Search Results (140)

This article adopts a comparative approach to two women-only landmark exhibitions in Portugal—Portuguese Women Artists (1977) and All I Want. Portuguese Women Artists from 1900 to 2020 (2021–2022)—to explore how curatorial strategies can function as tools of resistance to gender asymmetries in the art field. Spanning 45 years, these initiatives reflect distinct historical, institutional, and cultural contexts: the former emerged in a post-revolutionary country as a bold, politically charged intervention, foregrounding female creativity within an established institution and promoting international visibility, while the latter offered a thematically structured survey that, albeit belatedly, engaged with more complex and globally informed debates. Both exhibitions converge in celebrating Portuguese women’s creative production, exposing persistent structural challenges and adopting critical yet defensive curatorial frameworks that reveal an ambivalent feminist gesture and certain limitations. By analysing these case studies, this research further emphasises the ongoing need for initiatives that foster discussion, awareness, visibility, and equity. Full article

A growing body of literature recognises media narratives’ influence in shaping public perceptions of leadership and governance. Studies suggest that women presidential aspirants are often framed within symbolic constraints, where they are perceived as capable leaders in supportive roles but not as legitimate rulers. This study systematically reviews news coverage of Malawi’s first female president, Joyce Banda, examining how the media differentiates women’s ability to “lead” and their perceived inability to “rule”. Specifically, the study seeks to answer two key questions: How does the media in Malawi frame women’s political leadership in terms of governance and executive power? And what recurring gendered narratives emerge in media portrayals of women seeking the presidency? This investigation employs a content analysis of Malawi24, utilising Framing Theory and Feminist Theory to examine the dominant themes in political reporting. Analysis showed that media coverage reinforces a symbolic barrier to power, portraying women as leaders within limits while positioning men as natural rulers. Various perspectives on women’s legitimacy in executive positions were expressed, with narratives frequently questioning their authority and decision-making capabilities. The findings of this study suggest that gendered media framing constrains women’s political ambitions by reinforcing patriarchal expectations of leadership. Addressing this bias requires greater media accountability and equitable portrayals of women in executive political roles. Full article

This review explores the intersection of gender, geography, and sustainability by examining the role of women in the blue economy across Europe’s Outermost Regions (ORs). Despite growing recognition of the blue economy’s role in sustainable development, there is limited understanding of how women participate in these sectors at the geographic periphery of the European Union. Using publicly available data from Eurostat, INSEE, ISTAC, and other national portals, we analyze employment patterns through a gender lens, supported by qualitative insights from case studies in regions such as the Azores, Réunion, and Guadeloupe. Due to the scarcity of disaggregated blue economy data, general labor force participation is used as a proxy, highlighting both opportunities and visibility gaps. Theoretically grounded in feminist political ecology and intersectionality, the review identifies key barriers, including data invisibility, occupational segregation, and structural inequalities, as well as resilience enablers such as women-led enterprises and policy interventions. We conclude with targeted recommendations for research, policy, and practice to support inclusive blue economies in ORs, emphasizing the need for better data systems and gender-sensitive coastal development strategies. Full article

This study explores the persistent barriers hindering women’s meaningful participation in South African politics, with a particular focus on the widespread lack of support that women encounter across various social and institutional domains. Despite South Africa’s progressive constitutional and legislative framework promoting gender equality, the research reveals that many women in politics face systemic non-support from family structures, peer networks, community members, political parties, and even fellow women leaders. Using a feminist political theory lens, particularly liberal and radical feminism, the study focuses on how these barriers constrain women’s political participation at the local level. The study specifically investigates how lack of support affects women’s ability to participate, exercise influence, and access decision-making in local governance. Qualitative data drawn from in-depth interviews highlights experiences of tokenism, exclusion from decision-making, inadequate mentorship, and intra-gender rivalry. Political parties, in particular, emerge as critical gatekeepers that publicly promote gender equity while privately reproducing male-dominated power structures. The study concludes that achieving substantive equality requires more than representational quotas; it demands a structural shift in political culture, values, and leadership practices to foster inclusive and supportive environments that empower women to lead authentically and effectively. Full article

