This paper draws on feminist geographies of space, proposing a feminist critical spatial practice approach to study social movement organizing. Inspired by the work of Jane Rendell, a feminist theorist and architectural historian, we propose embodiment, materiality, affectivity, and alterity as co-constitutive of feminist organizing. Specifically, we prioritize the intertwining of space and body in resisting extractivism to analyze visual artifacts produced by artists/activists who have joined the anti-extractivist struggle against mining in Northern Greece, Chalkidiki area. In particular, we focus on how bodies transgress and reconstitute space by affecting its materiality during artistic performances. We argue that the protesting (moving and ensounded) body enacts affective solidarities and invites collective action against exploitative neoliberal regimes. Finally, the article brings together body-land territory and territorial-community feminism literature to enrich our understanding of spatial practices of resistance against neoliberal extractivist regimes while highlighting the role of emotions and affect as a means of mobilizing for action and maintaining momentum.
Addressing a paucity of large-scale studies about women academics maternity experiences of leave in academia and under-theorizing the influence of neoliberalism on this phenomenon, this research provides one of the largest studies of women's experiences of maternity leave in the academic sector. Secondary analysis of a subset of data from a global online mixed method survey with 553 women academics (82% UK, 18% international) was undertaken to explore experiences and implications of maternity leave for women. The findings reveal that women academics continued to undertake core academic work duties during maternity leave such as writing grant applications and journal articles, supervising doctoral students, teaching, and responding to emails. We document four distinct orientations adopted by women during maternity leave that characterize neoliberal subjectivity and use Foucauldian governmentality to unmask the inculcation of such norms. Our analysis shows how neoliberal ideology has gained a hegemonic position in academia that leaves little space for maternity leave, resulting in many women effectively relinquishing their maternity rights to sustain academic productivity. We argue that neoliberalism and new managerialism within the academy undermine policies to support women's maternity rights. The findings of this study will be of interest to scholars and Human Resources professionals, academic mothers, managers, and policymakers who are championing change in the sector.
The Buckets Revolution is a local non-governmental organization arisen from an initiative implemented in a favela, a marginalized community in the South of Brazil, led and conducted by its women to resist their condition of intersected subordinations and address the socioenvironmental problems caused by the lack of public care. Based on the understanding that women of the Buckets Revolution developed a particular politics of care, this study investigates the configuration of the complex relations between their political practice and the responsibility for care—understood as a core element of women's intersected subordination, and simultaneously, a central value for a new and revolutionary politics of care. From a qualitative approach, the case study is based on an intersectional feminist theoretical framework, epistemology, and methodological design, necessary for the analysis of gender in the South, where its imbrications with race, class, and nation compose a complex, diverse, and unequal scenario. In that sense, the women of the Buckets Revolution, by occupying a social place where these axes of subordination intersect more intensely, offer a “vantage point” to make more visible the processes of domination and resistance on both national and global levels—that is, both in Brazilian society and in an otherwise increasingly interdependent world shaped by neoliberal globalization. The gendered intersectional outline is conducted through the combination of data collection techniques, including participant observation, focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews, and bibliographical research. The results show that, with their revolutionary politics of care, the women of the Buckets Revolution built a contextualized, horizontal, and bottom-up care-based counter-hegemonic alternative to address the socioenvironmental problems that resulted from intersected subordinations in the Brazilian context, and more broadly, in the contemporary neoliberal global order.
When a pregnancy ends in England and Wales, statutory time away from paid employment is limited to circumstances where there is a live birth or stillbirth. Forms of leave, such as Maternity Leave or Paternity Leave, depend on parental status derived from the civil registration of a new person or a post-viability stillbirth. Other early pregnancy endings, such as miscarriage or abortion, do not provide specific time off work after pregnancy. This paper uses the concept of reproductive governance to analyze current and shifting biopolitical truth discourses, strategies of intervention, and modes of subjectification around post-pregnancy leaves. It shows how different inclusions and exclusions are generated by the classificatory boundaries which act as political technologies in this field. Contributing to an area that is under-researched in the literature, we provide a review of post-pregnancy statutory employment leave entitlements in this context. We then consider proposals for change presented in the United Kingdom political system in relation to more inclusive leave benefits offered by some employers and different pregnancy ending leaves offered in other jurisdictions. We argue that current arrangements and proposals do not adequately reflect the complexity and diversity of pregnancy endings. We conclude with a call to policymakers in all contexts to carefully assess the consequences of new ideas around leaves for pregnancy endings and to formulate inclusive and fair proposals for change.
