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The notion of sexual health has become a buzzword across various spheres, including the scientific, political, and social arenas. In a similar manner, discussions about the subject of disability and sexuality are commonly articulated through the lens of sexual health and “healthy sexualities.” Greater focus has been placed on issues of protection, abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, and unplanned pregnancy. Opportunities to talk about sex, desire, and pleasure is missing in this discourse. Drawing on my experience conducting studies about disability and sexuality, I interrogate the (over)reliance and unproblematized use in terms of the language of sexual health and healthy sexuality when it comes to people labeled/with intellectual disabilities.

This chapter presents an interpretation of gentrification and touristification as gender-related issues. The underlying question driving this discussion is: How can we envision feminist cities when certain forms of feminism today are strongly intertwined with consumerism? In the context of ghost cities or neighborhoods, Airbnb and digital nomads dominate, skyrocketing prices make life unaffordable, support structures vanish in favor of place branding, and oppressive security practices are normalized. The chapter examines the history of neoliberal deactivation in Rome’s Ostiense neighborhood. It explores the resistance by places of liberation, such as the occupied former barracks of Porto Fluviale, which serves as a residence for homeless families. It delves into the genuine transformation of the area into an open-air museum exploited for tourism and the occupation of a former nightclub turned into a meeting space for marginalized individuals to ensure their safety through acts of resistance. The territorial appropriation dynamics driven by neoliberal forces have altered geographies, resulting in an emotional detachment that renders the city unlivable. The chapter touches upon the transformation of soulful places into sites of emotional resistance, illustrated through Sara Ventroni’s poem dedicated to the Gasometer. This suburban colossus has indelibly shaped the area’s cityscape since the early 20th century, constantly caught between branding and resistance. Drawing from these experiences and insights, a new theory of the city is proposed, one rooted in the principle of care.

Environments are gendered and environmental issues have impacts on gender. This introduction highlights some current environmental issues from the ecofeminist perspective that characterizes the contributions and summarizes the chapters in the volume that feature the activities of indigenous women in the Columbian Amazon, urban environments in Athens and Rome, workplace environments in Bangladeshi offices, STEM labs in universities in the United States, and homes used for sex work in Punjab. It ends with a suggestion for a queer spiritual ecofeminist approach to environments.

This research aims at explaining the phenomenon of the “black children” (heihaizi), a very little-known generation who lived with concealment under the one-child policy in China. The one-child policy was officially introduced to nationwide at the end of 1979 by permitting per couple to have one child only, later modified to a second child allowed if the first was a girl in rural China in 1984. It was officially replaced by a nation-wide two-child policy and most existing research focused on the parents’ sufferings and policy changes. The term “black children” has been mainly used to describe their absence from their family hukou registration and education. However, this research aims at expanding the meaning of being “black” to explain the children who were concealed more than at the level of family formal registration, but also physical freedom and emotional bond. What we do not yet know are the details of their lived experiences from a day-to-day base: where did they live? How were they raised up? Who were involved? Who benefited from it and who did not? In this way, this research challenges the existing scholarship on the one-child policy and repositions the “black children” as primary victims, and reveals the family as a key figure in co-producing their diminished status with the support of state power. It is very important to understand these children’s loss of citizenship and human freedom from the inside of the family because they were concealed in so many ways away from public view and interventions. This research focuses on illustrating how their lack of access to continued, stabilized, and reciprocally recognized family interactions framed their very idea of self-worth and identity.

The UK government has taken the lead in accelerating the capacity of higher education to engage with sustainability accounting and adopting a novel systematic approach toward a collective implementation of and contribution to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The UN SDG 16 “Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions” promotes the (re)building of effective and accountable institutions. In line with the institutional logics metatheory, we provide empirical evidence on how the alignment between social mechanisms alongside the reputation of higher education institutions (HEIs) and SDGs on transparent and responsible service (SDG 16) affect the students' overall experience. Using a sample of 142 UK HEIs, interpretative content analysis and ordinary least squares, the results show that integrating HEIs' responsible-oriented research agenda proactively with high sustainability reputation adds significantly to greater student satisfaction.

