psychological perspective. They have underscored the link between gender violence and other factors of social inequalities. Feminists contend that men use violence as a means to exercise power over women. They have defended the idea according to which violence against women is a form of political violence. Marxist/materialist feminisms have argued that the dichotomy between the private and the public spheres structures power relations between women and men. They have shown that the private/public distinction depoliticizes the private sphere. Simultaneously, they have demonstrated that the private sphere—as much as the public domain—is a political construction which serves to reinforce women’s subordination and their social, political and economic exploitation. Women’s relegation to domestic tasks and their responsibility for care work reinforce the norm of political participation and economic resources as a male privilege. The concept of political violence locates politics in the public domain, and links violence with armed conflicts, social movements, and wars. By contrast, feminist studies situate the production of political violence within domains of life which were previously dismissed as irrelevant for politics: the home, the neighborhood, the intimate space, interpersonal relations and everyday life. Feminist theories make visible the political nature of violence against women. They consider that violence against women takes various forms, occurs in all social spaces, and is closely intertwined with gender hierarchies. Violence against women is an instrument for maintaining women’s oppression and men’s privileges in societies. The political economy of patriarchy and gendered inequalities makes women more vulnerable and fuels violence against women. Furthermore, women of color and queer feminists have highlighted the importance of other categories of identity such as race, class, and sexuality in the way gender violence is deployed. A focus on gender, instead of women, enables to bring nuances to monolithic representations of masculinity and femininity by demonstrating how the masculine and the feminine constitute socially constructed sets of attributes, behaviors, and roles that are constantly negotiated and changing over time and history. An intersectional approach to gender is therefore necessary to understand how violence differently targets and affects women of color and queer people.


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