Collaborative mapping has emerged in recent decades as a key practice for producing open geospatial knowledge and fostering critical citizenship. However, several studies have shown that these platforms may reproduce existing gender inequalities, both in terms of participation and representation. This article examines the potential of collaborative feminist cartography as a strategy for making inequalities visible and promoting gender equality in public space. Methodologically, the study focuses on the project Las Calles de las Mujeres, developed by Geochicas OSM, combining quantitative analysis of street naming in urban development with qualitative implementation in educational contexts. A global overview of 32 cities in 11 countries is provided, with a detailed case study of 11 Spanish cities. Results confirm the persistence of a significant gender gap in urban toponymy: streets named after men not only outnumber those dedicated to women but are also on average longer, more central, and symbolically more prominent. Educational experiences in Spain provide learning outcomes and demonstrate that collaborative mapping strengthens spatial thinking, digital competence, and critical awareness, linking geography education to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5 and SDG 11). The article concludes that feminist mapping initiatives are simultaneously pedagogical, social, and political tools, capable of fostering more inclusive and sustainable cities. Full article

Background: While sexual trauma is inherently an embodied experience, research on psychological interventions that is cognisant of geographic and socio-political community contexts within which embodied, therapeutic interventions occur remains limited. Decolonial, African and feminist community psychologies have noted this epistemic–ethical gap. Objectives: This paper explores the co-development of trauma-informed care pathways for adult survivors of childhood sexual trauma (CST) in under-resourced communities in Cape Town, South Africa. The study aimed to integrate intergenerational community knowledge, embodied therapeutic practices and collaborative approaches into locally relevant models of care. Methods: Drawing on feminist mental health frameworks, this qualitative study engaged 13 adult female survivors who identify as “coloured”. Embodiment was central in guiding the deconstructive therapeutic praxis, informing both the co-development of care pathways and the conceptualization of integrative trauma-informed care (ITIC) beyond pathologizing, deficit-based narratives. The cultivation of trust and the situated lived realities of survivors were foregrounded to illustrate the relational dimensions of trauma recovery. Results: Establishing relational safety emerged as the foundation for therapeutic engagement, supported by non-directive therapeutic probing. Grounding practices, affective regulation and embodied awareness enabled participants to process trauma at their own pace. Somatic engagement allowed the integration of dissociative experiences while strengthening relational resilience. Recovery was a continuous process, with participants reporting increased peace, authenticity and capacity for social connection despite structural barriers to community support. Conclusions: The development of care pathways was embedded within the research process itself, offering an approach that is culturally sensitive and responsive to survivors’ lived experiences. ITIC accounted for temporal, intergenerational and embodied trauma and should be adaptable across age and community-specific needs. The ITIC approach offers a transferable framework for co-developing de-pathologizing, culturally responsive interventions that can be adapted across diverse global contexts to support sustainable trauma integration. Full article

In this study, I expand on the Black feminist tradition of rethinking Black women’s activism by examining how Black queer women’s fashion shows challenge traditional definitions and sites of activism. I present BlaQueer Style as an interpretive framework that largely draws on the wisdom and theories of Black feminism to undercover how these productions and the politics that shape them are not only sites of activism because they challenge the conventions of mainstream cultural institutions, but because they make space for the social and personal transformation of the communities they center. In this analysis of two public LGBTQ+ fashion shows, I argue that intention aside, the Black queer women founders and fashion workers and their practices and performances of centering marginalized communities, using the body to signal and subvert controlling images, and building coalition among these communities, highlight the liberatory potential of their fashion work. In a time when Black queer and trans people are experiencing misrepresentation and other forms of violence globally, BlaQueer Style is what I name the politics that presents a deep commitment to both the aesthetics and the liberation of these communities in Black queer women’s fashion work. Full article

This paper critically interrogates the French model of secularism (laïcité) and its implications for Muslim women’s rights in contemporary France, particularly within post-colonial and post-secular contexts. It explores how historical legacies of colonial governance continue to inform current regulatory frameworks around religious expression, especially regarding the wearing of Islamic veils in public institutions. While laïcité is officially presented as a principle of neutrality and universalism, its practical enforcement often targets Muslim women, functioning as a mechanism of exclusion that conflates religiosity with political threat. Drawing on intersectional feminist theory and recent debates on post-secularism, the paper examines how dominant feminist movements in France have struggled to incorporate the lived experiences and agency of pious Muslim women, frequently aligning with state-led narratives that instrumentalises gender equality in service of national identity and securitisation. Drawing upon the concept of intersectional post-secularity as discussed in recent scholarship, this article offers a new contextualised framework from within the French system of laïcité for analysing how secular governance, feminist discourse, and colonial legacies converge to regulate Muslim women’s visibility and subjectivity. This approach moves beyond binaries of secularism versus religion and emancipation versus subjugation, offering new insights into the entangled politics of faith, gender, and national identity. Ultimately, the paper calls for feminist and civic discourse that upholds democratic inclusivity, accommodates religious diversity, and resists the racialised governance of Muslim women’s bodies in the name of laïcité. Full article

