Gazing at the child protection system in England through the lens of Black feminists Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and bell hooks, I analyse the role of race, gender and class in deciding who is allowed to be a mother. Using ethnographic vignettes, I interrogate how colonialism, poverty and patriarchy has affected one woman’s fight to mother her children and document how the state has tried to ‘unmother’ her. The article is based on an 18-month multimodal ethnographic study with ten children and their mothers, all of whom have experienced domestic abuse and social work intervention in England. All children lived with their mothers and siblings in social housing and had one or both parents from a country formerly colonised by the UK or another European country. The article concludes that the narratives and practices in England’s child protection system have deep roots in the colonial discourse on mothering. Through the ethnographic account of one mother, Nicole, I reflect on Sharpe’s question of how a woman becomes ‘a former mother’ or ‘unmothered’. I argue that ‘the hold’ that Sharpe writes about is very much in existence in the child protection system in England.
This article examines the Malayalam film Ullozhukku , directed by Christo Tomy, as a meditation on feminist ethics, affective complexity and intergenerational trauma within Kerala’s layered social structure, which is entangled by patriarchal, class and caste systems. Progressing beyond the familiar feminist tropes of resistance and empowerment, the film presents ethically complicated women who strategically navigate betrayal, care and survival in a system that was never built for them. This article contends that Ullozhukku destabilises the various binaries of victim and agent, complicity and resistance, care and harm, offering a view of feminism that is grounded in contradiction, affective entanglement and endurance. It suggests that the women in the film cannot be neatly positioned as either oppressed or complicit but inhabit ethically complicated spaces shaped by kinship, obligation and systemic constraint. The film foregrounds the texture of everyday life as a space where feminist meaning is lived and negotiated in unfamiliar forms. The article draws on the work of feminist thinkers including Deniz Kandiyoti, who conceptualises the patriarchal bargain, and Uma Chakravarti, who examines how class, kinship and gender mediate survival and complicity. It also draws from trauma studies, engaging Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory and Cathy Caruth’s framing of trauma as belated and unassimilable, and from Sara Ahmed’s and Leela Gandhi’s concepts of sticky objects and affective communities in the field of affect studies. Aspects from hydrofeminism and spatial theory help examine how spatial conditions, particularly floodwaters, catalyse emotional exposure and relational transformation. This interdisciplinary framework situates the film within a transnational feminist conversation that is attentive to ambiguity and the difficult ethics of survival. Rather than arriving at conclusive moral judgments, this research proposes that Ullozhukku articulates a feminism that emerges from the contradictions of ordinary lives, where agency, interdependence, survival and quiet acts of care form the basis of feminist possibility.
We are a group of four persons, assigned female at birth, identifying as queer and non-binary, residing in India. We ruminate about the need and politics of queer nurturing. Drawing from our own and our friends’ fragmented life histories, we wonder about the elements of nurturing, such as intergenerational allyship, friendship and kinship, that shape our present. Our rumination and writing are collaborative. We have received formal academic training methods and methodologies in our disciplinary backgrounds and identify as academic activists. Because of this combination, our writing evades formalism, with the intention of being accessible to both non-academics and our students. In a larger global dialogical space, this will be categorised as ‘knowledge production from the Global South’, a somewhat overused phrase perhaps that hides more than it clarifies. Other than our geographical location, the phrase fails to highlight that we are also bearers of caste-class privileges. So, instead of conceptually positioning ourselves as (uninterrogated) figures from the Global South, we reframe ourselves as dialogists to exchange thoughts about queer nurturing. We hope that this will help sustain transnational dialogues when conversations fail and authoritarian regimes flourish. We met via Google Meet video chats, discussed and then went back to writing. Nurturing is central to our lives and movements, which is absent from a popular dictionary definition. We are queer folks embroiled in turbulent political moments that translate to violent casteist and classist affronts on the ground. Therefore, we look to the promise of nurturing as we almost break when we break each other’s fall. This promise is manifested in our connections to each other, i.e. the authors. Nurturing is all we have against violent encounters, institutional backlashes and dying elders. Nurturing, while interactional and requiring individual attention, will be viable if it is informed by radical compassion and bound by the constitutional imagination of the social. It is urgent to recapitulate feminist and queer histories of nurturing and situate our political position today. It is perhaps the experiential and epistemological basis of feminist and queer politics, where nurturance finds political meaning.
