Framing Feminism: News Coverage of the Women's Movement in British and American Newspapers, 1968–1982

This article analyses the framing in four British and American newspapers of the second-wave feminist movement during its most politically active period (1968–1982). Using content and critical discourse analysis of 555 news articles, the article investigates how movement members were represented, what problems and solutions to women's oppression/inequality were posed and whose voices were used. This paper identifies: opposition to the movement, support for the movement, conflict and movement defined in terms of its goals. In addition to exploring nuances in coverage across time and space, we use a feminist perspective to make political statements about how gendered hierarchies function through media discourse, and argue that the circulation of patriarchal and capitalist ideologies worked to prevent women's equal partnership with men in both countries.     

The Evolution of Feminism: Comparison of Adaptation and By-Product Concepts

The aspiration of an ideal social structure includes the ambition of construction of a society that does not discriminate on the basis of gender. The development of feminist thought is an endeavor for evolutionary changes within the prevailing patriarchal society. This article exemplifies the development and changes in the feminist movement due to internal pressures, external politics, and ideological changes, by highlighting the oppression of women and the movement's chief accomplishments, and strives to explain this evolution from the standpoint of two alternative justifications, an adaptationist and by-product influence. It elucidates underlying aspects of the movement and the prerequisites for it to flourish and become a multifaceted, global phenomenon.     

De/Composing Gran's Photo Album

This is the story of my maternal grandmother's photo album as it is seen through the feminist psychoanalytic eyes of her granddaughter. The photos take on particular meanings as my mother and I ponder over them. The photo album, set against the backdrop of the early twentieth century, tells tales of frivolity and young romance, friendship and daughterhood, extended families and holidays. What is most significant, however, is the way in which the photos are framed within the patriarchal Catholic discourse, which enveloped my grandmother's life. Yet, it is argued that there were, and continue to be, momentary fissures and ruptures in this patriarchal discourse as feminist psychoanalytic frames come into view.     

Transgressive Sexualities: Politics of Pleasure and Desire in Kamasutra: A Tale of Love and Fire

Utilizing feminist film theory, critical reviews, and viewer responses, this article examines visual representations of transgressive sexuality in two diasporic Indian women's films: Kamasutra: A Tale of Love by Mira Nair, and Fire by Deepa Mehta. The article draws from research on ancient discourses on sexuality in India to argue that contemporary constructions of women's sexuality in South Asia are not devoid of patriarchal and fundamentalist cultural politics of representation.     

Fighting racism within ourselves — Even when you have carried your mixed‐race children in your womb

This alternative narrative tells the story of an upper‐middle‐class White feminist scholar, Lili. Lili builds her feminist knowledge by pursuing an equality ideal situated at the crossroads of gender, race, class and religion. Married to a Black Muslim man from West Africa and mother of three mixed‐race sons, Lili's story shows the ambiguities of her own anti‐racist struggles. Her story illustrates how being anti‐racist does not mean that one is free from racism, even in the case of a White woman who has carried her mix‐raced children in her womb. This is a call for humility and self‐awareness when entering in anti‐racism acts.     

The woman writer's body: Multiplicity,neoliberalism, and feminist resistance

What goes behind the scene of a woman writer's writing process? Beneath shiny finished writing products lies an arduous writing process often remain unseen to readers. The article makes visible two women writers' bodies and our embodied writing experiences through an intersectional feminist lens. Writer One is a Singapore-born, ethnic Chinese, queer migrant woman academic residing in Australia with her long-term partner. Writer Two is an England-born, Australian-British dual citizen, white heterosexual married mother of young twin children ready to kick start her academic career after her recent PhD conferment. Writer One with her fibromyalgic, traumatized, and othered bodies and Writer Two with her vulvodynia, mothering, and gendered bodies write themselves, their bodies and embodied writing experiences into existence in this article. Using autoethnographic accounts, they discuss how their multiple, chronically ill, and pained bodies influence their writing process and choice of writing topics. Specifically, they reveal how their bodies negotiate the tension between neoliberal demands imposed on their bodies and their feminist resistance efforts against constrictive forces in the knowledge production economy. Using this piece of writing as feminist resistance, they seek to reject dominant discourses, hold space, inscribe their own narratives, and call for collective feminist action with fellow women writers.     

