Feminist theory, method, and praxis: Toward a critical consciousness for family and close relationship scholars

Feminism provides a worldview with innovative possibilities for scholarship and activism on behalf of families and intimate relationships. As a flexible framework capable of engaging with contentious theoretical ideas and the urgency of social change, feminism offers a simultaneous way to express an epistemology (knowledge), a methodology (the production of knowledge), an ontology (one’s subjective way of being in the world), and a praxis (the translation of knowledge into actions that produce beneficial social change). Feminist family science, in particular, advances critical, intersectional, and queer approaches to examine the uses and abuses of power and the multiple axes upon which individuals and families are privileged, marginalized, and oppressed in diverse social contexts. In this paper, I embrace feminism as a personal, professional (academic), and political project and use stories from my own life to illuminate broader social-historical structures, processes, and contexts associated with gender, race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, nationality, and other systems of social stratification. I provide a brief history and reflections on contemporary feminist theory and activism, particularly from the perspective of my disciplinary affiliation of feminist family science. I address feminism as an intersectional perspective through three themes: (a) theory: defining a critical feminist approach, (b) method: critical feminist autoethnographic research, and (c) praxis: transforming feminist theory into action. I conclude with takeaway messages for incorporating reflexivity and critical consciousness raising to provoke thought and action in the areas of personal, professional, and political change.

Shaheen Bagh: Making sense of (re)emerging “Subaltern” feminist political subjectivities in hashtag publics through critical, feminist interventions

In this article, we examine protest of India’s passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Registry of Citizens (NRC) which spurred instances of physical and digital protest. We study the intersections of gender, political subjectivities, and digital activism among anti-CAA-NRC activists, specifically the “Women of Shaheen Bagh.” We discuss our data collection methods, description, and analysis of the protests in the context of larger questions, including how critical, feminist researchers may engage with data tools and how forms of gendered, transnational protest are mediated and represented via individual images, texts, and videos that make up social media data. We illuminate the formation of political subjectivities in the context of transnational, digital protest movements by re-appropriating computational and data tools. This article seeks to demonstrate an interdisciplinary engagement between critical, feminist approaches to knowledge and subject formation and data science approaches to social network analysis and data visualization techniques.

Feminists against Fascism: The Indian Female Muslim Protest in India

This article explores contestations around ideas of India, citizenship, and nation from the perspective of Indian Muslim female university students in Delhi. In December 2019, the Hindu majoritarian government introduced new citizenship legislation. It caused widespread distress over its adverse implications for Muslims and a large section of socio-economically deprived populations. In response, millions of people, mainly from Dalit, Adivasi, and Bahujan backgrounds, took to the streets to protest. Unprecedentedly, young Muslim female students and women emerged at the forefront of the significant public debate. This situation disrupted the mainstream perception of oppressed Muslim women lacking public voice and agency. Drawing on the narratives of the Indian Muslim female students who participated in these protests, this article highlights their conceptions of, and negotiations with, the idea of India. In doing so, this article reflects on the significance of critical feminist protest as a form of “public pedagogy” for citizenship education as a powerful antidote to a supremacist, hypermasculine, and vigilante idea of India.

Critical political geographies of slow violence and resistance

Engaging Rob Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence, this special issue provides a critical framework for how we understand violence relevant to political geography. In this introduction, we highlight three key contributions of the collection that build upon and extend Nixon’s framing of slow violence. First, we attend to the spatialities of slow violence, revealing how the politics of disposability and racialized dispossession target particular people and places. Next, we foreground critical feminist and anti-racist perspectives that are largely absent in Nixon’s original account. And third, through engaging these approaches, the papers together employ an epistemological shift, uncovering hidden and multi-sited violences that prioritise the accounts of those who experience and are most affected by slow violence.

Dialing up Critical Feminist Research as Lockdown Dialed us Down: How a Pandemic Sparked Community Food Dialogs in Cape Town, South Africa

The COVID-19 pandemic and its control measures had a devastating impact on household food security in South Africa. The pandemic brought existing food injustice patterns, such as spatial inequality, intersectionality, and the causes of food poverty to the forefront, especially for women. It also galvanized momentum in the people's agenda for solidarity and stimulated community members' calls for an overhaul of the existing commercialized food system toward hyper-localized, community-led solutions such as food dialogs and community kitchens. First and foremost, that meant talking about hunger and addressing its root causes. This paper reports on a co-research process on household food security during the pandemic in four neighborhoods of the Cape Flats. This study found that household food insecurity and the roles women play in food systems are significantly shaped by intersectionality: the consequences of being women, Black or Persons of Color, residents of geographies of social and economic marginalization within the city, and historically excluded from higher education. In this paper, we provide reflections on the co-research process from the perspectives of co-researchers, the project coordinator, and the project funder by applying a critical feminist framework and by answering the question: How can critical feminist research steer community-led action? Community members from the Cape Flats and five post-graduate students from a Berlin-based institute conceptualized this study and it was implemented by community researchers and projects partners in 2020. The paper highlights important aspects of the methodology, particularly the joint contextualization and sense making of findings by community researchers who placed food insecurity results in the context of their lived experiences. Based on their discussions, the co-researchers created visions for post-COVID-19 food environments, one of which is discussed in this paper: destigmatization of hunger. Hunger was described by co-researchers as a problem hidden by individuals and silenced by communities.

Queering potentials: Negotiations of gender, parenthood, and family in polyamorous relationships in the Netherlands

Using a critical feminist perspective, this article provides an ethnographic account of negotiations of gender relations, parenthood, and family in polyamorous relationships in the Netherlands. A conceptual framework is developed and employed to analyze the queering potentials of polyamory by looking at (1) a difference-oriented self, (2) expansion of political community, (3) deconstructions of gender, (4) enduring and unexpected care, and (5) an awareness of existence with people we do not know. Based on a thick description of everyday negotiations, it is argued that the categories of “gender,” “parent,” and “family” are mainly stretched and diffused rather than fundamentally disrupted.

Celebrating 30 years of Feminism & Psychology

Feminism & Psychology ( F&P) was launched in 1991 with a sense of possibility, enthusiasm and excitement as well as a sense of urgent need – to critique and reconstruct mainstream psychology (theory, research methods, and clinical practice). Thirty years have now passed since the first issue was produced. Thirty volumes with three or four issues have been published each year, thanks to the efforts of many. On the occasion of F&P’s 30th anniversary, we, the present and past editors, reflect on successes, changes and challenges in relation to the journal. We celebrate the prestigious awards accruing to the journal, its editors, and authors, and the significant contributions the journal has made to critical feminist scholarship at the interface of feminisms and psychologies. We note some of the theoretical and methodological developments and social changes witnessed over the last three decades. We highlight challenges facing feminist researchers in academia as well as international feminist publishing. We conclude that the initial enthusiasm and excitement expressed by the then editorial collective was justified. But, there is still much work to be done.