Search Results (17)

The aim of this article is to explain the sapiential moment experienced by some Latin American theologies and, in relation to it, the possible emergence of a new look at the origins of the liberation movements of the last century. Firstly, an interpretation of the ethical–spiritual matrix of liberation theologies and the affiliations that have sprung from this experience is summarily presented. Next, an example of the sapiential heirs of Latin American liberation theologies is shown: theogastronomy. Thirdly, a new hypothesis is proposed about the ethical–spiritual matrix presented above, associating it with the women’s emancipation movement. Finally, it concludes with a brief Eucharistic reflection, which gives a paschal meaning to the rereading presented, opening prospects for reconciliation in the contemporary world. Full article

The Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement in Iran represents an existentialist and humanist liberation struggle against the country’s oppressive clerical regime. Grounded in existentialist philosophy, particularly Simone de Beauvoir’s concepts of autonomy, self-realization, and the pursuit of freedom, WLF extends beyond political reform to advocate for both personal and national liberation. The movement emphasizes self-determination, bodily autonomy, and agency, rejecting imposed identities and societal constraints. With over 120 years of Iranian women’s struggles as its foundation, WLF builds on past movements, such as the One Million Signatures Campaign, which raised awareness of legal discrimination and violence against women. The movement has also been shaped by globalization and “glocal” processes, fostering cross-cultural feminist solidarity among Iranian women both inside and outside the country. These transnational feminist networks connect local, national, and global movements, strengthening advocacy efforts. A defining feature of WLF is the role of male allies. Some men, particularly as partners in solidarity, actively challenge patriarchal norms and advocate for gender equality. Their participation reflects a shared commitment to human rights, national dignity, and freedom while acknowledging the importance of gender in shaping lived experiences and struggles. Ultimately, WLF is not just a gendered struggle but a unifying force that redefines Iranian identity. By intertwining personal and societal liberation within a global framework, the movement advances a transformative vision, one that challenges oppression, reclaims agency, and aspires for a just and equitable society. Full article

This article argues for the critical need to value the voices and creative work of contemporary women writers in Australia. Historically, women writing in Australia have endured erasure, dismissal, and suppression. I argue that there is still, in the modern period, a continued lack of awareness, recognition and education on Australian women’s writing despite targeted awards and the achievements of the feminist movement. This piece reflects back across time, drawing on interviews I conducted and PhD thesis research with women writers in Australia at the turn of the twenty-first century, and maps how the legacies of gendered notions of writers impacted women at this pivotal era to consider what this may mean for women writing today. It also explores how feminist theories such as écriture féminine are helpful for framing and understanding the responses of Australian women writers to the shifting notions of sexual difference and agency in writing. This article aims to provide insights into the complexities of liberation for women from the past to modern times, and the impact of gender on creative expression in Australia across changing social periods. Full article

The Women’s March on 21 January 2017, opened a new social and political landscape for Muslim women to engage in Islamic liberatory activism. I locate Muslim women’s participation in the marches following the 2017 ‘Muslim travel ban policy’ as a site for discovering the link between the politics of resistance and the utility of Islam as a source for liberation. I argue that Muslim women living in minority and post-secular contexts resort to faith as a source of agentival liberation to address the political rhetoric of anti-Islamic sentiments and policies. The outcome of this research demonstrates (1) how Muslim women activists challenge the Western narratives of being oppressed and explore the ways they want to represent themselves; (2) how Islam serves as a catalyst for theological resistance and how this enhances the role of Muslim women as moral and spiritual agents in transforming their political and social conditions; (3) how the Islamic liberation in the US context historically intersects with Black churches’ resistance toward White racism; and (4) how Muslim women’s agency as spiritual beings is linked to the promotion of justice in the Western liberatory movements. Overall, the article shows how Muslim women resort to their spiritual journey and use such narratives to confront unjust political rhetoric and policies. 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

An essentialist view of gender and an individualistic concept of subjectivity have distanced psychological theories from emancipatory feminist projects. In Brazil, similar to some other psychological orientations, the behavior-analytic field has sought an interface with feminism. The anti-essentialist vein of radical behaviorism underpins the early movement toward feminism. This essay aims to expand the area of contact with feminism through a theoretical proposal for understanding women’s subjectivity inspired by Brazilian behavior-analytic literature. From a contextualized, multidimensional, pluralized, and politicized view of subjectivity, women’s subjectivation is forged in a tripartite complex of body, person, and “self”, whose relative unity is susceptible to changes and conflicts. In a patriarchal, racist, and cis-heteronormative society, such as the Brazilian one, subjectivation is also an oppressive process. Nevertheless, the essay demonstrates that women’s subjectivation can be a process of emancipatory liberation. This possibility is glimpsed within a virtuous dialectical circuit between disruptive verbal communities (uncommitted to institutional, hierarchical, and oppressive social control) and subversive subjectivities. Thus, behavior-analytic psychology has theoretical tools to situate the process of women’s subjectivation not as a locus of depoliticization but as a crucial ally in constructing a more equitable and just society, as envisioned by feminism. Full article

