Suicide justice: Adopting Indigenous feminist methods in settler suicidology

White settler colonies around the world have long reported disproportionately high rates of Indigenous suicides, a consequence of the continuing violence of imperialism. This article posits a need for interdisciplinary approaches to address this crisis and therefore turns to humanist methods developed in Indigenous and feminist scholarship. I analyze texts from U.S. psychologist Edwin Shneidman to rearticulate their relationship to what I call settler suicidology. I then evoke literary critic Eve K. Sedgwick’s reparative reading method to reimagine suicide prevention as suicide justice, reading the novel There There by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) to advocate for distributive justice as a new approach to Indigenous suicide crises. My term suicide justice names increasing accountability between settler suicide workers and the communities they seek to serve.

Can ecological relationships be grown indoors? A re-storying of plant-child relations

This multispecies ethnography case study uses poststructural and posthuman frameworks to question developmenta standards, classification, and anthropocentric thinking in early childhood education. This research re-stories the relationships between plants and eleven preschool children as they share an indoor play area. Situated in what is now known as settler colonial Toronto, this research suggests small scale ways to re-narrate nature-child relationships in an era of climate change. Using writing style and findings, the research uses feminist methods to question what is included as valuable knowledge within the field of early childhood education.

Can ecological relationships be grown indoors? A re-storying of plant-child relations

This multispecies ethnography case study uses poststructural and posthuman frameworks to question developmenta standards, classification, and anthropocentric thinking in early childhood education. This research re-stories the relationships between plants and eleven preschool children as they share an indoor play area. Situated in what is now known as settler colonial Toronto, this research suggests small scale ways to re-narrate nature-child relationships in an era of climate change. Using writing style and findings, the research uses feminist methods to question what is included as valuable knowledge within the field of early childhood education.

The Mythical Courtesan

This article interrogates how and why courtesan identities are simultaneously embraced and disavowed by Brahman dancers. Using a combination of ethnographic and critical feminist methods, which allow the author to toggle between the past and the present, between India and the United States, and between film analysis and the dance studio, the author examines the cultural politics of the romanticized and historical Indian dancer—the mythical courtesan. The author argues that the mythical courtesan was called into existence through film cultures in the early twentieth century to provide a counterpoint against which a modern and national Brahmanical womanhood could be articulated. The author brings together a constellation of events that participated in the construction of Indian womanhood, especially the rise of sound film against the backdrop of growing anticolonial and nationalist sentiments in early twentieth-century South India. The author focuses on films that featured an early twentieth-century dancer-singer-actress, Sundaramma. In following her career through Telugu film and connecting it to broader conversations about Indian womanhood in the 1930s and 1940s, the author traces the contours of an affective triangle between three mutually constituting emotional points: pleasure, shame, and disgust.

A Path to Transformation: Asking “The Woman Question” in International Law

Methods matter, and the discussion over feminist methods in international law is an important one. As Kathrine Bartlett famously noted, “thinking about method is empowering.” It makes us more aware of the nature of what we do and what we aim to improve in the law. Consequently, we can act more effectively when we examine legal structures and do it with a stronger sense of commitment towards our feminist work. Methods are also the fundamental means by which we produce “valid knowing.” The discussion of feminist methods in international law is one that engages with the combination of rules and assumptions that shape and delimit our views about the exclusion of women’s experiences from this doctrine. Methods determine the ways within those limits by which we aim to assert truth claims, determine our possibilities and conclusions, and establish the grounds for legal reform. Our chosen method defines what we consider as evidence and what we accept as proof. Yet, it cannot guarantee a particular outcome or even the right one. Rather, it provides a sense of discipline in our analysis.

Desiring Futures

In this paper, I analyze the animated television series Puella Magi Madoka Magica based on a variety of literary critical methods: neo-noir criticism, feminist epistemology and studies of technoscience, and discussion of utopia/dystopia imagination. My focus is on the depiction of desire and hope, as two interconnected but potentially conflicting concepts, in Madoka Magica which presents different philosophical edifices related to them as one central narrative tension. On the other hand, the feminist methods I utilize will demonstrate how the “genre subversion” the series introduce can be read alongside with not only magical girls’ struggle against their fates in the fiction but the real power structures and asymmetries in (post-)modern society. By highlighting the difficulties to resist a future and ethics imposed from the standpoint of dominant social groups as well as the attempt to solve such impasse by the series, the paper argues that Madoka Magica, while not committing itself to the creation of a radical alternative to the existent political or economic systems, has nonetheless affirmed the possibility and importance to have hope for futures that are yet to be imagined.

Queer Theory and Feminist Methods: A Review

Feminist research methodologies seek to conduct research that aligns with the political and social project of feminism. These research methodologies specifically focus on women's voice, experiences, and contributions, center a feminist perspective and adopt premises and assumptions of a feminist worldview. Some of these premises—raising critical consciousness, encouraging social change, and emphasizing a diversity of human experience related to gender at the intersection of race, sexuality, and other categories of identity—align with the premises and assumptions of queer theory. Since both feminist and queer research methods aim to centralize the experiences of people marginalized under racist, sexist, heterosexist, patriarchal, and imperialist conditions, both methods seek decentralization of and liberation from such experiences in research methodologies. While this paper will briefly discuss these important points of alignment between feminist methods and queer theory, the main purpose will be to distinguish these two broad approaches and to outline what queer theory additionally brings to the table.