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Guided by feminist perspectives, we critique existing approaches to the study of womenʼs entrepreneurship on epistemological grounds and suggest that the entrepreneurship field needs to recognize gendered assumptions in theorizing. Deploying a feminist framework, we suggest that understanding the “gender gap” in entrepreneurship requires focus on institutional and structural barriers women entrepreneurs face. Existing studies of women entrepreneurs often compare women with men without considering how gender and gender relations impact the very concepts and ideas of entrepreneurship. We propose, therefore, a conceptualization of entrepreneurship that illuminates gender bias and calls attention to the interrelated individual, institutional, and structural barriers in the entrepreneurial process that arrive out of societal and cultural gender norms. Through praxis or engaged practice, we redirect scholarship in the entrepreneurship field, while proposing ways that can promote gender equality in entrepreneurial activities. In all, our gender integrative conceptualization of entrepreneurship contributes to the entrepreneurship field by recognizing and addressing a more expansive realm of influential factors within the entrepreneurial ecosystem that have previously been researched separately.

This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the ontological dimensions of lived experiences of situatedness, intersubjectivity, intentionality and temporality in analysing women entrepreneurs’ agency within gendered institutional contexts. It also demonstrates that feminist phenomenology could broaden the current scope of IPA regarding the embodied dimension of language.

The adoption of feminist phenomenology and IPA presents new avenues for research that go beyond the traditional cognitive approach in entrepreneurship, contributing to theory and practice. The proposed conceptual framework also has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research, such as a phenomenological intersectional approach and arts-based methods.

The article contributes to a new research agenda in women’s entrepreneurship research by offering a feminist phenomenological framework that focuses on the embodied dimension of entrepreneurship through the integration of IPA and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).

Most feminists policies are aspirational. Deficiencies include vague terms of what constitutes ‘feminist’ within policy, ambiguous investment criteria, lack of consultation and the use of the binary definition of gender negating gender-diverse people (Tiessen, 2019). The purpose of this study is to identify parameters that characterize feminist entrepreneurship policies and to advance recommendations to operationalize these policies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled fragilities in the socio-economic gains that women entrepreneurs have achieved. Gender-regression is, in part, the product of entrepreneurship policies that fail to recognize the nature and needs of women entrepreneurs. To inform recovery measures, this article considers two research questions: what are the parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policies? and how can parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policy be operationalized in pandemic recovery measures? To inform the questions, the study draws on the academic literature and thematic analysis of three collective feminist action plans to operationalize ten parameters that characterize feminist entrepreneurship policy.

Supplanting ‘feminist’ for women in the construction of entrepreneurship policies, without specifications of how parameters differ dilutes government's efforts to achieve gender quality and women's economic empowerment. To inform policy, recommendations of three feminist recovery policies clustered under seven themes: importance of addressing root causes of inequality; need to invest in social and economic outcomes; economic security; enhancing access to economic resources; investment in infrastructure; inclusive decision-making; and need for gender disaggregated data to inform policy. Differences in policy priorities between collective feminist recovery plans and the academic literature are reported.

The parameters of feminist entrepreneurial policy require further interpretation and adaptation in different policy, cultural and geo-political contexts. Scholarly attention might focus on advisory processes that inform feminist policies, such as measures to address gender-regressive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research is also needed to understand the impacts of feminist policies on the lived experiences of diverse women entrepreneurs. Limitations: The study design did not incorporate viewpoints of policymakers or capture bureaucratic boundary patrolling practices that stymie feminist policies. Thematic analysis was limited to three feminist recovery plans from two countries.

Recommendations to operationalize feminist entrepreneurship policies in the context of pandemic recovery are described.

Ten parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policy are explored. The conceptual study also advances a framework of feminist entrepreneurship policy and considers boundary conditions for when and how the parameters are applicable.

According to thesaurus definitions, the absurd translates as “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous”; “extremely silly; not logical and sensible”. As further indicated in the Latin root absurdus, “out of tune, uncouth, inappropriate, ridiculous,” humor in absurd registers plays with that which is out of harmony with both reason and decency. In this article, the authors make an argument for the absurd as a feminist method for tackling heterosexism.

By focusing on the Twitter account “Men Write Women” (est. 2019), the rationale of which is to share literary excerpts from male authors describing women's experiences, thoughts and appearances, and which regularly broadens into social theater in the user reactions, the study explores the critical value of absurdity in feminist social media tactics.

The study proposes the absurd as a means of not merely turning things around, or inside out, but disrupting and eschewing the hegemonic logic on offer. While both absurd humor and feminist activism may begin from a site of reactivity and negative evaluation, it need not remain confined to it. Rather, by turning things preposterous, ludicrous and inappropriate, absurd laughter ends up somewhere different. The feminist value of absurd humor has to do with both its critical edge and with the affective lifts and spaces of ambiguity that it allows for.

Research on digital feminist activism has largely focused on the affective dynamics of anger. As there are multiple affective responses to sexism, our article foregrounds laughter and ambivalence as a means of claiming space differently in online cultures rife with hate, sexism and misogyny.

This paper aims to analyze the discourse of Arab feminism social media pages as a form of real-time new media. This is to be conducted culturally to understand the Westernized character these pages tend to propagate and the politico-cultural significations of such a propagation.

Using visual and content analysis the paper analyzes both the written and visual contents of two popular Arab feminist Facebook pages, “Thory” and “Feminist doodles” to explore its culture relevance/Westernization via the categories of “re-employing the binary second wave feminism, the historical relevance and the Westernized tone of both pages.

The pages showed a tendency toward second wave, Westernized, anti-orient feminism. Such importation of feminism made the pages’ message not only a bit irrelevant but also conceptually violent to a large extent. Starting from alien contexts, the two pages dislocate the Arab women experiences of their situation for the sake of comprehending and adapting to heavily Westernized images.

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate over the gender issue in the Arab context after 2011, what it originally offers is discussing the cultural relevance of popular feminist Facebook pages claiming to represent the everyday struggles of the Arab women. In addition, it shows the impact of real-time media on identity formulation.