Top Research Papers on Feminism

Despite reductions in poverty generally, recent trends in Latin American countries show processes of both a de-feminization and re-feminization of poverty. The latter has occurred despite feminized anti-poverty programmes, most notably conditional cash transfer (CCTs), which target resources to women. We show that methodological differences in what, how, and who is the focus of measurement, may influence patterns of poverty ‘feminization’. We also suggest that feminized policy interventions might in themselves be playing a role in the re-feminization of poverty, not least because the participa...

In many ways, this is a remarkable moment. The surge in what we might call “popular feminism” has allowed us to imagine a culture in which feminism, in every form, does not have to be defended, is ...

In this article I write on the rift between trans inclusive and gender critical feminists in the UK. I consider this division within university culture through a focus on the case of Kathleen Stock. I discuss the coverage of her resignation from the University of Sussex through a focus on The Daily Telegraph. From a trans inclusive feminist viewpoint, I discuss the way her case has been used to spread misinformation around universities, and trans people. I examine the key ideas of gender critical and trans inclusive feminists and present an analysis of concepts of free speech and debate that c...

Business feminism is a brand of feminism that privileges women's advancement in the corporate hierarchy and centres corporations as the ultimate purveyors of gender equity. While scholars have critiqued this formulation, little empirical research has analysed the processes that guide the dissemination and translation of business feminism in organizational settings within global corporate networks. This article advances scholarship on the global processes that drive the export of business feminism logics. We analyse the process of dissemination of business feminism from the headquarters of mult...

In this article we explore the intersections between white liberal feminisms and the carceral state, particularly within nonprofit agencies. We find a strong collusion between 'dominating feminisms' and the carceral state, through funding structures and the belief that the legal system can provide protection to victimized women. We use evidence from our own research on rape crisis centers and gender-responsive programming for criminalized women, respectively, to investigate how some nonprofit agencies further threaten the safety, stability, and self-determination of women of color, queer women...

After their release in 2001, Bratz dolls carved into Barbie’s previously monopolistic share of teen doll sales. Amidst their growing popularity, cultural critics expressed a host of concerns about Bratz dolls, especially over how they sexualize youth, but the line grew to include a host of products like costumes, makeup kits, games, books, clothing, and movies. It also inspired new, similar doll lines from other toy companies. In this article, we situate the Bratz’s popularity in a specific cultural moment tied to the history of modern feminism. We use a content analysis of the Bratz movie ser...

Feminism is not dead. This groundbreaking book advances a radical and pioneering feminist manifesto for today's modern audience that exposes the real reasons as to why women are still oppressed and wh

How has feminism changed in the UK since the 1960s? This was the question I set out to explore in my research on the British Women’s Liberation Movement, published as Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement (2015). I found that the motivations and aspirations of activists today were similar to those reported by feminists of the Second Wave; but the methods and tactics were more professionalized and there was less of a focus on women-only space.

This book provides a unique introduction to the study of relationships between gender and biology, a core part of the feminist science research tradition which emerged nearly half a century ago. Lynn Hankinson Nelson presents an accessible and balanced discussion of research questions, background assumptions, methods, and hypotheses about biology and gender with which feminist scientists and science scholars critically and constructively engage. Writing from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of science, she examines the evidence for and ethical implications of biological hypotheses ab...

The relative numbers of men and women in international migrations hold important clues to how gender ideology and inequalities drive emigration and facilitate immigrant integration for both men and women. Until recently, the feminization of migration, with men and women migrating in relatively equal numbers, was understood to be a product of economic restructuring taking place in the late twentieth century. Historical studies have pushed the onset of feminization back to the early twentieth century and revealed earlier periods of gender balance and both masculinization and feminization among l...

On China’s biggest social media platform, Weibo, feminists are staying one step ahead of the censors. Weibo Feminism is the first book to explore in-depth the connections and forms of resistance that feminist activists in China are making in online spaces despite increasing crackdowns on free speech and public expression.

A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Femini...

This entry outlines the waves of feminism to explain the modern history of the women's liberation movement and how it has been shaped by women's interactions with the media (and vice versa). The media context allows for a more situated analysis of “female troubles” as it unveils the role of media forms for shaping women's cultural circumstances. The entry explains the development of the feminist movement, focusing on the chronological evolution of the movement's assumptions. It describes the main events and activists of the women's liberation front, distinguishing between the targets and tools...

One of the core contributions of a feminist analysis has been the examination of what was often an implicitly racialized gendering of a purported division between public and private; this work examines its relevance to the multiplicities of COVID-19.

