Search Results (185)

Neither women’s studies nor lesbian and gay studies offers an adequate theoretical or political base for disruptive scholarship. Reading and interpreting Southern African writers, especially Sindiwe Magona and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, promotes women’s studies as an academic and political approach to both gender and the erotic. Drawing on genealogies of rupture and intergenerational studies, we argue that the feminist is a positionality that must be widely available to challenge heterosexual perspectives and become a catalyst for audiences to engage in nuanced analyses of discourses on places and genres—narrative in particular—where memories are rearticulated and elaborated. This article explores how the narratives of Magona, Ngugi, and Soyinka inform and complicate the erasure, erosion, and amnesia that accompany contemporary imaginaries of what is re/membered. We challenge the tendency to evaluate African feminisms as only either oppressive or empowering and read the selected texts and their prototypical characters as dynamic embodiments that inform gendered spaces across both the attachments that people hold to particular gender identities and styles and recognising the punitive realities of dominant gender expectations. The article takes a positionality on the often troubled relationship between feminism and femininity, a critical but generous reading that highlights the potential for an affirmative orientation towards identity politics. This study utilises the theoretical lenses of border thinking and decolonial and African feminisms to interrogate matrifocal borderlands and the sociohistorical and cultural dis/continuities of being and becoming. We explore notions of the entanglement of motherhood, daughterhood, wifehood, and sisterhood as morphing identities. These are identities at the margins of political, sociocultural, and gender normativities in African literature. Magona’s “threshold people”, like Ngugi’s perfect nine, destabilise, disrupt, and refuse to be subordinated as they codify living differently in the in-between worlds. Magona, for instance, laminates the challenging discourse of contestation to map difficult, dangerous, and marginal spaces where women live at the borders of sociocultural, religious, ethnic, and gendered norms. These are spaces suffused with affective possibilities—defensiveness, shame, anxiety, anger, curiosity—and the women have to develop relational solidarities in negotiating hyper-visibilities or (in)visibilities within the 21st-century global south. Full article

This study examined the place of care in early childhood education and the role of the state in the social organization of care in Chile. Official policy documents were reviewed, including the Early Childhood Education Curriculum Framework, Teaching Standards Framework (Marco para la Buena Enseñanza), Law 20.379, and Law 21.805. Following a thematic analysis of these documents, semistructured interviews were conducted with four early childhood teachers to triangulate the findings. The results, presented across three thematic categories, reveal an ambiguity in the state’s positioning, oscillating between its role as a guarantor of rights and a provider of targeted services. Care is also incorporated into the educational sphere in a fragmented manner—as a learning objective and a condition for achieving educational outcomes—without being fully recognized as a constitutive dimension of teaching work. This situation contributes to the invisibilization of teachers as care workers and the reproduction of gender inequalities. The study contributes to the literature by approaching care from an educational perspective, highlighting underexplored tensions and emphasizing the need to incorporate a feminist and intersectional perspective into educational policies to advance the recognition of care as a right and a central component of the teaching profession. Full article

While public sanitation is a fundamental component of urban infrastructure, it is often treated as a discretionary amenity rather than a core public service subject to legal standards of equality and dignity. This article challenges gender-blind approaches to urban planning by examining how inadequate public toilet provision constrains women’s everyday mobility and presence in public space, raising questions of indirect gender discrimination and regulatory responsibility. Drawing on an exploratory mixed-methods study (N = 97), the analysis combines quantitative assessment of access barriers, qualitative user narratives, and time-based measurement of total restroom use duration to examine patterns of use and waiting with particular attention to gender differences. The findings indicate that hygiene-related concerns are reported across both men and women, without clear evidence of a consistent gender-specific pattern, while women are disproportionately affected by throughput failures, long waiting times, and the absence of care-integrated facilities. At the same time, variation in support for gender-neutral toilet solutions suggests that user acceptance may not align with model-based proposals in the literature. These inequalities reflect an institutional accountability gap with legal implications in the governance of everyday public services. By shifting the focus from numerical potty parity to temporal inequality and responsibility, this article contributes to feminist legal scholarship by situating sanitation within questions of temporal inequality and institutional responsibility. While exploratory in nature, the findings offer empirically grounded insights into inequalities in everyday sanitation governance. Full article

