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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.

The young feminists in this chapter were part of several feminist groups in Manchester, analysed in this ethnographic case study as part of Manchester’s feminist movement. The young women described their motivations for ‘be(com)ing feminist’ as ‘personal-political’ and ‘political-personal’ journeys (Hanisch, 1970) that came about because of individual and group experiences of gendered disadvantage and a recognition that the needs of women, and women’s equality, would not be achieved in current political and democratic arrangements that favour a focus on the ‘common good’. While the young women campaigned for several causes (abortion rights, safer streets, sexual objectification, and so on), their frustrations with the mainstream neglect of women’s issues were the key drivers for self-organising for political action. The aim of their activism was to dismantle (or at the very least diminish) the patriarchal social order, and their participation and activism focused on women’s issues and rights and the need to create a ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) that addresses their group needs, differences, and specificities.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to analyze how young women from diverse national backgrounds adopt or resist feminist identities. This research is founded on three questions. First, what role does feminism play in the lives of young women from varying geographical and cultural locations? Second, how do media represent and shape understandings of feminism and enactments of femininity? Third, what is the interplay between the perceived relevance of feminism and focus on heterosexual partnering?

Methodology/approach – The research is based on semistructured individual interviews with 13 women. The theoretical framework is based on social movements, feminist, and postfeminist literature.

Findings – I found that the women adhered to media-fabricated stereotypes of feminists such as bra burners, and that despite their differing cultural backgrounds, they shared strikingly similar understandings of feminism. When asked questions about the film Bridget Jones's Diary, many of the women were conflicted with a simultaneous desire for independence and a yearning for traditional heterosexual relationships. The tensions surrounding tradition and modernity, coupled with the perception that feminism is the purview of lesbians resulted in many of them resisting feminist identities.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter highlights the complexities and contradictions exhibited by young women negotiating feminist identities. It demonstrates how difficult it is for feminism to change with respect to broader shifts in social life when it is saddled with such monolithic and static stereotypes. We must strongly consider the future of feminism if young women fail to see its relevance to their lives.

This paper evaluates the modern baseline presumption of nonconsent in sexual assault (rape) cases in light of different theories of sexuality (feminism on the one hand and sex positivism/queer theory on the other) and in light of how sexuality manifests itself in the lives of contemporary young women. The authors analyze social science literature on contemporary heterosexual practices such as sexting and hook-ups, as well as contemporary media imagery, to inform a contemporary understanding of the ways in which young people perceive and experience sex. Using this evidence as a foundation, the authors reconsider the ongoing utility of a baseline presumption of nonconsent in sexual assault cases. This paper demonstrates the complex relationship between women’s sexual autonomy, the contemporary culture’s encouragement of women’s celebration of their own sexual objectification and the persistence of high rates of unwanted sex. In the end, it demonstrates why a legal presumption against consent may neither reduce the rate of nonconsensual sex, nor raise the rate of reported rapes. At the same time, it shows how the presumption itself is unlikely to generate harmful consequences: if it deters anything, it likely deters unwanted sex, whether consented to or not.

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.

In this paper the authors aim to examine the forms in which feminist activism is played out at contemporary managerial universities and pose the following question: what notions of feminist activism and feminist theory have to be revisited in order to sustain the target of gender equality and support its move further into the centre and the mainstream of managerial universities?

Based on action research the authors document a workshop which they organised for different constituencies (administrators, researchers and feminist activists) working towards gender equality at an Austrian university and discuss its results in the context of feminist theory.

The five voices collected at the workshop show that feminist theories are still the underlying guiding principles for feminist activism towards gender equality at managerial universities. As this is the first time that different generations of feminist activists have been present at managerial universities and are working in a top‐down environment supported by administrators responsible for gender equality, common practices that have been successful to implement gender equality in the past have to be refined and new spaces for collaboration established.

This is the first paper that explores the multiple voices amongst those engaged in the process of transformation towards gender equality at contemporary managerial universities. It shows that an open discussion of complementary and conflicting ways in which the representatives can construct their selves, their strategies and their actions is required in order to start “managing the management” anew – from a higher level than the feminist grassroots activists in the 1980s and 1990s.

What effect does strategic frame adaptation have on movement continuation and popularity? Using a comprehensive online dataset from three North American cities, we show how SlutWalk’s continuous strategic adaptation of frames in response to criticisms and changing political and social climates has influenced its popularity over the past three years. SlutWalk’s initial “Shame-Blame” and “Slut Celebration” frames conveyed powerful messages that catalyzed protests and generated outrage mostly from young feminists during its formative phase. However, meanings of the term “slut” varied widely across racial, cultural, and generational contexts, causing the “Slut Celebration” frame to be problematic for some micro-cohorts of feminists and leading to a decline in protest participation after initial enthusiasm waned. The campaign responded to the criticisms by minimizing the use of the word “slut” and emphasizing the more transnationally resonant “Shame-Blame” and “Pro-sex, Pro-consent frames,” resulting in increased participation and continued prominence of the SlutWalk across North America.

In this paper I draw some reflections from the experience of the Free University of Women in Milan, Italy. Through this experience it was possible to clarify some of the main issues at stake in feminist knowledge production and pedagogy such as: the relationship between women's and feminist culture, the knowledge production processes which occur among women, their epistemology, and the kind of scientific rigor of such a body of knowledge. These issues are particularly important from the perspective of teaching and transmitting feminism to a new generation of women.