A ground-breaking volume of all new essays covering the conjunction of two topics--feminism and families--that, for all their centrality in our culture, have not been adequately examined in light of one another. While the has suffered feminist neglect, most women are in fact members of families, living their lives within the social context of families, even at a time when the concept of family has become bewilderingly unstable. The intersection of families and feminism is thus one in need of philosophical reflection, as a basis both for good public policy and for the ethical relationships of i...

As Latin America became the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the summer of 2020, inequalities around gender and sexuality intensified. Crime statistics in general fell, except for femicide ...

Abstract Materialist feminism is the outcome of engagements with the Marxist tradition. A materialist feminist research program is one that places special emphasis on the material conditions underlying gender inequality. Scholars within this tradition may vary in their definition of the line of demarcation and conceptual relationships between material and ideological spheres, but most would agree that the organization of production is central to material reality. Although all feminist scholars acknowledge the importance of women's economic status, materialist feminist approaches are distinguis...

Global events, from economic crisis to social unrest and militarization, disproportionately affect women. Yet around the world it is also women who are leading the struggle against oppression and exploitation. In light of renewed interest in Marxist theory among many women activists and academics, Marxism and Feminism presents a contemporary and accessible Marxist–feminist analysis on a host of issues. It reassesses previous debates and seeks to answer pressing questions of how we should understand the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism, and how we can envision a feminist project w...

This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women’s rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domíngez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from...

This article considers wide-ranging heart-centered approaches to understanding bodies, objects, and personhood. It puts these into in tension with other ways of approaching questions of life and embodiment, especially ones inspired by neuroscience, to argue that thinking with the heart has value for feminist theory. The heart that is my object traverses scale, and the paper’s analysis moves from the inside out – from heart cells, to hearts and circulatory systems, to women interpellated into heart health, to public debates on personhood that mobilize fetal heartbeats and contested cases of wom...

In a pioneering reinterpretation of the role of mainstream feminism, Eisenstein shows how the ruling elites of developed countries utilize women's labor and the ideas of women's liberation and empowerment to maintain their economic and political power, both at home and abroad. Her explorations range from the abolition of "welfare as we know it" and the ending of the family wage in the United States to the creation of export-processing zones in the global South that depend on women's "nimble fingers"; and from the championing of microcredit as a path to women's empowerment in the global South t...

Shoes, gloves, umbrellas, cigars that are not just objects—the topic of fetishism seems both bizarre and inevitable. In this venturesome and provocative book, Emily Apter offers a fresh account of the complex relationship between representation and sexual obsession in turn-of-the-century French culture. Analyzing works by authors in the naturalist and realist traditions as well as making use of documents from a contemporary medical archive, she considers fetishism as a cultural artifact and as a subgenre of realist fiction. Apter traces the web of connections among fin-de-siècle representation...

Joan Marie Johnson examines an understudied dimension of women’s history in the United States: how a group of affluent white women from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries advanced the status of all women through acts of philanthropy. This cadre of activists included Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst; Grace Dodge, granddaughter of Wall Street “Merchant Prince” William Earle Dodge; and Ava Belmont, who married into the Vanderbilt family fortune. Motivated by their own experiences with sexism, and focusing on women’s need for economic independence, these be...

The connections between gut and depression have been known, in the West, since ancient Greece.It was the Hippocratic writers who gave the name melancholia to states of dejection, hopelessness, and torpor.They understood such states to be caused by an accumulation of black bile (in Greek, melaina chole), a substance secreted by the liver.For these writers, and for prac ti tion ers of medicine for another two thousand years, melancholia was both the name of one of the enteric humors and the name for a disruption to emotional equilibrium (Jackson 1986).One of the Hippocratic aphorisms makes the a...

Gender equality is a widely shared value in many western societies and yet, the mention of the term feminism frequently provokes unease, bewilderment or overt hostility. Repudiating Feminism sheds light on why this is the case. Grounded in rich empirical research and providing a timely contribution to debates on engagements with feminism, Repudiating Feminism explores how young German and British women think, talk and feel about feminism. Drawing on in-depth interviews with women from different racial and class backgrounds, and with different sexual orientations, Repudiating Feminism reveals h...

Introduction -- Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin 1. Jane Gallop -- Women in Spurs and Nineties Feminism 2. Ellen K. Feder and Emily Zakin -- Flirting with the Truth: Derrida's Discourse with 'Woman' and Wenches 3. Kelly Oliver -- The Maternal Operation: Circumscribing the Alliance 4. Mary C. Rawlinson--Levers, Signatures, and Secrets: Derrida's Use of Woman 5. Tina Chanter -- On Not Reading Derrida's Texts: Mistaking Hermeneutics, Misreading Sexual Difference, and Neutralizing Narration 6. Ewa Plonowska Ziarek -- From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the ...

