Womens Studies International Forum最新文献

Through a gender-sensitive lens, this study explores the psychic and subjective meanings that Ukrainian women living in Southern Italy for economic reasons attribute to their long-distance motherhood and migration experience. Ten Ukrainian women were interviewed in the pre-war period, before 2022, through a semi-structured interview following the principles of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Our findings show that long-distance motherhood and the challenges of migration led to a redefinition of the respondents' identity as women and mothers. The complex affective configuration that developed from separation lacks adequate elaboration, leaving a gap that calls for supportive psychological interventions. Understanding these experiences has become urgent given that the war is affecting both Ukrainian women living in Italy and those who are arriving due to the war.

This article explores how the academic field of gender and feminist studies in England represents itself, by drawing on a discourse analysis of online descriptions from websites of all gender and feminist studies degree programmes and departments in English universities, all but one of which are graduate degrees. Foregrounding the context of the neoliberal university, in which feminist and gender knowledge is simultaneously marginalised and mainstreamed, the article asks how representations of the field are shaped by the marketisation of higher education. This analysis reveals a disjuncture between two representative logics: while most feminist, gender studies and queer scholarship relies on anti-essentialist epistemologies and ontologies, the dominant logic of representation in contemporary universities understands difference as static and representable. This representability enables and is in turn facilitated by marketisation.

This paper offers the term unreproductive citizenship to characterise the social positionality of LGBTQ people in Poland. Unreproductive citizenship is brought about by means of social sterilisation: while queer and trans people are ‘tolerated,’ they are not treated as reproductive subjects with a potential to participate in social reproduction. Drawing on Polish and international literature on queer families, reproductive politics, and forced sterilisation, as well as research including interviews, political speeches and auto-ethnography, I argue that the discursive and political framing of LGBTQ people as unreproductive subjects is eugenic. Leading political figures representing Poland's robust political right-wing, as well as the majority of Poles, have expressed fears that LGBTQ reproduction could somehow ‘contaminate’ future generations and therefore poses a threat to the nation's moral order. The social sterilisation of queer Polish people as ‘unreproductive citizens’ illustrates how the logics of reproductive righteousness operate in contemporary Poland.

This paper explores the gendered dynamics and impacts of online and offline sexual harassment based on fieldwork among young people in Denmark. The paper argues that harm related to sexual harassment relies on the embodied duality of agency and vulnerability as the foundation for humans' sense of dignity. This argument is developed first by exploring how unwanted ‘dick pics’ confront girls with a gendered vulnerability that impacts girls' sense of dignity. Second the paper shows that boys' solicitation of girls' ‘nudes’ is related to a gendered vulnerability for both girls and boys. Finally, unwanted sexual attention that moves between the online and the offline arena is enabled by gendered values, norms and meanings related to heterosexuality.

International aid to protect women and girls against religiously sanctioned violence in predominantly Muslim countries is prone to politicization and opposition by conservative religious actors. In Sudan religious leaders had varied responses to an internationally funded campaign to criminalize female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in 2009. In the capital Khartoum, this campaign provoked politicization of aid and counter- mobilization by national conservative religious leaders, while in the eastern town of Gedarif local religious leaders supported criminalization. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2008 to 2018, the study suggests that the power based of religious leaders and their inclusion in, or exclusion from, anti- FGM/C efforts accounted for this differential response. Even when successful, the inclusion of religious leaders as “agents of change” strengthened their power and the role of religion in state and society to levels that may endanger the rights of women and girls.

Before mid-century, the Young Women's Christian Association of the USA (Y-US) was complicit with global northern imperial projects, as its work with women across national borders was characterised by an ethos of ‘imperial maternalism’. Applying Serene Khader's (2019) analysis of imperialism in global northern feminisms shows that Y-US's approach to ‘overseas’ work was ‘missionary’ in its use and promotion of ‘western’ values and strategies. Although Y-US inevitably worked within ‘asymmetrical power relations’ (Grewal & Kaplan, 2000, para.4), in the 1970s its approach shifted as it began to recognise these imbalances. By the 1980s, Y-US's ‘global’ programmes sought out women's context-specific knowledge to identify and critique structural inequalities and US imperialism, characteristic of ‘transnational feminist’ ethic. The contribution of Y-US to the YWCA movement was more complex, and positive, than a perpetuation of cultural imperialism. In its national policy and project planning and evaluations, Y-US continued until the 1980s to apply mixture of missionary and transnational feminist lenses to understand its role and responsibilities as a member of the worldwide YWCA movement, and to grapple with the implications of US power on the world stage.

This article examines how Chinese digital feminists synergize with cyber nationalism to fight the patriarchy and strive to legitimize feminist discourse in Chinese digital realms, where online feminists face strict state censorship and nationalistic backlash. We situate pink feminism as a form of Internet-based nonconfrontational feminist activism revolving around nationalism, in which “pink” connotes young female nationalists, and analyze its precarity within an authoritarian state and neoliberal platform economy. We argue that while pink feminism contributes to the plurality of Chinese feminisms by legitimatizing feminist expression within nationalist frameworks and reinterpreting Chinese nationalism from a feminist perspective, it may inevitably reinforce the existing power structures that feminists seek to dismantle. We suggest that Chinese digital feminists should strategically and consciously engage with pink feminism without ceding feminist autonomy and reflexivity. This study enriches our understanding of the entanglement between feminism and nationalism in non-Western contexts.

This study applied the Gaslighting at Work Questionnaire (GWQ), the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), and the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) to 767 Turkish women who participated in an online survey via WhatsApp. Structural equation modeling and mediation analysis were used to determine whether psychological variables predicted the life satisfaction score, and the validity-reliability of the GWQ. We found that the GWQ scale is valid and reliable when used on that sample of Turkish women. Gaslighting directly and negatively predicted life satisfaction, but resilience directly and positively predicted life satisfaction. Gaslighting indirectly predicted life satisfaction by a significant amount. Resilience had mediating effect in the relationship between gaslighting and life satisfaction. Future research could focus on developing intervention and support programs to reduce the effects of gaslighting; assess the long-term effects of gaslighting with longitudinal studies; and examine the effects of different demographic groups (age, educational level, socio-economic status) on gaslighting.

In many instances, the medical approach to mental health issues remains a top-down process where patients are expected to act as purely passive agents. Yet, it is vital to recognize the agency individuals display in the medicalization of mental distress, from experiencing emotional suffering to becoming mental health patients engaged in their treatment. This qualitative study aims to describe the various forms of agency that men and women deploy to actively manage their emotional distress. Findings suggest a central role of agency in the entire process, revealing significant gender differences in recognizing and externalizing mental distress, deciding to seek medical help, managing of mental health diagnosis and psychotropic prescription, and the changes in patients´ subjective experience and social contexts. Highlighting these aspects, the study discusses the need for a nuanced and broader understanding of agency within the mental health field.