Search Results (24)

This article examines how LGBTQ+ allyship is made, felt, and negotiated within a secondary school workshop using creative, participatory methods. Drawing on affect theory (see Sara Ahmed) and feminist new materialist scholarship (see Barad, Renold, among others), the paper analyses a collaborative collage activity centered on Pride flags and symbolic materials. Rather than treating allyship as a fixed identity or a knowledge-based achievement, the study explores how it emerges relationally through encounters with materials, symbols, bodies, and digital technologies. Through close analysis of moments of uncertainty, affective attachment, cutting and shattering of symbols, and the collective naming of the final artwork, the article traces how not-knowing, pleasure, confusion, and togetherness function as generative forces for allyship. The workshop is framed as a propositional research-creation space in which phones, Google searches, bunting, scissors, and book references intra-act with young peoples’ lived experiences, redistributing epistemic authority and unsettling school-based expectations of correct knowledge. The findings contribute to existing research on LGBTQ+ inclusion and allyship in schools by shifting focus from identity labels and institutional frameworks toward the affective, material, and speculative processes through which allyship is assembled in the moment. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative conceptualisation of allyship as relational practice rather than static position, with implications for creative pedagogy and inclusive educational research. Full article

Transgender and gender-diverse teachers occupy a precarious position within educational spaces, often facing increased scrutiny and regulation aimed at disciplining their gender expression. This article brings to light original and significant insights by exploring how transgender and gender-diverse teachers resist and subvert cisnormative dress codes, as acts of self-affirmation and resistance within their professional educational contexts. Through an unconventional lens of Barad’s feminist new materialism combined with Wieringa’s continuum of symbolic subversion, our analysis offers an important theoretical contribution by interpreting how these individuals negotiate and challenge institutional cisnormativity, unsettling the tacit expectations of gendered professionalism in their trans embodiment. Drawing on the experiences of three transgender and gender-diverse teacher participants, a group often overlooked, this paper integrates findings from two distinct qualitative studies which used a participatory-focused ‘object-interview’ methodology. Findings from these in-depth studies reveal that transgender and gender-diverse teachers trouble dress code regulations by simultaneously embodying resistance and compliance, effectively reshaping and disrupting gendered expectations and institutional norms. While some forms of self-affirmation expressed by participants remained unseen, others materialised as embodied subversions of normative organisational expectations. Additionally, the degree of agency these teachers have in resisting binary dress code constraints is contingent on the entanglements of the teachers themselves, students, school policies, leadership and institutional climates. Unexpectedly, this research suggests that schools can act as sites of visibility and safety for transgender and gender-diverse teachers, where gender expression is validated and extends beyond the classroom. This article concludes by recognising that, when transgender and gender-diverse teachers resist uniformity and dress code norms, they embody their affirmed identities and, in doing so, offer vital representation for transgender and gender-diverse students, providing a sense of belonging, possibility, and authenticity within educational spaces. Full article

The literary career of Lettice Galbraith (1859–1932) coincided with a transformative period in British intellectual history, when the boundaries between scientific rationalism and occult epistemologies were being vigorously contested. This paper argues that Galbraith’s supernatural fiction represents a sharp challenge to Victorian medical science, using Gothic tropes to expose its deeply gendered structures of power. Situating her work within what Alex Owen has termed “modern enchantment”, it contends that Galbraith does not merely use the supernatural as a metaphor for social critique, but treats spiritualist practice as a legitimate methodology, a way of knowing that privileges embodied experience, and the testifying power of the material world over the cold, isolating rationality of institutional orthodoxy. Through a close reading of “In the Séance Room” and “The Ghost of Vittoria Pandelli”, and by employing a theoretical framework that combines feminist theory with new materialist perspectives, this analysis demonstrates how Galbraith’s stories reconfigure the séance as a ‘feminist counter-laboratory’. In this space, women—both as mediums and as spectral presences—reclaim agency from male dominated medicine and psychiatry. Matter itself becomes an agential force: objects, sounds, and even atmospheres intra-act with human participants to produce truths that medical authority cannot access or suppress. Ultimately, Galbraith’s stories deliver a powerful and enduring claim, that systems of power designed to silence and erase will be undone by the vibrant presence of the material world itself. Full article

