Women's History Commons^™

Neoliberalism And Public University Agendas: Tensions Along The Global/Local Divide, Peter Wanyenya, Donna Lester-Smith

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Over the last decade, internationalization efforts have accelerated at leading postsecondary institutions in North America and elsewhere, with universities now aggressively competing for the most talented students worldwide. With the focus on recruiting international students, one of the major attendant objectives has seemingly been a social-justice-oriented agenda on tackling pressing global issues; the local has indeed become the global. However, not everyone is ostensibly benefiting from this new global focus. For some, their local issues and conditions are increasingly precarious and nonprioritized in institutional and broadening neoliberal governmental agendas. In the Canadian context, various Indigenous and low-income racialized communities, youth …

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

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beginning With The Body: Fleshy Politics In The Performance Art Of Rebecca Belmore And Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Samantha Balzer

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article examines what I term the "fleshy" politics of Rebecca Belmore's 2002 Vigil and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's contributions to the 2009 version of the performance project Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility. Focusing on the embodied performances of both Belmore and Piepzna-Samarasinha, I read the skin of the artist as a site where complex politics develop. This analysis is broken into three sections: the first considers the relationship between the performing body and the performance space; the second attends to specific movements each artist makes; the third focuses on garments worn in each …

Feminist Interruptions: Creating Care-Ful And Collaborative Community-Based Research With Students, Kelly Concannon, Laura Finley, Nadine Grifoni, Stephanie Wong

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article describes a feminist community-based research project involving faculty and student collaboration to evaluate a dating and domestic violence awareness initiative. Using a critical ethics of care that emphasizes relationships and allows for constant reflection about power dynamics, role, positionality, and emotions, the authors reflect on what was learned during the research process. Faculty and student researchers share their perspectives and offer suggestions for future feminist collaborative research projects. Significant lessons learned include ensuring that all are invested from the outset of the project, guaranteeing that student researchers understand why their role is so critical in community-based research, and …

Teaching Against Hierarchies: An Anarchist Approach, Stephanie Spoto

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The state of California spends more on prisons than on colleges and universities, and the fact that these two budgetary figures are often compared shows the relationship between the two state institutions. Our classrooms, starting from a very early stage, not only prepare children to be productive members of the consumer economy but educate them for complacency in the face of state violence and mass incarceration. In attempting to move away from hierarchical models of education, this article looks at the feminist pedagogical theory of bell hooks and antiauthoritarian and anarchist theorists such as Jacques Rancière and Derrick Jensen in …

Mother Of A New World? Stereotypical Representations Of Black Women In Three Postapocalyptic Films, Karima K. Jeffrey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay explores three cinematic representations of Black matriarchs who play prophetic roles in redeeming humanity in the midst of apocalyptic change: Ika (Quest for Fire), Kee (Children of Men), and The Oracle (The Matrix trilogy). Not only do these courageous women resist the politics of domination, rebelling against a dying status quo, but they "give birth" to the leaders needed to rebuild a world in chaos and decay. One film ends with a pregnant woman rubbing her belly as she stands on the precipice of evolutionary change; another positions a mother and newborn adrift, waiting to be found by …

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

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Professor Xavier Is A Gay Traitor! An Antiassimilationist Framework For Interpreting Ideology, Power And Statecraft, Michael Loadenthal

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Ideology is an integral component in the reproduction of power. Integral to this central tenet of statecraft is the regulation of identity and proscribed methods of social engagement—positive portrayals of "good citizenry" and delegitimized representations of those challenging hegemony. Through an Althusserian and linguistic analysis, positioning the X-Men movie franchise as an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), one can examine the lives of mutants portrayed in the text as indicative of preferred methods of state-legitimized sociopolitical interaction. This metaphorical and textual analysis is used to discuss the lived realities of queer persons resisting hegemony, and is located in the bodies and …

Portrait Of The Feminist As A Publisher: A Conversation With Urvashi Butalia, Anupama Arora, Sandrine Sanos

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Education, Intersectionality And Social Change, Lena Wånggren, Maja Milatovic

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Queer Desires And Critical Pedagogies In Higher Education: Reflections On The Transformative Potential Of Non-Normative Learning Desires In The Classroom, Jennifer Fraser, Sarah Lamble

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article considers what a queer approach might offer in addressing some of the challenges of higher education in the contemporary neoliberal landscape. Despite a rich literature on queer issues in the classroom, most of the existing scholarship has focused on engaging queer students, being a queer teacher, or teaching queer content in the curriculum. Very little work has focused on what it means to take a queer approach to pedagogic techniques or how such an approach might impact educational practices more broadly. We ask: What does it mean in theory and practice to “queer” our teaching methods? What role …

Teaching Postcolonial Literature In An Elite University: An Edinburgh Lecturer’S Perspective, Michelle Keown

