sexual assault as trauma: a Foucauldian examination of knowledge practices in the field of sexual assault service provision

This paper examines the deployment of the concept of psychological trauma in the field of sexual assault service provision, a field in which a feminist understanding of sexual violence has achieved a position of ‘truth’. Using a Foucauldian methodological approach, the investigation centred on service provision in New South Wales, Australia, and analysis focused on the everyday practices of workers illuminated through documents collected from the field, in particular the interview texts produced from interviews with thirty sexual assault practitioners. The paper focuses on the adult survivor of child sexual assault who emerged in the study as the most traumatised category of victim. I lay out how ‘trauma’, specifically the concept of ‘complex trauma’, operates as the conceptual (emotional, relational, neurobiological) link between past abuse and current problems, redefining them not as ‘problems’ but as the symptoms or effects of untreated childhood trauma. I argue that in the local field this deployment is simultaneously enabling and problematic. The production of a subject position of ongoing ontological vulnerability has the effect of repositioning the ‘adult survivor’ outside the socio-political context of their current lives and as such appears misaligned with a feminist ‘regime’ centred on enabling practices and structural gender inequality. However, I demonstrate how this same knowledge of the neurobiological, relational and emotional effects of trauma on the survivor self is used by practitioners as part of their established feminist practices of enabling victims to regain a sense of power and control, of interrupting blame and working for victims at a broader systemic level. The research adds to feminist research and commentary that has drawn critical attention to uptake of trauma in sexual assault work by showing the specificity of how trauma operates in a specific location, and illustrating both the potential and the problematic aspects of trauma as a feminist knowledge practice.     

Politics Materialized: Rethinking the Materiality of Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics

The ‘new’ of new materialism should not be read as current feminism's distancing from or disavowal of the legacy of previous feminist movements. This past cannot be left behind as it is enfolded—both conceptually and materially—and reconfigured as feminism's current theorizing and political action. This article argues that this cultural inheritance is at the same time corporeally manifested in the biology of feminist bodies. Such a contention is inspired by Karen Barad's argument that concepts, ideas and other social phenomena are specific physical arrangements materialized through apparatuses. Barad insists that the relationships between the social, political and discursive and physical matter are not relations of externality. Instead, there is a complex entanglement where the differences between the cultural and the physical are matters of making separate rather than there being two radically separate realms. Barad's claims are supported by epigenetic research into the intergenerational health effects of the experience of social stigma. The results of this research suggest that an individual's environment, both physical and social, current and historical, manifests in biology at the molecular level. So politics, then, is a truly material practice which is at the same time constitutive of its practitioners. New materialism's history of feminist action and theorization can never be excluded from current practices of feminism but neither can it determine them in advance. Politics and feminism are particular, contingent, material histories, with each practitioner reconfiguring her or his specific biological and social materialization as their present-day political and feminist actions.     

‘history’ is now: feminist theory and the production of historical feminisms1

Over the last decade, feminist practitioners across a variety of disciplines have been invoking history as an important grounding for both feminist politics and feminist theory. At the same time, however, insufficient account is taken of the extent to which standardized versions of ‘the feminist past’ are being invoked to represent a wide variety of feminist experiences and an equally heterogeneous set of historical circumstances and cultural contexts. It is suggested that if feminist reconceptualizations of history are to be taken seriously – if, in other words, history is the production of knowledges about the past and is itself contingent on the conditions of the present – feminist theorists must begin to reference both the imperial legacies of Anglo-European feminism and the multiplicity of feminist movements around the world. Only when feminists of all disciplinary persuasions begin to acknowledge the complex historical legacies of modern feminisms and situate their own critiques within them will feminist theory be properly grounded in, and responsive to, the exigencies of feminist history.     

