Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1177/01417789231198158
Elaine Craddock
Tamil thirunangais (or hijras) emphatically claim that in thirunangai kinship networks there is no caste, class or religion, that individuals are accepted regardless of their birth family. This kinship network creates a space of desirable encounters where thirunangais can reorientate themselves to their community as well as the larger public. Gender identity is central to thirunangai lives, but it operates in a nexus of other forces. Devotional practices within and outside the kinship community provide a space for thirunangais to transgress hierarchical norms of gender, caste and class and construct authentic identities empowered by divine agency.
{"title":"un/desirable encounters at the intersections of caste, class and religion","authors":"Elaine Craddock","doi":"10.1177/01417789231198158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789231198158","url":null,"abstract":"Tamil thirunangais (or hijras) emphatically claim that in thirunangai kinship networks there is no caste, class or religion, that individuals are accepted regardless of their birth family. This kinship network creates a space of desirable encounters where thirunangais can reorientate themselves to their community as well as the larger public. Gender identity is central to thirunangai lives, but it operates in a nexus of other forces. Devotional practices within and outside the kinship community provide a space for thirunangais to transgress hierarchical norms of gender, caste and class and construct authentic identities empowered by divine agency.","PeriodicalId":47487,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Review","volume":"9 1","pages":"126 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139292451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1177/01417789231201860
Karin Hansson
The digitalisation of cultural heritage creates expectations for improved research methods and more diverse and inclusive memory institutions. However, it is difficult to take advantage of the opportunities the quantification might give owing to deficient and inadequate metadata. The diversity of standards and wilfulness in different historical archive practices creates problems when aggregating data from various sources. The ambition to create more diverse and inclusive memory institutions, compensating for the historical lack of justice, also creates the risk of excluding important contexts from the digital collections. To develop research methods that take this archival wilfulness into account, in this study I have used speculative design to explore images from Europeana, the digital archive that aggregates data from memory institutions all over Europe. Instead of seeing this archive as something lacking in terms of shared standards and inclusive vocabularies, I suggest we see Europeana as a queer collection of wilful archival practices, by showing the desires and imaginations represented in the archival context. By contrasting the visual content of an image with the metadata that describes the image, the norms and desires in the archival practice come into focus, as the metadata points out what at the time was considered interesting about an image, and the reason the photograph was taken. Images described as ‘Swedes’, for example, rarely show pictures of Swedes in Sweden. Swedes are described as Swedes when they are outside Sweden. It is the exotic and foreign that are categorised. Most importantly, the person who controls the camera is not in the picture, but the choice of perspective and the metadata description of the image tell us something about the photographer’s and archivist’s will and desires. By visually reversing the perspective and making visible both norms and deviations, I show how one can approach this digital heritage with a methodology of feminist wonder.
{"title":"visual methods for desire and wonder in the digital heritage","authors":"Karin Hansson","doi":"10.1177/01417789231201860","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789231201860","url":null,"abstract":"The digitalisation of cultural heritage creates expectations for improved research methods and more diverse and inclusive memory institutions. However, it is difficult to take advantage of the opportunities the quantification might give owing to deficient and inadequate metadata. The diversity of standards and wilfulness in different historical archive practices creates problems when aggregating data from various sources. The ambition to create more diverse and inclusive memory institutions, compensating for the historical lack of justice, also creates the risk of excluding important contexts from the digital collections. To develop research methods that take this archival wilfulness into account, in this study I have used speculative design to explore images from Europeana, the digital archive that aggregates data from memory institutions all over Europe. Instead of seeing this archive as something lacking in terms of shared standards and inclusive vocabularies, I suggest we see Europeana as a queer collection of wilful archival practices, by showing the desires and imaginations represented in the archival context. By contrasting the visual content of an image with the metadata that describes the image, the norms and desires in the archival practice come into focus, as the metadata points out what at the time was considered interesting about an image, and the reason the photograph was taken. Images described as ‘Swedes’, for example, rarely show pictures of Swedes in Sweden. Swedes are described as Swedes when they are outside Sweden. It is the exotic and foreign that are categorised. Most importantly, the person who controls the camera is not in the picture, but the choice of perspective and the metadata description of the image tell us something about the photographer’s and archivist’s will and desires. By visually reversing the perspective and making visible both norms and deviations, I show how one can approach this digital heritage with a methodology of feminist wonder.","PeriodicalId":47487,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Review","volume":"184 1","pages":"162 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139301711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1177/01417789231200487
Blanca Larrain
This research investigates the political practices of online public shaming (funa) with regard to gender violence in Chile and their ability to trigger feminist social change. The central argument is that funa, as a feminist practice, offers a problematic pathway to social change, which, despite contributing to denaturalising violence against women, does not address the structural causes of gender violence. Online public shaming, as a feminist practice and strategy for change, triggers critical moral and social dilemmas, generating a questionable feminist transformation. The research explores those dilemmas, presenting the advances and setbacks of this practice in current feminist movements globally and in Chile. It contributes to the reflection on feminist movements in terms of their ability to trigger social change.
