‘Atheism is not the problem. The problem is being a woman’. Atheist women and reasonable feminism

While the percentage of religiously unaffiliated women is growing in the West, little is known about the relationship between atheism and feminism. This article redresses the gap by exploring women’s identification with atheism and feminism. The central argument draws on qualitative interview data from the UK, Australia, the US and Poland and emphasizes the role of atheism as a background identity marker through which female subjectivity is enacted in everyday life. The findings are two-fold: first, atheism and feminism are both devalued identities when embraced by women; and second, identifying as an atheist affords the participants an impetus to invent a new vocabulary to account for their identity. In conclusion, I argue that atheism provides a catalyst for the post-feminist discourse of independence, empowerment and freedom of choice as the participants construct narratives of ‘reasonable feminism’.     

The feminist frontier: on trans and feminism

Against a back-drop of ongoing hostility between sections of feminism towards trans communities, and particularly feminist antagonism towards trans women, this paper explores the relationship between feminism and transgender. Through the use of original case study material, gathered by virtual methods, the paper explores events that have occurred since the millennium that are used to highlight particular epistemological and political tensions between feminism and trans. Central themes running through the case studies include the constitution of ‘woman’, the policing of feminist identities and spaces, and questions of bodily autonomy. In conclusion, the paper stresses the importance of rejecting trans-exclusionary feminism and of foregrounding the links between feminism and transgender as a key social justice project of our time.     

Whales and minnows: Some sexual theorists and their followers and how they contribute to making feminism invisible

Past feminism was made to vanish, so that only now are we beginning to realise the full extent of our history. The same process is already beginning to happen to present feminism—we too are being made invisible. One instance of this process is examined in the work of some ‘radical’ male academics. They use the work of various sexual theorists (Lacan, Gagnon and Simon, Foucault) to construct a particular and de-politicized version of ‘sexual politics’; and in doing so they recognize only an equally partial version of ‘feminism’. It seems that ‘our friends’, ‘radical’ men, are at least as dangerous as the rest, for they increasingly claim the right to ‘name’ feminism and sexual politics for us.     

the reinvention of feminism in Pakistan

This article argues that there has been a significant turn in the discourse of feminist politics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The author suggests that the rise of a new feminism – rooted in Islamic discourse, non-confrontational, privatized and personalized, whose objective is to ‘empower’ women within Islam – is not a post-9/11 development but rather a result of unresolved debates on the issue of religion within the progressive women's movement. It has been due to the accommodation of religion-based feminist arguments by the stronger secular feminist movement of the 1980s that paved the way for its own marginalization by giving feminist legitimacy to such voices. The author argues that the second wave of feminism may have become diluted in its effectiveness and support due to discriminatory religious laws, dictatorship, NGO-ization, fragmentation, co-option by the state and political parties in the same way as the global women's movement has. Yet it has been the internal inconsistency of the political strategies as well as the personal, Muslim identities of secular feminists that have allowed Islamic feminists to redefine the feminist agenda in Pakistan. This article voices the larger concern over the rise of a new generation of Islamic revivalist feminists who seek to rationalize all women's rights within the religious framework and render secular feminism irrelevant while framing the debate on women's rights exclusively around Islamic history, culture and tradition. The danger is that a debate such as this will be premised on a polarized ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ Muslim woman, such that women who abide by the liberal interpretation of theology will be pitted against those who follow a strict and literal interpretist mode and associate themselves with male religio-political discourse. This is only likely to produce a new, radicalized, religio-political feminism dominating Pakistan's political future.     

Staging race: Florence Mills,celebrity, identity and performance in 1920s Britain

This article focuses on the time the African American performer Florence Mills spent in Britain in the 1920s. Mills was one of the most popular performers of the period, taking a lead in African American vaudeville productions, she was admired by working class and ‘elite’ black and white audiences. Our paper examines four examples of Mills’ British fan mail alongside newspaper reports of her performances in London. These reveal complex themes of identity, of Britishness, sexuality, gender and class within the context of changing international understandings of race relations in the Inter-war period. We utilise these letters alongside newspaper reports to consider how Mills’ presence in Britain as a performer and anti-racist activist influenced debates and personal reflections on racial identity, sexual desire and belonging to Britain.     

militarism,conflict and women's activism in the global era: challenges and prospects for women in three West African contexts

