Journal articles on the topic 'Feminist intersectionality theories'

Feminist scholars have increasingly expressed their worries about the depoliticization of intersectionality since it has travelled from its point of origin in US Black feminist theory to the shores of Europe. They have argued that the subject for which the theory was intended has been displaced, that Black feminists have been excluded from the discussion, and that white European feminists have usurped all the credit for intersectionality as theory. Intersectionality has been transformed into a product of the neoliberal academy rather than the helpmeet for social justice it was meant to be. This article explores three of the bones of contention in these debates about intersectionality and its travels. The author argues that they rest on notions of ownership that, while understandable, are untenable and, ultimately, counterproductive. A case will be made for taking a less proprietary stance toward critical theories and instead treating the travels of intersectionality as an occasion for dialogue rather than a contest over ownership.

Intersectionality is often understood to exist primarily as a corrective to other emancipatory theories rather than as a theory in its own right. Social reproduction theory (SRT), a strain of Marxist feminism exemplified in this article by contributors to the volume Social Reproduction Theory – Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression published in 2017, is characterized by a self-understanding that involves incorporating intersectional insights as a reaction to Black feminist interventions. In this narrative, intersectionality itself becomes obsolete, serving first and foremost as a step on SRT’s dialectical journey to becoming a better theory. Allegedly undertheorized intersectional frameworks constitute an ever-present foil for SRT’s self-image as an emancipatory theory of the capitalist social whole. This narrative is problematized on multiple levels in this article. SRT and its depiction of intersectionality are summarized in the first part of the paper. The second part demonstrates, on the one hand, that a historicization of intersectionality as ‘intervening’ into Marxist feminist theories, adding an intersectional perspective to feminist analysis of capitalism, ignores the formative role of analyses of Black women’s position as working subjects within overarching capitalist structures in intersectional thought. On the other hand, SRT's narrative occludes practical and theoretical implications of a framework that explicitly theorizes resistance from the margins. Building on this critique of SRT’s understanding of intersectionality, the third part develops an intersectional notion of solidarity, thus showing that the ostensibly seamless integration of intersectional insights into SRT obfuscates a potentially fruitful tension between the two frameworks pertaining to their respective understandings of solidarity and social transformation.

AbstractDebates on nation, self-determination, and nationalism tend to ignore the gender dimension, women's experiences, and feminist proposals on such issues. In turn, feminist discussions on the intersection of oppressions generally avoid the national identity of stateless nations as a source of oppression. In this article, I relate feminism and nationalism through an intersectional framework in the context of the Catalan pro-independence movement. Since the 1970s, Catalan feminists have been developing theories and practices that relate gender and nationality from an intersectional perspective, which may challenge hegemonic genealogies of intersectionality and general assumptions about the relation between nationalism and gender. Focusing on developments made by feminist activists from past and present times, I argue that women are key agents in national construction and that situated intersectional frameworks may provide new insights into relations among axes of inequalities beyond the Anglocentric perspective.

Although intersectional analyses of gender have been widely adopted by feminist theorists in many disciplines, controversy remains over their character, limitations, and implications. I support intersectionality, cautioning against asking too much of it. It provides standards for the uses of methods or frameworks rather than theories of power, oppression, agency, or identity. I want feminist philosophers to incorporate intersectional analyses more fully into our work so that our theories can, in fact, have the pluralistic and inclusive character to which we give lip service. To this end, I advocate an intersectional family resemblance strategy that does not create philosophical problems for feminists. I test my approach against María Lugones's argument in “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (Lugones 2007) to determine, in particular, whether we can successfully resist a move to create multiple genders for women. If we can successfully resist this move, then we can answer the objection that intersectionality fragments women both theoretically and politically. I also argue that my approach avoids Lugones's critique of forms of intersectionality that fall within “the logic of purity.”

The EJWS has been at the forefront of debates about intersectionality in Europe. In the past two decades, the journal has published countless articles on intersectionality as theory, methodology, and political framework for doing critical feminist research. We have selected some of these articles that illustrate the rich and varied European contribution to intersectionality. We want to use this as an opportunity to think critically about the possibilities and pitfalls of one of feminism’s most important travelling theories. The selected articles can be accessed at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/ejw/collections/virtual-special-issues/intersectionality

Because of risks of essentialism and homogenization, feminist theorists frequently avoid making precise ontological claims, especially in regard to specifying bodily connections and differences among women. However well‐intentioned, this trend may actually run counter to the spirit of intersectionality by shifting feminists' attention away from embodiment, fostering oppressor‐centric theories, and obscuring privilege within feminism. What feminism needs is not to turn from ontological specificity altogether, but to engage a new kind of ontological project that can account for the material complexity of social space in the twenty‐first century. Taking inspiration from the phenomenological concept of flesh as well as ecofeminism and María Lugones's theory of the colonial/modern gender system, this essay argues that our own flesh is related to that of others through lines of intercorporeal relations that collectively form topographies of flesh. When we attend to those material relationships present in a particular locality at a point in time, we are able to recognize topographical aggregates of beings that can serve as a basis for this new feminist ontology. An example from Toni Morrison's Beloved involving a human woman and a nonhuman one is used as a paradigm for thinking ontological connection and difference at the same time.

Kristina Fjelkestam's artide is a review of the feminist theoretical discussion in Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift (Kvt) during the last twenty-five years. Inspired by English language journals such as Sign sand Feminist Review, Kvt has emphasised a double strategy from the very first issue. On the one hand the editors declare that Kvt is supposed to act as a disseminator of international and national feminist research in Sweden, and, on the other hand, to engage in a dialogue with the women's movement activists. Kristina Fjelkestam identifies the central feminist theme that runs through Kvfs twenty-fiveyear history as being the "whys" and "hows" of the subordination of women. Although the questions remains central to feminist theory, the explanations have varied over time. Two major theoretical shifts are re-read and analysed, namely the early theories of patriarchy and the more comtemporary theories of intersectionality. A reflection on the epistemological and ontological foundations of emancipatory theory concludes the article.

Throughout the text, Capper explores critically oriented epistemologies such as Critical Race Theory; LatCrit, Asian, TribalCrit, and Black Crit; Disability Studies theories; feminist theories; Queer Theory, and theories of intersectionality. In each chapter she presents teaching suggestions and discussion questions to use within the classroom as well as discussion questions aimed to help aspiring leaders critically analyze their leadership strengths and limitations in order to integrate these epistemologies into practice. This review examines the suggestions for creating a learning environment that honors the diversities and strengths students bring to the classroom.

Abstract The feminist agenda in International Relations has recently drawn attention to gender issues in diplomacy, focusing mainly, though not exclusively, on analysing the trajectories of female diplomats in the institution. Though scarce, these studies approach the topic primarily via national case studies, resorting to the concept of gender to examine the power structures based on ideals of masculinity and femininity, which establish patterns of inequality and discrimination within the institution. In this article, we review national and international studies on gender and diplomacy, aiming to map the theoretical and methodological articulations underlying the gender analysis of diplomacy, which sees it as a gendered institution where gender-based hierarchies of power operate. In terms of methodology, we discuss the main concepts and theoretical frameworks of this research agenda, unraveling their connections to the broader feminist agenda in IR. We map the most recurrent methods and point out both theoretical and methodological gaps that need to be addressed in future research. Furthermore, we briefly review the main studies on gender and diplomacy conducted by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and academia, attempting to bridge national and international studies on gender and diplomacy. We conclude that the research agenda on gender and diplomacy has a rich conceptual and theoretical arsenal that establishes multiple dialogues with institutional feminist theories and with feminisms in IR. However, important gaps persist both in terms of the incorporation of intersectionality and cross-national comparative approaches, which are paramount to advancing gender analyses of diplomacy as an institution.