Nuclear contamination challenges assumptions that harm can be contained through technological control, political borders, or bodily separation. Across the Asia-Pacific, radioactive exposure moves unevenly through racialised, gendered, and colonial histories, rendering some bodies more vulnerable to ecological violence than others. Nuclear regimes continue to depend upon theological logics of purity, sacrificial exclusion, and protected innocence. This article develops a spirituality of fermentation through Asian eco-feminist theology and the Korean practice of sakhim. Fermentation becomes a practice of sustaining wounded life through endurance, permeability, and communal care. From this spirituality of fermentation, I develop the concept of Vital Fluidity as an ethical and theological framework for understanding how life continues through shared vulnerability, where bodies, nourishment, and histories remain deeply entangled. The article contributes to intersectional debates in theology, religion, gender, and ecology by approaching contamination through relation rather than separation. Under nuclear conditions, ethical responsibility emerges through practices that hold grief, contamination, memory, and nourishment together within shared existence. Fermentation therefore becomes a practical theological model for living with nuclear bodies. Full article

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a critical public health concern in South Africa, which ranks among the countries most severely affected worldwide. Women and girls are reported to bear the greatest burden, with men predominantly identified as perpetrators. GBV is particularly prevalent in densely populated areas such as informal settlements, where adverse socioeconomic conditions create fertile ground for its proliferation. Despite the scale of this problem, to the researchers’ knowledge, few studies, especially qualitative ones, have been conducted in such contexts, even though informal settlements are widespread across the country. To generate nuanced insights into this phenomenon, the current study explored the lived experiences of women victims of GBV in Alexandra, one of South Africa’s largest informal settlements. The study was grounded in an interpretive paradigm, employed a qualitative approach, and adopted a single-case-study design. Participants were purposively selected from a population of women victims of GBV, and the sample size was determined through data saturation. Data were collected through individual, face-to-face semi-structured interviews and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) with Nvivo version 15 software and interpreted through the lens of feminist theory. The findings revealed that GBV has profound effects on women’s emotional, psychological and social wellbeing, extending beyond the immediate incidents to also affect their overall functioning, erode self-confidence, and limit opportunities for independence. The use of intimidation and coercion tactics by perpetrators trapped victims in a cycle of dysfunction which diminished agency, and fostered isolation. Interpreting these findings through a feminist lens highlights the systematic and recurrent nature of GBV, which cuts across personal, structural and relational dimensions. The findings underscore the urgent need for context-specific interventions that will help dismantle structures of abuse while supporting victims’ and/or survivors’ autonomy, recovery and, most importantly, capacity to rebuild identity and trust. Full article

This article examines how justice institutions produce and reproduce gender-based violence against women through the invisibilization of moral violence, with particular attention to their spatial dimensions. Drawing on the concept of juridical–patriarchal habitus, the study conceptualizes justice institutions not only as sites of legal action but as spatial formations that shape the visibility, recognition, and adjudication of harm. Using a feminist ethnographic approach, the article analyzes two cases of gender-based violence documented in 2020 in the municipality of Querétaro, Mexico. The findings demonstrate how movement into legal and institutional spaces transforms lived experiences of violence, as procedural requirements, evidentiary expectations, and institutional interactions operate as spatial filters that render certain forms of harm visible while obscuring others. In this process, justice actors construct and reproduce gendered stereotypes about what counts as violence, simultaneously positioning women as victims and subjecting them to processes of revictimization. By conceptualizing the invisibility of moral violence as a spatially mediated process, the article contributes to debates in legal and feminist geography, highlighting how institutional spaces not only respond to gender-based violence but actively participate in its production and concealment. Full article

The current research employs a mixed-methods approach to examine associations among mentoring, academic belonging, and the imposter phenomenon (i.e., persistent self-doubt) among undergraduate women. Participants were 383 women who were undergraduates in an introductory psychology course at a public university in the Southwestern United States. Approximately half of the sample reported that they had either an academic or non-academic mentor. Quantitative analyses revealed that women with mentors had lower levels of imposter feelings and higher levels of academic belonging compared to those without mentors. Qualitative analyses explored whether and how women discussed their imposter experiences with their mentors. Using a deductive approach informed by feminist research on empowerment, thematic analysis revealed two key themes: combatting imposter phenomenon at the individual level and acknowledging imposter phenomenon as a shared experience. Together, these themes provide new insight into how mentors can help women cope with imposter experiences. The current study highlights novel associations between mentoring and women’s academic experiences. The findings also indicate that academic and non-academic mentors can both play a helpful role in enhancing women’s academic experiences and alleviating feelings of inadequacy. Full article