This paper deals with the wrought relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism, broadly defined. Tracing the trajectory in which psychoanalysis leads feminism from sexuality to sexual difference then to the Phallus and the ideology of femininity, the paper takes on these ‘f-words’—femininity and ‘f-allus’, Freud and Foucault—to foreground an unacknowledged challenge of Judith Butler by Toril Moi in 1999. In this paper, I read Freud closely and demonstrate that although Freud's theory of cure is obscured by the turn to the Phallus and the ideology of femininity, its language of fantasy, sexuality, desire and the unconscious remain important concepts for feminism of the new millennium. On the other hand, critiques of ‘empire of the Phallus’ such as the French feminists’ affirmation of femininity and Judith Butler's concept of ‘lesbian Phallus’ only reproduce the master's system. Butler's misreading of Freud's ‘tooth’ and Lacan's ‘eyes’ as the Phallus shows that ‘inversion, subversion and rebellion’ by reversal or negation often leads to repetition without difference. In conclusion, I introduce Joan Copjec's critique of Foucaultian historicism and Toril Moi's turn to ordinary language philosophy to propose a new psychoanalytic feminism that can have sex without the Phallus.     

Cindy Sherman in a New Millennium: Fashion,Feminism, Art and Ageing

ABSTRACT

If feminism and the fashion industry were once seen as adversaries, given how the strictures of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) permeated so much of second wave feminism, a consideration of ‘fashion’ is now central to contemporary feminist scholarship. But just as the earlier critique of fashion seemed finally to have been supplanted, certain basic arguments around dress and makeup nevertheless resurfaced within contemporary feminism. The current neoliberal climate has led to the ever-increasing consumption of ‘fashionable’ goods, provoking unease and encouraging the contested ‘protectionist discourse’ within feminism to shield young women from just such excesses. Meanwhile, the fashion world itself, arguably more powerful than ever, has across the last twenty years continued a process of legitimising itself through its various modes of alliance with the art world; it has even hijacked elements of feminist practice in the pursuit of publicity. This article suggests that the fashion industry and contemporary feminism are nonetheless alike in one significant respect: neither have properly engaged with the needs of an ageing population. It is an omission that this article will seek to examine through a discussion of the recent ‘portraits‘ of Cindy Sherman, an artist of great interest to feminist scholars, in whose earlier work there was a discernible ‘anti-fashion’ element. Now ‘fashionable’ herself, a leading figure in the global art world, she has collaborated with the fashion industry in rather different ways. Her ‘portraits’ of 2012, in which she reconfigured herself as imaginary Manhattan socialites in or beyond middle age, and a later series, exhibited in 2016, where she appears as a series of ageing, anonymous ‘movie stars’, reveal more general ideological tensions surrounding the representation of women, the ageing process and the fashionable ideal. It is the dissection of these tensions that underpin this article, for while Sherman’s work has been the subject of academic debate across a forty year period, her use and critique of the ‘fashionable ‘ image has not been examined alongside an exploration of the expanding activities of the fashion industry itself; nor have her recent images of ageing women been examined within this more general context.     

Beyond Repudiation: The Affective Instrumentalisation of Feminism in Girlfriendly Spaces

As a mediated sensibility, Gill, McRobbie and Angela have argued that postfeminism is held together by an incorporation of feminist ideas, in order to position feminism as ‘past’, a positioning which contributes to the production of highly individualised subjectivities. This article highlights an emerging modality of feminine subjectivity in which feminism is affectively incorporated, but, rather than being repudiated, it is deconstructed and instrumentalised to fit within norms of girlfriendship. To draw attention to how this discussion may open a more nuanced understanding of the relations between feminist and postfeminist subjectivity, I explore a set of blogs hosted on Tumblr that are situated within ‘girlfriend’ culture. In these blogs, young women articulate humorous reactions to everyday situations based on assumptions of common, feminine experience. I suggest that girlfriendliness, as an emerging normative condition of youthful femininity, constructs an instrumental relation to feminism requiring the discerning, selective performance of traits suggesting an acceptance of certain feminist ideas. Rather than proceeding to a repudiation of feminism per a classically postfeminist sensibility, feminism is dismantled into an affective plasticity that is flexibly incorporated to show individual value, creating ‘likeable’ and resilient femininities. This article draws attention to shifts in the regulation of femininity that occurs on the plane of the affective, calling for an expanded analytical approach that more broadly problematises the instrumentalisation of feminism as a technology of subjectivity.     

‘It’s what Emmeline Pankhurst would have wanted’: Celebrity Big Brother: Year of the Woman (2018, UK) and negotiations of popular feminism(s)

Feminist scholarship has invested attention in popular culture as a terrain upon which understandings of feminism are circulated, contested and explored. This is particularly so in the contemporary moment in which feminism appears to have achieved a new ascendency. But whilst popular culture and feminism are recognised as inextricably enmeshed, there remains the implicit or explicit assumption in feminist scholarship that popular media culture could do ‘better’, and that there is a more ‘authentic’ form of feminism waiting to find representation. In response to this context, this article undertakes an analysis of Twitter responses to Celebrity Big Brother: Year of the Woman (2018) in order to explore the ways in which a popular media text provides an arena for the negotiation of popular feminism. Rather than positioning reality TV and celebrity culture as a site of ‘ideological ruin’ for feminism, this article explores how CBB is discussed in relation to feminism as popular television, and the ways in which this may offer affordances and limitations. The article concludes that feminist media scholars need to give due attention to the complexities of popular feminism as articulated by popular media culture.     