This article considers ways to enhance the conceptualization of Black deaf women’s lived experiences through an intersectional lens. An intersectional framework places emphasis on how social constructions of blackness, gender, and deafness shape the identity and experiences of Black deaf women. To outline the need for such a theory, this article first examines social constructions of Black deaf women in the intersections of race, gender, and deafness in comparison to current research. Second, I discuss the relevancy of social theories (i.e., critical race feminism, feminist disability theory, and theoretical approaches prominent in critical deaf studies) in providing a conceptual framework for an analysis of identity in relation to race, gender, and disability. Finally, I introduce the tenants of Black Deaf feminism and discuss the ways Black Deaf feminism enhances intersectionality by centering the lived experience from the standpoint of Black deaf women.

Austerity politics, war in the Middle East and at other borders of the European Union, the rise of nationalisms, the emergence of populist parties and politicians, Islamophobia and the refugee crisis are amongst the recent developments suggesting the need for discussions about the theories and concepts that academic disciplines provide for making sense of societal, cultural and political transformations. In this article, we focus on the capacities of feminist political theories to undertake this task. By assessing different feminist approaches to political analysis that range from focusing on women and men, to analysing gender, to doing intersectionality and to adopting post-structural and new materialist approaches, we explore the contributions and the limitations of each framework. This allows us to consider where feminist theoretical debates on gender and politics currently are, to assess old and new developments and to address lacunae in the debate. Our argument is that dominant approaches in political science influence the emergence and marginalisation of particular feminist frameworks for political analysis, but also that feminist theorising of gender and politics, in striving for recognition within mainstream political science, reproduces its own hegemonies and marginalisations.

This article investigates the relationship between feminism and conscientious objection in Israel, evaluating the efficacy of feminist resistance in the organised refusal movement. While recent feminist scholarship on peace, anti-occupation and anti-militarism activism in Israel largely highlights women's collective action, it does so at the risk of eliding the relations of power within these groups. Expanding the scope of consideration, I look to the experiences of individual feminist conscientious objectors who make visible significant tensions through their accounts of military refusal and participation in the organised conscientious objection movement. Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article problematises feminist activism in the organised Israeli refusal movement through three primary issues: political voice; privilege; and the realisation of gender agendas. Using Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of power as it has been critiqued and qualified by feminist scholars, I consider the ways in which resistance may be both multiple and a diagnostic of power, allowing activists and academics not only to envision new avenues for social change, but also to recognise their constraints. Critically, feminist theories of intersectionality enrich and complicate this Foucauldian approach to power, providing further modes of critique and strategy in the context of feminist activism in Israel. Ultimately, I argue not only for engagement with the limits of power, but also attention to their function, as in theory and praxis these boundaries critically inform our theorising on gender and resistance.

In spite of the presence of intersectionality as a concept in feminist literature for over twenty-five years, the State Policy, across the world, has been ignorant towards the interplay of identities and its role in the discrimination law jurisprudence. This article claims that a legitimate accommodation of a multi-ground claim under the Right to Equality regime, present in various legal systems, shall be a purposive step towards substantive equality. The article also highlights certain frailties associated with Intersectionality and introduces the age-old dilemma surrounding the formulation of State Policy, as to whether it should be ―identity-neutral‖ like anti-classification principle, or ―identity-sensitive‖ like intersectionality itself. The article also introduces the vulnerability theory proposed by Martha Fineman, as a post identity approach. The final analysis, explains how the two theories can coexist so that the State Policy can move towards substantive equality, and thus, mitigate the horrors of discrimination.

This essay argues that feminist legal theory offers an important, and underutilized, perspective to examine health law and policy. We use several theoretical frameworks developed by feminist legal theorists including relational autonomy, intersectionality, vulnerability theory, and the feminist critique of the public-private divide to demonstrate the utility of these theories to health law analysis. These frameworks provide insights relevant not only to issues that obviously relate to gender, but also to matters of choice, quality, and access that are less obviously gender-related. We map three key areas of existing scholarship and future inquiry at the intersection of health law and feminist legal theory: (I) patient choice and relational autonomy, (II) patriarchy, power and patient safety, and (III) access to health care and healthy living conditions at the public-private divide. Uniting these areas of inquiry is a nagging question central to the relationship between critical legal scholarship (including feminist scholarship) and pragmatic action to combat injustice: Can we use legal rights to achieve our aims even as we recognize them as tainted tools that have propped up oppressive social structures? A feminist agenda for health law and policy must grapple with this dilemma.

A recent call by some feminist conflict mediation practitioners proposes to rename power-sharing: either by prioritizing sharing over power or by replacing ‘power’ with the word ‘responsibility’. The purpose of these discursive reformulations is to move beyond just adding women to power-sharing institutions; instead, these proposals signal a desire to promote inclusion through a feminist emphasis on sharing in power-sharing systems above a masculinist emphasis on power. Inspired by these proposals and reflecting on the experiences of gender mediation experts, I work through critical feminist theories of intersectionality and feminist empowerment to show how power-sharing theory can be reimagined so that power is not just understood as coercive or as a finite resource that can only be divided between a limited number of privileged groups; rather, power can also be productive, as well as a central feature of all hierarchical relationships. I also explore how a feminist care ethic can offer alternative ways of conceiving of sharing in governance. My objective is to demonstrate how feminist approaches can provide a new language of both power and sharing to illuminate pathways through the ‘exclusion amid inclusion’ dilemma in power-sharing theory.

The paper analyzes the gender dimension in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, using the theories of intersectionality and feminist film theory by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Laura Mulvey. The theory of intersectionality will be used to study Bertha Mason’s race, who is a character in Jane Eyre-described as the madwoman and the insane first wife of Edward Rochester (the male protagonist of the classic), and finally conclude to find out, whether Bertha’s madness made her locked in the attic, or it had something to do with her Jamaican race. Intersectionality theory was first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, where she stated how multiple forms of inequality combines to create disproportions in society. She wanted to make the thinkers understand that issues like gender discrimination, race, colonial roots are not individual subjects to talk about. They are all combined and none of the issues should be dropped to study a certain issue, specially gender discrimination. The paper further uses two other genres-- movie and series, namely Jane Eyre (2011 film) by Cary Joji Fukunaga, and Jane Eyre (2006 TV series) by Susanna White. The movie and series will be used to connect the 19th century text with the 21st century adaptations. The mise-en-scene of the adaptations will be studied to analyze to what extent where they loyal to the classic. The compare and contrast will also study how the adaptations highlighted Bertha’s race, her colonial roots, and her madness. Finally, the paper will conclude how the Hollywood industry with all its modern lightings and sound, cut down Jane’s bildungsroman journey and highlighted Rochester as modern, and post-feminist father/husband.

Abstract The feminist agenda in International Relations has recently drawn attention to gender issues in diplomacy, focusing mainly, though not exclusively, on analysing the trajectories of female diplomats in the institution. Though scarce, these studies approach the topic primarily via national case studies, resorting to the concept of gender to examine the power structures based on ideals of masculinity and femininity, which establish patterns of inequality and discrimination within the institution. In this article, we review national and international studies on gender and diplomacy, aiming to map the theoretical and methodological articulations underlying the gender analysis of diplomacy, which sees it as a gendered institution where gender-based hierarchies of power operate. In terms of methodology, we discuss the main concepts and theoretical frameworks of this research agenda, unraveling their connections to the broader feminist agenda in IR. We map the most recurrent methods and point out both theoretical and methodological gaps that need to be addressed in future research. Furthermore, we briefly review the main studies on gender and diplomacy conducted by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and academia, attempting to bridge national and international studies on gender and diplomacy. We conclude that the research agenda on gender and diplomacy has a rich conceptual and theoretical arsenal that establishes multiple dialogues with institutional feminist theories and with feminisms in IR. However, important gaps persist both in terms of the incorporation of intersectionality and cross-national comparative approaches, which are paramount to advancing gender analyses of diplomacy as an institution.