This study examines women’s marginalization and agency in We Need New Names by situating the novel within broader frameworks of transnational genealogies, spatial politics, and colonial migration legacies. Utilizing Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), based on Lazar’s gender ideology and discourse approach in (de)constructing gender identities and gender equality, along with Homi K. Bhabha’s Third Space Theory, this study analyses how diaspora displacement and colonial past influence gendered identities. Through a qualitative and interpretive analysis of select textual episodes, the study reveals how spatial displacement, linguistic fragmentation, and cultural hybridity both inhibit and facilitate female empowerment. Women counter marginalization using everyday tactics such as silence, storytelling, embodied resistance, and discursive bargaining, turning marginal spaces into spaces of resistance. This paper makes a theoretical contribution to migration studies, spatial inequality, and decolonization by exploring gendered identities in transnational and postcolonial settings. Full article

Background/Objectives: Current research on vaginismus predominantly represents White cisgendered and heterosexual women of reproductive age. It is unclear how health professionals (HPs) navigate and support the needs of patients with vaginismus who are gender, sexually, ethnically, religiously, age and/or disability diverse. Therefore, this qualitative study explored health professionals’ experiences and perceptions of patient diversity to holistically assess and support people with vaginismus. Methods: In 2023–2024, 23 HPs in general practice, uro/gynaecology, pelvic floor physiotherapy, mental health, nursing and clinical education participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were inductively thematically analysed with a critical feminist poststructuralist focus on heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ethnocentricity, chrononormativity, and able-bodied normativity. Results: Two themes were developed. The first theme on ‘uneven attention of diversity dimensions in the assessment and support of vaginismus’ explored patients’ ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, age and disability. The second theme on ‘sexually and gender-diverse people’s varied treatment goals for vaginismus’ examined nuanced challenges between heterosexual and non-heterosexual women and limited representation of gender-diverse people. Conclusions: The findings suggest that not discussing patients’ diversity may contribute to their identity erasure and ethnocentric exaltation of White centrality. Treatment approaches may uphold heteronormativity. HPs often described vaginismus as a young woman’s problem. It is recommended that HPs review whether patients with advancing age and/or disability suppress desires for pain-free sex due to societal norms. Decolonising approaches and abject theory could inform the development of inclusive health resources. This can assist HPs to sensitively and supportively assess patients’ diversity to improve their holistic health and well-being outcomes for vaginismus. Full article

The legislative framework of labor law is generally described as gender-neutral based on universal presumptions about employment availability, work productivity, and the ability to work without interruption; in actuality, this gender-neutral framework remains contingent on the existence of the non-menstruating body. This paper analyzes the concept of menstruation as the blind spot in labor law, exploring whether the gender-neutral framework of the legal system has the ability to achieve true gender equality while turning a blind eye to the cyclical body, which has been identified to negatively impact the lives of many menstruators. Methodologically, this research takes a normative approach, incorporating feminist legal theories, principles of substantive equality, and socioeconomic and medical studies on menstruation. The results of this research prove that the concept of menstruation cannot be described or characterized by frameworks such as illness or disability, leaving the normative regulatory space for menstruators to experience structural inequality. The formal equality of labor law rules thus produces unequal effects in practice by privileging an implicit model of uninterrupted work capacity. This article concludes that the legal silence surrounding menstruation is not neutral but reinforces gendered patterns of disadvantage. Making menstruation visible within labor law is therefore not a matter of special treatment but a necessary step towards substantive equality and embodied gender justice, and a prerequisite for any future regulatory responses aimed at addressing workplace inequality. Full article

Mental health inequities affecting migrant populations stem from structural determinants that hierarchize access to resources, recognition, and social protection. Among these determinants, structural racism plays a central role in the experiences of racialised Brazilian immigrant women in Portugal, producing vulnerabilities at the intersection of race, gender, nationality, and migration status. Grounded in intersectional feminist and decolonial epistemology, this study analyses how structural racism operates as a health determinant through specific mechanisms traversing material conditions of life, distress trajectories, and experiences of psychological care, and it examines how these women navigate the limitations of mental health services, identifying conditions for a practice committed to racial equity. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with racialised Brazilian immigrant women and analyzed through Reflexive Thematic Analysis. The findings indicate that racism is manifested through professional devaluation, labour precarity, documentation instability, and linguistic racialisation, impacting access to rights and the production of psychological distress. Mental health inequities are not limited to barriers to access, as institutional and clinical dynamics tend to individualize distress and disregard its historical and social bases, operating as epistemic violence. The community-based strategies mobilized by participants challenge models centred on individual intervention. This study underscores the need for structurally competent approaches and for institutional reforms oriented toward equity and racial justice within mental health systems. Full article