This article reconstructs the lives of women under transitional justice by narrating their history in Bojayá, in the Colombian Pacific, where one hundred children and adults were killed in clashes between the FARC guerilla and the paramilitary in May 2002. The stories reveal how the women, through games, social construction of the territory, and alabaos (funeral dirges), construct a fundamental counter-power through which to understand transitional justice. Using photographs of post-conflict realities in Colombia and ethnographic work carried out since May 2016 in the area, we argue that these sub powers build a kind of infrapolitics that collaborates, challenges, and reconstructs the power of the State as a nodal agent of the “transition” in Colombia. In this sense, the women use and endure the suffering, their condition as victims, and the reality created for them by transitional justice, as a new means by which to bargain conditions of citizenship in precarious contexts.
Trans men often face discrimination in the hiring process. However, it remains unclear whether the disclosure of gender identity and perceived masculinity during transition play a role in first impressions and perceived job suitability of trans male applicants. Across two studies (N = 332), we examined how cisgender heterosexual participants perceived a transgender male candidate in terms of his masculinity and whether they judged him suitable for a stereotypically masculine job. Such judgments were first based on the candidate's voice at different stages of gender transition and, secondly, after disclosure of gender identity in the job application form. In Study 1, participants judged a trans man at the beginning of the voice transition (3 months on testosterone) or a trans man in advanced transitioning (1 year on testosterone). Study 2 involved the judgments of the same trans men at different times in the voice transition (1 week—beginning, 6 months—intermediate, and 1 year—advanced). Masculinity judgments were influenced by voice transitioning, but judgments were adjusted after his gender identity was disclosed. Disclosure created an advantage in perception of the trans man candidate as more suitable for the role, especially when he was at the beginning of the voice transition when his voice was not perceived as masculine. Findings are discussed in relation to trans men's employability and identity disclosure.
Based on the meaning-making of women geoscientists in their descriptions of work and career experiences, this article explores the gendering of geoscience by analyzing women's hard work as a theoretical concept. Our findings show that the gendered requirements for women in geoscience involve “doing” various forms of hard work, including making one's work visible, asserting one's physical performance, and building social relations. Thus, hard work is found to be gendered in terms of being a perceived requirement shared by female geoscientists. It is a requirement that entails compensating for not being male in masculine organizations and simultaneously prevents women geoscientists from fully engaging in core geoscience work tasks. Hence, by gendering hard work and theoretically defining hard work as the work of the “other”, the study expands the theoretical understanding of the concept by suggesting that women's hard work is gendered and social rather than productive.
Scholars have long been fascinated by the push-pull discourses that have been used to account for the work-life (in)balance of college-educated, stay-at-home mothers in the United States. However, the entire conversation about the opting-out myth excludes the increasing population of highly educated, immigrant mothers. Meanwhile, international migration literature contends that highly educated, skilled, immigrant women experience an unexpected downward career mobility. However, among all the studies, the term motherhood and housewife are largely framed as a threat and source of frustration. In response to these two bodies of literature, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 highly educated, Chinese stay-at-home mothers in the United States between August 2019 and July 2021. By adopting an intersectional lens, I argue that although the neoliberal, immigration structures have indeed caused career downward mobility among highly educated, Chinese immigrants, we should not assume that the current, new generation of Chinese women unanimously interprets full-time motherhood simply as a disadvantage. Instead, I have found out that, due to social and cultural differences, these mothers all felt compelled to be stay-at-home immigrant mothers in the United States where they believe they would receive more respect and acceptance, and feel more liberation.
While scholars have investigated how prison workers understand and navigate occupational risks through performances of gender, most studies have focused on staff in security roles whose organizational cultures value displays of masculinities premised on characteristics such as toughness and stoicism. Less scholarly attention has considered how prison staff in nonsecurity roles, who perform duties oriented toward using interpersonal skills and helping others—characteristics that are commonly associated with female-dominated helping professions—understand and navigate risk through gendered forms of impression management. The current study explores the question of how one such occupational group, institutional parole officers (IPOs) working in Canadian federal prisons, performs gender in response to both their perceptions of workplace risk and their occupational, and often personal, commitment to supporting the rehabilitation of prisoners. We organize and analyze our findings using Goffman's (1959) theory of impression management to demonstrate that IPOs, as they attempt to both support prisoners and mitigate the perceived risks of a prison workplace, perform gendered presentations of self that fluidly incorporate aspects of masculinities and femininities. However, we also argue that female IPOs experience greater feelings of workplace vulnerabilities and, thus, perform more impression management labor than their male counterparts. Our analysis thus deepens the limited literature on gendered presentations of self among nonsecurity prison workers by situating gender performances within the occupational risks experienced in the prison workplace.