Sporty Boys and Fashion Girls: Manoeuvring Between Dominant Norms of Gender Identity

The trigger for this article was the “Lévi-Straussian mythical formula” girls : boys = fashion : football, which came to the fore in the conversation with girls and boys aged 13 and 14 years. Amid the cacophony of ambivalent representations and meanings of modern masculinities and femininities which young people are facing, it schematically expresses traditional symbolic relations and gender differences. International studies at the crossroads of cultural, educational and gender studies, including critical studies of men and masculinities (Frosh et al., 2002; Zaslow, 2009; Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 2007) show that teenagers use clothing practices to assert an imaginary boundary in relational and binary self-construction of masculine and feminine identity. The article analyses how teenagers deploy clothing practices, the strong attention they pay to their outfit and some other techniques of body self-regulation in order to negotiate social control and peer pressure related to the processes of the self-construction of masculine and feminine identity. The analysis looks at the peculiarities of these processes in doing hegemonic or marginalised masculinities and traditional or alternative femininities. Comparison of boys’ and girls’ (in intersections with classed and ethicised social locations) attitudes to clothing and outfit demonstrates that both experience the pressure of performing normative gender identity through their body, however the techniques of body self-regulation are different for boys and girls and for specific social locations. In the conclusion, the author reflects on the implications of teenagers’ doing gender through body and their outfit for the pedagogical situation.

The Grammar of Knowledge: A Look at Feminism and Feminist Epistemologies

The aim of the article is to reflect indirectly first on all the contributions in this volume, and second to help fix the present line of thought onto feminist epistemologies. Some postulates of feminist epistemologies are presented. The key question of feminist epistemology as a field of inquiry is defined according to Iris Van Der Tuin (2016) – it involves “the epistemic status of the knowledge produced by privileged and marginalized subjects”, and the reflection about the intersection of knowledge and power. There are ethical and moral implications here: the challenge and responsibility to recognise power relations. If a knowing subject is understood as epistemically inferior, this has a negative effect on how they are understood in non-epistemic contexts (Fricker, 2017). Feminism, in other words, is an epistemological project (Bahovec, 2002).

Feminism and Gender-Neutral Language: Between Systems and Effects

The debate on language and gender in Slovenia raises the issue of gender-sensitive language use, which goes far beyond mere equality and inclusiveness in language use. While the establishment of (gender) identity in language is related to the theoretical question of the social construction of gender, ensuring gender equality in language is also a matter that requires social engagement in various fields, especially including various segments of the education system. As the first public debate on this issue – organised by the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, on 23 October 2018, following attempts to reduce gender inequality in legal documents adopted by the Faculty – showed, the approach to language and gender will necessarily be interdisciplinary. Linguistic considerations call for a shift in emphasis from vocabulary and address code (available resources) to arguments of morphosyntactic form and, in particular, to the symbolic structure of linguistic signs, taking into account relevant contributions from other research areas that have understood the attribution of gender – even sex – as a socially determined decision (e.g. Butler, 2001 /1990/, 1993). Since we are, at this point, particularly interested in the impact of gender-sensitive language use on the discursive level, we argue that the essence of the effort to make language more inclusive – with an emphasis on discourse in education – is not to offer, authorise and institutionalise individual solutions and strategies under the auspices of the language authorities, but to understand gender-sensitive language use as a multiplicity of micro-politics and as a continuous process that leads us to re-examine linguistic “facts” in relation to a given social context.

Teaching Feminism: Between Marginalisation and Feminist Persistence

The aim of this article is to gain insights into how feminist principles, content and practices persist in higher education in times of neoliberal ideology, post-feminism and the intensification of extreme-right wing politics. The main issue the article seeks to address is the state of gender-related and feminist topics in higher education. Their state should be addressed at the intersections of: 1) social context; 2) institutional settings (formalised and officialised gender-related curricula); and 3) intra-institutional practices, such as backlashes to and sanctions against feminist practices. In order to achieve this, we start by briefly sketching the beginnings of women’s studies worldwide, and the ambivalences of institutionalising feminist knowledge. We proceed by focusing our discussion on the contemporary social situation, significantly marked by right-wing politics and neoliberal ideology, aiming to constitute feminism as irrelevant on the grounds of an individualised ‘brave new world’, where everything seems possible, achievable and accessible. We continue by focusing our attention on the state of feminist topics in the context of Slovenian higher education. This part is based on document analysis of curricula of various universities in Slovenia (a description of their study courses and programmes: the research shows that gender-related topics are still marginalised within higher education as feminist topics remain rare and optional rather than obligatory. After discussing the barriers and obstacles facing feminism, we conclude with a discussion on feminist persistence and resistance in higher education: it is still persisting despite the backlashes that seek to extort a price for doing feminism, even if feminist practices are forced to take a more subtle form.

