Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Explaining The Lack Of Progress In Yemeni Women’S Empowerment: Are Women Leaders The Problem?, Nadia Al-Sakkaf

Journal of International Women's Studies

Despite the existence of women’s empowerment policies and the appointments of women leaders to oversee the implementation and sometimes design of those policies, the Republic of Yemen has repeatedly ranked last in the WEF Gender Gap Index since 2006. Is this a problem of capacity? Are the women leaders, who are driving the national women’s development agenda forward, lacking in this field? This article investigates this question through a mixed-method research by surveying and interviewing Yemeni women leaders who were involved in empowerment policies in health, education, economic participation and political empowerment between 2006 and 2014. Findings from this research …

A Bibliometric Analysis Of Journal Of International Women’S Studies For Period Of 2002-2019: Current Status, Development, And Future Research Directions, Rohail Hassan, Meghna Chhabra, Arfan Shahzad, Diana Fox, Sohail Hasan

Journal of International Women's Studies

This research paper aims to present a thorough overview of the Journal of International Women’s Studies (JIWS). The Scopus database has been used to study the most prolific writers and frequently cited papers of the JIWS. This article considered 907 papers, which offers a map of the knowledge produced and circulated by the JIWS. It offers insights into publication activities, prominent themes, citation trends, and the state of collaborations among the contributors to the JIWS and the journal’s aggregate contributions to the area of Women’s Studies. Moreover, by analyzing the correlation of keywords and how they are clustered together, the …

“Valli” At The Border: Adivasi Women De-Link From Settler Colonialism Paving Re-Enchantment Of The Forest Commons, Deepa Kozhisseri

Journal of International Women's Studies

The forests of Attappady Hills part of the Western Ghats in Kerala homeland to Adivasi people is a frontier region where a settler population is now predominant. This paper aims to bring the concept of borders as a heuristic device to interpret gender-ecology-indigeneity in Attappady. The conversations among Adivasis, between Adivasis and settlers, between Adivasi women and their children become in media res dialogues of their border subjectivity. This was an empirical study in Attappady in which life experiences, oral history and myths were studied using narrative analysis. The paper discusses four findings: First how land dispossession disproportionately impacted Adivasi …

Explaining The Lack Of Progress In Yemeni Women’S Empowerment; Are Women Leaders The Problem?, Nadia Al-Sakkaf

Journal of International Women's Studies

Despite existence of women’s empowerment policies and the appointments of women leaders to oversee the implementation and sometimes design of those policies, the Republic of Yemen has repeatedly ranked last in the WEF Gender Gap Index since 2006. Is this a problem of capacity? Are the women leaders, who are driving the national women’s development agenda forward, lacking in this field? This article investigates this question through a mixed-method research by surveying and interviewing Yemeni women leaders who were involved in empowerment policies in health, education, economic participation and political empowerment between 2006 and 2014.

Findings from this research show …

The Turkish Women’S Movement In Abeyance, Gizem Kaftan

Journal of International Women's Studies

The Turkish women’s movement started during the Ottoman era, and it is still in process in the newly established Turkish Republic. This paper examined the Turkish women’s movement, which began after 1923 and found that the Turkish women’s movement had two abeyance cycles. The first abeyance period in the Turkish women’s movement took place between 1935 and the 1960s. In the first abeyance period, the reasons for the abeyance were economic problems, World War II, and the changing political arena in Turkey. In 1945, Turkey became a multi-party democracy, and this changed political opportunity structures. After 1960, the Turkish women’s …

Waking Up The Dissident: Transforming Lives (And Society) With Feminist Counseling, Donna F. Johnson

Journal of International Women's Studies

When I was a student in the 70’s I took a year off to travel the world with a friend. Despite taking every precaution, I was sexually assaulted twice. The incidents changed the course of my life. I completed my studies and began working in a refuge for battered women. There I bore witness, not only to unimaginable cruelty, but to widespread institutional indifference to women’s suffering. Decades later, police, judicial and child welfare responses remain inadequate in Canada (as everywhere), and mental health practitioners continue to routinely blame and pathologize women. As a counselor, first at the shelter, later …

Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose: An American Sisterhood In Black And White, Ahmed N. Bensedik

Journal of International Women's Studies

In light of the theme of the 5th World Conference on Women's Studies 2019, 'Activism, Solidarity and Diversity: Feminist Movements Toward Global Sisterhood', this article contends that Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) is an appeal for an American bond of sisterhood between feminists and womanists. In the process, it examines the relationship between the novel's two Black and White heroines, Dessa Rose and Ruth Sutton respectively, through the lens of Bonnie Thornton Dill's definition of sisterhood in her seminal work, Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for an All-Inclusive Sisterhood. While discomfort and distrust encircle their first encounter in the …

Orientalism, Gender, And Nation Defied By An Iranian Woman: Feminist Orientalism And National Identity In Satrapi’S Persepolis And Persepolis 2, Diego Maggi

Journal of International Women's Studies

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novels Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004) —focused on her youth and early adulthood in Iran and Austria— reveal in many ways the conflicting coexistence between the West —Europe and North America— and the Middle East. This article explores feminist Orientalism and national identity in both Satrapi’s works, with the purpose of demonstrating the manners that these comics complicate and challenge binary divisions commonly related to the tensions amid the Occident and the Orient, such as East-West, Self-Other, civilized-barbarian and feminism-antifeminism. In the first part of the …

Who Is Afraid Of ẸfúNṣetáN AníWúRà? Performing Power In Yoruba Masculinist Oligarchy, Omolola A. Ladele, Abimbola O. Oyinlola

Journal of International Women's Studies

The iconic Yoruba female personage of Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà has, in several studies, been vilified; and at a first glance, it would seem that Akinwunmi Isola’s eponymous protagonist and heroine of that play reinforces the image of a villainous, wicked and self-centred woman. Contextualized within the Yoruba socio-political and economic national narratives of the late18^th and early 19^th centuries, this image appears both problematic and complexly contradictory. It is therefore useful to appropriately recuperate and verify the status of Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà within the backdrop of Yoruba cultural context. This is illustrated through a feminist re-reading of Ẹfúnṣetán’s actions and …

Reflections On A Transnational Project: Suffrage In The Americas, Patricia Harms, Stephanie Mitchell

Journal of International Women's Studies

Suffrage is the most significant political development within modern Liberal states. Despite this fact, it is curious as to why suffrage movements have so little history. This article focuses on the creation of an edited volume that seeks to address the women’s suffrage story across the Americas. While the intellectual process of the project is discussed in some detail, this article is predominantly a reflection on the process of developing a collaborative project and the challenges inherent to a transnational approach. This project reveals both the significance of suffrage and simultaneously the fractured landscape within individual countries, suffrage movements and …

“Me Gritaron Negra”: The Emergence And Development Of The Afro-Descendant Women’S Movement In Peru (1980-2015), Eshe Lewis, John Thomas Iii, Spanish Translation: Https://Revistasinvestigacion.Unmsm.Edu.Pe/Index.Php/Sociales/Article/View/19567

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines the evolution of the Afro-descendant women's movement in Peru between 1980 and 2015. We examine the development of women’s conscious through other movements, specifically through the national Afro-Peruvian movement and the regional feminist encounters that have been taking place since the 1980s. Our study outlines the tensions, and points of convergence and divergence that have existed for Afro-Peruvian women in these movements. We demonstrate how these issues characterize the nature of Afro-Peruvian women's struggle and their social and political position within the realm of race- and gender-based activism. We show that this friction has prompted women to …

"We Neither Are Of The Past Nor Of The Future" : Analyzing The Two Opposing Aspects Of A Female Character Through Four Modern Works Of Persian Fiction", Ronak Karami

Journal of International Women's Studies

Under Iran’s growing contact with the West from 1925 until 1979, which caused cultural changes, modern writers were stuck between two realities: the vanishing culture of the past with its unified view of women and the modern Western-oriented culture of the present with its doubting, ironic, and fast-changing view of women. Both labels, the ‘ethereal’ (or inaccessible paragon) and the ‘whore’ (or accessible temptress) for female characters emerged in a major literary work of the 20th century in Iran, The Blind Owl (1937), by Hedayat due to these cultural changes. Furthermore, the labels appeared within some later modern Persian fictional …