The White Woman's Burden: “Feminist” War Rhetoric and the Phenomenon of Co-optation

This article takes a critical stance towards the rhetoric of protecting and liberating Afghan women in the wake of the “war on terror”, in this paper called “feminist” security rhetoric. An increased gender awareness in general and in relation to war in particular has influenced the ways in which war stories have been expressed over the last two decades. References to UN Resolution 1325, on women and security in post-conflict situations, will serve as both an indication and illustration of “feminist” security rhetoric, the co-optation phenomenon included, a practice that absorbs the meanings of the original concepts to fit into the prevailing political priorities. The rhetoric of the former Norwegian defence minister, Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen, is presented as a case study of this phenomenon. The Norwegian (and the Nordic) gender equality model has mainly been analysed from a welfare perspective, seldom from a post-colonial war(fare)/peace perspective. By analysing Norwegian “feminist” security rhetoric, I also want to push feminist rhetoric to create a space that is sensitive to post-colonial perspectives as well as political philosophy. I thereby intend to question both cultural relativism and aggressive cosmopolitanism dressed in various feminized outfits, aiming instead to suggest some common ground for feminist post-colonial voices to meet the voices of Western feminists who oppose the tendency to see whole cultures as internally homogeneous and almost externally sealed. These voices may together constitute a potent oppositional discourse to Western feminized security rhetoric.     

Insider Perspectives or Stealing the Words out of Women's Mouths: Interpretation in the Research Process

This article examines the ways in which social class differences between the researcher and female respondents affect data analysis. I elaborate the ways in which my class background, just as much as my gender, affects all stages of the research process from theoretical starting points to conclusions. The influences of reflexivity, power and ‘truth’ on the interpretative process are developed by drawing on fieldnotes and interviews from an ethnographic study of women's involvement in their children's primary schooling. Complexities of social class are explored both in relation to myself as the researcher and to how the women saw themselves. I argue that there is a thin dividing line between the understandings which similar experiences of respondents bring to the research process and the element of exploitation implicit in mixing up one's own personal history with those of women whose experience of the same class is very different. Identification can result in a denial of the power feminist researchers exercise in the selection and interpretation of data. However, researchers are similarly powerful in relation to women from very different class backgrounds to their own, and I attempt to draw out problematic issues around power and ‘truth’ in relation to the middle-class women whom I interviewed. I conclude by reiterating that, from where I am socially positioned, certain aspects of the data are much more prominent than others and as a consequence interpretation remains an imperfect and incomplete process.     

archive fanfiction: experimental archive research methodologies and feminist epistemological tactics

This essay proposes that subcultural practices such as gossip and fan writing are feminist epistemologies that can form radical archive inquiry and knowledge production, and creative outputs. Drawing on feminist new materialism and archive theory, I develop a set of principles for practice-based research methodologies that incorporate a researcher’s intersubjective relationship with archive matter (e.g. records, documents, classification systems, social-material contexts) and consider the production of knowledge from such research as forms of fabulation. Fabulation here is seen as part of a critically transgressive epistemological stance that expands feminist critiques of universalising master narratives and archive orthodoxies. My proposition, formed in part through a residency in the Woman’s Art Library in London, is to name such research gestures ‘archive fanfiction’, where experimental and practice-oriented method moves with feminist politics and activism.     

Dame unise,feminist maiden who fares well with the patriarchy: Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘the prodigal daughter’ and the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction

In her discussion of recent feminist utopias, Joanna Russ notes that the authors have likely read one another and that their ‘works form a remarkably coherent group in their presentation of feminist concerns and the feminist analyses which are central to these concerns’ (Russ, 1981: 71). My essay further explores the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction. It notes the common elements connecting three novels—Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong (1976), Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines (1978), and Elizabeth A. Lynn's The Northern Girl (1980)—and analyses Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘The prodigal daughter’ (1981) in terms of its relationship to these connections. References to Louise Bernikow's Among Women (1980) link these feminist imaginative works to feminist reality, reality which is more closely adhered to by Salmonson than by the authors of the novels. While the novels' feminist protagonists succeed in isolation from the patriarchy, Salmonson's feminist hero, Dame Unise, succeeds because she is able to cooperate with a patriarch. Positive images of patriarchy are absent from the novels; Salmonson's story emphasizes such positive images.     