Artificial intelligence is quietly shaping social structures and private lives. Although it promises parity and efficiency, its computational processes mirror biases of existing power even as often-proprietary data practices and cultural perceptions of computational magic obscure those influences. However, intersectionality—which foregrounds an analysis of institutional power and incorporates queer, feminist, and critical race theories—can help to rethink artificial intelligence. An intersectional framework can be used to analyze the biases and problems built into existing artificial intelligence, as well as to uncover alternative ethics from its counter-histories. This paper calls for the application of intersectional strategies to artificial intelligence at every level, from data to design to implementation, from technologist to user. Drawing on intersectional theories, the research argues these strategies are polyvocal, multimodal, and experimental—suggesting that community-focused and artistic practices can help imagine AI’s intersectional possibilities and help begin to address its biases.

This article discusses refugee determination from an intersectional perspective to unpack the impacts of gender on the refugee determination hearing in Canada. The article highlights the importance of dominant discourses in a legal context, focusing particularly on how discursive constructions of subjectivity affect refugee determination where claimants’ trustworthiness depends not only upon their abilities to describe their past experiences, but also how well their story corresponds with dominant discourses about refugees. It also discusses how these dominant discourses are racialized, gendered, and hetero-normative, and how feminist theories of intersectionality could be of use to deconstruct the ways they affect different groups of refugee claimants. The article concludes by considering the implications of the newly shortened timelines in refugee adjudication.

AbstractThis essay is a sequel to “Narrative theory, 1966–2006: A narrative,” Chapter 8 of the 2006 edition of The nature of narrative. Rather than attempting to be comprehensive, it highlights five particular developments in the field, each connected with issues discussed in the 2006 essay, and it illustrates the interpretive consequences of each development by considering its implications for reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement. The first two developments are related to ongoing “instabilities” I identified at the end of the 2006 essay: unnatural narratology and theories of fictionality. The next three developments are related to the three main approaches I discussed in 2006: within cognitive theory, work on theory of mind or mind-reading; within feminist theory, work on intersectionality; within rhetorical theory, work on the narrative communication model.

The paper deals with the intersection of several types of discrimination (gender and age, gender and nationality, race) in the travelogues of the Serbian writer Jelena Dimitrijević (1862–1945). The following aspects of her works are touched upon: 1) the Balkans as an imaginary space between East and West; 2) self-identification of a Serbian female traveler; 3) ageism in Serbian society; 4) imaginary East; 5) the relationship of patriotism and feminism; 6) discriminatory practices in the USA; 7) place in the national canon. Methodologically, the study is based on the achievements of postcolonial and gender theories, as well as on the theory of intersectionality. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between the “eastern” and “feminine” topic in Dimitrijević’s texts, their relationship with national problematics, and the racial discrimination is also touched upon. The writer herself encounters various forms of oppression. Sometimes women she meets during her travels are vivid cases of oppression. Quite often various types of discrimination are exposed in her texts (for example, in an American travelogue). In the works of the Serbian writer the search and the rejection of fixed identities are obvious.

AbstractHuman history is marked by group and individual struggles for emancipation, equality and self-expression. This first volume in the Brill Research Perspectives in Comparative Discrimination Law briefly explores some of the history underlying these efforts in the field of discrimination law. A broad discussion of the historical development of issues of discrimination is first set out, looking at certain international, regional and national bases for modern discrimination legal structures. The national frameworks examined are the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden, focusing on the historical developments in each of the countries with respect to discrimination legislation. Several of the theoretical frameworks invoked in a comparative discrimination law analysis are then addressed, either as institutional frameworks or theories addressing specific protection grounds. These include access to justice, comparative law method, feminist legal theory, critical race theory, post-colonial theory, queer theory and intersectionality.

Drawing from intersectionality theories and black feminist critiques of white, masculinist, and racist discourses still prevailing in the American popular culture of the twenty-first century, this article looks critically at contemporary images of African-American women in the selected television series. For at least four decades critics of American popular culture have been pointing to, on the one hand, the dominant stereotypes of African-American women (the so-called controlling images, to use the expression coined by Patricia Hill Collins) resulting from slavery, racial segregation, white racism and sexism as well as, on the other hand, to significant marginalization or invisibility of black women in mainstream film and television productions. In this context, the article analyzes two contemporary television shows casting African-American women as leading characters (e.g., Scandal, 2012-2018 and How To Get Away With Murder, 2014-2020) to see whether these narratives are novel in portraying black women’s experiences or, rather, they inscribe themselves in the assimilationist and post-racial ways of representation.

Purpose Through the application of traditional and contemporary feminist theories in gender mainstreaming, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to emergent debate on gender dimensions in climate-smart agriculture (CSA) adoption by smallholder farmers in disaster-prone regions. This is important to ensure that CSA strategies are tailored to farmer-specific gender equality goals. Design/methodology/approach An exploratory-sequential mixed methods research design which is qualitatively biased was applied. Key informant interviews and farmer focus group discussions in two study sites formed initial qualitative phase whose findings were explored in a quantitative cross-sectional household survey. Findings Findings shared in this paper indicate the predominant application of traditional gender mainstreaming approaches in CSA focusing on parochial gender dichotomy. Qualitative findings highlight perceptions that western gender approaches are not fully applicable to local contexts and realities, with gender mainstreaming in CSA seemingly to fulfil donor requirements, and ignorant of the heterogeneous nature of social groups. Quantitative findings establish that married men are majority adopters and non-adopters of CSA, while dis-adopters are predominantly de jure female household heads. The latter are more likely to adopt CSA than married women whose main role in CSA is implementers of spouse’s decisions. Access to education, intra-household power relations, productive asset and land ownership are socio-cultural dynamics shaping farmer profiles. Originality/value By incorporating African feminisms and intersectionality in CSA, value of this study lies in recommending gender policy reforms incorporating local gender contexts within the African socio-cultural milieu. This paper accentuates potential benefits of innovative blend of both contemporary and classic gender mainstreaming approaches in CSA research, practice and technology development in disaster-prone regions.

Many are already familiar with the idea of intersectionality. Intersection Theory can be conceived as encompassing other progressive theories, such as Philosophy of Race and Feminism. In Philosophy of Race, the ultimate explanatory concept is race; in Feminism, the ultimate explanatory term is gender. This discrepancy has given rise to Black Feminism. Intersection Theory can also be contextualized and expanded to include more detailed intersections when there is inequality within intersected groups. But, intersectionality does yet address unpredictable violence, either against blacks or normally advantaged groups, such as United States Jews. For such cases, it is useful to posit a new intersectional factor of regressive violence, to account for counter-revolutionary response to decades of progress for minorities. Overall, the flexibility of Intersection Theory allows for creative analysis. However, not all intersections yield politically viable identities and those that would might require governmental recognition of group rights.

Recently, the concept of intersectionality has acquired bigger visibility because of the interest and alert that have awaken in our society a range of social rights fights and movements, among them, and in a remarkable way, feminism. However, their demands and the theories derived from the ideas of these groups do not seem to have passed through the consciousness, knowledge or practice of architects, urbanists, and others involved in the urban-architectural production in Mexico. Most actions that harm, force, discriminate or marginalize people occur in the built environment which, itself, is not neutral. On the contrary, through its materiality and inner dynamics, the built environment manifests -and gets incorporated into- the social processes of the context, perpetuating or modifying its constructs. Because of this, we consider it is fundamental to think about the links between the approaches generated by the ones that drive social change and the collective work related with the production of the built environment. The concept of intersectionality has a main role in this paper for what it makes evident: the privilege and domination that certain conditions have over others -as well as their possible intersections-, which can affect anyone at some point.

