Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 30 of 100

Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Gender Unfreedom: Gender Diverse Perspectives From Digital India, Sara Bardhan Jan 2022

Gender Unfreedom: Gender Diverse Perspectives From Digital India, Sara Bardhan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Pornography, Its Harms, And A New Legal Strategy: Research And Experience In Japan, Seiya Morita, Caroline Norma Mar 2021

Pornography, Its Harms, And A New Legal Strategy: Research And Experience In Japan, Seiya Morita, Caroline Norma

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In this article we describe pornography’s harms in Japan, which are known about from surveys and research, and from the outreach and consulting activities of Japanese feminist-abolitionist groups. Among these are the Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) and People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence (PAPS). We then propose a renewed classification scheme for pornography’s harms that centrally considers the experiences of victims in Japan. Lastly, we consider various legal approaches to addressing the myriad harms we describe and suggest possibilities for a new legal strategy. The article’s research comes from Japanese-language materials produced by the above-mentioned activist groups, as …


Welcome To The New Dignity, Donna M. Hughes Feb 2021

Welcome To The New Dignity, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.


Do Prostitution Advertisements Reduce Violence Against Women? A Methodological Examination Of Cunningham, Deangelo, And Tripp Findings, Katie Feifer, Jody Raphael, Kezban Yagci Sokat Aug 2019

Do Prostitution Advertisements Reduce Violence Against Women? A Methodological Examination Of Cunningham, Deangelo, And Tripp Findings, Katie Feifer, Jody Raphael, Kezban Yagci Sokat

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

A recent study by Cunningham, DeAngelo, and Tripp (unpublished 2017, 2019) found that advertising prostitution online led to a lower rate of homicide of women in the United States. These findings have circulated widely in the mainstream media as proof that advertising prostitution online increases the safety of prostituted women. The study’s findings were used to argue against the 2018 passage of a federal anti-trafficking bill: Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), known collectively as FOSTA-SESTA. This new law holds websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking accountable for …


Against All Odds: A Legacy Of Appropriation, Contestation, And Negotiation Of Arab Feminisms In Postcolonial States, Hoda Elsadda Jan 2019

Against All Odds: A Legacy Of Appropriation, Contestation, And Negotiation Of Arab Feminisms In Postcolonial States, Hoda Elsadda

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Arab feminists have always faced challenges related to the burden of colonialism, accusations of westernization, isolation from their cultural heritage, and elitism, but the biggest challenge of all has been the fact that their activism and their entire lives have all been in the context of authoritarian postcolonial states. This article engages with a persistent challenge to Arab feminists that questions their impact, their awareness of their cultural and societal problems, and undermines their achievements over the years. It constructs a narrative of what feminists have achieved against all odds, within the constraints of authoritarian postcolonial states that have politically …


"We Aren't All The Same": The Singularity Of Reproductive Experiences Amidst Institutional Objectification In Argentina's Public Maternal Health Services, Sabrina S. Yañez Jan 2018

"We Aren't All The Same": The Singularity Of Reproductive Experiences Amidst Institutional Objectification In Argentina's Public Maternal Health Services, Sabrina S. Yañez

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Reproductive health services in Argentina are organized in ways that depersonalize, standardize, and fragment women’s bodies and lives. Alternatively, women’s accounts of their pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experiences reveal many nuances and moments of dislocation between experience and language: their immersion in social and material conditions; traces of ambivalence and contradiction; moves between continuity and fragmentation; density of lived time and space; and profound corporeal awareness. Guided by the methodological and conceptual premises of institutional ethnography, this article is a critical effort to explore experiential narratives as a means for apprehending what women perceive, need, and want during their reproductive …


Precarious Responsibility: Teaching With Feminist Politics In The Marketized University, Lena Wånggren Jan 2018

Precarious Responsibility: Teaching With Feminist Politics In The Marketized University, Lena Wånggren

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

One of the most pressing characteristics of the neoliberal restructuring of academia, together with increased managerialism, performativity measures, and a “customer service” approach, is the casualization or precarization of academic work. Casualization entails a fragmentation of academic work, where academics are forced to move between workplaces on hourly-paid and fixed-term contracts, often doing their job without access to resources such as an office, training, or paid research time. While a number of feminist scholars have investigated the ways in which feminist academics negotiate the ever-increasing mechanisms of individualization, ranking, and auditing of their work, this article focuses on the precarious …


