Search Results (36)

In response to the increasing politicization and polarization of discourses around gender, sexuality, and the body, feminist theorists like Judith Butler call for feminism to strive toward flexibility and responsivity. This essay lays out some of the theoretical considerations that inform studies of graphic embodiment—or studies of embodiment in graphic narratives—both generally and within feminist studies, then examines several graphic texts by Tillie Walden and Élodie Durand that exemplify feminist theories of embodiment, with particular attention to the creative co-construction of embodied narratives. Full article

Cisheteronormativities inform and distort what LGBTQ+ young people’s bodies can be and do, and what choices about the body are possible, profoundly impacting mental health. This article presents findings from a UK study examining ‘what works’ in early intervention mental health support for LGBTQ+ youth to examine how these impacts can be addressed. Data were collected across 12 mental health support services via the following: interviews with LGBTQ+ youth aged 12–25, service staff/volunteers, and parents/carers (n = 93); document review; and non-participant observation. In analysis, ‘Body’ was identified as a key principle underpinning effective early intervention mental health support. This article presents three key areas: the ability to name and define the body; the body’s ability to ‘do’; and the ability to make informed decisions about one’s body, life, and future. This article highlights the urgent importance of upholding bodily autonomy for LGBTQ+ youth if efforts to address mental health inequalities are to have any chance at success. Full article

“If it wasn’t for the women” is a common refrain in Black Church culture, made most popular by Cheryl Townsend Gilkes’ sociology of religion work in the 1990s. As conversations grow around a perceived disconnection from the church—particularly among younger generations—many Black congregations and denominations are asking the following question: Where do we go from here? One possible response is to ask the women. Black women have long been central to the sustenance and theological framing of the Black Church. However, many contemporary Black women theologians and church-adjacent writers are reshaping religious discourse in ways that move beyond traditional ecclesial boundaries and into the interiority of Black womanhood. This turn should be considered essential in any reimagining of the Black Church. This paper employs content analysis to examine five contemporary works by Black women thinkers—Candice Benbow, Lyvonne Briggs, Tricia Hersey, EbonyJanice Moore, and Cole Arthur Riley—whose writings reflect Black women’s embodied spirituality, theological imagination, cultural meaning-making, and institutional critique within Black religious life. Rather than signaling a decline in moral or spiritual life, their work points to the search for sacred spaces that are more liberative, inclusive, and attuned to lived experience. Through a thematic analysis of Power, Authority, and Institutional Critique; Afrofuturistic Visioning of Faith; Sacred Embodiment and Spiritual Praxis; Language and Rhetorical Strategies; Gender, Sexuality, and Sacred Autonomy; and Liberation, Justice, and Social Transformation, this study contributes to the evolving conversation on Black women’s spirituality, leadership in religious spaces, and a possible iteration of the Black Church. Full article

This article offers insights into conceptualizing a different angle of cultural heritage in its intangible form and generational inheritance, in relation to migrant community bonds and their impacts on embodied stories of trauma and healing. This article aims to contribute to understanding how cultural and historical knowledge of heritage is passed from one generation to the next, with deep emotional impacts, whether trauma or self-development. While engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue with Bion’s work, we explore nodes of divergence and convergence in how gendered and embodied migrant sexuality/identity stories of trauma and healing exemplify the call for research to engage with perspectives of social and cultural differences. This understanding of contested cultural heritage and how belonging can be achieved links to ethnic–ancestral/national consciousness, as well as the struggle to belong among first- and second-generation migrants. The empirical data draws from extensive ethnographic, multi-method, multi-sited, comparative, and narrative research conducted with first- and second-generation migrants. The analysis is situated within Bion’s theory and articulated through an interpretative interdisciplinary framework aiming to unravel the complexity of the phenomena of mobility and identity construction. This analysis exemplifies the power dynamics inherent in migrant inter/intragenerational relations shaped by cultural heritage. Full article

