Showing papers in "Feminist Review in 2022"
TL;DR: In this article , the authors focus on swimming in the sea as one form of wild methodology and draw on hauntology to think about the possibilities of such methodologies for troubling normative academic practices directed at different ways of being and becoming.
Abstract: This article thinks with oceans and swimming, in dialogue with decolonial feminist materialist approaches and other current novel methodologies which foreground embodiment and relational ontologies, in order to consider the conceptual potential of such diffractions for the project of alternative scholarly practices. We focus on swimming in the sea as one form of wild methodology and Slow scholarship that draws on hauntology to think about the possibilities of such methodologies for troubling normative academic practices directed at different ways of being and becoming. Located in the (post-)apartheid space of South African higher education, which continues to follow and reinstate colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist logics, we ask questions about the silences around material histories of subjugation and violence that are embedded in the institution and the lives of those who enter these spaces. Propositions are made about how a swimming methodology may inspire a consciousness and engagement with intersectional gender hauntings that permeate the material, curricula, relational and affective spaces of academia as part of disrupting and reimagining the university as a space of/for justice and flourishing. We explore the ways in which embodied, affective methodologies in or near the ocean/s may be deployed to subvert and reconfigure, to make and stay with trouble. We therefore propose sea swimming as a powerful way of thinking with the sea in productive and creative ways for scholarship towards a justice-to-come, to open up new imaginaries of scholarship that make a difference.
6 citations
TL;DR: In this article , the authors describe their experience of thinking with decorator crabs as a feminist practice of care within the conceptual context of the ocean, and show that the aquarium is a potent space of transformation that allows us to imagine new and distinctly feminist entanglements that dismantle hierarchies.
Abstract: Feminist scholarship has increasingly turned towards the ocean as a conceptual apparatus in which to think through the complex philosophical and ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene. Responding to the ebbs, flows and transformations of the oceanic turn, our article outlines our interactions with four decorator crabs. It begins by situating our experience of thinking-with these crabs as a feminist practice of care within the conceptual context of the ocean. Our article then draws on the knowledge that arose out of our fertile entanglements with the crabs to propose that: 1) the aquarium, with its colonial histories of subjugation, is a fertile space to re-image human–aquatic relationalities, revealing the fallacy of human control over ‘nature’ and emphasising the agency of marine worlds; 2) Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality is a powerful way to think through the consequences of an acidifying ocean, both for ourselves and for our shelled companions; and 3) remediation is a radical approach to taking seriously the materiality of watery worlds. The objective of the article is to craft a practice of material feminism that entangles our more-than-human bodies to learn-with decorator crabs. In doing so, we show that the aquarium is a potent space of transformation that allows us to imagine new and distinctly feminist entanglements that dismantle hierarchies. We show that thinking-with the materiality of marine worlds is a series of remediations, both material and discursive, that dissolve the boundaries between entities, creating an embodied environmental ethics that is necessary as a feminist challenge to the Anthropocene.
2 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored several vignettes that complicate dominant feminist myths underlying its mandate, revealing that the pursuit of feminist solidarity can neither rely on myths about refugee women's identities and conditions, nor be taken-for-granted as an organic outcome of group activities.
Abstract: Over the last decade, growing concern over Syrian refugee women and girl’s gendered displacement experiences, including gender-based violence, has led to the proliferation of women and girl safe space interventions across neighbouring countries affected by the Syrian conflict. Though diverse in their design and implementation, some of these safe spaces aim to mobilise aspirations for feminist solidarity and collective action, where women recognise their collective power and work together to transform their gendered social conditions. Drawing on feminist ethnographic research in a safe space primarily targeting Syrian refugee women in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley, I explore several vignettes that complicate dominant feminist myths underlying its mandate. These vignettes reveal that the pursuit of feminist solidarity can neither rely on myths about refugee women’s identities and conditions, nor be taken-for-granted as an organic outcome of group activities. I offer several reflections on what these vignettes can tell us about better working towards cultivating feminist solidarity in safe spaces for refugee women in practice, with the hope that their generative and transformative potential be realised.