Just Like Us: Elizabeth Kendall’S Imperfect Quest For Equality, Kate Rose Jan 2018

Just Like Us: Elizabeth Kendall’S Imperfect Quest For Equality, Kate Rose

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay analyzes United States academic Elizabeth Kendall’s 1913 travelogue A Wayfarer in China through the lenses of gender and criticism of imperialism. In China, Kendall sought to transcend social norms while reflecting empathetically, though sometimes contradictorily, on the lives of the people she encountered. In her travelogue, Kendall is exploring China’s wild areas but also the metaphysical, untamed space beyond conventions in a quest for gender equality and cultural autonomy. She also defends Chinese immigrants in the US at a time of overwhelming anti-Asian prejudice.


Battleground Texas: Gendered Media Framing Of The 2014 Texas Gubernatorial Race, Susan E. Waters, Elizabeth A. Dudash-Buskirk, Rachel M. Pipan Jan 2018

Battleground Texas: Gendered Media Framing Of The 2014 Texas Gubernatorial Race, Susan E. Waters, Elizabeth A. Dudash-Buskirk, Rachel M. Pipan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Feminist political theory is a sprawling theoretical field that intertwines sociological and philosophical perspectives and applies them to the study of campaigns, policy, voting, and the general structure of what Americans call politics. In Western democratic republics, the concept of participation has been hotly debated, specifically with regard to voting. Applying the critical lens of an intersectional feminist perspective introduces questions about the participation of different genders, races, classes, and cultural groups in political action, voting, and running for office. Before equal representation can be attained (if that is, indeed, desirable), it is important to understand how our politics are …


From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner Jan 2018

From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Maternal Assemblage: Nonprocreative Maternity As Contagion And Resistance, Charles E. Hicks Jan 2018

The Maternal Assemblage: Nonprocreative Maternity As Contagion And Resistance, Charles E. Hicks

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article analyzes the consistent problematic of nonprocreative maternal identity, specifically its positioning in a heteronormative symbolic framework as the antithesis of biological or “real” motherhood. Using Lee Edelman’s work on the queer body’s relationship to a futural horizon, the first part addresses how the epistemological framework whereby nonprocreative maternal bodies are subjected to the image of the Child, a fantasy of wholeness, thematizes the nonprocreative maternal body as deviant and enacts a logic of repetition that supplements a heteronormative future. The second portion of this essay illustrates how, due to the monomaternalist matrix’s refusal to accept it as legitimate, …


From The Editors, Heather M. Turcotte, Anupama Arora, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley Jan 2018

From The Editors, Heather M. Turcotte, Anupama Arora, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


"We Sick": The Deweys As Women's Willful Self-Destruction In Toni Morrison's Sula, Kathleen Anderson, Gayle Fallon Jan 2018

"We Sick": The Deweys As Women's Willful Self-Destruction In Toni Morrison's Sula, Kathleen Anderson, Gayle Fallon

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Toni Morrison explores the complexities of race, gender, and matrilineal influence in Sula. Although much recent feminist criticism has addressed the operations of race and gender in the novel, this essay provides the first developed examination of Morrison’s strategic use of three diminutive boys, all named “dewey,” to emphasize the willfully self-destructive tendencies of the novel’s female characters. Burdened with their community’s limiting idealizations of femininity and motherhood, the women of Sula practice various forms of self-harm in an effort to develop and proclaim their holistic, autonomous selves. The deweys’ mischievous childhood games foreshadow the consequences of female self-harm, but …


Reclaiming The Streets: Investigating Female Experience Of Cinematic Urban Violence, Angelica De Vido Jan 2018

Reclaiming The Streets: Investigating Female Experience Of Cinematic Urban Violence, Angelica De Vido

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The spatial ideologies and narrative tropes of gendered victimhood, which are designed to induce fear and anxiety, are routinely employed to govern and restrict female access to and experience of urban spaces—both in cinematic depictions and in the real world. This paper explores how such tropes are challenged and rewritten in three screen narratives based in urban landscapes: London in Happy-Go- Lucky (2008), Paris in Amélie (2001), and New York in Sex and the City (1998–2004). Contrary to the ideologies of fear that routinely dominate urban narratives, I will argue that the texts under discussion instead display the city as …


Emancipating The Passive Muse: A Call For A Feminist Approach To Writing Biographies On Historical Women, Ina C. Seethaler Jan 2018

Emancipating The Passive Muse: A Call For A Feminist Approach To Writing Biographies On Historical Women, Ina C. Seethaler