Traveling Feminista: A Blog About Traveling As A Pakistani/American/Muslim/Feminist Scholar-Art-Ivist, Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Journal of International Women's Studies

At the heart of my blogging lies the desire to be a traveler moving through the world in a body marked as female, a woman whose evolving feminism can help heal herself and in so doing, inspire others to do the same. Journeying without and within, allows for the self to turn toward its other, to recognize the other in oneself; in so doing, one can learn to connect across the divides that threaten to engulf us, dissolving boundaries that keep us from loving our multiple selves.

Media Empowers Brave Girls To Be Global Activists, Gayle Kimball

Journal of International Women's Studies

A surprising way to silence young women globally, in addition to overly protective families, is by scholars of youth studies and development professionals. Ageism against youth is rarely discussed, so this article reveals this academic bias that ignores or discounts youth voices—especially young women. However, in the safe space of their bedrooms, the Internet and the cell phone enable young women to express their voices, even to organize uprisings. They can get around family restrictions and desires to protect them by speaking publicly from a private space. Some media provide empowering images for young women activists and informative networks of …

Flora Tristan, Precursor Lecture By Magda Portal, Kathleen Weaver

Journal of International Women's Studies

A major figure in Latin American struggles for women's rights and social justice, Magda Portal (1900-1989) co-founded the revolutionary nationalist APRA Party of Peru and was the principal women's leader of that party. In her Chilean exile Portal discovered the nineteenth century writer and social reformer, Flora Tristan. In 1944 Portal offered her first lecture on Tristan (1803-1844)—a brilliant diarist and journalist as well as a seminal social theorist, labor organizer, champion of women's rights, and a significant precursor—arguably co-founder—of socialist internationalism. Expanding and revising her initial account, Portal continued into her later years to lecture on Tristan, whom she …

Scripting Resistance: Rape And The Avenging Woman In Hindi Cinema, Isha Karki

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article considers how contemporary Hindi cinema engages with traditional cinematic representations of rape and the extent to which it inscribes resistance by rewriting dominant cultural scripts. It analyses Pan Nalin’s Angry Indian Goddesses (2015) and Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink (2016) by locating them within the tradition of the avenging woman genre in 1980s Hindi popular cinema. It argues that the historical avenging woman genre was unable to successfully dismantle dominant rape scripts, and that these contemporary films, by subverting the genre, offer alternatives to the problems inherent in the visualisation of rape. It explores issues of eroticisation and spectacle …

‘Red Amazons’? Gendering Violence And Revolution In The Long First World War, 1914-23, Matthew Kovac

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article seeks to position gender theory as critical to making sense of one of the First World War’s largest remaining historical problems: the persistence of mass violence after November 1918. While Robert Gerwarth and John Horne’s pathbreaking work on veteran violence has challenged the standard 1914-18 periodisation of the war, their focus on military defeat and revolution obscures the centrality of gender relations to the continuation of violence after the formal end of hostilities. By putting their work into conversation with that of feminist theorists, I argue that countries which experienced more extreme gender dislocation or ‘gender trouble’ witnessed …

Widows And Concubines: Tradition And Deviance In The Women Of Raja Rao’S Kanthapura, M. E. P. Ranmuthugala

Journal of International Women's Studies

Raja Rao’s 1938 novel Kanthapura depicts the impact of Gandhian thought on women and men, and this research focuses on the novel’s fashioning of female identities in terms of nationalism as espoused by Mahatma Gandhi. This analytical research paper hypothesises that although women constitute a considerable part of the narrative and have political agency, their identity is moulded by men to serve men’s nationalist interests: The paper contends that women must undergo transformation and refashioning of their identities for nationalism. The novel provides a strong argument for Mahatma Gandhi’s political ethic of empowering people and engages with diverse issues such …