What can hybridity teach us? The answer I posit is–like water–to embrace movement in all its forms. We are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event on earth and yet few scholars give prolonged attention to how we are to sustainably move our human inheritances forward on this increasingly uninhabitable planet. Reflecting on the work of transnational poets, specifically South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon translated through Korean American poet Don Mee Choi and Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan, we are reminded of the myriad ways in which humans can move and survive in a foreign yet familiar world. This paper finds its support in the confluence of transnational contemporary feminist poetics, formalism, environmentalism, and posthumanism. Through the use of various critical discourses, this paper considers how movement and its hybrid capacities offer a new understanding of contemporary North American poetics. In this sense, a poem should be viewed as a dynamic temporal cybernetic system, a vessel, full of energy, simultaneously pulsing with the changing movements and constrictions of everyday life. Full article

At the intersection of memory and feminist studies, this article examines the issue of suffrage and feminist monumental commemoration in the United States. Starting from the deficit of statues representing female historical figures in the public space, it analyzes the conception and reception of two important monuments honoring women’s suffrage (Portrait Monument 1921 and the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument 2020). While those monuments have somewhat broken the “bronze ceiling”, they testify to the mechanics of exclusion and inclusion at work both in the construction of history and memory. Then, the article takes on a broader perspective, questioning the extent to which traditional monuments, as products of a patriarchal culture and memory, can properly commemorate modern feminism. The essay identifies two trends, one consisting of transforming the bronze through various strategies, the other of “breaking the bronze” by replacing it with other materials and proposing new memory frameworks belonging to what James E. Young has labeled countermonuments. Still, the article ultimately questions the limits of the monument itself and points to the notion of interactive spaces as perhaps the most adequate sites of memory for the complex, multifaceted, contested, and contemporary movement that feminism(s) stand(s) for. 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

This paper is a conceptual exploration and diffractive reading of refugee/(im)migrant education through multiple lenses, including data-driven decision making, critical refugee studies, new materialism and critical feminist and posthumanist studies, and trans theorizations such as Black trans feminism. After a brief introduction to “the field” of refugee/(im)migrant education, the paper turns to diffractive readings of refugee/(im)migrant education as means of exploring what is the matter, as in the material and discursive substance, in refugee/(im)migrant education, and why and how (including when, where, and by whom) does that matter come to matter? The paper concludes with discoveries, or findings, from this diffractive, transdisciplinary exploration and considerations for educators, policymakers, researchers, activists, and other actors (co)constituting and “becoming with” refugee/(im)migrant education. Full article

Recent research has documented the relationship between the promotion of ‘ideal’, ‘fit’ bodies in social media, body image and associated body concerns and conditions. This article expands this scholarship, focusing specifically on gender, body disaffection and social media. Thus far, body disaffection has mostly been understood through a psychological framing, as a pathology residing within an individual and strongly associated with poor body image because of internalizing media images. In this paper, drawing on feminist new materialism, I offer a framing of body disaffection as a relational phenomenon. The paper draws on a mixed method study in England, with over 1000 young people examining their experiences with a range of digital health technologies. I focus specifically on their engagement with social media, to explore the relationship between ideal images and body concerns. Far from being a simple process of internalization of negative perceptions or image one has of their body, disaffection is formed through the body via a complex process of entanglement with social media and other elements. I outline how disaffection materialises as part of an assemblage of elements, including discourses, humans, bodies, digital objects and platforms. The paper reveals how entanglements with social media can generate powerful affects such as shame, pleasure and belonging along gendered lines, which may have significant implications for young people’s relationships with their bodies. I analyse how social media events focused on the ‘transformation’ of bodies generate powerful affects, which open or limit capacities for what ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ bodies might become in deeply gendered and sometimes harmful ways. Full article

This practice-based paper explores the methods of answering the question: what is our collective body? This article offers a case study of collaborative research and seeks to enact a collective body as a means of transgressing and occupying individuated neoliberal spaces of higher education. Understanding the processes through which knowledge is collectively built highlights the in-becoming nature of practice-based research and the enabling forces of this inquiry. The methods enacted access a particular rendering of how we understand ourselves as a collective; we answer the question through doing together. The ways we encounter the collective enable understanding around the shifting boundaries of the individual–collective connection, made palpable by a string. Through playful forms of dissent, such as embodied, remembered, and writing encounters, enable connections with others and inspire a refocusing of our individual practices. Full article

Anarchism is a fertile site for nurturing the sorts of encounters that feminists have called intersectionality. Anarchism and intersectionality share the goal of critically examining familiar as well as emergent flows of power and meaning, and understanding their relations to one another. This paper focuses on three compelling directions for anarchist studies: Indigenous anarchism, anarchism developing with new materialism, and anarchism emergent in radical book arts. Each thread has established roots while also moving in new directions. Anarchist encounters with Indigeneity, new materialism, and book arts resonate with each other: they can foster “a commitment to the particular” through which we can immerse ourselves in rich and dense worlds where specific Indigenous theories and practices, detailed encounters with non-human things, and particular artistic + intellectual productions of materials can emerge. Full article