The Haemophilia Society

Abstract

A popular feminist principle in community work emphasises egalitarian relations between women. The ‘false equality trap’ of sisterhood has been highlighted recently through demonstrating women's different experiences of gender oppression. However, in making experiential diversity the starting point for practice it is possible to overlook power relations. A gendered relations perspective keeps the relations between men and women to the fore, while not precluding relative power differences between women. This perspective ensures that political institutions and practices become targets for change. In contrast, experiential diversity necessitates individual empowerment work and collective action based on local and unique circumstances. This perspective may encourage strategies which are inward-looking and which sidestep mainstream political institutions. Feminist community work needs to be judged according to its contribution to constraining the reproduction of patriarchal power relations. Feminist-inspired community development must operate in tandem with social action, policy reform, prefigurative strategies and above all, political reform.     

Jessie Bernard: The Unfolding of the Female World*

This article reviews Jessie Bernard's work on families and family relationships over a forty-year period and identifies her paradigmatic shift from a functionalist orientation to a strong feminist perspective. Through chronicling women's relationships over the years she found a new way of viewing family and women's issues. This article argues that Bernard is one of the first sociologists who can be called a feminist.     

Intersectional Individuality: Georg Simmel's Concept of “The Intersection of Social Circles” and the Emancipation of Women

Georg Simmel's “The intersection of social circles,” a chapter in his 1908 Sociology, contains discussions of class, religion, ethnic, and gender relations that are highly relevant to contemporary sociological concerns. Simmel's argument is based on a notion of historical dynamic that interprets increasingly complex intersectionality as a sign of progressing civilization. The article establishes how Simmel describes “the intersection of social circles” and then looks at Simmel's account through the concept of “intersectionality” as developed in contemporary feminist theory. The article suggests that although some aspects of Simmel's account of women in modernity are incompatible with contemporary feminism, the shared use of the same image, “intersection,” in Simmel and in contemporary feminist theory is the symptom of a shared concern with a particular aspect of the complexity of modern society. In Simmel, the increasing density of the intersections of social circles points to the increasingly complex individuality of modern subjects, whereas the use of the same image in contemporary feminist theory is part of a critique of inequality and oppression in the same modern society whose advent Simmel celebrated. Intersectionality is a characteristic of modern society that first became visible more than a century ago and has meanwhile become ever the more a signature of modernity.     

Finding a Sociological Voice: The Work of Mirra Komarovsky*

This article offers a biographical sketch of Mirra Komarovsky in the framework of an analysis of her work as a researcher, writer, teacher and feminist. It demonstrates how the cultural conflicts that existed while she was a college student laid the foundation for her later sociological research. It also illustrates the particular dynamics of a woman's career in sociology, especially with regard to the influence of social supports on a woman's sense of “finding her voice.” Her work after retirement suggests that this period may have particular significance in the lives of academic women. The theoretical foundation and methodological characteristics of her work are additional foci of this article.     

Absent men: paid domestic work,sexual exploitation and male domination in the family in the USA

This article analyzes the sexual exploitation of paid domestic workers in the US through the lens of male domination in employing families. Departing from the dominant tendency in studies of paid domestic work to focus on relationships between female employers and workers, the article addresses the role of male domination and patriarchal family structures within employing families in the sexual exploitation of domestic workers by male employers. Using materialist feminist approaches, the article argues that domestic workers’ experiences should be seen as embedded in the patriarchal environment created by male household heads who appropriate the labor of other household members, including wives, children and paid domestic workers. The sexual exploitation of domestic workers is then analyzed as being a result of the appropriation of women’s entire personhood by men within the relationship of sexage outlined by Colette Guillaumin.     

Castration and Medusa: Orlan's Art on the Cutting Edge

French multimedia artist Orlan (b. 1947) literally altered her body and identity in the name of art by undergoing multiple cosmetic surgeries that replaced her features with those from art historical masterpieces. She transformed herself into an objet d'art as well as a site for public debate, thereby injecting a radical sensibility into Western art and its history. The provocative surgeries at the core of Orlan's “carnal art” both exemplify and expand Freud's notion of castration to include the wish to transcend gender and even the body itself. Like Medusa, Orlan confronts us with blinding images that compel us to question our assumptions about art, beauty, gender, identity, and technology. Her project shows us the fate of human embodiment in a posthuman age. In addition to elucidating her social, feminist, and aesthetic agenda, this paper clarifies her personal psychology and her work's effect on the audience.     

A Century of Essential Feminism

In the course of reflecting on her own experience as a woman in the professional world, the author identifies 2 lines of development in the feminist movement. One is the increasing demand for women's political and economic power. The other is the search for an autonomous self, one that is independent of the power of men in patriarchal societies. The relative successes and failures over time, culture, social class, and geography are discussed, and some form of social action is suggested for American feminism at the present time.     

