Queer Black Feminism: The Pleasure Principle

In this critical personal narrative Harris explores some of the gaps between conceptions of feminist thought and feminist practice. Harris focuses on an analysis of race, class, and desire divisions within feminist sexual politics. She suggests a queer black feminist theory and practice that calls into question naturalized identities and communities, and therefore what feminism and feminist practices might entail.     

Feminism Means Business: Business Feminism,Sisterhood and Visibility

ABSTRACT

By interviewing self-proclaimed feminists with small-scale businesses who sell feminist commodities, the aim of this article is to understand why and how the market has become an arena for doing feminism and what this can tell us about contemporary feminism. Using theories of postfeminism and popular feminism in combination with Lacanian discourse theory, the analysis shows that feminism is renegotiated into ownership by reshaping the feminist discourse of sisterhood into business support and advice. Furthermore, competition is reshaped into a positive value of expanding the feminist community, and making profit is reshaped into a feminist discourse of equal pay. Business feminism produces an individual, visible, affluent and entrepreneurial feminist subject who does not challenge economic structures or ownership conditions.     

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.     

The Emergence of Feminism in Fiji 1

This article traces the etymology of Indo‐Fijian (Fiji Indian) feminisms in Fiji. In the first section, the resistances of female indentured laborers (for example, Sukhrania, Naraini and Kunti) are recovered as reflections of early forms of individualized feminisms in the early 1900s. In the second section, it is proposed that the informal and organic, yet socially significant movement of Indian women laborers in Fiji in the 1920s comprised one of the first collective intersections of gendered, classed and ethnicized relationships in Fiji. The 1930 (post‐indenture) women's movement, with its main emphasis on economic empowerment, is included in the discussion of Indo‐Fijian feminisms in the third section. The conclusion highlights that while each phase of the early feminist movement in Fiji focused on a different set of concerns that impacted on the lives of Indo‐Fijian women, this group of women have played and continue to play a prominent role in furthering the rights of women nationally and regionally.