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The text explores the feminist concept of intersectionality and its adoption within disability studies. The aim is to analyze how feminist and disability movements and theories have managed the issue of struggling against oppression and for equality while acknowledging internal diversity.

Literature review based on the concepts of intersectionality, disabled women, and disability and diversity seeking for explicit and implicit confluences and emerging implications at different levels: social movements, theoretical developments, and policymaking.

Intersectionality is a minor field within disability studies. However, diversity and multiple oppression issues have been addressed by the disability rights movement, after disabled women introduced feminist principles. This intersection of disability and feminist studies has transformed both fields, and at the same time fostered a new paradigm. It situates the claims on the similarities between disabled and nondisabled people, instead of focusing on identity politics.

The chapter acknowledges social movements as key actors in generating and developing significant debates, both in feminist and disability studies. Moreover, it seeks for conceptual tools that promote alliance-building strategies between oppressed groups in the struggle for social justice.

The chapter presents overall perspective of what intersectionality is and how the disability rights movement has addressed it, while seeking broader implications of the analysis of multiple inequalities.

This chapter offers a critical outline of the Egyptian feminist movement. It traces the forms of feminist activism and the demands raised by Egyptian feminists throughout the twentieth century and into the new millennium.

The study uses the tools of feminist theory and women’s history in charting a critical outline of the Egyptian women’s movement and feminist activism throughout a century of Egyptian history. The study attempts to identify the main features of the movement in terms of the demands raised by women and the challenges and achievements involved within the socio-political national and international contexts.

The Egyptian feminist movement is divided here into four waves, highlighting the intersections between feminist demands and national demands, as well as Egyptian women’s struggle for their rights. The first wave is seen as focusing on women’s right to public education and political representation. The second wave is marked by women’s achievement of constitutional and legal rights in the context of state feminism. The third wave is characterised by feminist activism in the context of civil society organising. The fourth wave has extended its struggle into the realm of women’s bodies and sexuality.

The study limits itself to forms of women’s agency and feminist activism in the public sphere.

This chapter is an original attempt at outlining the Egyptian women’s movement based on the demands raised and challenges faced. The chapter also suggests the existence of a sense of continuity in the Egyptian women’s movement.

Age has not received much attention in the literature on social movements, but it is an important part of human identity. Like other people, activists engage in age-related “identity work.” By studying age dynamics – cooperation and conflict between and among age-based groups – we can learn about collective identity and conflict. This chapter examines age-related discourse and interaction in the feminist movement in Argentina. As the movement has grown and gained momentum over the past 15 years, younger women have joined movement pioneers. Drawing on data from interviews with activists and participant observation in Buenos Aires during three periods (1998, 2001–2003, and 2011), the study examines narratives as an aspect of age-related identity work. While discourse about distance and conflict were common in the earlier periods, when the movement’s pioneers dominated, narratives about cooperation and respect surfaced in the later period as young women shared the movement with older ones. In movements with multiple age-based cohorts, age gains salience with interaction.

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.

In the United States, rights-based laws have opened major social institutions to previously marginalized groups, altering the terrain on which social movements act, creating opportunities for disruption, and expanding the forms protest takes. This research is an attempt to add to our understanding of contemporary protest. I use data from 50 open-ended, loosely structured interviews with women feminist PhD sociologists working at U.S. (and 1 Canadian) colleges and universities as a lens through which to examine contemporary protest. These in-depth interviews reveal that the demand-making and discursive protest of feminists in academia is rooted in the empowering intersections of their collective feminist identities and disrupts hegemonic practices in the academy and beyond. My findings indicate that social movement theory must move beyond restrictive notions of potential movement targets, activist locations, and strategies; and past narrow conceptualizations of collective action and movement goals.

This chapter bridges cultural and political approaches to determine why elite support for movement claims may be inconsistent across the policy process. I analyze this question empirically through 16 in-depth interviews with government officials in two regions of Peru: Arequipa and Cusco. Regional officials appraised feminist advocacy in two opposing ways. First, they valued feminist advocates’ contributions to policy processes, which enabled them to advance reproductive rights and gender equity initiatives. They also perceived women as a group deserving of these initiatives and framed gender policies in terms of rights and equality. Second, they were critical of feminist advocates’ weaknesses in mobilizing support, which hindered the officials’ own ability to advance reproductive rights and gender equity initiatives. Furthermore, regional officials understood reproductive rights and gender equality to be thwarted by the State’s economic instrumentalism and by Catholic Church’s ultra-conservatism. This research shows how a cultural approach to policy elites’ support for movement claims goes beyond their individual attitudes and calculations to capture their perceptions, frames, and understandings tied to the broader cultural context. This wider conceptualization in turn helps clarify inconsistencies in policy elites’ support for movement claims across the policy process.