Gerty MacDowell’s initial, albeit brief, appearance in James Joyce’s Ulysses has sparked debates regarding her identity and agency. In the critical literature, there are interpretations that characterize Gerty as a woman and disabled person whose actions conform to patriarchal beauty standards that objectify her. This paper argues for revising such readings by applying an intersectional feminist disability perspective attuned to the interconnections between her womanhood and disability. Rather than positing Gerty’s identities as inherently conflicting, I illustrate how her disability and feminine social position co-constitute and transform one another. Her self-care practices aimed at securing a husband, though partly conforming to norms, also foster confidence and counter pervasive cultural assumptions of disabled women as ugly, useless, and asexual. Gerty’s exhibition of sexual desire and pursuit of pleasure likewise contest views of disabled women as unsuitable for romance or unable to be agentic sexual subjects. Furthermore, conceptualizing agency beyond neoliberal notions of rational autonomy acting against all constraints upholds Gerty’s agentic power. She makes strategic use of available discourses and resources to expand her precarious options given material and ideological limitations. Overall, analyzing Gerty’s intersectional experience denaturalizes the reductive models of identity and agency that have dominated Ulysses criticism. Applying fresh perspectives opens new symbolic interpretations of embodied identity and sexuality. Full article

In this paper, we draw upon a study exploring how COVID-19 and social isolation impacted young people’s (aged 13–18) experiences of online sexual and gendered risks and harms in England during nationwide lockdowns and upon their return to school. We explore the complexities, tensions and ambiguities in youth navigating algorithmised feeds on social media apps such as TikTok and content featuring idealised cis-gendered, heterosexualised feminine and masculine embodiment. Young people repeatedly witness hateful and abusive comments that are algorithmically boosted. We argue that this toxic content normalises online hate in the form of body shaming and sexual shaming, developing the concept of the postdigital to analyse the offline, affective, embodied and material dimensions of online harm, harassment and abuse. We also explore young people’s direct experiences of receiving harmful comments, including girls’ and gender and sexuality-diverse youth’s experiences of body and sexual shaming, as well as boys’ experiences of fat shaming; which, in many instances, we argue must be classified as forms of image-based abuse. Using our postdigital lens, we argue that the ways heteronormative, cis-gendered masculine and feminine embodiment are policed online shapes behaviour and norms in young people’s everyday lives, including in and around school, and that better understanding and support around these issues is urgently needed. Full article

In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the postsecular emerges as a critical framework to understand the characters’ search for home amidst the remnants of South Africa’s colonial legacy. This essay proposes an exploration of how the novel’s engagement with the postsecular scriptures and moments offers a nuanced perspective on the religious impulse within the literary form. I focus on the protagonist, Lurie, whose journey from a sexual scandal to a commitment to animal welfare symbolizes a broader quest for redemption and atonement. Contrasting Lurie’s postsecular odyssey is his daughter Lucy’s steadfast attachment to her farm, which becomes a battleground for historical racial tensions. Through a mythological critical approach, I interpret Lucy’s experience as a contemporary iteration of the scapegoat, embodying the sacrificial role in a society seeking reconciliation and healing. My analysis extends to the novel’s esthetic and ethical dimensions, examining how Coetzee’s narrative challenges and reframes traditional religious narratives. By situating my discussion within the fields of the sciences of religions, theology, and mythology, I contribute to the understanding of literature as a vital medium for engaging with religious and theological themes. The essay concludes with a reflection on the implications of Coetzee’s postsecular discourse for the individual’s search for home and belonging in a post-apartheid context. Full article

The aim of this paper is to discuss how young Latinx men living in Australia negotiate, embody, and complicate existing dominant and racialized masculinities. Queer and feminist theories are used to explore how Latinx men negotiate and embody masculinities, sexualities, and being ‘other’ in a White dominant cultural context. These tensions were explored through semi-structured in-depth interviews and a creative visual method known as sandboxing with twenty-one Latinx men. Sandboxing aims to elicit conversation and allows for the reflection and sharing of a visual and symbolic representation of participants’ lives. The findings suggest masculinities are lived and embodied alongside negotiating racialization and sexualities. The fluidity of masculinities surfaces in participants’ reflexive engagement with masculinities and the nuances in negotiating and simultaneously reproducing gender binary norms. Participants’ careful negotiation in engaging with feminine culture led to developing the concept ‘feminine threshold’, a theoretical contribution offered in this article, in understanding how Latinx men negotiate masculinities. Full article