{"title":"online public shaming as a feminist practice for social change, a double-edged sword for fighting gender violence: the case of the ‘feminist funa’ in Chile","authors":"Blanca Larrain","doi":"10.1177/01417789231200487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789231200487","url":null,"abstract":"This research investigates the political practices of online public shaming (funa) with regard to gender violence in Chile and their ability to trigger feminist social change. The central argument is that funa, as a feminist practice, offers a problematic pathway to social change, which, despite contributing to denaturalising violence against women, does not address the structural causes of gender violence. Online public shaming, as a feminist practice and strategy for change, triggers critical moral and social dilemmas, generating a questionable feminist transformation. The research explores those dilemmas, presenting the advances and setbacks of this practice in current feminist movements globally and in Chile. It contributes to the reflection on feminist movements in terms of their ability to trigger social change.","PeriodicalId":47487,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Review","volume":"9 1","pages":"80 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139291201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1177/01417789231202415
María Fernanda Yanchapaxi, Jade Nixon, Eve Tuck
In this article, we reflect on our practices of seeking consent as Indigenous and Black researchers engaged in social science research with Black, Indigenous and racialised youth and communities. We critique flimsy consent practices in social science that are extractive and superficial. This article has three discussions around consent in social science research: why we as Indigenous and Black people and researchers care about consent; harmful approaches to consent in social science research; and how harm commonly occurs in three dimensions of consent: consent around bodies, consent around stories and consent around artefacts. The third and final discussion describes the informal and formal ways that we practise consent in research projects created in the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab consisting of Black, Indigenous and racialised research practitioners. We conclude this article by sharing the practices of consent we engage with as Indigenous and Black researchers to make desire-based and beauty-affirming social science research. What we share is also an invitation to other social scientists to engage in practices of consent that prioritise being in good relation with Black, Indigenous and racialised people and communities.
{"title":"consent practices in desire-based and beauty-affirming social science research","authors":"María Fernanda Yanchapaxi, Jade Nixon, Eve Tuck","doi":"10.1177/01417789231202415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789231202415","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we reflect on our practices of seeking consent as Indigenous and Black researchers engaged in social science research with Black, Indigenous and racialised youth and communities. We critique flimsy consent practices in social science that are extractive and superficial. This article has three discussions around consent in social science research: why we as Indigenous and Black people and researchers care about consent; harmful approaches to consent in social science research; and how harm commonly occurs in three dimensions of consent: consent around bodies, consent around stories and consent around artefacts. The third and final discussion describes the informal and formal ways that we practise consent in research projects created in the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab consisting of Black, Indigenous and racialised research practitioners. We conclude this article by sharing the practices of consent we engage with as Indigenous and Black researchers to make desire-based and beauty-affirming social science research. What we share is also an invitation to other social scientists to engage in practices of consent that prioritise being in good relation with Black, Indigenous and racialised people and communities.","PeriodicalId":47487,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Review","volume":"31 1","pages":"113 - 125"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139306076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1177/01417789231206047
Reetika Revathy Subramanian
Since 2011, female khatna, or the practice of female genital cutting within the Dawoodi Bohra community, has become a big topic of debate in India and globally. The ‘secret’ tradition has been challenged by community activists, tabled in parliament, heard by international courts of law and debated on news channels. In response, a growing number of Bohra women have come to the fore to publicly defend their right to khatna by subverting seemingly Western tropes of autonomy, equality and modernity. Situated in the thick of these polarised exchanges, this article examines the complicated, under-explored relationship between gender and Islam by foregrounding self-narratives of the Bohra women who actively participate within, as opposed to fight against, patriarchal norms to preserve the tradition. I juxtapose their narratives with those of anti-khatna activists to further contextualise and clarify their ‘modern-yet-traditional’ subjectivities. As such, this article combines a postcolonial feminist lens with Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of ‘invention of tradition’, to investigate the multiple ways in which a majority of Bohra women are using the rhetoric of ‘modernity’ in public—by reinventing history, renegotiating patriarchies, reimagining the other and incorporating biomedicine—to preserve and perpetuate this contested tradition.