Autonomous Women's Movement In Kerala: Historiography, Maya Subrahmanian

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper traces the historical evolution of the women’s movement in the southernmost Indian state of Kerala and explores the related social contexts. It also compares the women’s movement in Kerala with its North Indian and international counterparts. An attempt is made to understand how feminist activities on the local level differ from the larger scenario with regard to their nature, causes, and success. Mainstream history writing has long neglected women’s history, just as women have been denied authority in the process of knowledge production. The Kerala Model and the politically triggered society of the state, with its strong Marxist …

Speaking And Silence As Means Of Resistance In Alifa Rifaat's Distant View Of A Minaret And Bahiyya's Eyes, Sumaya M. Alhaj Mohammad

Journal of International Women's Studies

This study aims at investigating the dilemma of creating a counter discourse that speaks against the dominant androcentric one in Alifa Rifaat’s fiction. The study explores the characterization of the protagonists of two short stories: “Distant View of a Minaret” and “Bahiyya’s Eyes,” culled from Rifaat’s collection Distant View of a Minaret and Other Short Stories (1983). These stories present two different paradigms of resistance that the female protagonists use, which are speaking and silence. The study argues that both speaking and silence are attempts to heal women’s cyclic trauma, as they are means of representing women’s experience and oppression …

Defying Marginalization: Emergence Of Women’S Organizations And The Resistance Movement In Pakistan: A Historical Overview, Rahat Imran, Imran Munir

Journal of International Women's Studies

In the wake of Pakistani dictator General-Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization process (1977-1988), the country experienced an unprecedented tilt towards religious fundamentalism. This initiated judicial transformations that brought in rigid Islamic Sharia laws that impacted women’s freedoms and participation in the public sphere, and gender-specific curbs and policies on the pretext of implementing a religious identity. This suffocating environment that eroded women’s rights in particular through a recourse to politicization of religion also saw the emergence of equally strong resistance, particularly by women who, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, grouped and mobilized an organized activist women’s movement to challenge Zia’s oppressive …

Bengali Art House Cinema, Women’S Subjectivity, And History: Satyajit Ray’S Use Of Silence In Charulata (1964) And Devi (1960), Lakshmi Quigley

Journal of International Women's Studies

Unmediated representations of women’s everyday subjective experiences of historical events are difficult to find in discourses about masculinity and femininity. Discussions often centre on normative expressions of sexual difference, explaining the ways in which patriarchy was reconstituted rather than focusing on women’s experiences. Late nineteenth century strands of nationalist thought in the Bengal relied on gendered ideas about the nation, self, and society in their representations of womanhood, which served as a symbol of the nation. Various historians have explored the idealised versions of women that these discourses presented, but often these studies fail to examine portrayals of the subjective …

‘Freedom In Her Mind’: Women’S Prison Zines And Feminist Writing In The 1970s, Olivia Wright

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper examines the under-researched and undervalued area of American women’s prison zines. It discusses three publications created at the California Institute for Women, Frontera, during the 1970s, placing them in the wider contexts of prison reform and the women’s movement. Through close analysis, it demonstrates the influences of, and connections to, the feminist print culture at the time and how groups such as the Santa Cruz Women’s Prison Project enabled their publication and influenced their ideology. Examining women’s prison zines can contribute to conversations about women’s liberation by offering new perspectives on what I call ‘collective autobiography’, and giving …

Sex Wars Revisited: A Rhetorical Economy Of Sex Industry Opposition, Alison Phipps

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper attempts to sketch a ‘rhetorical economy’ of feminist opposition to the sex industry, via the case study of debates around Amnesty International’s 2016 policy supporting decriminalisation as the best way to ensure sex workers’ human rights and safety. Drawing on Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’ in which emotions circulate as capital, I explore an emotionally loaded discursive field which is also characterised by specific and calculated rhetorical manoeuvres for political gain. My analysis is situated in what Rentschler and Thrift call the ‘discursive publics’ of contemporary Western feminism, which encompass academic, activist, and public/media discussions. I argue that …

The Exploitation Of Women And Social Change In The Writing Of Nawal El-Saadawi, Muhammad Youssef Suwaed