The windigo is a generally malicious figure in several Indigenous cultures of the land currently administered by the governments of the USA and Canada. In traditional narratives, the windigo is generally associated with hunger, greed, winter, and cannibalism. In this paper, I discuss how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers have used the figure of the windigo to critique and challenge environmental injustice. While some windigo stories present the being as a terrifying monster of the “wilderness”, others use the figure as an embodiment of environmental destruction and the injustice that comes with it. Windigo stories also highlight three further aspects of colonial violence: military violence, sexual violence, and religious violence. Although some stories depict windigos being defeated through violence, many stress the importance of care and healing to overcome the windigo affliction. In fact, storytelling itself may be part of the healing process. Windigo stories, I argue, can be a useful way to interrogate the injustices created by colonialism and environmental destruction, and the stories can also offer hope for healing and for an environmentally just future. Full article

Over the past decades, Iran has been witnessing the growth of a burgeoning feminist movement. With its origins deeply rooted in the early 20th century, the Iranian feminist movement, as such, is not a uniform body: it embodies various, opposing even, political ideologies under the umbrella of feminism, reflecting the divergent social locations of its protagonists. While the movement has been criticized for its centralist, middle-class and at times apolitical tendencies, academic scholarship has yet to offer intersectional analyses that problematize historically rooted and daily materialized relations of power within the movement, particularly in relation to axes such as ethnicity (and race), religion, gender identity, sexuality, and (dis)ability. In light of this gap, the present article aims towards documenting and theorizing the intersectionality of the challenges facing Iranian feminist activists belonging to various ethnic nations and religious beliefs. Drawing on ethnographic research, it argues that minority feminists find themselves between a rock and a hard place: the rock being masculinist politics within their minoritized communities, which prioritize ethno-nationalist demands over gendered ones; the hard place being a centralist liberal feminist movement that fails to reflect the intersectionality of their experiences as non-Persian non-Shia women, thereby reproducing hierarchies of power in relation to ethnicity, religion, and class. Full article

Karate can be both a martial art and a combat sport. Male and female karate athletes attended the Tokyo Olympic Games 2020 (2021). Elite sport often portrays female athletes through the sexualization of their bodies, while the martial environment leaves them open to accusations of masculinization. In the process of constructing themselves as fighters, karateka women do produce new ways of performing femininities and masculinities, which is a hard-work process of negotiations, leading them to the construction of a particular habitus strictly linked to their performativity within the environment. They take part in a contested terrain that mixes several elements that are often contrasting. In this article, we aim to present factors identified with the women athletes of the Spanish Olympic karate team that affect the construction of their embodied subjectivities. We focus on two main topics, authenticity as the real deal to belonging, and a possible gendered habitus struggling with the achievement of the condition of a warrior. We carried out an ethnographic study with the Spanish Olympic karate squad supported by autoethnographic elements from the first author. We focus here on the data from double interviews with 14 women athletes and their four male coaches. Embodied subjectivity as a process of subject construction to disrupt objectification and forms of othering showed to be a challenge, a complex task, and embedded in contradictions. Karate women’s embodied subjectivities are built in the transit between resisting and giving in. Despite several difficulties, through awareness and reflection on limitations, karateka may occupy their place as subjects, exerting agency, feeling empowered, and fighting consciously against the naturalized ‘tide’. Full article

The terms cyberbullying and nudes, when used by young people, generally overlap to categorise a range of online harms. Yet, when unpacked with girls, their co-opting of these terms can minimize image-based sexual harassment. This paper draws upon findings from a participatory project exploring implicit interpretations of cyberbullying and nudes. I narrow in on the voices of girls, aged 13–15, as they report embodied discomfort and violation from [i] unwanted dick pics from peers and [ii] stranger cyberflashing. To analyse their experiences, I re-work Pierre Bourdieu’s toolkit to a gendered digital habitus with social fields in integrated offline–online contexts in which the unexpected viewing of dick pics leaks across. This reworking illustrates the tensions the girls experience. Resourcefully, the girls draw on embodied postfeminist dispositions to manage their discomfort and safety. I conclude that their normalisations may illustrate symbolic violence, as their postfeminist dispositions attune them to rationalize image-based sexual harassment as naturalised masculine actions. These responses ‘make sense’ to the girls, a position held in preference to the consequences of reporting image-based sexual harassment. Reporting could increase the risk of confrontation with the sender in offline fields and/or potentially result in loss of access, due to adult intervention, to devices and social media. Full article