This article posits Georgia Gilmore and the “Club to Nowhere”—a crucial fundraising arm of the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as a critical vector in a larger tradition in the U.S. In Black movements for Black liberation, food and food production are engaged as a communal pedagogy for constructing agency, behavioral reform, economic power, resistance, and sustainable social transformation. While Montgomery preachers made speeches, activists strategized, and male leaders debated the place of women in the Black liberation project, Gilmore and her cadre of Black women domestics secured thousands of dollars to fund the movement by selling soul food staples. Through their labor, “The From Nowhere” transformed the socio-political and epistemological positionality of Black domestic women into a valuable intellectual resource for generating a movement for social change. Consequently, Gilmore reminds contemporary and future liberation theologians that interrogating and re-envisioning our epistemologies is essential to sustainable revolutionary social praxes. Working at the juncture of history, ethics, and critical theory, I look to Gilmore and “The Club from Nowhere” for historical reflection on the intersections of food, race, gender, and the future of liberation theologies. Full article

Particularly pushed by the Edmund Burke Foundation and its president Yoram Hazony, the political movement of National Conservativism is largely based on specific concepts of nation, faith and family. Driven by the mission to overcome the violence of liberalism, identified with imperialism, national conservatives shape potent international and interreligious alliances for a religiously based system of independent national states. The article gives an outline of the main programmatic pillars of National Conservativism at the example of Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, one of the current ideological key works of the movement. It will show how its political framework is based on a binary frame of liberalism (identified with imperialism) versus nationalism, the latter supported as the way forward towards protecting freedom, faith and family. The analytic part will focus on the use of religious motifs and the construction of a specific kind of Judaeo-Christianism as a means of exclusivist theo-political nationalism. It will be shown that Hazony’s nationalism is no way to overcome violence, but a political theory close to theo-political authoritarianism, based on abridged readings of Scripture, history and philosophy. It severely endangers the foundations of democracies, especially with regard to minority and women’s rights, and delegitimizes liberal democracy and religious traditions positively contributing to it. Full article

This article is an empirical investigation into the visual mobilization strategies by far-right political parties for election campaigns constructing Muslim immigrants as a “threat” to the nation. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical approach of social movement studies and research on media and communication, I focus on the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has produced several widespread inflammatory series of visual election posters featuring anti-Islam rhetoric, combined with provocative images of gender and sexuality. By approaching visual politics through a perspective on actors constructing visual forms of political mobilization, I show how far-right populist “movement parties” are supported by professional graphic designers commercializing extremist ideologies by creating ambivalent images and text messages. My findings on the AfD’s visual campaign politics document the instrumentalization and appropriation of the rhetoric of women’s empowerment and LGBT rights discourse, helping the AfD to rebrand its image as a liberal democratic opposition party, while at the same time, maintaining its illiberal political agenda on gender and sexuality. Visual representations of gender and sexuality in professionally created election posters served to ridicule and shame Muslim minorities and denounce their “Otherness”—while also promoting a heroic self-image of the party as a savior of white women and Western civilization from the threat of male Muslim migrants. By documenting the visual politics of the AfD, as embedded in transnational cooperation between different actors, including visual professional graphic designers and far-right party activists, my multimodal analysis shows how far-right movement parties marketize and commercialize their image as “progressive” in order to reach out to new voters. Full article

This article addresses the prevalence of colorism among the hair care narratives of African American female adolescents. Eleven interviews were conducted to explore the connection between hair and sense of self and self-esteem. During data collection and analysis, the theme surrounding colorism emerged, as many participants discussed its influence on hair, recalling traumatic hair and colorist experiences. This article focuses on the analysis of these narratives using the colorist-historical trauma framework. Three themes emerged: (1) colorist experiences; (2) perceptions of good hair; and (3) the influence of White beauty standards. These themes reflect how participants conceptualized the implications of colorism and its impact on their psychosocial and emotional well-being. The article highlights how colorism is embedded in their lived experiences and how participants combated the presence of colorism perpetuated by family, peers, and society, to embrace their identities. The article outlines the implications of collective efforts to decolonize hair and promote healing and liberation through actions such as the natural hair movement, legal efforts to protect hairstyle preferences in schools and the workplace, and overall awareness of the perception of Black women in media. It also discusses shifts in attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs regarding hair among younger generations. Full article