According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan’s advice to eat of the forbidden fruit. The notion of woman as the Devil’s accomplice is prominent throughout the history of Christianity and has been used to legitimate the subordination of wives and daughters. During the nineteenth century, rebellious females performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Hereby, Lucifer was reconceptualized as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priest...

This edited volume focuses on the role of women and their incorporation as gamers, developers and cultural producers in gaming culture. It explores women's resistance and activism in gaming, depictions within video games, and women's participation and consumption practices in gaming culture.

If we don't tell our stories, hailstones will continue to fall on our heads Thrown by fathers for the children to see -

The woman born Gloria Watkins but better known by her pen name, bell hooks (1952–), describes herself as a writer, feminist theorist, and cultural critic. She has done as much as any recent thinker to bring the particular issues central to African American women’s experience to the forefront of feminist debates. In this selection, however, hooks’s aim is the still broader one of responding to simplistic caricatures of feminism as anti-male. She does so by defining feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” As such, hooks argues, feminism is not born of hatred ...

The "sliding" genioplasty has the most potential for dramatically reshaping the chin, while also avoiding many of the issues that may occur with implants.

Feminism is Queer is an introduction to the intimately related disciplines of gender and queer theory. Whilst guiding the reader through complex theory, the author develops the original position of queer feminism, which presents queer theory as continuous with feminist theory. Whilst there have been significant conceptual tensions between second wave feminism and traditional lesbian and gay studies, queer theory offers a paradigm for understanding gender, sex and sexuality that avoids the conflict in order to develop solidarity among those interested in feminist theory and those interested in ...

In this commentary, I use the notion of carceral feminism and the false dichotomy of the public and private sphere to reimagine how geographers interrogate the spatiality, legality, and embodiment of violence against women. By rethinking the role of the state as doling out punishment, the social work approach as service providers, along with moving beyond the bifurcation of public and private, activist scholars have the opportunity to change power relations in cities and communities. While a somewhat radical idea, it is already happening in cities like Chicago.

This book sets out a rationale for the compatibility of Islam and Feminism and shows that Islamic Feminism is a diverse and valuable lens through which to analyse religion and gender. In addition, including scholarship written in Arabic, it promotes the decolonisation of knowledge production around Islam, gender and sexuality. Islamic feminism is a field of study that has been marginalised both in contemporary Islamic discourse and in feminist discourse. This study counters this marginalisation in two ways. Firstly, it enumerates the diversity of approaches used in Islamic feminist scholarship...

An experiment examining the effect of gender cue and cue location upon user evaluations of a robot elicited greater perceptions of robot femininity than male interface cues, especially when conveyed via the screen.

As well as providing a clear and critical introduction to the theory, this refreshing overview focuses on the practice of feminism with coverage of actions and activism, bringing the subject to life for newcomers as well as offering fresh perspectives for advanced students. Explanations of the main strands to feminism, such as liberalism, sit alongside an exploration of a range of approaches, such as radical, anarchist and Marxist feminism, and provide much-needed context against which more familiar historical themes may be understood. The author's broad and inclusive view conveys the diversit...

Repudiations of trans-exclusionary radical feminism often take the form of a call to strip from TERFs the name feminist. TERFism, it is often argued, is not "real feminism," and in this same vein it is sometimes argued that lesbian exponents of transmisogyny are not a "real" part of queer history. Asa Seresin and Sophie Lewis—both of us transplants from "TERF Island," living in the United States—here advance a different approach. In this critical dialogue, we suggest that, if some feminisms are patriarchal, and some lesbianisms are invested in whiteness, then queer feminists must become comfor...

This issue of Approaching Religion brings together different voices and disciplines to think in and about hospitality and solidarity through feminist thinking and lived experiences of the contemporary world.

Book Review of: REVOLUTIONARY FEMINISMS Bhandar, B. & Ziadah, R. Verso , 2020, 240 Pages.

Feminism seems to be experiencing a resurgence. This research examines an Australian case where this resurgence produces some bizarre outcomes and an uncomfortable mix of moderate and neoliberal feminisms, as conservative women distance themselves from the term feminist and conservative men embrace it. We rhetorically analyse the discourse of four conservative leaders using an ideographic analysis to reveal how political actors evoke ideologically laden terminology to support specific courses of action. For the conservative women, the ideograph feminist was too heavily laden with history. A mo...