This article reflects on a coaching session held in Vienna in March 2025 for recipients of the Emma Goldman Award, which recognises groundbreaking research on feminism and inequality across Europe. What began as a simple reflective exercise unexpectedly became a powerful space of collective vulnerability and healing where emotions acted as catalysts for knowledge, solidarity and resistance. Participants shared experiences of racism, colonialism, gendered oppression and survival, transforming the session into a site of resistance that challenged neoliberal models of professional development, which often prioritise productivity over care. Drawing on a humanist feminist approach that foregrounds emotions, care and relationality as vital to knowledge production, I situate these reflections within feminist decolonial and anti-racist thought, writing from my positionality as a Palestinian scholar shaped by settler colonialism, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the destruction of my family home and the profound grief of losing my father. By centring emotions as sites of knowledge and resistance in shared struggle, I show how feminist communities transform pain into strength, sustain movements for justice and create alternative spaces of collective healing and solidarity.
This article takes the form of a deliberate monologue addressed to the figure of the ‘casteless queer’ in Nepal and South Asia due to the structural silences that make dialogue impossible. Drawing on Sharmila Rege’s theorisation of ‘casteless gender’ and feminist standpoint theory, it conceptualises the casteless queer not as a fixed identity but as a location that can be inhabited across caste and ethnic positions. Through a critical reading of Nepali LGBTI+ and queer activism, the article shows how queerness is routinely articulated as independent of caste, Indigeneity and class, even as activism is densely populated by Adivasi-Janajatis and other marginalised groups. Centring Nepal’s specific sociopolitical history, it challenges the conflation of Nepal with India and resists both the erasure and romanticisation of Indigeneity, insisting on its entanglement with caste. The article ultimately argues that the universal queer subject in South Asia is a distortion of the casteless queer and calls for a reorientation of queer studies that foregrounds Indigenous and Dalit epistemologies as sites of theory making.
This study examines the gender dynamics of inter-caste romantic relationships (Dalit/non-Dalit) among Maoist combatants during Nepal's insurgency (1996-2006). Sixty open-ended interviews were conducted in 2018-2022 with former combatants and leaders in mid-west Nepal, where the Maoist insurgency originated and spread. Drawing on a feminist intersectional perspective, the study reveals that despite the Maoist Party's ideological promotion of inter-caste marriage as a revolutionary praxis, combatants' lived experiences exhibited deep contradictions. Despite their ideological commitments, combatants considered broader practices, such as family expectations and societal perceptions, when selecting partners. Women combatants (Dalit and non-Dalit) expressed significant apprehension and actively sought family approval due to the fear of social rejection and future instability, whereas men largely bypassed familial consultations. Furthermore, partner selection frequently relied on enduring caste stereotypes, gendered expectations of labour and 'worldly' criteria such as occupation, physical appearance and talent, mirroring broader societal norms that the revolution sought to dismantle and reflecting both the limitations and adaptability of the Maoist ideology in navigating personal and social identities. The study concludes that intimate relationships are a critical site at which revolutionary ideology falters, failing to overcome entrenched patriarchy, caste hierarchies and social constraints, particularly for women, thus highlighting the limits of structural transformation within the movement.
In this article, I explore the ambivalent and recurring theme of feeling at home as it emerged in my doctoral research. I conducted twenty-nine in-depth interviews and four focus group discussions over three years with women involved in nine common spaces that had been established across five cities in Turkey, each shaped by distinct needs and desires and formed within the political enthusiasm sparked by the 2013 Gezi Protests. One of the key insights of my research was that women felt at home within these common spaces insofar as they could authentically be themselves. Firstly, I examine the meaning of being-oneself by exploring how women reclaim common spaces as sites of being-herself through an embodied politics of location. Building on this, I examine how women extend this politics beyond the commons to resist masculine displacement procedures. Drawing on Stavros Stavrides' concept of threshold spaces, I further argue that these commons also enable encounters with otherness. The emotional complexity of such encounters leads me to explore how these spaces may simultaneously serve as sites of self-dispossession, drawing on the theory of Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou. Through this analysis of the interplay between being-oneself and self-dispossession, I interrogate whether a sense of home can acquire new feminist meanings. In the final section, I illustrate the transformation of communities of common places into closed ones, driven by escalating authoritarianism in Turkey. By discussing their shift from thresholds to shelters, I focus on the self-enclosing aspects of feeling at home for women. The article contributes to feminist literature by reframing home not as a fixed site of identity or constraint but as a dynamic space of selfhood and otherness in women's practices of commoning.