‘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.     

feminism and futurity: revisiting Marge Piercy’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Woman on the Edge of Time</Emphasis>

This article considers the question of feminist futurity through Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). While dominant readings of this novel have focused on its relationship to the feminist utopian genre and feminist theory from the 1970s, this essay aims to critically reframe the novel through contemporary feminist theorising on time and futurity. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory that suggests that the future might most productively be figured through more nuanced and renewed engagements with the past, I argue that readings of Piercy’s novel that frame it only through its contemporary moment obscure the novel’s critique of singular, linear models of time. The novel represents the future through the themes of loss, mourning and haunting, which I argue resist a model of time that moves linearly from past to future and instead bring the past and future into complex relation with each other. In this regard, Piercy’s novel is read as representing a form of feminist futurity that engages with progress in time as necessarily uneven, discontinuous and fractured, speaking to contemporary demands for a feminist futurity that might require more nuanced accounts of the past.     

Feminism and the Complexities of Gender and Health

Abstract

Feminist research and activism have made a distinctive contribution to social studies of health and have also had a significant impact on public health policy. Gender is widely recognised as a key driver in the social determination of health and is a well-established category of analysis in fields such as the sociology of health. As a response to Broom, this article focuses on two ways in which feminist social science has complicated the understandings of gender and health which underlie much health policy and research. The first is the framework of intersectionality, which emphasises the interactions between different aspects of social identity and reveals the limitations of a singular or primary focus on gender in analysing experiences of health and ill-health. The second is the critical analysis of health as a regulatory ideal, prompted by the rise of the ‘new public health’ and its emphasis on individual responsibility for risk reduction. Together these critical insights reveal some of the tensions embedded in feminist goals such as improving women's well-being.     

An Interview with Ahlam Mosteghanemi

Ahlam Mosteghanemi was the first Algerian woman writer to publish a novel in the Arabic language. Her work is therefore very significant in the context of Arab women's writing and feminism. Her novels express a unique understanding of social and political events, and convey the impact of these events on individuals by combining love stories with political and social history, fused together in present time. The interview examines Ahlam Mosteghanemi's novels and the impact of colonization and post-colonization on Mosteghanemi, her writing, Algeria and the Algerian people. Mosteghanemi's decision to write in Arabic and the themes of her novels are directly informed by the Algerian war of independence and as such can be seen both as a statement of independence from the Eurocentric homogenization of language and discourse, and as a feminist political statement. The interview seeks to deconstruct the widespread image of feminist literature as a genre that attempts to explore the female experience through an unnuanced binary focus on the opposition between the male and female within a patriarchal society. The interview pays particular attention to the rich symbolism of Mosteghanemi's novels. Even in the English translation there is a strong sense of the historical and geographical reality of Algeria, an ancient country repeatedly invaded by colonizing forces, and struggling again in the modern world to establish an independent identity. The interview looks at some of the significant themes raised by Mosteghanemi in her novels. In addition to this, the interview pays particular attention to the issue of translation in Mosteghanemi's novels and to her attitudes towards her readership.     

Feminism,masculinity and male rape: bringing male rape ‘out of the closet’

Feminist research has played a pivotal role in uncovering the extent and nature of male violence against women and suggests that the main motivations for rape are the need for power, control and domination. This paper argues that, although feminist explanations of rape are robust and comprehensive, male victims of rape have largely been excluded from this field of research. While feminism has enabled the victimisation of women to be recognised, further understanding of the victimisation of men is required. Some feminist writers (such as hooks, 2000) have argued that men's emancipation is an essential part of feminism since men are equally harmed by gender role expectations and sexism. This paper makes a contribution to current knowledge through evaluating the social constructions, stigma and phenomenological realities associated with male rape (by both men and women), arguing that there has been neglect in this area that functions to support, maintain and reinforce patriarchal power relations and hegemonic masculinities.     