Feminist Classrooms in Practice

Feminist pedagogy is a way of thinking about teaching and learning that guides our choice of classroom practices (Shrewsbury, 1987). As such, it is used in different ways within and across disciplines. Feminist pedagogy offers a critical perspective on gender-related issues in everyday life and in the educational process and facilitates transformative teaching and learning situations characterised by alternative conceptions of power and power relations. This paper focuses primarily on the teaching and learning process, reflecting different aspects and elements of feminist pedagogy important in the context of the educational process itself. The key question in this regard is: what makes feminist classrooms feminist? The paper starts by defining feminist pedagogy, focusing on its transformative power. It goes on to highlight the importance of integrating feminist pedagogy throughout the entire education system. Examples of feminist classrooms on different education levels are given, starting with preschool education and continuing with primary and secondary education. A few of the practices presented were acquired in the literature review, but the majority of others, especially for the primary and secondary levels, was reported in a semi-structured interview with a teacher in training. In the conclusion, the need to include feminist pedagogy in teacher training programmes is stressed.

What Can We Learn About Feminism from Web Portals? – Analysing Media Bulletins

In contemporary society, the media is a powerful social force capable of actively supporting but also negating feminist values, even though the feminist perspective is today woven into the political and institutional lives of Western countries (McRobbie, 2009). Feminism is considered to be instrumentalised and words such as “empowerment” and “choice” are often used in the media and popular culture “as a kind of substitute for feminism” (McRobbie, 2009). This paper presents a media analysis of articles published by the five most visited Croatian web portals in 2019. The content of the articles was analysed by the qualitative method of thematic analysis. The results show that feminism is a neglected topic on web portals and most often found in “news”, “culture” or “film” sections. The results of the thematic analysis identified five thematic frameworks which encompass the published articles: feminist pioneers, female politicians and feminism, celebrity feminism, feminist activism, and feminism and film. The first framework “feminist pioneers”, along with the “feminist activism” framework, are more educational in the nature of their reporting, while the “celebrity feminism” framework deals more with the topics of violence towards women, women’s relationship with their bodies and gender equality in general. The presentation of female politicians within the framework dealing with politics and feminism is the most neglected because it is practically devoid of any political-feminist content while the “film and feminism” framework is almost entertaining in character because it is mostly based on commenting on movie characters and their lifestyles as well as screenwriter choices. Although all of the identified frameworks mention and broach a series of subthemes, except in the case of feminist activism, these subthemes are not problematised nor can the audience reach a wider comprehension. Young people, as regular consumers of news content on the most visited web portals, cannot acquire a realistic image of feminism, and in rare occasional news items can they obtain a cursory education on feminist values.

Feminism as Epistemic Disobedience and Transformative Knowledge: Exploration of an Alternative Educational Centre

Living under the threat of demonising feminism along with its de-politicisation and commodification in an age of “postfeminist sensibility” (Gill, 2007), and the reduction of women’s/gender studies programmes worldwide is more than a reason to revisit the feminist politics of knowledge here and now. Since the neoliberal trend is impregnated “with old-fashioned academic design that counts on (neo)conservativism” (Kašić, 2016), retrograde claims and (neo)traditional morality, one challenge is how to respond to the sexist, androcentric, anti-gender and racist assumptions that are deepening inequality and fostering social exclusion and discrimination as well as to disrupting the mainstream knowledge of scientificity (Pereira, 2017). By using the Centre for Women’s Studies in Zagreb as an example, the paper argues that an alternative form of education outside mainstream academic institutions, despite various obstacles and inner problems, can ensure a freeing up from hegemonic and misogynist knowledge more than a university education by creating a powerful space toward feminism as an epistemic disobedience and activist theory, and by providing the political subjectivisation of both teachers and students. In this regard, three topics are of analytical interest here: feminism as subversive knowledge; critical pedagogy from the perspective of “epistemology of discomfort”; and the potential held by feminism as an engaged (activist) theory. The questions and themes proposed are not new but continue on previous epistemic dilemmas and disputes both around feminism and progressive ideas around education, and coming to terms with feminist urgency and ethical responsibility (Spivak, 2012).