This autoethnography, structured as a short story, traces my journey from childhood to my current role as a female researcher exploring the subversive possibilities of bisexuality in an urban Indian context as part of my doctoral research. My early beliefs were shaped by the social norms of my convent education, a Catholic upbringing and community, each reinforcing a rigid understanding of morality, relationships and sexuality. Through ethnography, I navigate between personal experiences and academic inquiry, encountering unresolved questions and contradictions that challenged these foundational beliefs. This short story highlights the complexities of living within structures that impose normative ideals, social expectations and moral standards, as well as the realities of everyday deviations. It further interrogates the essence of morality while positioning myself as a woman in society and reflecting on how my socialisation and lived experiences influenced my moral reasoning. By situating my personal journey within broader sociocultural contexts, this narrative ultimately questions the hegemonic patriarchal heteronormative and homonormative structures based on monogamy and monosexuality, offering a critical lens on how sexuality is constructed and negotiated in contemporary society.
The theories underpinning gender/feminist studies, alongside critical race studies and queer studies, are rooted in historic, intersecting, radical social movements, driven by communities who were and remain oppressed by states, societies and institutions. Individuals who work in these fields therefore hold an ambiguous relationship with the university, often experiencing it as a site of both material potential and co-optation. In this article, I explore whether, and how, those in this contradictory position can carve out space and time from within institutional thresholds to engage in decolonial feminist praxes. Abolitionist theorists have sketched the figure of the 'subversive intellectual', whose labour is paradoxically indispensable to and disowned by the university. Seeking the material existence of this figure, I held conversations with subversive intellectuals. My analysis of these interviews follows queer and posthuman feminist thinkers who invest in the political potential of the body - and the multiplicity of its possible relations with space, time and other bodies - for counter-institutional action. In this article, my aim is not to determine what role, if any, the subversive intellectual has in the university's abolition, but I do share and make connections between the stories of individuals who are re-orientating relationships, spaces and time towards an imagined future, and who are collectively embracing a queer uprising from within the university.
This text blends semi-transcription and personal reflection, documenting a conversation I had with two sex workers in Sonagachhi, Kolkata's red-light district (India). Facilitated by Namita Bhattacharya, founder of Umar Swapno foundation and an activist by profession, this piece focuses on translating and recording these women's voices rather than engaging in extensive academic analysis. It reflects on their complex lives, dynamic notions of motherhood, the instability and fallacy of international borders and how the nation-state constantly interrupts intimate spaces of belonging.
This article engages with the complex relationship between vulnerability, relationality and hierarchy through the creation of Tatyana: Reflected in Your Gaze, a portrait of my friend, Tatyana, painted during our time in Oxford. By expanding the conventional understanding of vulnerability, drawing on Judith Butler and bell hooks, the author reframes it as a relational space and an empowering, co-creative process rather than a mere point of precariousness. Through the act of painting, I subvert traditional artist-subject hierarchies and instead foster a collaborative, mutual dialogue that allows for shared agency in the portrayal of the subject. In reflecting on the painting's creation, I navigate the tension between personal identity, social context and academic constraints at Oxford, a space often resistant to vulnerability. The painting Tatyana becomes a dynamic site of negotiation, where multiple identities, histories and truths coexist, reminding us that meaning and power are never fixed but always shifting. This work, while exploring the limits of representation, invites ongoing dialogue and engagement with the vulnerabilities it seeks to represent, positioning the painting as a site for continuous transformation and collective understanding.
Women entering the performing arts, particularly theatre and studio spaces, in 20th-century India navigated a patriarchal and hierarchically structured sphere marked by systemic gendered exploitation. Moreover, the stigma surrounding women's participation in public performance rendered them subjects of social disapproval and moral scrutiny. This article argues that, despite such stigma and the hierarchical power structures that characterised the performing arts in 20th-century India, networks of care enabled early women performers to enter and sustain careers in this field. Drawing on the autobiographies of Kanan Devi and Zohra Segal, pioneers of Indian theatre and cinema, the study explores how their narratives of everyday trials are interwoven with accounts of supportive relationships that shaped their artistic journeys and resilience. The analysis situates these relational dynamics within the broader framework of the ethics of care. However, given the Western-centric orientation of care ethics and its tendency to prioritise gender at the expense of other intersecting identities, the study adopts an intersectional approach that grounds care in performers' caste, class and gendered experiences in 20th-century India. In doing so, it contributes to feminist scholarship on the significance of relationality and community in advancing women's empowerment and extending care ethics beyond its Global North foundations.