Neo-feminism or second-wave feminism emerged in the USA in the late 1960s in the context of the publications of Betty Friedan, Kate Millett and the rise of various socio-political movements for gender equality. Born as political activism with the main demand of exposing and dismantling the “patriarchal structures”, neo-feminism was gradually instilled into US university campuses where it became the mainstay of “gender studies”. That research was also based on the legacy of French Theory, - a broad set of ideas from French poststructuralist and de-constructivist thinkers (Foucault, Derrida, Lacan), revised by American sociologists, notably Judith Butler. An important element of neo-feminism is its “intersectionality”, a theory of the intersection of different types of oppression in society: patriarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and so on. The study and exposure of patriarchy run parallel to the denunciation of “systemic racism” of Western countries, “colonial consciousness”, “white supremacy” and other systems of oppression theorized by the representatives of postmodern cultural researchers and widely spread in the world. In the US, those theories gave rise to the so-called new social ethics or “Woke” –particular sensitivity to minority issues that became the hallmark of all “progressive” movements. “Woke” ideas, however, increasingly give concern to the majority of the academic community, whose representatives emphasize the anti-scientific and ideological nature of most gender and decolonial studies, as well as the intolerance and strident moralism of the “new ethics”. The article offers criticism of neo-feminism as one of the fundamental elements of the “Woke” culture by Western authors (primarily American and French), who can be defined as representatives of classical liberalism, traditional socialism and paleo-conservatism. They see in the “new ethics” the distortion and degeneration of the ideals of women’s emancipation, freedom of speech, pluralism, anti-racism, democracy and classical freedoms – that is, all the major gains of Western civilization.

The authors take up the guest editors’ invitation to address the difference that posthumanist and feminist ‘new’ materialist theories make and why this matters politically and ethically. Alongside events from an early childhood (kindergarten) classroom, the authors engage with current conversations which build on and extend Kimberlé Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality with post-philosophies by scholars who identify as Black feminist, Women of Colour feminist, queer theorist, Chicana and/or Indigenous scholars. In an iterative, slow thinking-making-with-reading, this contemplation brings intersectionality and post-philosophies into conversation to explore diffractive-affirmative possibilities for social and curricular (re)shapings. The authors create a philosophical playground to think identity and subjectivity when engaging with these theories both with/in classroom events and with/in their own co-constituted scholarly and teacherly becomings. The authors set forth several potentially generative frictions in teaching and researching environments.

Abstract Using feminist theories of geolegality, geopolitics, and intersectionality, this article presents Syrian refugee women’s experiences and perceptions of both formal and informal security providers in Amman and Beirut in 2016–2017. Based on qualitative data from refugee women based in these cities since the onset of the Syrian civil war, this article argues three related points regarding urban refugee women and their experiences with security providers. First, that although not gendered at the State level, refugee law is applied in gendered ways in the everyday by State and non-State security providers and that this has direct outcomes as to how refugee women perceive and access security services in their host cities. Secondly, that whilst women perceive both formal and informal security providers in ambivalent terms, they are deeply appreciative of State security presence in urban areas which seem vulnerable to tension and conflict. Lastly, in order to understand ambivalent experiences of (in)security of (in)formal security providers, we need closer examinations of the ways in which identity interacts with structures of policy, law and culture, using feminist theories of intersectionality and geolegality.

In the course of less than forty years, the Spanish political and cultural scenario has changed drastically, particularly in relation to civil rights. Social movements, especially feminist and LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) organizations, have been successful in putting demands on the political agenda that have translated into gender equality, same-sex and transgender laws. Looking at definitions of equality, this article explores the implications of some postmodern theories that promote the analysis of political intersectionality for some of the recent laws that are presented as progressive and transformative in Spanish policy making. The analysis will explore two case studies: samesex marriage and equality policy law texts, discussing the conception of intersectionality and equality. In addition, the definition of the feminist political strategy in which these policies are framed is addressed. Both case studies show that the policies are conceptualized within a liberal and assimilationist framework, since neither the male norm nor the sexual order is profoundly questioned.

This project explores the positioning of queer students and queer curriculum in schools with a specific focus on elementary education. Using intersectionality as a guiding framework along with queer theories, educational theories, and feminist theories, this project examines and critiques how queer subjectivities have (not) been included in schools via curriculum for elementary school children. In an effort to better understand how educators have been successfully incorporating queer topics into their classrooms, this study uses qualitative research methods, specifically semi-structured interviews with teachers in New York City. The findings from this study have been used to create a 23-lesson curriculum for 4th grade teachers that investigates bodies, puberty, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Furthermore, the curriculum uses an intersectional lens to explore how various identities such as race, gender, ability, sexuality, and religion intersect to inform understandings of privilege and discrimination.

The relationship between Black Lives Matter (BLM) and anti-police brutality movements abroad reveals the variety of ways in which Black feminist theories of justice have taken root in public discourse. The EndSARS movement in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and the world’s largest Black nation, illustrates the influence of BLM transnationally and some of the continuities and discontinuities between anti-police brutality movements across contexts. I examine these two movements in tandem and develop a theory of political behaviour that builds on transnational Black and African feminist insights. More specifically, I consider how Black feminist articulations of intersectionality, personal politics, and Black liberation have informed the language and organizational praxis of two of the largest anti-police brutality movements to have taken place in the midst of a global pandemic. Here, I argue that organizers, many of whom were women, leveraged social power, in the form of embeddedness in politically active communities, to effectively organize protests and demand for justice. Through this comparative analysis, I contribute substantively to our understanding of how social power engenders political empowerment for individuals and communities in spite of patriarchal systems of exclusion.

The article explores recent theoretical debates on intersectionality and gender equality. It addresses problems and potentialities of the emerging ‘equality for all’ policies, drawing upon empirical examples from equality work in Iceland (equal opportunities workers, minority groups, the City of Reykjavik and the University of Iceland). Practical equality work will be viewed through the lenses of feminist theories on ntersectionality and related to wider political context and gender discourse in Iceland. These empirical examples are analyzed in light of the theoretical background, in particular, the different models, discussed by Verloo (2006) and Squires (2005) regarding how practical equality work can be dealt with. By bringing together theory and praxis, light will be shed on some of the problems and possibilities that are bound up with the different approaches.

Abstract Background Women globally report suboptimal conditions during facility-based childbirth. Most approaches that capture abuse, violence or mistreatment in epidemiology do not reflect a theoretical perspective in their measurement. In order to contribute to a more valid consideration of the cultural drivers, institutional conditions, direct expressions and individual perceptions that violate or preserve what we define as “birth integrity”, we developed a new theory-informed approach and an accompanying multilevel framework. Methods We theoretically substantiated birth integrity, referring to medical anthropology, sociology, social epidemiology and a critical-feminist theory, in particular: risk and medicalization of childbirth, social embodiment and intersectionality. We then contextualized birth integrity within a multilevel framework to operationalize its potential for epidemiological research. Results We present a six-field theoretical framework to operationalise and measure birth integrity violations, from institutional discrimination, to gender norms structuring labour room interactions and restrictions on autonomy. It allows to measure birth integrity violations that women experience at the macro-to-micro level as implicit, invisible and normalized, or explicit, visible and societally accepted. Conclusions Our new multilevel framework, based on a theory-informed construct of birth integrity, allows to measure drivers of health inequality and gender-based violence in more dimensions than so far represented in epidemiological research. Key messages The birth integrity concept integrates theories of medicalization, risk, embodiment and intersectionality into a multilevel framework. Our birth integrity framework is useful in epidemiological approaches to explicitly acknowledge and integrate cultural drivers of gender-based violence and inequalities in maternity care research.

Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). It also suggests that the transnational feminist ethic lies not in the global North and global South paradigm but in the fluidity of migration between and among cultures rather than geographical boundaries and military borders. All this argues that across the imperial cartography of discrimination and oppression, women’s solidarity is only possible through intercultural and syncretistic negotiation that respects the individual and the community.ReferencesAbdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big in This? Sydney: Pan MacMillan Australia, 2005.———. “Ending Oppression in the Middle East: A Muslim Feminist Call to Arms.” ABC Religion and Ethics, 29 April 2013. <http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/04/29/3747543.htm>.———. “On ‘Nine Parts Of Desire’, by Geraldine Brooks.” Griffith Review. <https://griffithreview.com/on-nine-parts-of-desire-by-geraldine-brooks/>.Agarwal, Bina. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. 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This research was inspired by two critical factors relating to women leaders in senior positions in education district offices. Firstly, women leaders are continually plagued with stereotyping, and secondly, women are repeatedly undermined by male colleagues. Although the South African Constitution and other related legislation prohibits any form of gender discrimination, inequalities and injustices against women still prevail. Women are subjected to a false notion that they lack the resilience and experience desired when faced with hard-hitting or threatening situations. The primary focus of this study was to explore the experiences of women leaders in senior positions in the Gauteng East Education District office. To underpin this study, intersectionality and feminist theories were selected. Using a qualitative case study, one of the main findings of this study revealed that women in senior leadership positions in education districts persistently struggled to balance their work and family life amidst rooted patriarchal systems and cultural traditions. These women primarily lacked the aspiration to apply for senior leadership positions, but through formal mentorship, dedication and resilience took up senior leadership positions in education district offices.

