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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.


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.


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.


A New Heroic Figure: Female Protestors And Precarity In Puerto Rico, Guillermo Rebollo Gil Jan 2016

A New Heroic Figure: Female Protestors And Precarity In Puerto Rico, Guillermo Rebollo Gil

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper offers a critical look on an isolated, failed incident of protest carried out by a young Puerto Rican woman and her two children. In doing so, it explores the possibilities of radical political thought and action on the island. Furthermore, by situating this event within the larger context of danger—physical, social and discursive—that women in Puerto Rico are subjected to, it seeks to question the manner in which female protestors’ vulnerability and agency challenge those on the left to formulate gender-progressive strategies for emancipation. Lastly, it is argued here that this protestor features as new type of radical …


More Wounding Than Wounds: Hysterectomy, Phenomenology, And The Pain(S) Of Excorporation, Heather Hill-Vasquez Jan 2016

More Wounding Than Wounds: Hysterectomy, Phenomenology, And The Pain(S) Of Excorporation, Heather Hill-Vasquez

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Focusing on the pain experience of hysterectomy, this article applies and interrogates the foundational descriptive process on which phenomenology is based and suggests that feminism and phenomenology are more compatible than previously asserted. Building upon the work of feminist philosophers who have also explored how feminist and phenomenological approaches share similar methods and intentions—especially in connection with the former’s significant attention to lived experience as a source for the theory feminism employs—the article engages with the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Samuel Mallin who maintain a consistent attention to the body in their phenomenological approaches. Arguing that Mallin’s method of …


Bodies And Contexts: An Investigation Into A Postmodern Feminist Reading Of Averroës, Reed Taylor Jan 2016

Bodies And Contexts: An Investigation Into A Postmodern Feminist Reading Of Averroës, Reed Taylor

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In this article, I contribute to the wider discourse of theorizing feminism in predominantly Muslim societies by analyzing the role of women’s political agency within the writings of the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher Averroës (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198). I critically analyze Catarina Belo’s (2009) liberal feminist approach to political agency in Averroës by adopting a postmodern reading of Averroës’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. A postmodern feminist reading of Averroes’s political thought emphasizes contingencies and contextualization rather than employing a literal reading of the historical works.


Do You Understand? Unsettling Interpretative Authority In Feminist Oral History, Katherine Fobear Jan 2016

Do You Understand? Unsettling Interpretative Authority In Feminist Oral History, Katherine Fobear

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article interrogates interpretative authority in feminist oral history through a critical Indigenous lens. I argue that critical Indigenous theory provides a useful and needed understanding of participants’ agency and the active role they have in shaping the research. Feminist oral history as a methodology has a long and well-established lineage of exploring difficult questions of power in the relationship between the researcher and the participants. While many feminist oral historians have actively interrogated issues surrounding power within their own research, there are relatively few works that press beyond looking at the one-sided hierarchical relationship between the oral historian 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.


The Future Of Chicana Studies: An Intergenerational Conversation With Historian Vicki L. Ruiz And Filmmaker Virginia Espino, Lori A. Flores Jan 2016

The Future Of Chicana Studies: An Intergenerational Conversation With Historian Vicki L. Ruiz And Filmmaker Virginia Espino, Lori A. Flores

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.