When queer characters are erased or denied closure on screen, fans mobilise not only for representation but to reconfigure memory and rehearse queer world-making. This article develops the concept of mnemonic fan labour, theorising it as queer fan practices through which grief, endurance and creativity contest heteronormative rhythms of media storytelling, as exemplified by collective activist interventions. Drawing on memory studies, queer theory and fan studies scholarship, I foreground queer fandom as a potent site of vernacular memory-making. A tripartite framework is developed to theorise queer fandom as mnemonic labour: (1) chrono-affective labour, manifested through collective endurance in waiting rituals that anchor fans in global queer histories of resilience; (2) transmedia-memetic labour, exemplifying remediation as fans remix tropes and circulate hybrid archives of memory across platforms and cultures; and (3) speculative labour, exemplifying pre-mediation, as fan-made alternative endings and utopian world-making rehearse futures beyond unsatisfying narrative closures. These modalities are exemplified in the 'YaoTing' fandom of the long-running Taigi soap opera S & egrave;-kan-ts & icirc;ng ((sic)(sic)(sic); 2013-2015). Through a digital ethnography and qualitative analysis of 3199 fan-generated threads posted between 2014 and 2015 on PTT, Taiwan's largest online forum, the article traces how audiences enact mnemonic practices to resist queer erasure and forge new queer memories. Therefore, theorising fan labour as mnemonic labour opens imaginative pathways towards queer belonging and futures. The article theorises that fans' mnemonic labour emerges as radical world-making: a queer memory practice reclaiming time, remaking genre and rendering queer life liveable, again and anew.
In this creative-critical visual ethnographic essay, as in my work in general, I am interested in understanding traces - what we leave behind. It is an archaeological work of sorts, an excavation into the depths of everyday life, into the dimensions that remain unarticulated. In anthropological writing, the messiness of fieldwork is often obscured. How, then, does one navigate anthropological research on a topic that requires precisely diving into what is messy, what lacks an unequivocal verbal language to be named? The visual ethnographic approach I share here responds to this question. I studied the discursive practices surrounding incestuous violence against Indigenous and peasant women at Bolivia's National Psychiatric Hospital, at the intersection of psychiatry and traditional Indigenous medicine. The creative-critical narratives developed in this visual ethnography - grounded in photography, dance and drawing - articulate my interpretation of Tatsumi Hijikata's thinking on body and language. The images I share here, including the pieces of dance and drawings and the creative narratives they reference, were created by my friends and fellow survivors of violence(s) at Bolivia's National Psychiatric Hospital; my partner-photographer, who assisted me with my research; and me. Photos, dance and drawing - aside from making visible a trace of multiple forms of victimisation, including sexual, institutional and ethnic violence - allow for their resignification and even the exploration of the aesthetics of violence and suffering from the perspectives of survivors, thereby challenging any attempt at simplification of this social reality in academic literature.
This manifesto explores the intersections of crip feminism, disability activism and queer politics, articulating a collective vision of resistance, solidarity and reimagined futures for people with physical disabilities, particularly disabled women. Our work challenges mechanisms that marginalise non-normative bodies through poetic expression and critical reflection, advocating for self-determination, accessibility and intimate citizenship. Drawing on the lived experiences and sociopolitical activism of Chien-Ju Chou, Chun-Chieh Lin and Ya-Wen Huang, the manifesto highlights the struggles against structural and everyday exclusions compounded by ableism and hetero-patriarchy while emphasising the consciousness of 'co-dependency' as both a principle and a praxis within feminist and disability justice movements. By centring these women's voices and their agency in knowledge production, the manifesto resists the ableist tendency to objectify disability and instead fosters transformative politics rooted in mutual care. Ultimately, it asserts crip feminism as both a theoretical framework and an embodied practice of reclaiming space and authorship for disabled communities.
Shambu is a member of staff at the MSM branch of a non-profit organisation in urban Bangalore, India, who works on HIV/STI awareness and prevention. His daily life is a careful balance between family responsibilities, his job, multiple sexual partners and sex work. This piece shares Shambu's reflections on his early experiences with sexuality, his engagement in cruising sites, gender performance, engagement with male sex workers, non-consensual sex and the financial realities that shape his life, including his involvement in activism. Defying rigid identity boundaries and societal expectations, he openly discusses his relationships with both men and his wife while expressing a desire to be transgender. He recalls a significant relationship with a man he called his 'panthi', marked by an intricate dynamic of emotions, sex, dominance, economic exchange and silence. His narrative offers a nuanced exploration of identity, gender, sexuality, activism, consent, morality and economic survival in Bangalore. It defies the hegemonic structure of society by challenging the binary construction of gender and sexuality.