There are four periods in the development of gender geography since its inception in the 1970s in the Anglo-American school of human geography to nowdays. It’s periods were changing with the development of the methodology of feminist and gender studies. Contemporary gender geography has moved beyond the Anglo-American school, because it has become an international subdiscipline, and beyond analyses of gender differences because in the direction of intersectionality it began to focus on intersection of gender with other differences (racial, ethnic, class, etc.). Russia has not yet formed its own school of gender geography, but this area is receiving increasing attention as well as by Russian geographers, as by anthropologists, sociologists and economists. Classical gender geography is based on gender and feminist theories and human geography. Gender, like place, is a social construction. At different scales of space, there are different mechanisms for constructing gender differences. The scales and objects of research in classical gender geography can be divided into traditional and specifi (new) ones for Russian socio-economic geography. Traditional scales include local, regional, and national scales, while objects include mobility and migration. Specifi (new) scales are the micro-levels of home, work, and public urban space, and the object is the human body. The article illustrates that gender geography occupies an important place in foreign socio-economic geography, and gender processes – in regional development, which, in turn, emphasizes the need to develop gender geography in Russia.

With increased focus on historically excluded populations, there have been recent calls for HCI research methods to more adequately acknowledge and address the historical context of racism, sexism, gendered racism, epistemic violence, classism, etc. In this paper, we utilize Black feminist epistemologies to serve as critical frameworks for understanding the historical context that reveals the interconnected systems of power that mutually influence one another to create unequal outcomes or social inequalities for different populations. Leveraging Black feminist thought and intersectionality as critical social theories of design praxis, we introduce intersectional analysis of power—a method that enables HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to identify and situate saturated sites of violence in a historical context and to transform the ways in which they engage with populations that have been historically oppressed. Engaging in self-reflection as researchers, we apply an intersectional analysis of power to co-design technologies with community street outreach workers who address violence in their predominantly Black communities. We: 1) identify the saturated site of violence; 2) identify the intersecting systems of power and who holds power (past and present); 3) describe the “conceptual glue” that binds these intersecting systems together and the assumption(s) that those who hold power are employing to guide their interactions; 4) examine the ways in which Black people are subjugated, surveilled and/or expected to assimilate to “normative” ways of being and behaving; and 5) identify acts of resistance. This paper contributes an alternative to traditional HCI and design methods that falsely perpetuate a lens of neutrality and colorblindness that centers whiteness, innovation, and capitalism and ignores the history of State sanctioned violence and structural oppression.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has led us to this current public health and political moment, bringing widespread attention to social and health inequalities and interconnecting racial discrimination faced by Black communities and other communities of colour. The pandemic has also precipitated a transition of the qualitative methodology classroom from physical to virtual spaces. At this juncture, an opportunity has emerged to amplify critical pedagogies challenging White, Eurocentric, hetero- and cis-normative epistemologies and introduce their practice into the ever-evolving classroom. Rooted within a genealogy of Black women’s political and intellectual activism, Black feminist pedagogy captures their unique intersectional experiences and presents a methodology for teachers and learners alike to promote equity in the classroom and our society. In this presentation, we discuss the ways in which Black feminist pedagogy can support reflection on the inherent relations of power shaping the pedagogical practices and knowledge production of/in the classroom. We hold that Black feminist pedagogy is not simply concerned with the instruction of, for, and about Black women. It additionally puts forth learning strategies informed by Black women’s historical experiences of race, gender, and class discrimination that can support the inclusion of diverse epistemological positionings and meaningfully represent the social and health inequities of marginalized communities. We affirm that a ‘standpoint epistemology' is foundational to Black feminist pedagogy and that those who experience marginalization are best positioned to make claims about its meanings and impacts. The presenters draw from their epistemological standpoint as Black women, graduate and postdoctoral scholars, and Black feminist thinkers. We center our own experiential knowledge as learners and teachers to reflect on the value of Black feminist pedagogy. A major learning from our experiences in this current moment has compelled us to advocate for integrating a critical reflexivity process. This process is undertaken by teachers and learners to assess how knowledge is being produced, legitimized and/or erased as a counter to the social and institutional power and authority constituting the classroom. We also discuss considerations for teaching theoretical and methodological approaches to intersecting oppressions as elemental to Black women’s experience and a cornerstone of Black feminist pedagogy. An intersectional approach supports us to take stock of the interlocking stigmas shaping health inequalities, ontologically and epistemologically (re)position the multiply marginalized communities they impact, and take up theories, methods, and practices that better align with our experiences. Intersectionality will be used to exemplify tensions as a ‘travelling theory’ and its strengths when rooted in a Black feminist pedagogy. At a time where Black feminist thought is at the forefront of public consciousness, we emphasize the dangers of taking up this tradition through white and patriarchal logics and pedagogies. As we rework the notion and formations of ‘the classroom’ in this current moment, it is important to not only recognize it as a place of intellectual advancement but also as a historical site of colonial, racial, and epistemic violence. Black feminist pedagogy holds that the experiential knowledge of racialized communities uniquely positions them for the teaching of ontologies and epistemologies characterizing their social realties and the methodological approaches employed to interpret them. To this end, redressing academic violence unequivocally requires the meaningful engagement and inclusion of Black (feminist) scholars in academic institutions and actively creating an environment that supports this pedagogical practice as an ethic and praxis towards decolonizing the classroom and qualitative health research more broadly. In this presentation, we aim to represent Black feminist thinking as a pedagogical tool to emphasize the intellectual, experiential, and cultural contributions of Black scholars to knowledge production and to help practitioners meaningfully approach teaching-learning and conducting qualitative health research in a (post-)COVID-19 reality.