2 citations
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TL;DR: In this article , the authors argue that fictions which actively defamiliarise the ocean can be used to redress the anthropocentric privilege found in hitherto narratives of the oceanic that were predicated upon mastery and control, and that uncanny moments of displacement and uncertainty can illuminate human/oceanic interconnections and foster a sense of responsibility and compassion towards the oceans.
Abstract: In this article, I argue for the notion of what I term ‘uncanny water’ as a conceptual tool for reading contemporary oceanic fictions. The uncanny’s affective capacity to destabilise epistemological and ontological certainties makes it a particularly potent literary tool for challenging the nature/culture binary. I argue that fictions which actively defamiliarise the ocean can be used to redress the anthropocentric privilege found in hitherto narratives of the oceanic that were predicated upon mastery and control, and that uncanny moments of displacement and uncertainty can illuminate human/oceanic interconnections and foster a sense of responsibility and compassion towards the oceans. I identify resonances between the uncanny’s continuing referentiality and the notion that feminist transcorporeality interrelates the subject into networks of materiality which extend across time and space in unknowable ways. Both transcorporeality and the uncanny work against the conceit of the individual through the dissolution of boundaries, and, crucially, both require a suspension of assumptions of the self as whole, discrete and impermeable. To demonstrate this, I read the uncanny waters of contemporary fictions from the Northern Atlantic Littoral (Atlantic Canada and the westernmost parts of the UK). The littoral position of these spaces makes them ideally placed to negotiate the borders between habitable and unhabitable spaces, and the limitations of knowledge that run alongside this. I assert that iterations of uncanny water offer a transoceanic dialogue which shifts constructions of subjectivity away from national and terrestrial boundaries to one more akin to the fluid and relational dialectics of transcorporeality.
1 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that decolonial feminism should be understood as an experiment, a risky, unfinished project rather than a fixed location, and argue that it should be based on a more radicalised notion of what María Lugones calls learning from other resisters.
Abstract: The rhetoric of decolonising feminism has been increasingly connected to reformism rather than a radical intervention. Problematising the idea of finality in the calls to decolonise, I suggest that decolonial feminism should be understood as an experiment, a risky, unfinished project rather than a fixed location, and I argue that it should be based on a more radicalised notion of what María Lugones calls ‘learning from other resisters’. I draw on my experience working with feminists across the vast and diverse Indonesian nusantara (archipelago) and reflect on Lugones’s concept of ‘other resisters’ in her essay ‘Toward a decolonial feminism’. Learning from feminists from places such as Nusa Tenggara and West Papua who challenge the singular imagination of the Global South, I advocate shifting the debate away from Euro-American academia as the locus of knowledge production by centring other resisters on the path towards decolonial feminism. I propose three aspects in learning from other resisters: actively engaging in the process of creating feminist linkages, acknowledging borders and friction within the Global South and interrogating the notion of resistance.
1 citations
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors describe Andil Gosine's artistic archives as "watery" to chart a feminist genealogy of archival practice and argue that routing interdisciplinary studies of Atlantic and Indian Oceans through the Caribbean provides a transoceanic method to analyse race and sexuality within Indo-Caribbean connections.
Abstract: In this article, I describe Andil Gosine’s artistic archives as ‘watery’ to chart a feminist genealogy of archival practice. I argue that routing interdisciplinary studies of Atlantic and Indian Oceans through the Caribbean provides a transoceanic method to analyse race and sexuality within Indo-Caribbean connections. To that end, I examine the representation of water and waterways in Gosine’s Our Holy Waters, and Mine (2014) to illustrate how relations with water provides a heuristic and representative practice for critiquing afterlives of colonialism and indentureship. I bring together Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology, scholarship on feminist and queer archival practices and ocean studies to read Gosine’s experimental artistic practice as offering ways to rethink oceanic materiality in the context of historical and archival knowledge production.