Ora Shem-Ur’s detective series starring Ali Honigsberg established her as one of the early female pioneers in the new wave of Israeli detective fiction writers. In line with the current trend in post-feminist criticism towards analyzing the place of women within popular culture by looking at fiction as an agent of social change, this article suggests that the series not only addresses gendered topics but also other tensions and social exploitations of power within Israeli society. Shem-Ur thus provides a fascinating portrait of Israeli society in the 1990s, reflecting the way in which female detective fiction developed from light reading material into a social mirror presenting and addressing social changes and shifts in gender conception. Reading the series through a post-feminist lens, the article seeks to demonstrate how its themes of the relations between men, women, and power, and of economic corruption and politics, shed light on contemporaneous Israeli social issues. Full article

The narrative of a line of research from a feminist perspective involves describing the situated practices that contribute to understanding inequality in the construction of the social relationships that build links between human and nonhuman materialities. This paper aims to link feminist epistemology and actor–network theory to the expert network that produces, sustains and manages the design of the chemical zone of a fiber optic sensor (FOS) and of new smart materials, tracing the path of a university research group with important scientific publications that has also developed a line of work in the field of science, technology and society (STS). We are interested in the generalized division of labor and the role of science and technology in the creation of symbols in our culture, particularly in the field of expert knowledge, where research carried out by men and women constructs trajectories of academic success that are predominantly male. The transversal incorporation of gender analysis into the production of FOSs helps reveal the processes that have, up to this point, excluded women from prominent positions in publications. Full article

In this article, I explore the interplay of yoga, theology and the time of perimenopause and menopause. Through an approach centered physically, theologically and philosophically on becoming, I find an integrated web of thinking, feeling and moving that weaves new ways of perceiving and living this time of change; an example, I suggest, of what Keller calls creatio ex profundis, new creation from the depths of a life. I bring aspects of process theology (along with feminist and queer theology), phenomenological materialism, embodiment and somatic psychology/physiology into conversation with personal narrative. I examine ideas of severance, threshold and emergence, and images such as release, holding and breath that resonate helpfully with the holistic embodiment of yoga, theologies of change and (peri)menopause. Full article

The 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich’s theology, dissolving gender binaries and incorporating medieval constructs of the female into the Trinity, captivates scholars across rhetorical, literary, and religious studies. A “pioneering feminist”, as Cheryll Glenn dubs her, scholarship attempts to account for the ways in which Julian’s theology circumvented the religious authority of male clerics. Some speculate that Julian’s authority arises from a sophisticated construction of audience (Wright). Others situate Julian in established traditions and structures of the Church, suggesting that she revised a mode of Augustinian mysticism (Chandler), or positing that her intelligence and Biblical knowledge indicate that she received religious training (Colledge and Walsh). Drawing from theories on space and gender performativity, this essay argues that Julian’s gendered body is the generative site of her authority. Bodies are articulated by spatial logics of power (Shome). Material environments discipline bodies and, in a kind of feedback loop, gendered performance (re)produces power in time and space. Spaces, though, are always becoming and never fixed (Chavez). An examination of how Julian reorients hierarchies and relations among power, space, and her body provides a hermeneutic for recognizing how gender is structured by our own material cultures and provides possibilities for developing practices that revise relations and create new agencies. Full article

This article connects recent work in critical race studies, museum studies, and performance studies to larger conversations happening across the humanities and social sciences on the role of performance in white public spaces. Specifically, I examine the recent trend of museums such as the Natural History Museum of London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to name but a few, offering meditation and wellness classes that purport to “mirror the aesthetics or philosophy of their collections.” Through critical ethnography and discursive analysis I examine and unpack this logic, exposing the role of cultural materialism and the residue of European imperialism in the affective economy of the museum. I not only analyze the use of sound and bodily practices packaged as “yoga” but also interrogate how “yoga” cultivates a sense of space and place for museum-goers. I argue that museum yoga programs exhibit a form of somatic orientalism, a sensory mechanism which traces its roots to U.S. American cultural-capitalist formations and other institutionalized forms of racism. By locating yoga in museums within broader and longer processes of racialization I offer a critical race and feminist lens to view these sorts of performances. Full article