“The difference is the total amount of revenue. It’s not a gender issue. It’s a revenue issue.” This was Mark Cuban’s response when called out about the pay gap between men’s and women’s professional basketball players by Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) player Skylar Diggins-Smith. So often when the question, “Why do male athletes get paid more than female athletes?” arises, the response is, “Because men’s sports generate more revenue.” While men’s sports typically do generate more revenue, people seldom consider why this is the case. Is it because men produce a higher quality product? Is it because men’s sports require more skill? Is it because men tend to win more international competitions? This Note argues that none of these explanations account for the differences in revenue and the subsequent pay gap, and contrary to the opinion expressed by Mark Cuban, the three are inseparable: The wage gap is both a revenue and gender issue. Through the lens of feminist theory and critical race theory, I argue that men’s sports generate more revenue than women’s sports in part because consumer preferences are rooted in internalized racism, sexism, and homophobia. A foundational assumption of feminist theory is that, because society organizes people based on stereotypical gender roles, women are expected to perform gender in ways that conform to hegemonic femininity. A key component of critical race theory is intersectionality, which puts forth idea that people experience discrimination because of multiple marginalized identities. Therefore, women who play sports, especially Black women and queer women, directly defy hegemonic femininity by exhibiting characteristics that do not conform to the way society expects women to look and behave. As a result, I argue that one reason why consumers do not want to watch women—let alone women who possess several marginalized identities—play sports, is that these women are not performing gender in the way that consumers expect of them. From Kathryn Johnston cutting off her hair in order to play Little League Baseball in 1950, to Katherine Switzer registering under a pseudonym in 1967 to participate in the (then men’s-only) Boston Marathon, women throughout history have fought for equality in the sports industry. With the passage of Title IX in 1972, the future looked promising for creating equal opportunities for women in sports. However, even after the passage of Title IX, we have seen female athletes threatening to boycott major sporting events, protesting unequal facilities, and, most recently, suing governing organizations for gender discrimination. Leagues and teams generate most of their revenue from three sources: media rights, gate receipts, and sponsorships. It is no coincidence that these main sources of revenue are largely dictated by consumer viewership and demand. Under the Equal Pay Act of 1963, it is generally illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sex regarding wages. Further, in Diaz v. Pan American World Airways, Inc., the Fifth Circuit held that employers cannot discriminate based on consumer preferences unless consumer preferences are essential to a company’s ability to perform its main function or service. This Note argues that because women in sports directly contradict notions of femininity, consumer’s desire to watch women play sports is adversely affected, thereby lowering their revenue-generating potential. As a result, by paying women lower wages based on revenue, leagues, teams, and governing organizations are discriminating against women athletes and coaches based on consumer preferences, thereby potentially violating the Equal Pay Act. Part I provides a historical and current look at the state of women in sports. Part II argues that the simple rationale that “men generate more revenue” quells the fight for equal pay because it fails to consider the reality of why men generate more revenue—which is in part attributable to consumer preferences that are rooted in sexism, homophobia, and racism. Part III analyzes sports examples in order to introduce the theoretical underpinnings of feminist theory and critical race theory and the application of these theories to legal doctrine. Lastly, Part IV proposes that the doctrine set forth in Diaz should be expanded and applied to the sports context. Doing so would allow women in sports to argue that an important reason why men generate more revenue is due to consumers internalized sexism, racism, and homophobia; therefore, basing compensation off revenue is discriminating based on consumer preferences.

The following article inquires how introducing the gender category, feminism theories, and intersectionality into social sciences education, especially regarding historical thinking development, could be key for the construction of a more critical and egalitarian future. The main research problem is knowing how the use of the gender category is included, or not, in the development of historical thinking in pre-service teacher beliefs and how it could condition them when they work on historical and social problems in the classroom. The main objective is to analyze the historical thinking development in pre-service Spanish teacher students and their capacity for constructing critical discourses with a gender perspective. Pre-service teachers of five Spanish universities (of the Primary and Secondary Education Degree) were asked about a report from a digital newspaper version that forces them to use historical thinking and to consider gender stereotypes and prejudices. Their responses were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results indicate that pre-service teachers are not able to identify their own gender roles and prejudiced attitudes when they attempt to explain a social problem and they propose solutions, even when they could verify that there was another manner to understand this report. Hence, this research highlights the relevance of implementing feminism, intersectionality, and gender category for historical thinking development since these future teachers need to work around democratic culture competences. By contrast, not including this perspective will lead to them still maintaining historical thinking and democracy configured on hegemonic, heteropatriarchal, sexist, and Eurocentric cultural models.