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This reflective essay explores some of the pedagogical challenges I have faced in teaching postcolonial literature and theory at the University of Edinburgh. There are particular social dynamics at work at Edinburgh that make engaging with intersectionality, particularly in the context of colonialism and racism, a rather complex endeavor. Edinburgh is a Russell Group university, and our undergraduate constituency is overwhelmingly white, middle class and British, with a high proportion of students coming from British public-school backgrounds. Many of these students approach postcolonial writing with well-meaning liberal intentions, but often adopt what Graham Huggan (2001) would term an exoticizing perspective …

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

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What's Feminism Got To Do With It? Examination Of Feminism In Women's Everyday Lives, Claire Carter

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In recent decades there has been considerable debate about the role and meaning of feminism in younger women's lives. Feminism can be understood as an empowering discourse, fostering critical awareness and resistance to dominant social norms. However, it can also be experienced as regulatory and disciplinary, clearly defining who and what constitutes a "good" feminist. Utilizing Michel Foucault's principle of care of the self, this paper analyzes women's body practices in relation both to women's interpretation of feminism and to dominant feminist discourses. The complexities of negotiating diverse social identities, as well as women's desire for a happier life and …

(Re)Pinning Our Hopes On Social Media: Pinterest And Women's Discursive Strategies, Katherine Gantz

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Pinterest, the theme-based image-sharing website, has seen a predominantly female usership since its launch in 2010. Unique in both its design and its demographics in the US, the site has generated distinctive patterns of use, posing new questions about how women are claiming this particular spot in social media as their own. Supported by both feminist linguistic and social science research, this article undertakes a discussion of Pinterest's implicit and explicit gendered protocols of usership, which result in what I argue is an emerging women's online rhetoric. Through the examination of images and accompanying comments taken from the site, I …

Was That Ethical? Feminist Critics’ Response To The “Queerness” Of Modernist Women’S Writing, Meridith M. Kruse

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article employs insights from contemporary theories of ethical reading to conduct a case study of feminist critics’ reaction to the queerness of modernist women’s writing. My aim is to develop a set of practices and principles for ethically responding to queerness in literary texts and everyday life, as well as contribute feminist acumen to the current claim that the humanities are the best site to train students how to do justice to texts. The introduction utilizes theories of ethical reading set forth by Jane Gallop and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to develop a preliminary framework of ethical response. The subsequent …

The Methodological Imperatives Of Feminist Ethnography, Richelle D. Schrock

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Feminist ethnography does not have a single, coherent definition and is caught between struggles over the definition and goals of feminism and the multiple practices known collectively as ethnography. Towards the end of the 1980s, debates emerged that problematized feminist ethnography as a productive methodology and these debates still haunt feminist ethnographers today. In this article, I provide a concise historiography of feminist ethnography that summarizes both its promises and its vulnerabilities. I address the three major challenges I argue feminist ethnographers currently face, which include responding productively to feminist critiques of representing "others," accounting for feminisms' commitment to social …

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

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Moving Beyond "Slaves, Sinners, And Saviors": An Intersectional Feminist Analysis Of Us Sex-Trafficking Discourses, Law And Policy, Carrie N. Baker

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article analyzes stories and images of sex trafficking in current mainstream US public discourses, including government publications, NGO materials, news media, and popular films. Noting the similarities and differences among these discourses, the first part demonstrates that they often frame sex trafficking using a rescue narrative that reiterates traditional beliefs and values regarding gender, sexuality, and nationality, relying heavily on patriarchal and orientalist tropes. Reflecting this rescue narrative, mainstream public policies focus on criminal justice solutions to trafficking. The second part suggests alternative frameworks that empower rather than rescue trafficked people. The article argues that the dominant criminal justice …

The Slutwalk Movement: A Study In Transnational Feminist Activism, Joetta L. Carr

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In the past two years the term "slut" ricocheted through the North American media and showed up on signs and banners on every continent as young feminists and their allies launched a series of demonstrations under the name of SlutWalks. In January 2011, a Toronto police officer told students at York University that if women wanted to avoid rape they should not dress like sluts. This incident sparked international outrage, with protests spreading quickly throughout the world, and revealed the misogyny and victim-blaming vitriol that characterize contemporary patriarchal culture. In the wake of the global SlutWalk movement, important questions have …

Breaking The Gender Binary: Feminism And Transgressive Female Desire In Lucía Etxebarria's Beatriz Y Los Cuerpos Celestes And La Eva Futura/La Letra Futura, Lauren Applegate

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The popular texts of Spanish author Lucía Etxebarria have created a polemical social phenomenon in contemporary Spain for their blatant depiction of a world of violence, drugs, and experimental sex of the late-millennium youth culture of Generación X. These topics, along with Etxebarria's public persona and feminist ideology, have fomented much public criticism and given rise to discussion of the current status of feminism, gender norms, and women's authorship in Spain today. This article analyzes Etxebarria's novel Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes and her collection of feminist essays La Eva futura/La letra futura, demonstrating that Etxebarria's depiction of female desire …