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay analyzes two popular biographies on historical women to interrogate how a focus on gender has shaped the genre: Nancy Ruben Stuart’s The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation (2008) and Jung Chang’s Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013). I argue that biographers who perpetuate gender stereotypes miss a momentous opportunity during the current life writing boom in the United States to educate readers on women’s social, cultural, and political contributions worldwide. In proposing that feminist-informed biographies are more accurate, complete, and make social …


Teaching Feminist Research Methods: A Comment And An Evaluation, Shannon N. Davis, Angela Hattery Jan 2018

Teaching Feminist Research Methods: A Comment And An Evaluation, Shannon N. Davis, Angela Hattery

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

What are feminist research methods and how are they different from other, non-feminist research methods? This paper begins by interrogating the question of how research methods become labeled as feminist. Building on this knowledge, we detail how this investigation guided our implementation of a new feminist research methods course sequence in a Women and Gender Studies program. This article is not an evaluation of our course; it is a feminist exercise in self-reflection on the feminist processes that, when invoked, results in feminist teaching of any course. But in this case, it is a course that is not always identified …


Recreating And Reenvisioning Scandal: A Photographic Exploration Of The Eliot Spitzer And Anthony Weiner Press Conferences, Hinda Mandell, Meredith Davenport Jan 2018

Recreating And Reenvisioning Scandal: A Photographic Exploration Of The Eliot Spitzer And Anthony Weiner Press Conferences, Hinda Mandell, Meredith Davenport

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Remembering An Abolitionist, Ambassador John R. Miller (May 23, 1938-October 4, 2017), Eleanor Kennelly Gaetan, Donna M. Hughes Oct 2017

Remembering An Abolitionist, Ambassador John R. Miller (May 23, 1938-October 4, 2017), Eleanor Kennelly Gaetan, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

A memorial for Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, John R. Miller (May 23, 1938-October 4, 2017). Ambassador Miller believed modern-day slavery, encompassing sex trafficking and forced labor, requires a principled global offensive that the United States is morally obligated to lead. In the four formative years he led the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, 2002 to 2006, John Miller set the office’s course as diplomatically aggressive and programmatically creative. He made the annual Trafficking in Persons report more than a bureaucratic submission, putting daring heroes at the center, and insisting on compelling …


Beware The Mammoni: My Search To Understand Domestic Violence In Italian-American Culture And Rhode Island's Family Court, Anne Grant Sep 2017

Beware The Mammoni: My Search To Understand Domestic Violence In Italian-American Culture And Rhode Island's Family Court, Anne Grant

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Since I disapproved of stereotypes, I found myself trying to comprehend Italian-American culture after I became executive director of the largest shelter in Rhode Island for battered women and their children. Many of those I met were fleeing Italian-American men. On 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl reported from Italy about the large number of single men who still live with their parents and are known as mammoni, or “mama’s boys.” Their mothers dutifully cook and clean for them. The Roman Catholic Church’s view of the Holy Family reinforces mammoni culture. I learned that Rome’s founding legend starts with men …


Twenty Reasons To Publish In Dignity, Donna M. Hughes Apr 2017

Twenty Reasons To Publish In Dignity, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.


Not Mine Alone, Nor Mine To Own: Some Reflections On The Young Girl, Jacqueline Mabey Jan 2017

Not Mine Alone, Nor Mine To Own: Some Reflections On The Young Girl, Jacqueline Mabey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay looks at the role of the young girl in the curatorial practice of Jacqueline Mabey. Mabey reckons with the young girl as the signifier of a spectrum of mutable cultural signifieds and young girls as subjects on their own terms in the two exhibitions under review, Miss World and Utopia Is No Place, Utopia Is Process. In doing so, she recognizes a shift in motivations from an interest in what the young girls mean as a narcissistic reflection to how she could work in service of the development of young girls.