Pornography is neither a documentary media genre that documents what real sex in everyday life looks like, nor is it a pedagogical or moral media genre aimed at showing what ideal sex (in terms of health or morality) should look like. Instead, pornography is a fictional media genre that depicts sexual fantasies and explicitly presents naked bodies and sexual activities for the purpose of sexual arousal (Williams, 1989; McKee et al., 2020). Regarding media ethics and media effects, pornography has traditionally been viewed as highly problematic. Pornographic material has been accused of portraying sexuality in unhealthy, morally questionable and often sexist ways, thereby harming performers, audiences, and society at large. In the age of the Internet, pornography has become more diverse, accessible, and widespread than ever (Döring, 2009; Miller et al., 2020). Consequently, the depiction of sexuality in pornography is the focus of a growing number of content analyses of both mass media (e.g., erotic and pornographic novels and movies) and social media (e.g., erotic and pornographic stories, photos and videos shared via online platforms). Typically, pornography’s portrayals of sexuality are examined by measuring the prevalence and frequency of sexual practices and related gender roles via quantitative content analysis (for research reviews see Carrotte et al., 2020; Miller & McBain, 2022). It should be noted that the conceptual differentiation between erotica and pornography is complex and that “pornography” remains an ideologically charged, and often negatively connotated, concept. Hence, the research literature sometimes uses the broader and more neutral term “sexually explicit material” (SEM) in place of “pornographic material” (McKee et al., 2020). Furthermore, it must be emphasized that in the context of content analyses of SEM the focus is typically on legal pornography. Legal visual pornography is produced with adults who have given their informed consent for their image to be recorded, and then disseminated and marketed as SEM. Illegal pornography is usually beyond the scope of media content research, as the acquisition and use of illegal material would be unethical and illegal for researchers (e.g., the analysis of so-called “child pornography”, or what might be more accurately labeled “images of child sexual abuse”). Criminological and forensic research projects are exceptions to this rule. Field of application/theoretical foundation: The theories applied in pornographic media content research primarily come from four academic disciplines: communication science, psychology, sex research, and gender studies. These different theories are fairly similar in their core assumption that pornography users’ sexual cognitions and behaviors are molded by the ways in which sexuality is portrayed in pornographic material. Some of the theories also explain the typical content of pornography and point to the fact that audiences might not only be influenced by pornography but can also shape porn production through their preferences. All theories demand content analyses of pornographic material to back up their predictions. General Media Effects Theories Cultivation Theory and Social Cognitive Theory are the most commonly used media effects theories, irrespective of specific media content. They are often applied to pornographic material. Cultivation Theory (CT) was developed by communication researcher George Gerbner in the 1960s (Gerbner, 1998). CT claims that heavy media users’ perceptions of the prevalence of different societal phenomena (e.g., crimes) are shaped by the prevalence with which these phenomena occur in the media they consume (e.g., cop shows on TV). Applied to pornography, CT predicts that heavy users of pornography will severely overestimate the prevalence of sexual practices that are rare in reality, but widespread in pornography. Young people who lack real life sexual experience are regarded as particularly vulnerable for sexual cultivation effects in terms of biased perceptions of the popularity and normalcy of different performances of sexuality (e.g., name calling and slapping during sex). Another classic media effects theory that is widely adopted in pornography research is psychologist Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1971), later re-labeled as Social Cognitive Theory (SCT; Bandura, 2001). SCT claims that people imitate the behaviors of media role models. Applied to pornographic material, SCT predicts that media audiences will develop more favorable attitudes towards, and engage more frequently in, sexual behaviors portrayed positively in sexually explicit material. Such sexual imitation effects may influence not only attitudes toward, and engagement in, sex acts represented in pornography (e.g., anal sex), but also gender role behaviors (e.g., men acting dominantly, women acting submissively during sex), safer sex measures (e.g., lack of condom use), bodily appearance (e.g., breast augmentation), and consent communication (e.g., lack of explicitly asking for, or giving, consent to engage in different sex acts). Sexual Media Effects Theories While CT and SCT are broad media effects theories applicable to pornography as well as many other types of media content, Sexual Script Theory and the 3AM specifically address sexual media and their effects. Sexual Script Theory (SST) was developed by sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon in the 1970s (Gagnon & Simon, 1973; Simon & Gagnon, 2003; Wiederman, 2015). SST argues that human sexuality is not merely a biological instinct, but a highly complex set of cognitions and behaviors shaped by symbolic, social and cultural factors: People develop ideas about how to have sex in terms of organized cognitive schemas or “scripts” that reflect intra-psychic desires (e.g., their sexual fantasies), social norms (e.g., peers’ and partners’ sexual expectations), and cultural influences (e.g., representations of sexuality in the media they consume). SST stresses that the intra-psychic, social, and cultural determinants of individuals’ sexual scripts mutually influence each other and can change over time (Simon & Gagnon, 2003). However, in pornography research, usually only the third element of the theory (cultural influences through media representations of sexuality) is considered. Applied to pornography, SST predicts that sexual scripts presented in pornographic material (e.g., spontaneous anal sex with strangers without condoms or overt consent communication) can shape individuals’ sexual scripts. The Acquisition, Activation, and Application Model of Media Sexual Socialization (3AM) was developed more recently by communication researcher Paul Wright as a specification of SST regarding media influence (Wright, 2011). According to the 3AM, sexually explicit media content shapes cognitive schemas of sexuality in three ways: Pornography can foster the creation of new schemas (schema acquisition), it can prime extant schemas (schema activation), and it can facilitate the utilization of extant schemas to inform attitudes and behaviors (schema application). The 3AM differentiates between specific scripting effects of pornography (e.g., engaging in condom-free casual anal sex without sufficient consent communication after having observed this exact sexual script multiple times in pornography) versus abstract scripting effects (e.g., adopting a more permissive sexual worldview after having observed many people engaging in unrestricted sex in pornography). The aforementioned general and sexuality-specific media effects theories have been used predominantly to predict negative (unwanted, harmful) effects such as dangerously distorted views of sexuality and gender roles as well as engagement in risky or violent sexual behaviors, while potential positive effects have been mostly ignored. Only recently, has serious consideration been given to the beneficial effects of pornography use (e.g., sexual identity validation, sexual empowerment, improved couple communication, sexual skill acquisition, etc.) in the research literature (e.g., Döring, 2021; Döring & Mohseni, 2018; Döring et al., 2021; Kohut & Fisher, 2013; Kohut et al., 2017; Miller et al., 2018; Tillmann & Wells, 2022). Depending on specific negative and/or positive effect assumptions, different aspects of the representation of sexuality will be measured (e.g., expressions of aggression during sex or different types of sexual stimulation techniques). Gender Role, Feminist and Queer Theories Typically, analysis of the ways in which sexuality is represented in pornography involves considerations of gender relations, therefore gender role theories and feminist theories of gender (in-)equality are frequently drawn upon (e.g., Eagly, 1987). There are two main reasons for this additional theoretical focus on gender: 1) Most SEM depicts heterosexual encounters, hence the portrayal of sexuality in pornography implies a portrayal of sexual gender relations (Williams, 1989). 2) Gender relations in the media are often asymmetrical, depicting men and women in superior and subordinate positions, respectively. Such patriarchal gender relations are expected to be reflected, or even exaggerated, in pornographic material. Radical feminist approaches in particular characterize pornography as a portrayal of sexual degradation of women by men, that is so harmful to society that it should be prohibited (e.g., MacKinnon, 1991). Other feminist approaches are also critical of asymmetric gender relations in traditional mainstream pornography and call for more gender equality in SEM, such as in feminist pornography (Williams, 1989). Feminist criticism of gender roles and relations in pornography does not address the demographic variable of sex/gender alone, but also covers other diversity dimensions such as age, race/ethnicity, or disability. According to the analytical framework of intersectionality, the subordination and discrimination of women in society and media representations particularly affect those women who have multiple marginalized demographic characteristics (e.g., the representation of white women in pornography differs from that of black or Asian women; Fritz et al. 2021). Queer theory is also concerned with different racial/ethnic and sexual identities of women and their participation and representation in pornography (Ingraham 2013). Content analyses of pornography need to take into consideration that pornography is becoming increasingly diverse (Miller & McBain, 2022). Hence, content analyses need to differentiate between various pornographic sub-genres such as commercial heterosexual mainstream pornography (traditionally targeting men) versus, for example, women-friendly and couple-oriented pornography, feminist pornography, queer pornography, fetish and kink pornography, or authentic amateur and DIY (do it yourself) pornography in the form of visual or text pornography (Döring, 2021; McKee et al., 2008). Gender role, feminist, and queer theories predict that gender relations in mainstream pornography are more asymmetrical, stereotypical and patriarchal than in women- and couple-friendly, feminist and queer pornography. Sexual Fantasy and Desire Theories The above-mentioned effect theories do not address and explain the main intended effect of pornography, namely immediate sexual arousal, pleasure and satisfaction. The theories focus on linking the fictional pornographic content directly with real life opinions and behaviors, but mostly ignore the links between fictional pornographic content and sexual fantasies. Research shows that many sexual fantasies of people of all genders are unrealistic, extreme, clichéd, violent and norm-violating and that norm-violation is often what makes them arousing (e.g., Bivona et al., 2012; Critelli & Bivona, 2008; Joyal, 2015). The same might be true for pornographic content. Hence, measuring pornography, a fictional media genre, against standards of realism, health and morality might not always be in line with the main entertainment purpose of the genre. Erotizing the forbidden and dangerous (e.g, sex with family members, with mysterious strangers, with authority figures, with non-human creatures) is a common trope of sexual fantasies, hence meaningful variables to measure pornographic portrayals of sexuality could be derived from, and related to, theories of sexual fantasy and desire (e.g., Salmon et al., 2019; Stoller, 1985). Indulging in unrealistic and norm-violating fantasies and fictional media contents is part of media entertainment and may not necessarily lead to norm-violating behaviors. Competent media users should be able to differentiate between fiction and reality. Mold Theories versus Mirror Theories When analyzing and criticizing sexuality portrayals in pornography, it is important to realize that media do not just uni-directionally influence public opinions and behaviors (mold theory). Rather, media also bi-directionally reflect existing sexual relations and fantasies (mirror theory). Recent sex surveys, for example, demonstrate that engagement in consensual BDSM (Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism) practices and rough sex (e.g., name calling, spanking, hair pulling) is fairly widespread in the general population and enjoyed by all genders (e.g., Burch & Salmon, 2019; Herbenick et al., 2021a, 2021b; Strizzi et al., 2022). Hence, it might not always be the adult industry that influences audiences’ sexualities, but also audiences’ sexual interests that influence porn production. Particularly in the digital pornography market, producers and vendors can easily analyze audience preferences through the analysis of search terms and download statistics and adopt their content accordingly. Furthermore, general beauty trends in society (e.g., regarding shaving of pubic and body hair, growing of beards, or multiple tattoos and other body art) might be mirrored in pornography (through its selection and presentation of performers) rather than of generated by it. References/combination with other methods of data collection: Manual quantitative content analyses of pornographic material can be combined with qualitative (e.g., Keft-Kennedy, 2008) as well as computational (e.g., Seehuus et al., 2019) content analyses. Furthermore, content analyses can be complemented with qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys to investigate perceptions and evaluations of the portrayals of sexuality in pornography among pornography’s creators and performers (e.g., West, 2019) and audiences (e.g., Cowan & Dunn, 1994; Hardy et al., 2022; Paasoonen, 2021; Shor, 2022). Additionally, experimental studies are helpful to measure directly how different dimensions of pornographic portrayals of sexuality are perceived and evaluated by recipients, and if and how these portrayals can affect audiences’ sexuality-related thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (e.g., Kohut & Fisher, 2013; Miller et al., 2019). Example studies for manual quantitative content analyses: Acknowledging the multidimensionality and complexity of portrayals of sexuality in pornography, a recent research review identified eight main dimensions of analysis (Miller & McBain, 2022) that are adopted and extended in this DOCA entry as: 1) violence, 2) degradation, 3) sex acts, 4) performer demographics (sex/gender, age, race/ethnicity), 5) performer bodily appearance, 6) safer sex practices, 7) relational context of sex, and 8) consent communication. Example studies and measures for all eight dimensions of pornographic portrayals of sexuality are presented in separate DOCA entries. Eight Dimension of Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography DOCA entry 1) Violence Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography: Violence 2) Degradation Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography: Degradation 3) Sex Acts Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography: Sex Acts 4) Performer Demographics Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography: Performer Demographics 5) Performer Bodily Appearance Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography: Performer Bodily Appearance 6) Safer Sex Practices Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography: Safer Sex Practices 7) Relational Context of Sex Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography: Relational Context of Sex 8) Consent Communication Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography: Consent Communication References Bandura, A. (1971). Social learning theory. General Learning. Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory of mass communication. Media Psychology, 3(3), 265–299. https://doi.org/10.1207/S1532785XMEP0303_03 Bivona, J. M., Critelli, J. W., & Clark, M. J. (2012). 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Abstract Background The implementation of a theoretical intersectionality framework into quantitative data analyses is gaining increasing interest in health research. The substantive foundation of intersectionality was established in the U.S., based on the claim of black feminists to broaden the scope of contemporary gender studies by considering the intersection between sex/gender and race/ethnicity more firmly. The aim of our scoping review with particular emphasis on sex/gender was to assess how intersectionality-informed studies in epidemiological research considered different social dimensions in their multivariable and multivariate analyses. Methods Following the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR), we conducted a literature review in PubMed. Three distinct health-related fields were brought into focus: diabetes representing a frequent chronic disease, smoking as a wide-spread behavioural health determinant and physical activity as a central target for health promotion. Initially, we compared which and how different social dimensions were accounted for and how inter-categorical and intersectionality-informed analyses were conducted. Further, we assessed sex/gender sensitivity by comparing operationalisation of sex/gender, how sex/gender theories were used and which central theoretical sex/gender concepts were referred to when aiming at explanation of (intersectional) sex/gender differences. Results Our results suggest, that intersectionality-based analyses within the three selected health-related fields are mainly conducted in the U.S. and focused on the intersection between sex/gender and race/ethnicity by using them jointly as subgrouping variables and as parts of interaction terms in regression analyses. Income and education as proxies for social class as well as age are mainly used for adjustment in quantitative analyses. Other approaches for calculating interactions (i.a. synergy-index, CART-analysis) are an exception. Even though sex/gender was considered in every included study and Gender was the most frequent theoretical sex/gender concept referred to when theoretically explaining sex/gender differences, it was exclusively operationalised as binary and solution-linked sex/gender variables were hardly considered in quantitative analyses. Conclusion The systematic integration of solution-linked variables indicating modifiable aspects of sex/gender-related living conditions and disadvantages could improve sex/gender sensitivity as part of intersectionality-based quantitative data analysis in health research.