The pursuit of gender equality and inclusive societies—key goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda—depends in part on public alignment with feminist movements. This study examines associations between ideological beliefs, gender identity salience, and identification across multiple social categories and support for feminism in Spain. Drawing on a nationally representative sample (N = 3928) from the 2024 CIS survey, we assess whether individuals who view gender as their most salient identity report higher support for feminism, and whether progressive ideological orientations—such as left–right political positioning, environmental values, and lower moral conservatism—as well as broader single-axis identifications across social domains, are linked to feminist alignment. Results from descriptive and regression analyses indicate that support for feminism is strongly associated with ideological and environmental values, while gender identity salience shows no independent association once these beliefs are taken into account. Analyses conducted separately for women and men suggest different patterns: among women, feminist support aligns with progressive values and broader identifications; among men, greater gender salience coexists with some marginalized identifications but is not positively linked to feminist alignment. These findings highlight that value-oriented and multi-identity approaches are more effective in fostering feminist engagement than appeals based solely on gender salience. The study outlines implications for inclusive policy, civic education, and cross-sector strategies to advance SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities). Full article

This study examines Sylvia Plath’s literary corpus through a biopolitical lens, analyzing how her representations of embodiment—particularly aging, decay, disease, and institutionalization—function as sites of contestation against institutional power. Moving beyond traditional biographical and psychoanalytic interpretations, this research study applies theoretical frameworks from Foucault, Agamben, and Esposito to illuminate how Plath’s work engages with and resists biopolitical structures. Through close readings of “The Bell Jar”, “The Colossus”, and “Ariel”, this study demonstrates how Plath’s aesthetic strategies transform embodied vulnerability into forms of resistance. The analysis explores four key dimensions: the institutionalized body and medical authority; aesthetic politics and the anxiety of aging; the biopolitics of reproduction and maternity; and death as both boundary and transcendence. This study reveals Plath’s corporeal poetics as a sophisticated engagement with the political dimensions of embodiment in the mid-twentieth century, establishing a literary tradition that influences contemporary understandings of bodies as sites of political contestation. Comparative analysis with other confessional poets highlights Plath’s distinctive and systematic approach to biopolitical themes, positioning her work as particularly significant for subsequent feminist theorizations of embodied resistance. Full article

Persistent gender inequality in industrial employment continues to challenge inclusive labor systems worldwide. While education and labor market reforms have expanded opportunities for women, structural barriers remain deeply embedded in manufacturing sectors. This study adopts a systems-based perspective to investigate the institutional, demographic, and health-related factors shaping female employment in manufacturing across ten countries from 2013 to 2022. By integrating feminist political economy with interpretable machine learning techniques—including Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and Extra Trees regressors—the study models non-linear and interactive relationships among thirteen structural indicators drawn from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. The findings reveal that general female labor force participation is the strongest and most consistent predictor of women’s inclusion in manufacturing. Health-related variables, such as maternal mortality and fertility rates, exhibit strong negative effects, underscoring the continued influence of caregiving burdens and inadequate health systems. Education indicators show more variable impacts, suggesting that institutional context mediates their effectiveness. The use of SHAP and Partial Dependence Plots enhances the transparency of the models and supports a more nuanced understanding of how structural forces shape gendered labor outcomes. In addition to modeling structural inequalities, this study highlights how gender knowledges and cultures of equality are contextually produced and negotiated within the manufacturing sector. The findings underscore the importance of understanding both global systems and local cultural frameworks in shaping gendered employment outcomes. By linking interpretable machine learning with systems thinking, this research provides a holistic and data-driven account of industrial gender inequality. The results offer policy-relevant insights for designing more inclusive labor strategies that address not only economic incentives but also the social and institutional systems in which employment patterns are embedded. Full article