What a Difference a Decade Makes: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Coming to Power</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Second Coming</Emphasis>

A critical look at two books, Coming to Power – Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, published in 1981, and its ‘long awaited sequel’, The Second Coming – A Leatherdyke Reader, published in 1996, yields many differences and similarities. Both books have been judged negatively or positively on the basis of their sadomasochistic content and in line with knee-jerk positions around the lesbian ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s. The feminist politics represented in each book and the connections to more general lesbian feminist concerns and developments of either the late 1970s (Coming to Power) or the late 1980s and early 1990s (The Second Coming) are often overlooked or dismissed. Comparing the kind of sex acts and personas fetishized in each book as well as the claims made for lesbian sm by its adherents often reveals more than the writers may have intended. A more nuanced reading of both books also reveals connections between lesbian feminism, particularly lesbian radical feminism and the sm dykes. Rather than being the ‘illegitimate children’ of lesbian feminism, as Coming to Power maintained in 1981, it is clear now that sm dykes and lesbian feminists are strange sisters who needed each other to define their particular politicized identities.     

A bit of a dirty word: ‘feminism’ and female teachers identifying as feminist

Following the identification of a gap in the literature around reasons for contemporary women’s self-identification as ‘feminist’, this paper discusses an empirical study of an intergenerational group of contemporary Australian female teachers collaboratively designing English curriculum around girls’ media. The paper explores the group’s shared conversations around feminism, over a series of meetings, as we (teachers and researcher) plan curriculum and negotiate broader subject positions possible for girls and women. These contexts include the competing discourses of feminism and postfeminism and how these mediate texts chosen for study, our pedagogical approaches, and the ways we experience our own lives. In this study, we struggle to find a shared language, across generations, with which to work collaboratively in a community of practice committed to the critical study of media, but involving different individual orientations to ‘feminism’. This is a space in which impediments to the feminist study of girls’ media quickly emerge. The paper also serves as a reminder that feminist scholarship takes place in schools, as well as in the academy, and that the gender studies work teachers do in schools is potentially whole population work, worthy of keen attention in the gender studies academic mainstream.     

Gendering the union: imperial feminism and the ladies’ land league

The Act of Union of 1800, establishing Westminster control over Irish affairs, had important repercussions for the development of feminism within nineteenth-century Ireland, as well as contributing towards adifferentiation of Irish from British feminism. Feminism within Ireland was shaped by class, religion and racial identification: one strand followed theBritish model of Protestant philanthropy, while the other was concerned with asserting women's right to take part in nationalist political struggle. ‘Imperial’ feminists in Britain and Ireland, concerned with establishing their right to take part in the affairs of the ‘nation’, perceived those Irish who rejected British imperial rule as uncivilised, reserving sympathy for those whose economic position was threatened by the activities of those who campaigned against the landlord system. The period of the Land War of 1879–82 illustrates these conflicting discourses. The subsequent decline of imperial power in Ireland can be traced through a gradual change within Irish feminism from an initial support for the Union to a later embrace of nationalism, as young middle-class women, many from Catholic backgrounds, became involved in the movement     

‘Memory Speaks from Today’: analyzing oral histories of female members of the MIR in Chile through the work of Luisa Passerini

This article engages the work of Luisa Passerini in order to analyze the oral histories of women who belonged to the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) in Chile during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a theoretical framework that considers the interplay between memory, testimony, and gender as well as a transnational historical perspective can help explain how feminism and ‘new left’ groups emerged from the revolutionary 1968 context. Of primary concern is the manner in which certain gendered aspects of the MIR women's experiences—particularly the brutal sexualized political violence they endured at the hands of the state—have been historically silenced and also how, more recently, women's testimonials have helped to break that silence. Finally, the article proposes that feminism, both as a mode of critical thinking and as a social movement, will allow us to more fully ‘hear’ the testimonies of these women and to understand how their memories are ‘speaking from today.’     

Motherhood at center: Ellen key's social vision

The new Swedish women's movement was hampered in its analysis in part by the association of ‘feminism’ with a glorification of traditional feminity attributed to turn-of-the-century essayist Ellen Key. This paper examines Key's production during one controversial decade (1896–1905) and finds that she, in fact, sought freedom for women to be true to their own characters rather than follow patriarchal definitions or emulate male behavior. She advocated a new world-view based on social solidarity and the ‘self-assertion and self-surrender’ of the mother-child relationship, as well as a transformation of society that would put motherhood at the center of public life. Dismayed at sexual hypocrisy and the suffering it caused, she wanted to remove reproduction from its patriarchal moral and legal strictures and replace ‘man's erotic dualism’ with genuine love and a new understanding of sexuality based on ‘maternal feeling’. Several interpretive questions are raised: Where is the locus of feminism? How do we recognize it when we see it? Why is the so-called ‘exaltation’ of motherhood so problematic for modern feminists?     

