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Feminist legal activists in law schools developed what we call critical community tactics beginning in the late 1960s to bring about important cultural change in the legal educational arena. These feminist activists challenged the male-dominant culture and succeeded in making law schools and legal scholarship more gender inclusive. Here, we develop the critical community tactics concept and show how these tactics produce cultural products which ultimately, as they are integrated into the broader culture, change the cultural landscape. Our work then is a study of how social movement activists can bring about cultural change. The feminist legal activists’ cultural products and the integration of them into the legal academy provide evidence of feminist legal activist success in shifting the legal institutional culture. We conclude that critical community tactics provide an important means for social movement activists to bring about cultural change, and scholars examining social movement efforts in other institutional settings may benefit from considering the role of critical community tactics.

Historically, a major focus of women's health research has been on the increasing medicalization of “natural” reproductive processes, with early feminist scholarship in this area largely critical of this trend. Recently, feminist scholars have begun to explore the various ways that women actually experience medicalization. We suggest that current feminist scholarship on medicalization and childbirth remains limited in two ways: (1) much of this research still focuses on privileged women and neglects the experiences of women at various social locations, as well as how oppression and privilege shape those experiences and (2) existing literature does not operationalize what medicalization or “natural” reproductive processes mean for individual women. More specifically, feminist scholars have not investigated systematically how diverse women define and experience their births within the context of a taken-for-granted definitional dichotomy of “natural” versus “medical” birth that characterizes much of the classic and contemporary feminist literature. In this chapter, we explore women's different discussions of “natural” birth and, by default, learn about their definitions of medicalization as well. Drawing from a critical, comparative analysis of qualitative, empirical data gathered from three different groups of childbearing women in two studies – that is, middle-class Caucasian adult women birthing in a hospital setting, middle-class Caucasian adult women birthing in a birthing center setting, and poor African American teen mothers birthing in a hospital setting – we propose a new methodological and conceptual framework for re-examining the meanings of “natural” versus “medical” birth experiences and pushing beyond a strictly gender-based analysis.

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to introduce queer feminist cultural studies methodologies. For illustrative purposes, the chapter draws upon one specific study of locker room space undertaken by the author.

Design/methodology/approach – The design of the locker room study is delineated, including methods of data collection and analysis: self-reflective narratives, interviews, text and discourse analysis. Issues of contextualisation and insight into the use of queer feminist cultural studies methodologies to study normative geographies are foregrounded.

Findings – Findings acknowledge the systems of knowledge production that cohere around gendered and (hetero)sexed normative and non-normative bodies in locker room spaces.

Research implications – There is no quintessential queer methodology, which is a drawback to researchers trying to forge their way in this area. Instead, all interrogations and interpretations start from a critique of the (hetero)normative discourses and practices of gender and sexuality that take place at the expense of non-normative experiences.

Originality – The chapter provides an overview of queer feminist cultural studies theories and methodologies, for those unfamiliar with this post-positivist and counter-hegemonic approach. The author suggests that queer feminist cultural studies methodologies provoke us to ask the following questions: What new thoughts does my work make possible to think? What new emotions does my work make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open up for diverse subjectivities? Such questions take researchers in new and exciting directions.

This chapter explores the potential for the classroom to be a space for activism and hope within the contemporary business school. Drawing on the extant literature, a reflexive account of our own teaching and learning practice, and a small number of interviews with academics using feminist material in their teaching in business schools, we explore the challenges, opportunities and joys experienced in the feminist classroom. We suggest that engaging in feminist teaching practice and theory can offer an opportunity for academics to engage in the critical management studies practice which is often said to be lacking within management research. We begin by setting out the extant positioning of Critical Management Studies, moving to an analysis of the educational context. Interwoven through this are our own perspectives. Our own reflections do not reveal the identities of students.

This chapter will explore how different feminist theories and theorists have informed what counts as research, what is defined as a research issue, and methodological approaches to research in higher education. It will consider the theoretical and methodological tools feminist academics have mobilized in order to develop more powerful explanations of how gender and other forms of difference work in the relation to the positioning of the individual, higher education and the nation state within globalized economies. It pays particular regard to the feminist political project of social justice.

This chapter analyzes #YesAllWomen, one of the largest, most visible, feminist Twitter events of recent years. Though hashtags and other forms of digital activism are not always taken seriously as politics, in this project we investigate #YesAllWomen and its recirculation through media and public blogs, as an important instance of contemporary feminist discursive activism. Specifically, we argue that the hashtag functioned, first, as a site of collective identity for participants, and we describe some of the ways in which this identity building was achieved, and second, we argue that through its links to and recirculation by other platforms and media, #YesAllWomen also functioned as a public protest or agenda-building event with impact on public discourse beyond Twitter. Our project draws on content and discourse analysis methods to analyze the #YesAllWomen hashtag and to trace its interaction with other discourses such as news and blogs, including an automated content analysis of almost two million tweets and an analysis of a sample of 251 media and blog stories. We note that contemporary feminists are using digital media, in this case a Twitter hashtag, to achieve many of the same discursive goals of knowledge building and critique that have previously been achieved using other communications strategies such as consciousness-raising groups, publishing collectives, media strategies, and zaps.

This chapter reviews developments in the intellectual and activist work of African feminists and gender scholars over the past two decades. African feminists and gender scholar activists have broken with dominant epistemologies to frame their own sites of knowledge production and feminist identity, reflecting shifting conditions in local and global contexts. The knowledge they generate is rooted in a tradition of scholarship, activism, and engagements with state institutions and with transnational and regional feminist movements. I discuss (1) contexts in which African feminist standpoints have emerged over the past 20 years, (2) developments in women and gender studies programs, and (3) ways in which African feminist scholars in the continent and diaspora have stimulated intellectual engagement and activism through feminist research and publishing, collaborative scholarship, influencing policy, and new forms of activism.

Since the late 1980s we’ve been inspired by feminist theorizing to interrogate our field of organization studies, looking critically at the questions it asks, at the underlying premises of the theories allowing for such questions, and by articulating alternative premises as a way of suggesting other theories and thus other questions the field may need to ask. In so doing, our collaborative work has applied insights from feminist theorizing and cultural studies to topics such as leadership, entrepreneurship, globalization, business ethics, issues of work and family, and more recently to sustainability. This text is a retrospective on our attempts at intervening in our field, where we sought to make it more fundamentally responsive to problems in the world we live in and, from this reflective position, considering how and why our field’s conventional theories and practices – despite good intentions – may be unable to do so.

In this empirical study, I describe how Muslim women leading American Islamic schools demonstrate emotionality by managing their own emotions and the emotions of others as core components of leadership practices. Using the lens of critical feminist studies, this research makes private emotional expressions a site for critical analysis of social, cultural and political influences that reflect patriarchal power imbalances and rising anti-Muslim sentiment. Through a national analysis of 13 interviews of Muslim women school leaders, centering their everyday leadership experiences as qualitative data, I found that these women skillfully managed emotions as both a demonstration of their faith and a professional effort to advance their school communities. The following themes emerged from the data as evidence of emotionality within American Islamic schools: (a) emotions as nurturing; (b) emotions as burdens; (c) emotional fluency and (d) emotions as resistance. This study expands the scholarship of critical feminist studies that examine the intersections of emotionality and leadership, by adding the voices of Muslim women school leaders who expertly manage emotions across cultural boundaries, through a difficult political environment, and as an embodiment of prophetic principles.