The figure of the witch (bruxa) has been historically and contextually diverse, often shaped by gendered perceptions. With the rise of the feminist movement and Contemporary Paganism, the term ‘witch’ transformed into a powerful symbol of resistance and empowerment for women. It became a tool for women to challenge social expectations and assert their agency, embodying a subversive stance that promotes personal strength and social critique. Drawing on ethnographic research with Portuguese women who identify as both ‘pagan’ and bruxas, this article explores how embracing this identity is an everyday act of resistance, following the framework of anthropologist James C. Scott. Furthermore, the article argues that this affirmation is also transreligious, as proposed by anthropologists Eugenia Roussou and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, since it encompasses spiritual, religious, political, and socio-environmental dimensions that intertwine in women’s daily lives and identity formation. Both approaches highlight how women within contemporary pagan circles reinterpret and reshape traditional elements—using spiritual and political processes to confront structural challenges. The term ‘bruxa’ is a form of empowerment and resistance that blurs the boundaries between the spiritual and the political, providing ways to understand and cope with their anxieties, amid ongoing socioenvironmental crises. Full article

This study, conducted in Cajón de Piedra, Santo Domingo Tehuantepec, analyzes women’s participation in Sembrando Vida (PSV), Mexico’s flagship reforestation and rural development program, through the lenses of community engagement and feminist care economy frameworks. The research employed convenience sampling and participatory workshops with 27 participants (20 men and seven women). Using innovative mixed methods, the study maps gendered labor divisions and PSV’s impact on women’s daily lives. The results reveal that while PSV enhances women’s productive labor visibility, it simultaneously exacerbates time poverty due to unpaid care work burdens and infrastructural deficits. The program’s contribution to community resilience is tempered by its reinforcement of traditional gender roles. These findings underscore the urgent need for intersectional policy design in rural development initiatives, highlighting the importance of this research in shaping future policies. Full article

This case study examines the reproductive choices of republican couple Eliza Sharples (1803–1852) and Richard Carlile (1790–1843) and the conflicted political and personal trajectories of those choices. This includes examination of his initial public writings supporting birth control methods set next to his retrogressive attitudes about women’s roles and his increasingly conservative and patriarchal attitudes about sexuality while using Sharples’s pregnancy out of wedlock to make his case for “moral marriage.” It sets his ideas next to Sharples’s proto-feminist uses of her pregnancy (confinement) vis-à-vis his confinement in jail as she seeks to show how her “confinement” does “labor” for republican and feminist causes. The paper highlights a crisis when the jail rescinded Sharples’s right to visit Carlile and studies the rhetoric used in the heated, desperate, triangulated exchanges between the jailors, Carlile and Sharples. Full article

This article examines how gender shapes Holocaust memory through close analyses of two canonical women’s memoirs: Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After and Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive (2001), a considerably rewritten and culturally reinterpreted version of her earlier German book Weiter leben (1992). Delbo, a French political deportee, and Klüger, an Austrian Jewish survivor, provide testimonies that challenge the male-centered paradigms that have long dominated the Holocaust literature. Although pioneering feminist scholars have shown that women experienced and remembered the Holocaust differently, gender-based analysis remains underused—not only in Holocaust studies but also in broader memory studies, where it is often assumed to be already complete or exhausted. This view of theoretical saturation reflects a Eurocentric bias that equates critical maturity with Western academic prominence, thereby masking the ongoing influence of gender on the production, circulation, and reception of testimony worldwide. Drawing on trauma theory, concepts of multidirectional memory and postmemory, systems theory of media, and ethical approaches to testimony, this article argues that gender is not merely descriptive of Holocaust experience but also constitutive of how trauma is narrated, circulated, and archived. Testimony, as a cultural form, is inherently mediated, and that mediation is fundamentally gendered. This analysis illustrates how Delbo and Klüger create gendered testimonial forms through unique aesthetic strategies. Delbo’s writing focuses on seeing by invoking a feminist aesthetics of voir as imagined and ethical visualization, while Klüger’s narrative emphasizes voice, utilizing rhetorical sharpness and ambivalent narration to challenge postwar silencing. Instead of equating gender with femininity, the article understands gender as a relational and intersectional system—one that includes masculinity, non-binary identities, and structural power differences. It also questions Eurocentric assumptions that feminist critique has been fully explored within memory studies, urging renewed engagement with gender in transnational contexts, such as the often-overlooked testimonies from wartime Shanghai. Ultimately, this article argues that feminist approaches to Holocaust testimony expose the gendered structures of grievability that determine which kinds of suffering are preserved—and which remain unspoken. Full article