Forging feminism within labor unions and the legacy of democracy movements in South Korea

Abstract

Although most scholarship stresses that ‘male regular worker-centeredness’ is a trait of mainstream Korean labor unions, the specific reasons why feminism has failed to spread within Korean unionism have not been clarified. In order to answer this question, this article focuses on the entangled interrelations of feminism with broader social movements, maintaining that the historical legacy of the victory of the 1987 Great Worker Struggle – led by male workers from the heavy and chemical industries – is still a powerful factor in discouraging the spread of feminism, even though a fundamental transformation in the nature of Korean labor unions from being primarily class conscious to economistic has taken place. This article also highlights that Korean women’s movements have raised little criticism against the gender-blindness of labor unionism largely because Korean labor unions have been positioned as a ‘moral force’ in bringing about democratization. Furthermore, I stress that conflict between old feminists (socialist feminism) and young feminists (radical feminism), who tend to reflect on the dichotomous relations between gender and/or class, has actually been counterproductive to the proliferation of feminism within Korean labor unions.     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

Understanding Women in Scotland

This article explores obstacles to understanding the history and contemporary experiences of women in Scotland, and to the development of feminist research in Scotland. It is argued that explanations which invoke Scottish male chauvinism and misogyny alone are insufficient, and that the marginalization of women in Scotland is produced both by male domination within Scotland, and by English cultural and political hegemony within the UK. The article comments on the relationship of the concept of ‘Britishness’ to that of ‘Scottishness’ (and other identities within the UK) and illustrates how the frequent confusion of ‘British’ with ‘English’ serves to obscure Scottish experience. It is also argued that the place of Scotland within the British state has led to the creation of an institutional framework that disadvantages women, and a system of government that excludes women. This implies that feminist debates on the state in Britain require a specific focus on the form of the British state, and in the context of constitutional change in particular this is important for the development of future strategies. It is argued that the double marginalization of women in Scotland is not just a problem in relation to the development of feminist research, but is also a political problem in that it contributes to a degree of alienation from feminism in England. The article concludes by arguing for the necessity of recognition of difference, but also for dialogue, as the basis for feminist alliances in different parts of the UK.     

Re-thinking feminism: Some thoughts on the limitations of ‘basics’-training

In this article, I draw on my experience as a Jew and a lesbian and as a Jewish lesbian—both outside and inside the Women's Liberation Movement—to examine the problem of feminist ‘basics’ and to assess the new ethos of ‘diversity’, which has emerged in recent years as ‘other feminists have begun to make our presence felt within feminism.     

Frances gillam holden and the children's hospital dispute, 1887: woman's sphere,feminism and nursing

This paper examines the confrontations of a late nineteenth-century ‘lady superintendent’ with men and masculinity. It analyses the problematical links between femininity, feminism and ‘reformed’ nursing, in a period when the latter two were emerging from the first. A central focus is the extent to which the discourse of ‘woman's sphere’ was meaningful for such single, employed, middle-class women as the subject of this paper, Frances Gillam Holden, in the specific context of hospitals and professional health care. This paper argues that such a discourse informed her challenges to male/medical professional power and her bids for authority and recognition in her workplace. Ultimately this challenge failed, in that male/medical power was vigorously reasserted. However, such attempts suggest the gradual shifts in late nineteenth-century constructions of femininity and domesticity towards the possibility of feminism, not only in the familiar suffrage struggles, but also in such obscure locations as the Children's Hospital in Sydney     

Feminism,imperialism and orientalism: the challenge of the ‘Indian woman’

Abstract

This article examines the content and process of imperialist discourse on the ‘Indian woman’ in the writings of two North American women, one writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, the other a key exponent of the ‘second wave’ of the movement. By analysing these writings, it demonstrates how the content of the discourse was reproduced over time ith different but parallel effects in the changed political circumstances, in the first case producing the Western imperial powers as superior on the scale of civilisation, and in the second case producing Western women as the leaders of global feminism. It also identifies how the process of creating written images occurred within the context of each author's social relations with the subject, the reader and the other authors, showing how an orientalist discourse can be produced through the author's representation of the human subjects of whom she writes; how this discourse can be reproduced through the author's uncritical use of earlier writers; and how the discourse can be activated in the audience through the author's failure to challenge established cognitive structures in the reader.