Third Wave Feminism's Unhappy Marriage Of Poststructuralism And Intersectionality Theory, Susan Archer Mann

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article first traces the history of unhappy marriages of disparate theoretical perspectives in US feminism. In recent decades, US third-wave authors have arranged their own unhappy marriage in that their major publications reflect an attempt to wed poststructuralism with intersectionality theory. Although the standpoint epistemology of intersectionality theory shares some common ground with the epistemology of poststructuralism, their epistemological assumptions conflict on a number of important dimensions. This contested terrain has generated serious debates within the third wave and between second- and thirdwave feminists. The form, content, and political implications of their "unhappy marriage" are the subject of this …

The End Of Nowhere: The History Of Tuberculosis In Ri, Emma G. Sconyers

Senior Honors Projects

The World Health Organization estimates that approximately one third of the word's current population had been infected with tuberculosis. Prior to the 1940's TB was considered an incurable, chronic affliction. Historically, many people were forcibly detained in tuberculosis sanatoria to lessen the spread of the disease; my great granfather being one of them. In 1939, without warning, he was taken from his pregnant, jobless wife and one-year-old daughter, who were left to fend for themselves for two years without government planning or assistance. He spent those two years at Wallum Lake Sanitorium in northern Rhode Island, a place my great-grandmother's …

Students Teaching Students: Lgbtq History, Brian Stack

Senior Honors Projects

When the Students Teaching Students program called for submissions for student created courses I jumped at the opportunity to learn and share with a group of peers dedicated to a subject. The close to year long process culminated in the first Students Teaching Students course at URI, focusing on the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people: HPR 107: Introduction to LGBTQ History.

Just getting ready to teach was a multifaceted process, since I tend to fluctuate between ravenously seizing every book I can get my hands on and devising practical applications for that intellectual knowledge. First …

Questioning Appropriation: Agency And Complicity In A Transnational Feminist Location Politics, Joe Parker

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In feminist circles agency is often opposed to complicity and associated with resistance to sexism and patriarchy, yet such binary oppositions make the political stakes of their presumed boundaries difficult to interrogate. By bringing location politics into dialogue with agency theory, boundaries of same/Other and location categories may move from a naturalized ground for political work to the contested center of a politics of resistance. I follow a Foucauldian interpretation of agency to reconsider the ethico-politics of established divisions of self and Other both individually and in terms of social movements. By following Gayatri Spivak, Meyda Yeğenoğlu, and Chandra Mohanty's …

Reflections On Intellectual Hybridity, Kimala Price

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Drawing from the growing literature on interdisciplinarity and my own experiences as an intellectual hybrid, I discuss the personal and institutional challenges inherent in crossing disciplinary boundaries in the academy. I argue that boundary crossing is a natural occurrence and that the issue of (inter)disciplinarity is a matter of degree and of determining who gets to define the boundaries. Defining boundaries is not merely an intellectual enterprise, but also a political act that delineates what is, or is not, legitimate scholarship. This issue is especially salient to women's and gender studies during times of economic distress and educational budget cuts.

Caught Between A Rock And A Hard Place: The Title Ix Generation, Mathematics, And The State Of Feminist Quantitative Social Science Research, Jill R. Williams

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In this essay I reflect on the fortieth anniversary of the Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act of 1972 (Title IX), which prohibited discrimination based on sex in federally funded education programs in the United States and inspired educational programs that encourage girls to pursue math and science careers. I argue that despite the feminist underpinnings of Title IX, in recent years feminism has discouraged the advancement of women in math and science by excluding quantitative research from its publications, quantitative researchers from women's and gender studies programs, and quantitative training from its curriculum. I examine my own experience of …

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

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Staying Home While Studying Abroad: Anti-Imperial Praxis For Globalizing Feminist Visions, Shireen Roshanravan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper hinges on the recognition that when study-abroad opportunities are presented and perceived as a means of access to global perspectives on women and gender, they reduce the problem of US-centrism in Women's Studies to a geographic rather than an epistemic limitation. According to this logic, physical travel away from the United States can serve as an effective method for overcoming US-centrism and attending to the "global," a curricular strategy that Chandra Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander call "the cartographic rule of the transnational as always 'elsewhere'" (Mohanty and Alexander 2010, 33). This cartographic rule reinforces hegemonic representations of …

The Problem Of Protection: Rethinking Rhetoric Of Normalizing Surgeries, Amy Falvey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay focuses on the rhetoric of protection that emerges around infants who face the prospect of normalizing surgeries. Frequently, decisions to proceed with normalizing surgeries are made by doctors and parents with "protection" of the infant as a motivating force. "Protection," in such contexts, typically refers to protection of the infant from the inhospitable world that lies in wait for an individual whose body does not conform to social, morphological, and biological norms. While this concern may be valid and important, this essay argues that there are alternative narratives or notions of protection that must also be acknowledged and …