This performance autoethnography may or may not be interpreted as a continuation of a conversation regarding the experiences of those with devalued statuses in academic settings. The authors rely on “strange accounting” to consider their experiences in the academy from various standpoints: before and after promotion, before and after leaving academia. While reflecting on our past experiences, we introduce the concept of “everyday precariousness” as a way of explaining the normalization of instability, insecurity, and negative affect that is part of everyday life for those with devalued statuses in academic settings and beyond. Everyday precariousness is an embodied experience for those in vulnerable positions. Normalized exposure to risks, such as discrimination, harassment, bullying, or structural instability, produces an undercurrent of threat that permeates academic culture. Our stories of everyday precariousness span race, ethnicity, class, academic roles, and gender boundaries (among many others). Analyzing these experiences furthers previous work on the uses of strange accounting as well as the dynamics of status silencing. In the final analysis, unresisted and unabated, everyday precariousness and status silencing can lead to institutional failure and resonance disasters.

Gender-diverse people experience unique cultural and interpersonal stigma in mainstream society and sometimes within their own communities; they face allegations of inauthenticity based on their nonconformity to either cisnormative or transnormative gender regimes. Based on 21 in-depth life history interviews, we unveil the intricate interactional process of negotiating identity and authenticity in the biographical work of gender-diverse individuals. In this study, gender-diverse people engaged in a “gender audit” with their gender-diverse interviewer. Gender audits yield verbal performances of gender with oneself and others. Ambiguity was “accounted for” or “embraced and created” in their biographical work to organize their life stories and undermine binary essentialism – a discourse that was “discursively constraining.” Gender audits took place in participants' day-to-day lives, either through self-audits, questioning from others, or both. In the final analysis, we assert that we all engage in gender auditing. Gender audits are intersubjective sites of domination, subordination, resistance, and social change. Gender diversity, then, can be viewed as a product of gender in flux.

Despite Bangladesh’s continued attempts, gender disparity in the workplace has long been a concern, and progress has been slow. Studies conducted earlier indicate that working women in Bangladesh experience an unwelcoming work environment, leading to unequal pay and limited opportunities for their career growth. Academic literature focuses little on the connection between gender and the physical work environment. This chapter focuses on the connection between the masculinist culture of organizations, how work is carried out, and workplaces are set up, illuminating the crucial role played by the built environment in maintaining gender equality. Infrastructure, spatial design, safety measures, amenities, and the biased culture often influence the obstacles to women’s long-term success in the workplace. This chapter investigates and comprehends the constraints female employees encounter in Bangladesh during their work by scrutinizing the influence of the physical space and the biased socio-psychological environment. As women’s long-term professional progress depends on how these elements are interrelated, improving the environment is the first step toward a fairer and more empowered work environment. A qualitative approach has been used in this study. Seventy-eight Bangladeshi graduate, working women have participated in this research. The results show that, regardless of efforts, the environment in Bangladeshi workplaces is inhospitable, directly affecting women’s careers. Building a welcoming workspace accommodating all genders is crucial for creating gender parity and promoting long-term professional growth. Therefore, this research suggests that the government should capitalize on successful efforts and investigate alternative techniques to improve this issue.

Our present quest for sustainable cities requires a holistic understanding of city construction and people’s well-being. Feminist scholars have shown that urban space does not attend to women’s needs. This study focuses on women’s everyday life in Athens, Greece in late-1980s. This is a unique spatio-temporal point since it is located at the edge of several prevailing dichotomies – geopolitical, cultural and temporal. It examines how women use, experience and reconstitute public spaces in the city and aims to understand both how public spaces – with their material and social dimensions – restrict women’s lives, and how women reappropriate and (re)constitute urban space. It is based on in-depth interviews with women from three areas of Greater Athens, with different social class profiles. It focuses on neighborhood as a physical space, women’s social networks in the neighborhood and women’s mobility. The main findings include that the nexus of gender and class is inscribed in public spaces so that these restrict women and their right to the city; the organization of public spaces ignores women’s reproductive responsibilities; women participate in the public sphere, but gender hierarchies have not been eliminated; while local social networks are fundamental for women in their efforts to reappropriate public spaces. It concludes that the transition to sustainable – enjoyable – inclusive cities will benefit from incorporating women’s experiences and needs; adopting a socio-spatial perspective that focuses on everyday life; a focus on social reproduction too; and an explicit aim to eliminate gender hierarchies (rather than inclusion).