In 1920 Margaret Sanger called voluntary motherhood “the key to the temple of liberty” and noted that women were “rising in fundamental revolt” to claim their right to determine their own reproductive fate (Rothman, 2000, p. 73). Decades later Barbara Katz Rothman reflected on the social, political and legal changes produced by reproductive-rights feminists since that time. She wrote: So the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1970s won, and abortion is available – just as the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1920s won, and contraception is available. But in another sense, we did not win. We did not win, could not win, because Sanger was right. What we really wanted was the fundamental revolt, the “key to the temple of liberty.” A doctor’s fitting for a diaphragm, or a clinic appointment for an abortion, is not the revolution. It is not even a woman-centered approach to reproduction (2000, p. 79).

This chapter is a reflective evaluation of the preexisting and emerging issues and challenges which mediate contemporary efforts to sustain gender justice in the Caribbean. I use the perspectives of undergraduate feminist theory students and online feminist activists to establish how contemporary Caribbean feminist advocacy is situated. I also evaluate this situatedness by considering the salience of perspectives and sentiments inherited from a legacy of collective consciousness raising through developed Caribbean feminist theorizing and vibrant women’s movements in the region. I assert that student responses reflect an awareness of this legacy with an understanding of self as inheriting a secure agency as a collective, particularly as a collective group of women, but at the same time expressing a preoccupation with the individualistic, particularly in terms of concerns over bodily autonomy. This suggests a turn from their legacy. In addition, online feminist activists lament that change is not as evident as needed; that they still live limits, are still subject to gendered structures of power, and that struggles over legitimacy and for freedom from gender-based violence continue to undermine the attainment of gender justice. Their sentiments suggest that the “there” has been engaged but by no means arrived at as a fixed end point; while some agency can be accessed, gender justice in the region continues to be a journey that is complex and requires response to an ever changing social, political and economic landscapes.

This chapter explores the Slovenian equal opportunities policy in the context of globalization debates. Focusing mainly on the equal opportunities legislation in Slovenia and the other recent European Union (EU) member states, the aim of the chapter is to reflect upon globalization as Europeanization and as supraterritorialization. Supraterritorial processes, such as the second wave of Western feminist movement established a mutual relationship with feminists in the former Yugoslavia during the 1980s. Feminism and the feminist movement in Yugoslavia and in Slovenia in the 1980s and in the beginning of the 1990s, in particular, represent an important basis for gender equality politics and legislation in Slovenia. Another significant element that contributes to the introduction of gender equality legislation is EU integration. In Slovenia and also in other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that recently joined the European Union, the accession played a considerable role in adopting gender equality legislation. Europeanization in the context of equal opportunities policy leads to the homogenization process of standards for gender equality in the EU member states. In terms of legislation in member countries, the Europeanization of gender equality policy is performed as top-down politics particularly in recent member states, such as CEE. Using the example of gender equality policy in Slovenia, this chapter analyzes equal opportunities policy as a concept and as a legal mechanism emerging from the Western tradition, which was directly applied to CEE countries, such as Slovenia, when they joined the EU.

In this chapter, I address the issues in doing a feminist ethnography based on the archives of a lesbian feminist community structured around music. In doing so, I grapple with questions central to archival research with marginalized social movement communities. I pose these questions as moments of interrogation where I draw on personal experience as well as literature on archival research to create a framework aimed at social movement researchers who are considering or doing archival work. These interrogations cover three broad areas and apply to different moments in the research process. First, what are the origin stories of social movement archives? Second, how can researchers construct the stories of marginalized and vulnerable communities? Third, how can we access the voices of community members found in the archives? To answer these questions, I identify how conceptual tools such as identifying community boundaries and documenting types of interaction can aid a scholar in the research process.