Search results

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.

Examining how ideas about violence and agency relate to gender, this chapter considers women's participation in armed struggle during the 1960s–1980s. Drawing on a small selection of case studies, it specifically explores women's involvement with left-wing urban guerrilla groups in Italy, West Germany and the United States. I examine different examples of political violence connected to ‘women's issues’, discuss the experiences and reflections of women involved and look at how such activities were received by the broader women's liberation movement. With a foundation thus established, the chapter interrogates the implications of the examples covered in relation to the social organisation of gender, touches on their significance to feminism and concludes with a consideration of the subversive and potentially liberatory possibilities associated with women's political violence.

In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.

Relying on social influence and sociomateriality theories, this research provides new insights about the social and material drivers relating to the sexualisation of online behaviour of social media influencers.

Using a netnographic approach, observation data were gathered from the Instagram accounts of 20 influencers dedicated to beauty and fashion. In addition, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted with women adopting sexualisation practices online. The data were analysed using an abductive strategy; all materials were coded according to thematic analysis principles.

The authors observe that sexualisation is a result of a complex system of social interactions encouraged and reinforced by multiple factors and actors. In particular, the authors outline the major influence of technology that has become a non-human authority defining implicit norms and shaping the beliefs and behaviours of women influencers.

In contrast to existing literature which mainly focuses on the negative consequences of sexualisation, this work sheds some light on social constructs in social media. The authors contribute to the growing literature on social media influencers. Although many works focus on their persuasiveness, this work helps to better understand the social setting, motivations and pressures that are contained in social and technological contexts.

Filicide, the killing of a child by a parent, is one of the only crimes committed by women and men in roughly equal numbers. Women's violence against their children, however, more profoundly confounds common understandings of the links between gender and family violence, leading to its ambivalent treatment within the media. When men kill their children, they are usually characterised as either monsters or as sad, failed men. When women kill their children, they are usually represented as bad mothers or mad mothers suffering under the burdens of the pathological female body. In both cases, a mental illness/distress lens is common, though how it manifests is inflected by gender. This chapter examines recent Australian news representations of maternal filicide-suicide. Focussing on the mental illness/distress frame in news, it examines the ideological work this frame does in decontextualising and de-gendering maternal filicide, framing women's mental illness/distress in ‘psychocentric’ terms that strip it of political or social significance and subjecting it to an individualised lens that obscures the gendered aetiologies of women's use of violence.