Material Feminism and Epigenetics: A ‘Critical Window’ for Engagement?

ABSTRACT

While there is increasing interest in gender and sex issues in the medical field, most research in medicine can still be defined as operating with a binary of sex/gender. Epigenetics presents a marked challenge to such binaries as it operates across many tightly held boundaries, blurring the lines between the biological and social. Feminist scholars are paying attention to this new field and reconsidering relationships between the politics of matter, biologies and the social in new ways. The aim of this article is to investigate how theoretical insights from material feminism might enhance epigenetic research. Rather than repeat important critical arguments that point to the dangers of reductionism and biological essentialism, we make a case for examining the ways that material feminism can engage with epigenetic research by broadening ideas of reproduction (beyond in-utero effects) to relational and political views of gender and sex within a materialist framework. In conclusion, we suggest that a focus on material-discursive co-formations has the potential to contribute to an established body of feminist theory and science work; increasing awareness of the intra-action of gender and sex in relation to exposures, and increasing political leverage in supporting health-enhancing environments.     

From “Non-governmental Organizing” to “Outer-system”—Feminism and Feminist Resistance in Post-2000 China

ABSTRACT

In post-2000 China, both the frontiers and the landscape of feminism and feminist resistance have changed, and this change embodies a move away from the “non-governmental organizing” path that characterized the development of feminism during the 1980s and 1990s. This article addresses this “paradigm shift” in Chinese feminism by examining the “outer-system” political stand of post-2000 feminism and their domains of action through performance art, philanthropic volunteerism, and cyberfeminist articulations. These novel modes of feminist protest in the absence of a formal organizational structure challenge our understanding of feminism as a process of “non-governmental organizing” in public space and warrant a cultural analysis to shed light on how feminism engages in cultural contestation and subversion, often in semiprivate and semipublic spaces, in order to develop new and alternative cultural patterns and interpretive frames.

Abbreviations CPPCC The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference WF The All-China Women’s Federation     

White pregnant bodies on the Australian beach: a visual discourse analysis of family photographs

In this paper, I discuss a group of photographs that feature a place intrinsically related with Australian women’s photographic memories of pregnancy – the beach. Building on feminist interdisciplinary studies of family photography, I argue that family photographs of pregnancy contribute to alternative ways of knowing and interpreting the Australian beach landscape and the entangled social relations and interactions within these spaces. Data are drawn from a set of 34 pregnancy photographs that were taken at the beach in [Tasmania] between 1945 and 2013 and collected as part of a larger, ongoing mixed methods research project involving the analysis of 236 Australian family photographs of pregnancy. In this paper, I conduct a visual discourse analysis of three categories of beach pregnancy images including (1) the family holiday photograph, (2) the bikini photograph and (3) the ‘natural’ pregnant body/landscape photograph to enable a more precise account of how personal and cultural memories of the Australian beach intersect. In the concluding discussion, I suggest that the beach is a critical site for deepening sociological and feminist understandings of the production and expression of pregnant identities and Australian national identity.     

School,sexuality and problematic girlhoods: reframing ‘empowerment’ discourse

This paper draws on ethnographic research with teenage schoolgirls in Tanzania to explore the impact of education on their experiences of sexual agency and empowerment. School-based education is frequently presented within international development as a route for empowering girls to exercise agency over their sexuality; yet school itself often constitutes a space in which the same restrictive gendered and sexual norms that exist outside the classroom are reproduced or go unchallenged by those working with girls. Despite the constraints to their agency from both outside and within school, girls themselves do resist the narratives of girlhood and sexuality imposed upon them. Recognising how these dynamics challenge our understanding of sexual empowerment is key to finding ways to support girls in navigating repressive norms beyond the classroom.     

Pacific men: how the feminist gap explains hostility

The gender gap in attitudes to foreign policy is well established in public opinion literature. Studies have repeatedly reported that women tend to be more peaceful and less militaristic than men. This article reexamines attitudes of individuals in relation to foreign policy and pits the gender gap against the largely forgotten feminist gap. We argue that the individual-level relationship between gender equality attitudes on the one hand, and tolerance and benevolence on the other, is under-researched, but also that key contributions about the effects of feminism have been mostly ignored in research on the gender gap in public opinion. We return to the notion of a causal relationship between gender equality attitudes, and peaceful attitudes, and of a feminist gap that also exists among men. In a series of novel empirical tests, we demonstrate that attitudes to gender equality, not biological sex, explain attitudes towards other nationalities and religious groups. Using individual-level survey data from five countries around the Pacific: China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States of America, we show that both men and women who reject gender equality are much more hostile both to other nations and to minorities in their own country.     

女性主义组织的网络行动研究--以“新媒体女性”新浪微博为例

网络与女性主义是信息时代媒介与性别研究的重要方向。以“新媒体女性”非政府组织的官方新浪微博为案例,在网络行动主义理论框架下,通过虚拟民族志和社会网络分析研究方法,可以探讨女性主义组织的网络行动特征,并通过其积极行动者的社会网络特征来分析女性主义组织网络行动的动员能力。研究发现,“新媒体女性”能够充分利用微博平台进行抗争性话语的表达,对于积极行动者具有控制优势。其处于所在的积极行动者的社会网络的核心位置,具有很大话语权,但整个网络结构极为疏松,不具有凝聚力。网络整体对行动者的态度和行为等产生影响的可能性较小,不利于其形成互动联合的网络行动模式,女性主义组织的网络行动能力有待加强。     

Caregiving for identity is political: implications for citizenship theory

The citizenship literature now renders blurry the boundaries between ‘private’ and ‘public’. Feminist analyses of caregiving have contributed to this evolution. But while feminist circles widely depict caregiving to be on par with employment as a social aspiration and obligation of citizenship, the literature has stopped short of recognizing that caregiving can also represent political citizenship. The author argues that some caregiving for identity should be afforded this status. This recognition has implications for multiscalar approaches to environmental and queer citizenship studies; feminist visions of citizenship that imply a right to time for care; and multicultural citizenship.     

Chilean and Transnational Performances of Disobedience: LasTesis and the Phenomenon of Un violador en tu camino

This article analyses the performance Un violador en tu camino created by Chilean feminist theatre collective LasTesis, shared by millions and re-staged across the globe. It explores the relationship between the original piece and theorist Rita Segato's insights on rape culture, and how it counters aspects of this culture. It examines how the transnational spread of Un violador counters tendencies of MeToo, and examines four cases of the performance's re-staging in Latin America and beyond, showing how they make manifest the pervasiveness of rape culture as well as how groups have adapted them to speak to local issues.     

Articulating Body,Territory, and the Defence of Life: The Politics of Strategic Equivalencing between Women in Anti-Mining Movements and the Feminist Movement in Peru

In Latin America, rural and indigenous women have mobilised in defence of their territories and built strategic alliances with urban and mestiza feminist movements. This paper focuses on how these processes have played out in Peru, tracing the development of the discourse on ‘body as territory’, which articulates sexual and reproductive rights with territorial autonomy. It discusses the ‘cosmopolitics’ of translating the distinct concerns and worldviews of the women involved, arguing that this discourse has enabled partial recognition and strategic equivalencing but that it has failed to fundamentally transform the underlying asymmetric relations of power and privilege.