A Delicate Knot: Photographing Black Girlhood And Womanhood, Nakeya Brown Jan 2017

A Delicate Knot: Photographing Black Girlhood And Womanhood, Nakeya Brown

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, And The Performance Of The Teenage Girl In Harmony Korine’S Spring Breakers (2012) And Sofia Coppola’S The Bling Ring (2013), Maryn Wilkinson Jan 2017

Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, And The Performance Of The Teenage Girl In Harmony Korine’S Spring Breakers (2012) And Sofia Coppola’S The Bling Ring (2013), Maryn Wilkinson

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) introduced audiences to girls exploring criminal behavior both for and as leisure. The films introduce an idea of leisure/crime: criminal acts that appear to develop as natural, fruitful extensions of leisure activities, circumnavigating conventional laws of capitalism, yet still allow its actors to access, attain, and consume goods, money, value, and status. Through close analysis of the films’ style and character performances, this article proposes that the films and their enactments of leisure/crime in fact offer complex critical commentary on contemporary relations between the representation of teenage girls, …


Introduction: A Gun For Every Girl: Girlhood In Contemporary Visual Culture, Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory, Angelique Szymanek Jan 2017

Introduction: A Gun For Every Girl: Girlhood In Contemporary Visual Culture, Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory, Angelique Szymanek

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Más Rudas Collective, 2009-2016 (An Archival Epilogue To An Epic Pachanga), Josh T. Franco Jan 2017

Más Rudas Collective, 2009-2016 (An Archival Epilogue To An Epic Pachanga), Josh T. Franco

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Contemporary artists Más Rudas Collective (MRC) were active in San Antonio, Texas, from 2009 to 2016. This essay looks to primary source documents from preceding decades and keystone exhibitions of Chicana/o art to articulate MRC’s position in a network of art production and curatorial activity that takes Chicana/o identity as a conceptual framework and/or departure point. Specific examples of MRC members’ reappropriations of Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicana/o cultural elements are analyzed and considered as “weaponizations” against cultures of body shaming and misogyny. Their approach is compared to that of other artists and curators in order to highlight the variety …


Nonconsensual Collaborations, 2012-Present: Notes On A Shared Condition, Aliza Shvarts Jan 2017

Nonconsensual Collaborations, 2012-Present: Notes On A Shared Condition, Aliza Shvarts

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

"Nonconsensual Collaborations, 2012-present: Notes on a Shared Condition" is an extended performance text. It investigates the unmarked gendered dynamics of artistic collaboration, documenting a series of “nonconsensual collaborations”—that is, performances with other artists who did not agree to their participation. Presented here as written narratives, these nonconsensual collaborations frame everyday occurrences of violation, erasure, and misrecognition, exploring how discourses of consent arise from the raced and gendered histories of property relations. They call into question the politics of representation, the status of the document, the formation of evidentiary truth, and the interpenetration of sexual and aesthetic economies. These nonconsensual collaborations …


Acting Objects/Objecting Girls: Ann Hirsch’S Playground, Jen Kennedy Jan 2017

Acting Objects/Objecting Girls: Ann Hirsch’S Playground, Jen Kennedy

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper identifies and explores an oscillation between subjectivization and objectification in young girls’ participation in digital culture as a site of self-exploration and sexual experimentation. Using media artist Anne Hirsch’s performance Playground (2013) as a case study, it examines how the ways that adolescent girls use the internet not only complicate the subject/object opposition at the crux of many Western feminist critiques of representation but may even suggest forms of agency that think beyond this binary.


The Transgressive Girl, Nicole Killian Jan 2017

The Transgressive Girl, Nicole Killian

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper imagines the Internet as a potentially utopian girl-space by looking at how girls, and pop-cultural depictions of girls, use the language, signs, and symbols of the Internet, an inherently patriarchal system, in transgressive ways. I propose the 1990s media representations as the touchstone moment when the conditions of possibility for imagining the hacker as a weaponized girl emerged visually in popular culture. The girl, exemplified by various figures within popular television and film culture, is a precursor to and postulates an entry point into the ways Internet today is used in transgressive nature.


Towards A New Theory Of Feminist Coalition: Accounting For The Heterogeneity Of Gender, Race, Class, And Sexuality Through An Exploration Of Power And Responsibility, Holly Jeanine Boux Jan 2016

Towards A New Theory Of Feminist Coalition: Accounting For The Heterogeneity Of Gender, Race, Class, And Sexuality Through An Exploration Of Power And Responsibility, Holly Jeanine Boux

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper develops a novel theory of feminist coalition that centers and redefines the concepts of power and responsibility. After outlining several key ways in which feminist coalition work has been addressed by both theorists and practitioners, it goes on to explore how accounting for the complex experiences of identity rooted in factors such as race, class, gender, and sexuality continues to complicate the process of coalition building and theorizing. From these foundations, the article develops a theory of feminist coalition that speaks to how such a movement—or organizations within such a movement—can drive the political will for transformation and …


From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner Jan 2016

From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.