Journal of International Women's Studies

Nawal El-Saadawi is an Egyptian writer, a physician by education, who dedicated her life to promote gender equality. She is an activist writer, and the only one in Egypt who point out the connection of women’s sexual oppression to women’s social and political oppression. She boldly pursues women rights, and demands to change the status and image of the Arabic woman. Her writings include novels, studies and educated scholastic articles, focusing on the oppression and exploitation of the Arabic women, particularly customary rules imposed on women in rural Egypt relying on religion, tradition and the regime. Her writings keep the …

Eating Burnt Toast: The Lived Experiences Of Female Breadwinners In South Africa, Bianca Rochelle Parry, Puleng Segalo

Journal of International Women's Studies

In South African society, many women have overcome traditional notions of gender by becoming primary breadwinners in their homes and providing primary financial support for their families. Employing a Phenomenological viewpoint, this paper contextualises the individual lived experiences of South African female breadwinners, utilising data collected from ten female breadwinners from the Mpumalanga and Gauteng provinces respectively using in-depth, semi structured interviews. Taking into consideration their intersectional experiences of gender, race, as well as cultural, traditional and patriarchal societal pressures, the study represents voices that have for a long time been silenced and marginalised, to understand how these women make …

"Speaking Back" To The Self: A Call For "Voice Notes" As Reflexive Practice For Feminist Ethnographers, Fawzia Haeri Mazanderani

Journal of International Women's Studies

While what comprises “feminist research methods” is subject to debate, research with a feminist orientation is often characterised by heightened reflexivity and a recognition of the subjective nature of knowledge claims (Ryan-Flood and Gill, 2010). By drawing upon ethnographic research conducted among young people in post-apartheid South Africa, this paper interrogates the potential value of audio recordings or “voice notes” during fieldwork, in conjunction with the more traditional form of the fieldwork diary. I argue that, by providing an additional means through which to articulate the inevitable messiness of fieldwork, the recording of “voice notes” enables the researcher to “speak …

Discovering My Own African Feminism: Embarking On A Journey To Explore Kenyan Women's Oppression, Glory Joy Gatwiri, Helen Jaqueline Mclaren

Journal of International Women's Studies

All Black women have experienced living in a society that devalues them. The scholarship of bell hooks submits that the control of Black women ideologically, economically, socially and politically functions perfectly to form a highly discriminative but effective system that is designed to keep them in a submissive and subordinate place. As a Ph.D. student, in a reflective journey with my research supervisor, I engage in a struggle to define my own feminist perspective in as I prepare to explore the oppression, disadvantage and discrimination experienced by Kenyan women living with vaginal fistulas. I examine how poor and socially disadvantaged …

In Their Husbands' Shoes: Feminism And Political Economy Of Women Breadwinners In Ile-Ife, Southwestern Nigeria, Friday Asiazobor Eboiyehi, Caroline Okumdi Muoghalu, Adeyinka Oladayo Bankole

Journal of International Women's Studies

In a significant number of societies worldwide, the primary role of men is to serve as breadwinners in their households. However, in Nigeria, since the mid-1980s there has been a steady rise in the number of women breadwinners in many households. In spite of this, not enough studies have been conducted on this emerging phenomenon. Using feminist and political economy theories as explanatory tools, the study examined women breadwinners in Nigeria using Ile-Ife of Southwestern Nigeria as a case study. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection were utilized to explore the circumstances leading to the rise of women …

(Re)Imagining Haiti Through The Eyes Of A Seven-Year-Old Girl, Iliana Rosales Figueroa

Journal of International Women's Studies

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s new novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013) explores themes of love, loss, and death. The first character that is presented to us is Claire of the Sea Light, a seven-year-old girl, whose mother died giving birth to her and who is missing. It is at the intersection of this little girl’s loss that all the other characters and topics unfold. Madame Gaëlle, an upper class woman who has a fabric shop in Ville Rose, decides to adopt Claire in order to give her a better life. In this essay I demonstrate that Edwidge Danticat articulates …