Afterword: turning and twisting histories of women’s education: reading reflexively and diffractively

ABSTRACT

The Afterword discusses continuities and differences in how researchers are positioned in feminist themes and emerging feminist perspectives as they play out in debates around researcher reflexivity and diffraction as methodological strategies. The first section of the Afterword highlights the ongoing commitment to reflexivity when generating knowledge in women’s and gender history. The second part focuses on the challenge to reflexivity posed by diffractive methodologies that argue that knowledge is created from being entangled in the world, rather than reflecting on or during the production of historical work. This section discusses two examples of diffractive practice in archival research taken from the special issue. The third section outlines diffractive reading in more detail and provides two examples of diffractive reading of texts. Finally, the Afterword invites readers to undertake a diffractive reading of the articles in the special issue and provides some questions about diffraction for consideration.     

Women ‘s experiences ‐text or relation? Looking at research practices from a sociological and feminist perspective

As a paradoxical result of the very developments within women's research, the whole notion of “women's experiences” is now being questioned. In this article it is argued that this question should be dealt with not only on the metatheoretical or theoretical level, but also on the level of actual research practices. Starting with the level of research practices, we can find theoretical and methodological arguments for regarding experience as a proper object for study and politics. Arguments which in turn challenge the approaches on the metatheoretical level and which provide the missing links between these two levels. It is in the process of articulation of an experience (verbally, in writing, by gestures, and so forth) ‐ in contrast to the lived experience ‐ that we as social scientists enter the scene. Two different methods ‐ the interview and memory work ‐ are here discussed to illustrate how different relations of productions of knowledge (positivistic and non‐positivistic) will result in different ways of articulating and understanding the experience. It is argued that the extent to which an articulated experience is both “text and relation” varies with the method being used. It is, however, further argued that it is precisely the discursive dimension in the articulation of an experience that provides a constructive tension in relation to the lived experience. A tension that makes reflection and change possible. And pursuit of change, as a feminist enterprise within the production of knowledge is finally argued as a challenge to the pursuit of truth as the enterprise within the philosophy of science.     

Riot Grrrl Manifestos and Radical Vernacular Feminism

This essay argues that Riot Grrrl manifestos were instrumental in promulgating a form of radical feminism that demonstrates the enduring nature of feminist radicalism. While a great deal of important work has been written on the movement, little attention has been paid to how these manifestos developed a distinctive political language and culture. By foregrounding the volatility of feminine youth and the historical erasure of the girl subject as a radical political agent, Riot Grrrl manifestos redefined the gendered (and ageist) exclusionary practices of the radical public sphere, promoting unified forms of resistance, often symbolised as a personal, albeit contagious, awakening to the realities of harassment, repression, violence and ridicule. This kind of molecular, contingent politics worked to exploit the contradictions inherent in young women's lives rather than to overcome the differences that had splintered more congealed formations of feminist politics. In rejecting the traditional claims of the radical public sphere, Riot Grrl manifestos insist on a vernacular feminism that strategically emphasises micropolitical action over grand narratives of resistance and revolution. While these manifestos draw on aspects of second-wave radical feminism and older forms of avant-garde culture, they push the genre of the manifesto into new territory by stressing everyday forms of resistance, defining their imagined consistency as porous and reactive rather than exclusive or over-determined.     