This article examines the resurgence of a series of diverse practices from mending and sewing, to embroidery, knitting and crochet, which are traditionally situated in broader debates about gender and domestic labor but also care work, everyday life, and sustainability. While recently reframed as feminist and eco-conscious practices, these crafts have only been partially explored in their material, symbolic, and emotional aspects due to their association with the feminine and domestic sphere, their invisibility within public discourse, and the stigma attached to repair in consumer capitalist societies. Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted between 2023 and 2025, the research examines the intergenerational transmission of these skills within eleven Italian families. Semi-structured dyadic interviews were carried out with at least two members of each family, predominantly women, exploring learning processes, everyday uses, emotional meaning, and their influence on clothing consumption. Findings reveal a complex and discontinuous trajectory of transmission, shaped by gender expectations, class dynamics, and shifting cultural meanings: while older generations often learned these crafts out of necessity and social obligation, younger generations approach them as creative hobbies, tools for self-expression, or forms of sustainable consumption. Across generations, however, the crafts emerge as powerful affective languages through which care, memory, and relational bonds are materialized in clothing. Full article

This article investigates how women’s relative absence from medieval textual archives can be reconsidered through the study of visual and material culture. Focusing on Mongol and Yuan China and read in relation to The Travels of Marco Polo, it argues that women’s artistic production functioned as a form of embedded counter-archive that preserves traces of participation obscured in narrative sources. Drawing on Black feminist epistemology as a heuristic framework and employing critical fabulation and poetic inquiry as analytical methods, the study interprets silence as a meaningful historical trace rather than a void, and considers silence not as absence but as a structured condition of archival production. Four case studies—Guan Daosheng’s literati bamboo painting, the handscroll tradition associated with Lady Su Hui, imperial phoenix embroidery, and Silk Road textile fragments—demonstrate distinct modes through which women’s presence becomes materially legible: mediated visibility, formal containment, infrastructural anonymity, and circulatory displacement. These “quiet arts” reveal how women’s labour and creativity persisted within and alongside patriarchal inscriptional systems even when textual attribution receded. In dialogue with the shadow silhouettes of contemporary artist Kara Walker, the article further situates these premodern archives within a broader visual language of absence and recovery. Rather than reconstructing lost biographies, it proposes a transdisciplinary method—integrating art history, feminist theory, theology, and poetic inquiry—for reading material culture as a site where historical silence becomes structurally legible. It proposes a transdisciplinary approach that expands art historical methods for interpreting gender, authorship, and archival silence in medieval visual culture. Full article

This article develops the analytical concept of post-liturgical female rituality to examine informal religious practices created by Western Ukrainian female labor migrants in Israel. Drawing on approaches that conceptualize ritual as flexible, embodied, and processual, it focuses on women’s ritual activities that take place in close temporal and symbolic proximity to official church liturgy while remaining outside canonical frameworks. Rather than directly challenging institutional religion, these practices extend and reinterpret patriarchal liturgy through gendered forms of ritual engagement. The analysis is based on qualitative research among Ukrainian Greek Catholic women in Israel, including 27 in-depth interviews, participant observation, and digital ethnography. The findings highlight three interconnected dimensions: collective gatherings following church services; post-liturgical practices involving food, singing, and embodied performance; and national-religious rituals expressing emotional belonging to Ukraine in the context of war. The article argues that post-liturgical female rituals constitute a distinct form of women’s religious agency that operates within institutional Christianity while reworking its meanings, contributing to feminist scholarship on ritual, migration, and war. Full article

Foodborne illness remains a persistent public health issue, yet domestic food safety practices are shaped by individual knowledge, social expectations, and gendered norms. This study examines how gender norms and expectations shape Australian consumers’ safe food-handling knowledge, perceptions, and practices. Guided by a social constructionist epistemology and feminist framework, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 participants aged 18–24 years recruited from a university research participation pool. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Three themes were identified: “I know what I am doing”, optimism bias and false confidence, “Men’s casualness versus women’s strictness”, gendered safe food handling practices and expectations, and “Careful about others, relaxed for myself”, food safety as a social performance. Participants often expressed false confidence in their practices, reflecting optimism bias and reduced perceived susceptibility to foodborne illness. Women tended to portray vigilance and responsibility, while men described more relaxed approaches, reflecting gendered socialisation. Food safety also emerged as performative, with heightened care displayed when cooking for others. These findings highlight that domestic food safety is socially embedded and both reflects and reproduces gender norms. Addressing these dynamics through socially informed, context-sensitive interventions may improve public health outcomes. Full article