Victim-Warriors and Restorers—Heroines in the Post-Apocalyptic World of Mad Max: Fury Road

The article discusses the evolving image of female characters in the Mad Max saga directed by George Miller, focusing on Furiosa’s rebellion in the last film—Mad Max: Fury Road. Interestingly, studying Miller’s post-apocalyptic action films, we can observe the evolution of this post-apocalyptic vision from the male-dominated world with civilization collapsing into chaotic violence visualized in the previous series to a more hopeful future created by women in the last part of the saga: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). We observe female heroes: the vengeful Furiosa, the protector of oppressed girls and sex slaves, the women of the separatist clan, and the wives of the warlord, who bring down the tyranny and create a new “green place.” It is worth emphasizing that the plot casts female solidarity in the central heroic role. In fact, the Mad Max saga emerges as a piece of socially engaged cinema preoccupied with the cultural context of gender discourse. Noticeably, media commentators, scholars and activists have suggested that Fury Road is a feminist film.

Women's solidarity initiatives: the experience of a community development bank

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to understand the relationship between the granting of microcredit in a community development bank and the performance of female solidarity enterprises.Methodology: This research is descriptive with a qualitative approach and a theoretical-empirical nature. The data were submitted to the content analysis technique for organisation and interpretation of the findings.Findings: From the results, it can be concluded that the granting of microcredit by the community bank can positively influence the performance of female solidarity enterprises, but it has some limiting factors, such as a low credit limit.Originality: This study analyses the relationship between the microcredit concession processes and the development of female solidarity enterprises.Keywords: Microfinance; Community development bank; Women's solidarity enterprises.

“I’m Neither a Slut, Nor Am I Gonna Be Shamed”: Sexual Violence, Feminist Anger, and Teen TV’s New Heroine

This article interrogates the representation of feminism and feminists in contemporary US teen drama series. Focusing on Riverdale, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Charmed, I explore the racialized affective dimensions of female protagonists’ reactions to sexual violence. Textual analysis of the function of female anger—its causes, expression, and consequences—in sexual violence storylines signals the emergence of a new feminist figure within teen drama: the joykill, a postfeminist and postracial version of Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy. In these series, anger sparked by sexual violence incites female solidarity and culminates in utopian scenarios of feminist success. This new, celebratory representation of feminists and feminism as a unifying force visually centers diversity, while the intersections between sexism and racism in experiences of sexual violence remain unexplored within storytelling. Despite its intersectional look, this hollowly diverse feminism is thus racialized as white.

Gender role reversal, female solidarity, and fallen women in Oscar Wilde's plays

Wilde's plays The Importance of Being Earnest, A Woman of No Importance, Lady Windermere's Fan and Salomé all feature female characters and themes relevant to the domains of research of feminist literary theory, including relationships between men and women, marriage, the complexity of female characters, their treatment in literature, gender roles and how they are portrayed. This paper explores the themes of role reversal, female solidarity and fallen women with the aim of showing that Wilde's works were progressive for their time in terms of pointing out problematic societal expectations and norms. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde satirized the gender roles of the Victorian society and how men had power over women and their choices, while in the plays A Woman of No Importance, Lady Windermere's Fan and Salomé, the main characters are fallen women, a stereotype the Victorian society invented to mark women they considered impure. A Woman of No Importance and Lady Windermere's Fan are plays about the struggles of fallen women who made mistakes in the past and formed important friendships with other female characters, while the tragedy Salomé tells the tale of a woman who falls and dies as a consequence of her fall. Additionally, the paper will examine closely related themes, such as motherhood, sexuality, and negative gender stereotypes related to the one of the fallen women.

Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf

During 1938-1939, Virginia Woolf and the Chinese writer and painter Ling Shuhua engaged in frequent correspondence, which gave them the opportunity to confide to each other their shared sense of bereavement, as well as their respective anxieties over recent historical events in China, Europe, and Japan. Ling’s novel, Ancient Melodies, published by the Hogarth Press in 1953, exemplifies the idea of female solidarity and pacifism, opposing the rapid growth of international militarisation world-wide. This chapter elucidates the nexus between Woolf and Shuhua by juxtaposing their works, The Years (1937) and Ancient Melodies (1938). It shows that both women turn back to family, childhood and tradition to explore their cultural heritages to voice out distinctive female reflections on their respective cultures.