1 citations
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TL;DR: Melisa Ertuğrul as mentioned in this paper is an Izmir-based musician and dance artist who moved to Germany and focused her works on her biggest passion: music, and she lives in Berlin and is making music.
Abstract: author biography Melisa Ertuğrul is an Izmir-based musician and dance artist. Born in 1993 in Turkey, she studied music in high school and received a Bachelor’s degree in acting. From 2018 to 2020, her art practice focused on urban dance and contemporary dance and she has achieved success in this field. Melisa loves interdisciplinary and eclectic approaches. She is into phenomenology, music production, philosophy of body and dance, and the history of performing arts, all of which inspires her work-in-progress. In 2020, she moved to Germany and focused her works on her biggest passion: music. Currently, she lives in Berlin and is making music. 1045025 FER0010.1177/01417789211045025Feminist ReviewMelisa Ertuğrul research-article2021
1 citations
TL;DR: In the context of climate change and sea-level rise, the blue humanities have high stakes in telling captivating and persuasive stories that illustrate the intimate connections between human bodies and "bodies of water" as mentioned in this paper .
Abstract: In the context of climate change and sea-level rise, the blue humanities have high stakes in telling captivating and persuasive stories that illustrate the intimate connections between human bodies and ‘bodies of water’ (Neimanis, 2017, p. 1). Part of this work lies in a shifting of onto-epistemological boundaries to see bodies as porously and permeably embedded within environments, leaking into each other in a way that is posthuman and trans-corporeal (Alaimo, 2014, p. 190). Another part lies in coming to terms with the oceans’ abiding histories of empire and slavery, toxicity and global capitalism. However, even as our history is inundated with it and our existence depends on it, the ocean is, as Stefan Helmreich (2009, p. ix) so concisely puts it, ‘strange’. Unlike earth, it is an alien realm that resists direct experience and knowledge and prohibits humans from visiting on our own terms. Surfers, swimmers, sailors and divers have their own embodied ways of knowing the sea, but for most humans the ocean is a highly mediated environment that requires translation through cinema, documentary, photography, literature or poetry in order to become accessible for more than surface-level thought, emotion and concern (Alaimo, 2014, p. 191). The shape of these stories matters for imagining multispecies futures, and many have moulded themselves around ideas of otherness, danger, transcendence and use—giving us the ocean as alien, as stranger, as sublime nature and as resource and conduit for transnational capital and empire.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors look to three weaver-activists who use their practices to reclaim the matrixial power of the ocean (as maternal womb and network of relation) in the face of ongoing US occupation in the Pacific: Marshallese poet and climate activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Hawai‘i-based settler-ally weaver and installation artist Mary Babcock; and Kānaka Maoli sculptor Kaili Chun, also based in Hawai'i.
Abstract: This article engages weaving as a model of feminist decolonial climate justice methodology in Oceania. In particular, it looks to three weaver-activists who use their practices to reclaim the matrixial power of the ocean (as maternal womb and network of relation) in the face of ongoing US occupation in the Pacific: Marshallese poet and climate activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner; Hawai‘i-based settler-ally weaver and installation artist Mary Babcock; and Kānaka Maoli sculptor Kaili Chun, also based in Hawai‘i. Each artist begins from a particular positionality in the ongoing open weave of the ocean and uses specific cultural ontologies of weaving and netting to address knots and gaps in climate change imaginaries. These weavers help to articulate important nuances in recent calls for working in solidarity networks at the cultural interface of climate justice activism. Their processes directly address the need for greater emotional and relational capacity across cultural and national divides, across Indigenous and non-Indigenous feminist critiques of colonial-capitalist systems and through inter-connected waters.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors take up the historical figure of Dr Betty Paërl, who has surprisingly turned up in very different kinds of specialised archives, and find the recurrent image/item of the whip that presses them to carefully think through how the archive of Dr PaÃrl casts light on a history that Katherine McKittrick calls being "in the shadow of the whipped" and detect the liberatory politics underlying her activisms.