The significance of feminist infrastructure: #MeToo in the construction industry and the green industry in Sweden

To better understand the interplay between digital activism and feminist infrastructure, this study investigates #MeToo activism in the Swedish construction industry and green industry. Both are industries in transition characterized by a dissonance between formal incentives, that encourage women and others to work in environments previously dominated by white men, and the informal power structures hosting a toxic masculinity. Based on media texts and interviews with key persons from the industries, the article situates #MeToo in a local context and shows how it was embedded in a supportive social, cultural, and technical infrastructure. In both industries, at the time of #MeToo this feminist infrastructure was already in place consisting of: an awareness of the problem of sexual harassment and abuse, knowledge of feminist explanatory models, established feminist online networks, and a supportive feminist culture, which together with widespread digital and feminist literacy became instrumental in the organization of the movement. Social media connected activists and created a critical mass by supporting the uniting of conflicting identity positions around shared differences. The established feminist infrastructure meant that the #MeToo activism, by articulating a widespread affective dissonance, pushed open doors that were already half open and forced them wide. This can explain some of the movement's success in Sweden.     

“Lizzie Do You Mind”: Gertrude Stein's Laws of Genre in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor

Against previous critics’ readings of Stein's Blood on the Dining-Room Floor as a failed attempt at the hard-boiled genre, this article argues for the many ways in which the novel re-writes the gothic/domestic detective story in a brilliant tour de force that frames all that is un-natural about heteronormative Victorian family life while offering a lesbian alternative. In Stein's subversive and serious play with the forms and conventions of popular fiction, her positive invocations of Lizzie Borden as textual witness, her wide-reaching references to lesbian relationships in other of her works, and, finally, her virtuosic use of silence, Stein writes a profound critique of the patriarchal family through a radical unmaking of a thoroughly domestic literary form.     

Engendering Citizenship,Feminizing Civil Society

Abstract

In this paper, I describe how feminists in countries of the Middle East and North Africa are challenging their second-class citizenship largely institutionalized in patriarchal family laws-and are calling for an extension of their civil, political, and social rights. I use the term “feminist” to denote de jureand de factofeminists working to advance women's rights. The paper seeks to make theoretical sense of contemporary rights-based movements and discourses in the region through an application of theories of citizenship. It highlights the role of women's organizations in the regional call for democratization, civil society, and citizenship and it provides an empirical content to the discussion of citizenship, state, and civil society. Data and information are gleaned from a close reading of the literature by and on women's organizations in the region, and from personal observations and interviews.     

Women Who Work: The limits of the neoliberal feminist paradigm

This article examines Ivanka Trump's Women Who Work, arguing that it represents the newest permutation of the neoliberal feminist subject. After providing an overview of the recent emergence of neoliberal feminism, I explain why the book should be considered part of the wider cultural landscape in which this variant of feminism has increasingly become commonsensical. I then turn to demonstrate how Women Who Work construes the ideal female subject not only as generic human capital but also incites her to invest in herself constantly, where activities ranging from professional workshops through hobbies to friendships are understood as practices that appreciate the value of the self. The conversion of women into generic rather than gendered human capital remains, however, incomplete, since the ideal of a happy work–family balance continues to serve as a push back to the wholesale erasure of traditional notions of sexual difference. Finally, I highlight that neoliberal feminism is erasing other long‐standing divisions and political differences. Not only does the private–public divide collapse, but so, too, does the distinction between one's private self and one's public enterprise as the self itself becomes an enterprise. This dual process of collapse and reconfiguration shapes the newest neoliberal feminist subject, the main protagonist of Trump's Women Who Work.     

Exist or exit? Women business‐owners in Bangladesh during COVID‐19

Within the unique context of COVID‐19, this feminist research provides novel insights on how gender‐specific issues are articulated in the experiences of women concerning their small businesses in a patriarchal developing nation. Based on the interviews of women business‐owners in Bangladesh, this research reveals the diversified gendered experiences of women in private and public spheres in continuing their business operations during the pandemic period. It also unveils patriarchal practices regarding women's discontinuing or closing down ventures due to the COVID‐19 crisis. Thus, the research substantially advances the understanding on the influence of gender on women's continuing or discontinuing or even closing down their businesses in a highly patriarchal developing nation during the pandemic period. It further offers important suggestions for policy practitioners in supporting women business‐owners of patriarchal developing nations during the COVID‐19 pandemic.