Aging Bodies in Paradise: A Feminist Analysis of Key West’s Fantasy Fest

Cultural constructions of gender and age may be challenged within politically and socially progressive leisure environments, like Key West, that promote social deviance and out-group acceptance. However, this possibility receives limited scholarly attention. Addressing this gap, our study applies a framework that highlights gender and age as performances and uses interviews ( n = 77) collected in 2017 and 2018 at Key West’s Fantasy Fest, an annual carnivalesque event characterized by body displays of nudity, body paint, and costume. In this first systematic study of Fantasy Fest, data analysis revealed four themes centering on gender, age, and bodies—displaying diverse bodies; judging bodies; limiting body displays; and reinterpreting body-related norms. Key West’s cultural ideology of inclusion allowed both young and old participants to perform gender and age in ways that contributed to a more liberating environment celebrating a range of bodies—though performances were constrained by inequalities. Bodies, especially women’s, were subjected to judgments of their sexual appeal that led some, especially older women, to limit their displays. Our findings, nevertheless, suggest progressive, carnivalesque leisure environments’ potential, however fleeting or bounded, to disrupt everyday performances and broaden conceptions of gendered and aging bodies by reinterpreting the norms surrounding them.

The Portrayal of Women: Feminist Analysis of A Hologram for The King

This research paper attempts to investigate the representation of women, their character and their rights in Dave Eggers’ novel A Hologram for the King (2012), according to the feministic approach to literary works. Gender bias has been reflected in many literary works from classical canonical works to contemporary literary ones and has been dealt with in many critical pieces. The theme of self-objectification, which is closely tied to gender bias to some extent, has not been analyzed, independently and fully, especially in the literature of the post-colonial era. The current study scrutinizes the writer’s portrayal of women characters in order to uncover the replication of the same stereotypes and gender bias categories against women, dominant in the literary works before the post-colonial era. Based on the feminist approach, A Hologram for the King is identified as a misogynist work although it is written in postmodern era. The author of the novel, is inspired by men’s superiority, creates a completely distorted image of women by introducing them as people who turn themselves into objects of pleasure for men. The novelist further deprives women of their rights and misrepresents them as unprincipled humans, disparaging them as naïve and sexually licentious creatures. After all, this study becomes a means of writing back against marginalization of women, in their picturization and their subordination to men.

Mobilizing BIPOC Student Power against Liberalism at Soka University of America: A Collection of Voices

We write as a collective of BIPOC undergraduate activist students/organizers and contingent/tenured professors dedicated to Black, Third World, and Indigenous liberation through a feminist analysis at Soka University of America (SUA). We focus our critique on liberalism as a dominant political paradigm that has solidified the reign of empire and it’s necropolitical grips on our communities within and without SUA, our SLAC. We highlight through a brief chronology of the epistemic and physical struggles against hegemonic power exercised by our university the ways in which liberalism acts as counterrevolutionary ideology and offer critical reflections/interventions on our struggles against white supremacy at our SLAC, as well as on how our university administration utilizes “liberalism” as a technology of imperialism. We come together to resist empire from where we stand. We believe in the pedagogical possibilities of resistance.

A Post-Structural Feminist Analysis of Eating Disorders Intervention Research

Through an epistemological stance of post-structural feminism, this conceptual paper explores the use of language within eating disorders (ED) intervention articles, and the problematic narratives and power dynamics that are reinforced through this discourse. The paper begins with a vignette coupled with reflexive analysis of the authors’ experiences within a hospital-based ED unit. The authors then engage in a post-structural feminist analysis to discuss how language within ED intervention research relay problematic narratives of: (1) the individual with an ED as passively, not actively, engaged in care; (2) that their experiences can be captured and categorized; and (3) that measurement based scientific knowledge is more valuable than the lived experiences of clients. Overall, the authors argue that these narratives not only shape how social work researchers think of EDs, but also what we think of those with EDs. These themes also signal a larger power dynamic that continuously favours the epistemic value of researchers’ knowledge over that of the client’s, which runs contrary to the guiding principles of client-centered care in social work. To address these critiques, the authors recommend that social work researchers adopt an eco-social phenomenological approach informed by post-structural feminism when conducting ED intervention research.

Masculinities Theory as Impetus for Change in Feminism and Law

“Masculinities studies” refers to a body of theory and scholarship by gender experts in various fields of social science that has enriched the feminist analysis of law. In drawing on and incorporating masculinities theories into their work, feminist legal scholars have defined “masculinities” as a structure that gives men as a group power over women as a group, a set of “masculine” practices designed to maintain group power, and the engagement in or “doing” of these masculine practices. Although masculinities studies originated in fields outside law, legal scholars have adopted insights raised by masculinities scholars, combined with those of feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, to develop a legal theory of masculinities that proposes new legal interpretations and policies that better correspond to the lived experiences of persons of different genders, races, and classes. This chapter explores how masculinities research has influenced legal feminism in the United States.