Abstract: In this article, the authors take up the historical figure of Dr Betty Paërl, who has surprisingly turned up in very different kinds of specialised archives. The white mathematics professor was located in IHLIA LGBT+ Heritage, the largest queer heritage collection in Europe, as a notable SM sexpert and spokesperson on transgender politics, and also found during archival research into the anti-(neo)colonial struggles of Suriname against the Dutch. Upon closer inspection of the materials, the authors find the recurrent image/item of the whip that presses them to carefully think through how the archive of Dr Paërl casts light on a history that Katherine McKittrick calls being ‘in the shadow of the whip’. The article aims to combine an analysis of these versions of the whip in different visual and discursive registers to detect the liberatory politics underlying her activisms. To do so, the authors develop the intersectional model of the kaleidoscope employed by Dutch Black, migrant and refugee (BMR) feminist theorists to grasp the shifting patterns of power that Paërl battled and embodied as an activist of the anticolonial struggle, for sex workers’ rights, for kinky sex and for transgender people. This is all the more important in the historical study of transgender visual materials that most often arrive in archives via medical and police photography or pornographic materials. The historical researcher, the article argues, should be wary of (re)producing a static vision that would reduce transgender figures to sex and gender politics, or eclipse a vision of trans politics that dilates beyond sexuality.
TL;DR: This article carried out in-depth biographical interviews with black British women who raised children as single parents for their doctoral project and found that listening to numerous personal accounts of single black mothers over months slowly transformed my personal beliefs about single motherhood, and the way I viewed my own situation radically shifted.
Abstract: From 2017 to 2018, I was privileged to carry out in-depth biographical interviews with black British women who raised children as single parents for my doctoral project. This project is part of my ongoing work to investigate the experiences of single-parent women in the context of urban inequalities, and also to challenge a continued problematisation of single motherhood among black populations. While collecting this data, I was a single parent with a young son. My motherhood journey was still unfolding, so I had a personal interest in what women with more years of motherhood experience had to say. In policy, media and academic narratives, single black motherhood has been represented as a bleak, troublesome and disempowering experience for women, not to mention the communities they belong to more broadly. This was a message I had internalised. I devised the project to try to understand women’s experiences. Listening to numerous personal accounts of single black mothers over months slowly transformed my personal beliefs about single motherhood—the way I viewed my own situation radically shifted. To me, this indicated the potential of stories to vindicate, to heal and to empower.1
TL;DR: Wang et al. as mentioned in this paper found that gender-switching videos, which can be divided into two categories of complete and selective, involve homoerotic (including both boys' love and girls' love), hetero-erotic and queer narratives.
Abstract: In 2020, Yiwen Wang published an article about gender-switching videos, a Chinese gender subculture in the digital media environment. Different from Wang, who identified gender-switching videos as an example of the slash (especially boys’ love) subgenre, through a more comprehensive investigation of this subgenre this study found that gender-switching videos—which can be divided into two categories of complete and selective—involve homoerotic (including both boys’ love and girls’ love), heteroerotic and queer narratives. This article starts by demonstrating the multi-gender/sexual orientation narrative in gender-switching videos, and further analyses their social and cultural functions as a gender subculture in reconstructing gendered relationships in traditional Chinese aesthetics and narratives. The theory of feminist utopian narratives is further introduced to better understand how Chinese women intervene in the grand historical narrative as an important force to influence the development of history and story plots via fiction content creation in the digital media environment.
TL;DR: The concept of controlling images was coined by the black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins in her book Black Feminist Thought (2000) and demonstrates that these images are, in fact, ways of defining us for the sake of control and subjugation as mentioned in this paper .