Epistemic Credibility and Women in Philosophy

Abstract

Women in philosophy are disproportionately under-represented at elite institutions, and publishing patterns can be analysed to show that the ‘top’ journals publish articles by women at rates significantly lower than even the levels of women who have made it into tenure at these elite universities. In such journals, the type of epistemology that Lorraine Code describes as ‘immune to feminist critique’ is dominant, assuming that neutrality is the benchmark for knowledge, and that knowers float free of the encumbrances of situation. It is right to worry, as Code does, that feminist and critical race theory hold an increasingly fragile place in disciplinary philosophy and that disciplinary philosophy itself is thereby the loser. The question of how to reinvigorate radical projects of contestation is both urgent and vexing. To align this issue with the under-representation of women in philosophy poses its own problems, as this article explores: for women need not be feminist philosophers, and feminist philosophy can be a project of assimilation into the mainstream as much as it can be a project of radical transformation of disciplinary norms. There may be something to learn, however, both about equity in the academy and the fate of critique by considering the relation between prevailing institutional conditions, disciplinary trajectories and the gendering of prestige in the academic sector.     

Does Feminist History have a future?

Abstract

Contemporary shifts in scholarship and institutional agendas, I argue, have created new sets of challenges for feminist history. While these do not undermine the paradigms of this scholarly endeavour, there has been an inevitable shift in how feminist history is now written, conceptualised and undertaken. A hallmark of dynamic and innovative scholarship is a capacity to evolve and respond to intellectual challenges and developments. There is much to be positive about in the future, as I believe feminist history at its best has not remained a passive or static body of knowledge, but continues to be reformulated and reconceptualised, but with this dynamism comes uncertainties which institutional change can bring. While I do not believe these are systemic enough to pose a challenge to the enterprise, I suggest they do create cause for wider discussion, especially about the place of the humanities more generally in the corporate university of the twenty-first century.     

Warmth and Unity with All Women? Historicizing Racism in the Australian Women's Movement

In this paper I discuss the four Women and Labour conferences which were held in Australian capital cities over the seven years between 1978 and 1984. I explore the ways in which the history of Australian feminist activism during this period could be written, questioning in particular the claim that the Women and Labour conferences have been central to the history of Australian feminism. I discuss the ways in which a historical sense could be established, using writings about the conferences as historical ‘evidence’, that race and ethnic divisions between women had not been important to the ‘women's movement’ until 1984. In other words, I challenge the construction of this conference as a turning point - not only in the feminist politicization of immigrant and Aboriginal women, but also in the politicization of all feminists about race and ethnic divisions. More broadly, I am interested in how a history would be written if it aimed to get to the ‘truth’ about racism and about the feminist activism of immigrant women. How would the apparent lack of written ‘evidence’ - at least until 1984 - of immigrant women's feminist activism, and of the awareness of Australian feminists about issues of racism, be written into this history? In addition, I suggest that it is important to the writing of feminist history in Australia that published documentation has been mostly produced by anglo women, and is thus partial and mediated by the lived, embodied experiences of anglo women. Finally, my intention is to interrogate commonly understood narratives about Australian feminist history, to challenge their seamlessness, and to suggest the importance of recognizing the tension within feminist discourses between difference as benign diversity and difference as disruption.     

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.     

ABORTION IN AUSTRALIAN ELECTIONS

This article focuses on the question of the salience of the issue of abortion in Australian elections; that is, whether it is an issue on which electors cast their vote, and whether it plays a role in changes in voting patterns. The issue of public attitudes to such primary women's rights and feminist issues as abortion has been important in Australia for many years, but there is no body of research literature here on the electoral salience of those attitudes to abortion. In contrast, a body of US literature indicates that attitudes to abortion there are of significance in predicting voters' choices at state and federal levels and that this significance has increased over time. My argument is that there are no significant patterns of voting or even of party identification that are dependent on parliamentary candidates' views on abortion in Australia, and that this has been the case for at least 30 years. My argument is made through exploring opinion polls and academic surveys; examining three anecdotal claims of electoral retribution; and looking in detail at the case of the defeat of Barry Simon in the 1980 federal election. My finding as to the non-salience of the issue of abortion among Australian voters has significance in terms of accurately identifying obstacles to feminist proposals for reform of abortion laws in Australia. One of the aims of the article is to dispel the myth that politicians who are pro-choice or who vote for abortion reform are likely to face electoral retribution on that score. That is, the feminist project of abortion reform is not a vote loser.