This essay considers some of the insight we have gathered about language, feminism, racism and power. In many respects, it celebrates the linguistic power of the many theories about how Black women navigate intersectionality where racism and sexism intermingle, suggesting that our analyses should always recognise that a lethal combination of factors are in play. Black women, in particular, actively insist on forms of language and discourse that both represent and create their world through words, expressions and verbal routines that are created within and outside of the African American speech community to confront injustice. One example involves the verb ‘play,’ which I argue often functions as a power statement or ‘powermove’ that demands respect while presenting a threat to the status quo. This use of ‘play’ is the opposite of inconsequential games of play or joking.

If you live through this with me, I swear that I would die for you— Hole, “Asking for It” (1994)The 1990s was a curious decade – post-1980s excess and the Black Monday correction, we limped into the last decade of the 20th century with a whimper, not a bang. The baby boomers were in ascendency, shaking off the detritus of a century of extremes behind closed doors.It’s easy now to think that the disaffection manifesting in Generation X and in particular in the grunge music scene was a put on, an act. But in most big game cultures the emerging generation was caught between old school regimes that refused to recognise very obvious failures and what appeared to be distant, no access futures. This point has been compellingly made by Mark Davis, the author of one of the essays in this 'nineties' issue of M/C Journal.The editors of this issue came of age in 1990s Australia. Or, to paraphrase grunge act Hole, we lived through this. And what a time to be alive! How appropriate to revisit the twentieth century’s swansong as the second decade of the twenty-first century nears its own denouement.When we sat down to work on this issue, one clear question arose: How to explain this 1990s nostalgia? Commentators have proffered a slew of explanations. These have ranged from the “20 year cycles” for nostalgia in popular culture (Tucker) to a desire for an apparently simpler, more trouble-free and, well, less connected time. As Atkinson wryly observes: “While we had the internet in the grunge era, it didn't necessarily dominate your life at that point. Your existence was probably a bunch more focused on IRL than URLs.”Some contributors invoke 1990s nostalgia. Paul Stafford provides a reverential and autoethnographic account of his experiences as a fan of grunge music during that genre’s early 1990s heyday. Renee Middlemost describes the excoriating response from fans to The Simpsons’ episode “That 90s Show”. Middlemost’s essay reminds us of the program’s brilliance prior to “jumping the shark” in the 2000s.Yes, the 1990s hosted transgressive, test of time-standing examples of popular culture. This includes the ‘grunge’ music genre that arose in the US circa the early 1990s, in the work of bands such as Hole, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden (see Stafford’s essay). Grunge music and its associated sub-cultural markers went on to flourish globally in countries such as Poland, as Marek Jezinski and Lukasz Wojtkowski describe in their contribution.The 1990s also saw lesser known, but no less significant, pop cultural phenomena. Julian Novitz revisits the Doctor Who novels published between 1991 and 1997. These novels are particularly significant given that the 1990s have commonly been regarded as the “wilderness years” for that franchise.The 1990s saw an increased feminist visibility in popular culture. This visibility is suggested in Jessica Ford’s essay on Roseanne/Roseanne Barr’s feminism, Claire Knowles’s reading of Agent Scully (of X Files fame) as feminist icon, and Justine Ettler’s reflection on her meeting with US “post-punk-feminist” Kathy Acker. Ettler is the author of the breakout Australian novel The River Ophelia (1995), which was influenced by Acker’s oeuvre, and of which Acker was evidently a fan.Yet, 1990s feminisms had their limitations. They lacked, for example, the focus of intersectionality that was conceptualised by African-American legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw during the late 1980s, and that is only now (in the 21st century) really starting to take shape, albeit not without a struggle. Ford makes this point when analysing the “whiteness” of Roseanne/Roseanne’s gender politics in the 90s and 2018.In other areas, too, the 90s were not “all good”. There was no such thing as regional arts development funds. There was no reconciliation or Beyond Blue. No #MeToo or #TimesUp. No kombucha or viral campaigns or shops open after five. No royal commissions into child abuse. Australia was yet to have a female prime minister or governor general. Mentioning global warming meant you were a crackpot. Gender reassignment was something your nanna and your neighbour had never heard about.Put simply, then, the 1990s cannot be described in entirely affirmative or negative terms. The 1990s (as with any decade, really) is too complex for such summations.In some ways the 1990s was about what was started (internet insurgence), what was set on fire (Die Yuppy Die), and what came after the ashes drifted. Many of our writers have taken this comparative view, exploring the then(s) and now(s) and the enormous gaps between that don’t just register in years. Mark Davis, for example, argues the Alt Right is far more nightmarish in the new millennium than even he could have imagined.Some contributors have explored the merger of old and new, past and future in creative and idiosyncratic ways. Chris Campanioni theorises “the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine.” Campanioni’s exploration focuses, in particular, on the Y2K bug and David Lynch’s cult series Twin Peaks (1990-91), and the much hyped reboot in 2017.In his feature essay contribution, Mitch Goodwin reminds us that 1999 — and its anticipation of technological dystopia (Y2K anxieties ahoy!) — “could not have happened” without 1995. Goodwin teases out this point via readings of two futuristic thrillers Johnny Mnemonic and Strange Days.As Goodwin puts it:It might seem strange now but tapping into the contents of Keanu Reeve’s brain was a utopian data moment in 1995. This was still the digital frontier when the network was as yet not fully colonised by corporate America. The Lo-Teks effectively delivering a global moment of healing via satellite. These were the dreams we had in the nineties.While no single collection could hope to encapsulate the complexity of the period spanning 1990 to 1999. The contributors to the ‘Nineties’ issue of M/C Journal have given this one helluva go.References Bernstein, Sara. “Why Gen X Isn’t Psyched for the ‘90s Revival.” Vox. 13 Mar. 2018. <https://www.vox.com/2018/3/13/17064842/gen-x-90s-revival>.Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989): 139-167.Davis, Mark. Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Hole. “Asking for It.” Live through This. Georgia, US: City Slang, 1994.