Abstract: The concept of controlling images was coined by the black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins in her book Black Feminist Thought (2000) and demonstrates that these images are, in fact, ways of defining us for the sake of control and subjugation. White patriarchal capitalism engendered images that not only use us as empty vessels to be filled with the sayings of society but also constitute an effective way to annihilate our thinking and justify violence against our bodies. These images are: servants, black mothers, prostitutes, mules, angry, rude, not feminine, emotional, passionate, hypersexualised, dangerous, deviant, impure, aggressive and dependent on welfare, among others.
TL;DR: It was an afternoon in July of 2013 as mentioned in this paper , when Umut came to my studio in Tophane with goggles he had bought in Eminönü to protect our eyes.
Abstract: It was an afternoon in July of 2013. Umut came to my studio in Tophane with goggles he had bought in Eminönü. He said, ‘these are to protect our eyes’. We went out. Before climbing the steep Italian hill, we stopped by Yaso’s studio. She gave each of us two plastic bottles of water, mixed with acid reflux medication. What does one do with water mixed with Rennie at a protest in Taksim? I don’t remember from which corner we sneaked onto Istiklal. What I remember is that a plastic bullet tore the crowd in two. And all the rest of the bullets, skipping across our bodies, tear gas, sweat, panic, pushing, tear gas, bullets, sirens ... Umut and I didn’t let go of each other’s hands. We learned that Rennie heals the burnings of tear gas. And we didn’t die that summer.1
TL;DR: The authors examine the student debt crisis through a queer, feminist lens attuned to matters of the material, and argue that student debt is a product of neoliberal, racial capitalism, and its profit resides in its financialisation.
Abstract: This article examines the US student debt crisis through a queer, feminist lens attuned to matters of the material. Examining the discourse of ‘failed’ and/or forestalled millennial adulthood, I argue that the student debt crisis is a product of neoliberal, racial capitalism, and its profit resides in its financialisation. Drawing on queer and feminist theories regarding time and futurity and current research on student debt, I examine the configurations and effects of what I term the ‘student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse’, which renders the crisis of student debt legible through a heteronormative life narrative, and obscures the racialised, gendered realities of student debt. The student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse illustrates how under racial capitalism, heteronormative temporality is structurally conditioned via race. Examining US media coverage, I assert that the reprosexually oriented student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse legitimises new financial products that enable debtors to sustain and reproduce themselves via more debt.
TL;DR: In Fang Si-Qi's First Love Paradise (Lin, [2017]) was first published Taiwan as discussed by the authors , it tells the story, Lin's words, about teacher, who long used his status as a teacher to seduce, rape, and sexually abuse female students.
Abstract: The fifth anniversary of the death of Lin Yihan—creator of ‘Fang Si-Qi’—was marked on 2022. In Fang Si-Qi’s First Love Paradise (Lin, [2017]) was first published Taiwan. It tells the story, Lin’s words, about teacher, who long used his status as a teacher to seduce, rape, and sexually abuse female students’. 1 After the publication, Lin Yihan’s 16-minute monologue received 1.4 million views on YouTube, in which she cryptically reveals that Fang Si-Qi’s First Love Paradise is a semi-autobiographical work, and that the creation of the abuser in the novel is based on her Chinese teacher in real life. A week after the interview, Lin chose to end her life. The the
TL;DR: In this article , cultural products (books, articles and other published texts) constitute a principal cultural outcome of the feminist protest in the Catholic Church in Spain after 1975, and the authors analyze the cultural impacts of social movements targeting non-state institutions.
Abstract: This article studies the cultural impacts of social movements targeting non-state institutions. Using printed primary sources, bibliography and press clippings, the case of the feminist protest within the Catholic Church in Spain after 1975 is analysed from a comparative perspective. This research shows that cultural products (books, articles and other published texts) constitute a principal cultural outcome of the aforementioned protest. Some characteristics of the targeted institution, such as the intransigency of the Church hierarchy to feminist demands, made policy consequences impossible. Yet activists managed to produce cultural outputs and disseminate them to their movement constituency thanks to allies’ support; the use of the Spanish language as a vehicle for mobilisation; and the utilisation of activists’ locations within the Church and in society as sites from which to spread their world-views and demands.