Starting with a speech by Theodor Adorno, the essay analyzes some thematic parallels between political and religious populism regarding the view on gender and feminism. In both certain traditional Catholic circles and right-wing political parties, an explicit hostility toward gender can be observed. In this article, this resentment is discussed in three aspects: the defense of a traditional image of the family, the instrumentalization of women’s rights against “the Islam”, and, generally, the propaganda of anti-feminism or anti-genderism. Moreover, the text considers the fact that in spite of anti-feminist positions, many women are part of these movements, sometimes even as leaders. The text will prove that this is only a superficial contradiction. The right-wing populist groups—both secular and religious—promise to reduce the potential threat to modern societies while “preserving” the traditional order. The coalitions between them run along the lines of the “values” represented, including anti-feminism and anti-genderism. The danger that these “alliances” pose to a liberal society must not be underestimated by the religious and secular actors who value and protect ambiguity and diversity. Full article

This paper examines views of women among the most prominent “progressive” American religious groups (as defined by those that liberalized early on the issue of birth control, circa 1929). We focus on the years between the first and second waves of the feminist movement (1929–1965) in order to examine these views during a time of relative quiescence. We find that some groups indeed have a history of outspoken support for women’s equality. Using their modern-day names, these groups—the United Church of Christ, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and to a lesser extent, the Society of Friends, or Quakers—professed strong support for women’s issues, early and often. However, we also find that prominent progressive groups—the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the United Presbyterian Church—were virtually silent on the issue of women’s rights. Thus, we conclude that birth control activism within the American religious field was not clearly correlated with an overall feminist orientation. Full article

The ‘personal is political’ has long been recognised as the definitive slogan of second-wave feminism but can it still inform our understanding of the contemporary practice of feminism? Questioning the importance of this claim now invites us to critically reflect upon the trajectory Western feminism has followed in light of the efforts made by the Women’s Liberation movement to politicise formerly unquestioned aspects of social relations. In this paper, the significance of this feminist slogan will be assessed by locating it within two broadly defined historical periods. Firstly we identify the critical work performed by the ideas expressed in the slogan in the early years of the 1970s and then assess their continued relevance within the context of the early 21st century. Drawing upon the empirical analysis of young women’s experience of and relationship to feminism via their engagement with social media in Britain, this research critically assesses digital spaces as places where young women explore their personal experiences. We aim to understand how this may constitute a contemporary form of feminist practice consistent with the claim that ‘the personal is political’. Full article

I discuss the challenges that feminist activists in academia have raised about how to deal with violence against women and girls (VAWG) and gender-related violence (GRV) through education and training. Whilst VAWG and GRV have been on feminist agendas since the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in the 1960s and 1970s they were rarely linked with key demands for equal educational opportunities. It is still the case that feminist work on VAWG is rarely coupled with feminist studies in mainstream education. Drawing on a European Union (EU) funded study in the Daphne programme III—the GAP-work project—I consider strategies to address questions of VAWG and GRV for children and young people through education. This entailed involving ‘youth professionals’ and educators in four countries, namely Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK in training. Drawing on this international educational work, I present an outline of a Feminist Manifesto or a ‘femifesta’ for education. This brings together feminist demands for policy changes in mainstream education through sex and relationships education to deal with VAWG and GRV, with feminist pedagogies to transform social and sexual or gender relations in schools. Full article

Despite its post-Soviet history, Azerbaijan is an under-investigated country in academic research—compared with the other former constituencies, such as the Baltic countries or Russia, of the USSR—and gender questions of the contemporary Azerbaijani society are even less touched on. Within the current context of the post-“Arab Spring” era of mediatized connectivity and collective political engagement, this article looks into and analyzes how Azerbaijani women participate in different online and offline social and political movements, and if (and how) they are impeded by the increased state authoritarianism in Azerbaijan. Using data, obtained from online information resources, yearly reports of human rights organizations, focus group discussions, and interviews, the study detects four major activist constellations within the Azerbaijani field of gendered politics. Based on the analysis of conditions of detected groups, the article claims that flash mobs, a tactic employed mainly by liberal activists, emerge as the promising way in overcoming the normative nature of Azerbaijani patriarchal society, thus providing an opportunity for normalization and internalization of the feeling of being on the street and acting in concert with others—the practices which might lead towards an increasing participation of (especially young) women in the political processes of the country. Full article