This poetic reflection navigates the intersections of memory, gendered space and sonic inheritance, weaving personal recollection with cultural critique. Inspired by the hum of my late grandmother’s song – one I never heard but which remains alive in familial narratives – this work reclaims the kitchen as a site of resilience, history and intergenerational transmission. Anchored in Begum Akhtar’s song ‘Jochona koreche ari ashe na aamar bari’, this poem traces my grandmother’s migration from Bangladesh during India’s Partition in 1947, evoking the national silences of courtesans and the gendered silencing within our homes. The lyric ‘Jochona koreche ari’ literally translates to ‘The moonlight is sulking away’. In Begum Akhtar’s ghazal, ‘ari’ signals melancholic estrangement, while in Bengali childhood-play, it gestures towards a tone of mock sulking – a tender expression of intimacy, anger and attachment. This layered affect allows the moonlight itself to become a character – personified as playful yet wounded, withdrawing affection by choosing not to illuminate the beloved’s home, the beloved being my grandmother. The light travels into alleys, across spaces, but withholds its presence from the speaker’s doorstep. In this withdrawal, the moon becomes both witness to and agent of migration’s grief – a celestial register of absence that mirrors the internal experience of displacement. When all else changes through forced migration, moonlight becomes one of the few constants by which the dislocated body recognises ‘home’ – but even that now refuses to arrive. By centring the kitchen’s everyday soundscapes – the clinking of utensils, chopping rhythms and unvoiced hums – the poem engages with feminist poetics, listening with intention to the echoes of silenced histories. A singing river on my tongue thus becomes a meditation on sound, memory and agency, illuminating the ways in which poetic practice can reclaim maternal and marginalised voices across borders.
This article examines how Xiaohongshu, a fashion- and lifestyle-orientated online social commerce platform with a predominantly female user base (70%), simultaneously challenges and reinforces conventional beauty standards. While users are positioned within the discourse of 'she power', the platform's framing of empowerment remains deeply contradictory. Drawing on six months of online ethnography and in-depth interviews, this article explores how Xiaohongshu constructs and commercialises stylised femininity as a form of spectacle. Analysing aesthetic practices through three dimensions - norms, dual gazes and resistance - the findings reveal that user engagement (e.g. likes, comments, shares) drives algorithmic learning. This process transforms beauty pressures into data, reinforcing platform-defined ideals while promoting 'relatable' influencers who mirror everyday users. Such dynamics offer surface-level relief from beauty norms yet deepen entrenchment in consumerist algorithmic culture. The article extends Guy Debord's theory of the spectacle by demonstrating how platform participation sustains aesthetic standards through interactive visibility. It also contributes to scholarship on gendered platform economies by uncovering the socio-technical mechanisms shaping women's engagement with digital beauty cultures. As the data primarily reflect urban, youth-orientated experiences, future research should investigate non-urban and cross-platform variations.
This article offers a critical reflection on my community-based participatory action research (CBPR) with a migrant women's collective based in South China. I situate this self-reflexive account within the current conjuncture of post-Cold War neoliberal globalisation, where the US-China geopolitical confrontation looms large, giving rise to new authoritarian realities that compel Chinese feminists across domestic and transnational networks to envision and enact alternative forms of solidarity, activism and scholarship. Against this backdrop, I ask: How can we practise community-based research in solidarity with grassroots partners amid divisive and repressive political conditions? How can ethically accountable and politically attentive research relationships be co-nurtured to confront epistemic injustice and withstand political risk? Drawing on the migrant women's solidarity praxis of 'walking together', I conceptualise my CBPR as an ongoing transborder feminist crossing, where community and scholarly partners cultivate dissident companionship and walk across structural divides to co-produce knowledge for meaningful social impact. Through an autoethnographic account of my contingent border-crossing CBPR during the Covid-19 pandemic-trade war crisis, I discuss how the migrant women's ethics of solidarity, including mindful gatekeeping and meaningful reciprocity, resist hegemonic knowledge production and inform transborder feminist research engagement amid geopolitical uncertainty. By foregrounding Chinese grassroots women's solidarity politics, this text contributes to Global South feminist epistemologies and methodologies and calls for new forms of transborder political intimacy in resistance to the global refashioning of authoritarian regimes.
This piece sketches out how migrant Chinese women massage workers define their massage labour as health work rather than sex work to negotiate the oversexualisation of their labour. Centring migrant Chinese women massage workers' narratives of how they define their labour, I show how these women understand their healing labour as cultivating health and wellness rather than erotic pleasure, even if clients might experience pleasure. I argue that the impulse to distance such labour as categorically not sex work - in order to gain legitimacy as a worker under gendered, racial capitalism - is both smart and harmful. Drawing on Chinese migrant women massage workers' narratives, I analyse and push back against moral narratives of 'proper' work and workers that affirm a binary view of work as morally just and proper or immoral and corrupt. I ask, why do migrant Chinese women massage workers have to rely on scripts of respectability to receive respect as workers, and what does this say about the nature of gendered, racial capitalism?