In this paper, we assess the impact of extended reality technologies as they relate to sexual forms of harassment. We begin with a brief history of the nature of sexual harassment itself. We then offer an account of extended reality technologies focusing specifically on psychological and hardware elements most likely to comprise what has been referred to as “the metaverse”. Although different forms of virtual spaces exist (i.e., private, semi-private, and public), we focus on public social metaverse spaces. We do this to better explain how the concept of sexual harassment must be adjusted to such spaces and how approaches aimed at mitigating harassment must be sensitive to the type of metaverse spaces users utilize. We then offer a typology of sexual harassment for the metaverse focusing on three distinct forms of sexual harassment: (1) invariant (2) mixed variance or modified and (3) unique or metaverse specific. Although existing normative and legal frameworks may function well with respect to the first and, possibly, second forms of harassment, we argue such frameworks will not helpfully address metaverse-specific harassment. Ultimately, the changing nature of privately owned public spaces (POPS) which metaverses are likely to represent pose distinct ethical and regulatory challenges. Full article

In the recent Central American migrations spurred by violence, political instability, and economic insecurity, women grapple with whether and when to bring their children with them in pursuit of safety in another country, and with fulfilling their roles as mothers from afar. Drawing from the transnational motherhood literature and critical feminist theories, this interpretive qualitative study examined transnational motherhood grounded in the lived experiences of Central American women (n = 19) over the course of their migrations to the US. Informed by the principles of grounded theory, the inductive analysis identified five processes in which migration and violence shaped meanings of motherhood: risking everything, embodying separation, braving reunification, mothering others, and experiencing motherhood due to sexual violence. The findings contribute knowledge of how violence shapes and informs women’s migrations and decision-making, and the consequences women endure in taking action to mitigate threats of violence in their own and their children’s lives. The analysis furthermore highlights the specific and profound effects of family separation on mothers. The voices, perspectives, and experiences of migrating mothers and the ways in which migration and violence shapes notions and lived experiences of motherhood are imperative to research, practice, and advocacy to change oppressive immigration policies. Full article

Previous studies demonstrated sex-related differences in several areas of the human brain, including patterns of brain activation in males and females when observing their own bodies and faces (versus other bodies/faces or morphed versions of themselves), but a complex paradigm touching multiple aspects of embodied self-identity is still lacking. We enrolled 24 healthy individuals (12 M, 12 F) in 3 different fMRI experiments: the vision of prototypical body silhouettes, the vision of static images of the face of the participants morphed with prototypical male and female faces, the vision of short videos showing the dynamic transformation of the morphing. We found differential sexual activations in areas linked to self-identity and to the ability to attribute mental states: In Experiment 1, the male group activated more the bilateral thalamus when looking at sex congruent body images, while the female group activated more the middle and inferior temporal gyrus. In Experiment 2, the male group activated more the supplementary motor area when looking at their faces; the female group activated more the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). In Experiment 3, the female group activated more the dmPFC when observing either the feminization or the masculinization of their face. The defeminization produced more activations in females in the left superior parietal lobule and middle occipital gyrus. The performance of all classifiers built using single ROIs exceeded chance level, reaching an area under the ROC curves > 0.85 in some cases (notably, for Experiment 2 using the V1 ROI). The results of the fMRI tasks showed good agreement with previously published studies, even if our sample size was small. Therefore, our functional MRI protocol showed significantly different patterns of activation in males and females, but further research is needed both to investigate the gender-related differences in activation when observing a morphing of their face/body, and to validate our paradigm using a larger sample. Full article