{"title":"‘we are not like them’: reinventing modernity within tradition in the debates on female khatna / female genital cutting in India","authors":"Reetika Revathy Subramanian","doi":"10.1177/01417789231206047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789231206047","url":null,"abstract":"Since 2011, female khatna, or the practice of female genital cutting within the Dawoodi Bohra community, has become a big topic of debate in India and globally. The ‘secret’ tradition has been challenged by community activists, tabled in parliament, heard by international courts of law and debated on news channels. In response, a growing number of Bohra women have come to the fore to publicly defend their right to khatna by subverting seemingly Western tropes of autonomy, equality and modernity. Situated in the thick of these polarised exchanges, this article examines the complicated, under-explored relationship between gender and Islam by foregrounding self-narratives of the Bohra women who actively participate within, as opposed to fight against, patriarchal norms to preserve the tradition. I juxtapose their narratives with those of anti-khatna activists to further contextualise and clarify their ‘modern-yet-traditional’ subjectivities. As such, this article combines a postcolonial feminist lens with Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of ‘invention of tradition’, to investigate the multiple ways in which a majority of Bohra women are using the rhetoric of ‘modernity’ in public—by reinventing history, renegotiating patriarchies, reimagining the other and incorporating biomedicine—to preserve and perpetuate this contested tradition.","PeriodicalId":47487,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Review","volume":"281 1","pages":"3 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139291213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1177/01417789231205318
Tatiana Sanchez Parra
While conflict-related sexual violence has gained attention on international transitional justice agendas, conflict-related reproductive violence continues to be overlooked. The Colombian Truth Commission was the first truth-seeking transitional justice body worldwide to directly investigate these forms of conflict-related violence. Based on an ethnographic analysis of the Commission’s work on reproductive violence, in this article I engage with the reproductive justice framework to argue that the Commission’s work broadened understandings of both gendered victimhood and reproductive autonomy. Regarding gendered victimhood, I show that the Commission’s work focused on gaining recognition for conflict-related reproductive violence as distinct from conflict-related sexual violence, identifying conflict-related practices of reproductive violence and offering recommendations for addressing such practices. Secondly, I show that not only was the Commission the first truth-seeking body to directly investigate reproductive violence, but it did so through an understanding of reproductive violence that does not revolve around the notion of autonomy as individual choice. I argue that by doing this, the Commission compelled us to comprehensively consider war as part of the conditions under which reproductive autonomy may be exercised. Following this line, the latter part of the article focuses on the Colombian government’s use of glyphosate as a form of conflict-related reproductive violence that claimed ownership over the reproductive futures of entire communities by creating environmental devastation.
{"title":"the Colombian Truth Commission’s work on reproductive violence: gendered victimhood and reproductive autonomy","authors":"Tatiana Sanchez Parra","doi":"10.1177/01417789231205318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789231205318","url":null,"abstract":"While conflict-related sexual violence has gained attention on international transitional justice agendas, conflict-related reproductive violence continues to be overlooked. The Colombian Truth Commission was the first truth-seeking transitional justice body worldwide to directly investigate these forms of conflict-related violence. Based on an ethnographic analysis of the Commission’s work on reproductive violence, in this article I engage with the reproductive justice framework to argue that the Commission’s work broadened understandings of both gendered victimhood and reproductive autonomy. Regarding gendered victimhood, I show that the Commission’s work focused on gaining recognition for conflict-related reproductive violence as distinct from conflict-related sexual violence, identifying conflict-related practices of reproductive violence and offering recommendations for addressing such practices. Secondly, I show that not only was the Commission the first truth-seeking body to directly investigate reproductive violence, but it did so through an understanding of reproductive violence that does not revolve around the notion of autonomy as individual choice. I argue that by doing this, the Commission compelled us to comprehensively consider war as part of the conditions under which reproductive autonomy may be exercised. Following this line, the latter part of the article focuses on the Colombian government’s use of glyphosate as a form of conflict-related reproductive violence that claimed ownership over the reproductive futures of entire communities by creating environmental devastation.","PeriodicalId":47487,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Review","volume":"53 1","pages":"28 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139302733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}