Recent Malayalam cinema returns to folklore under conditions of feminist contestation and expanded platform circulation. This article compares Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra (2025) and Bramayugam (2024) to examine how inherited supernatural figures reorganize gendered injury, caste-feudal memory, embodied fear, oral knowledge, and transregional visibility. Using qualitative feminist textual and contextual analysis, the article shows how these retellings connect gendered experience and cultural memory with the films' images, sound, and circulation. Historically situating the films against Malayalam cinema's earlier economies of female suffering and spectral revenge, the study argues that Lokah converts Kalliyankattu Neeli into a mobile superwoman while making mythic rage legible through neon metropolitanism, spectacular agency, and franchise grammar. Bramayugam, despite its predominantly male cast, exposes patriarchal and caste domination through a feudal household, a threshold female spirit, possessed authority, and a precarious bardic voice. Their sonic worlds extend this contrast: Lokah's constructed language Mozhika invokes indigenous-coded oral memory while risking aestheticized difference, whereas the bard's singing functions as labour, survival, and counter-archive within feudal confinement. Post-COVID platform circulation enlarges the reach of regional folklore while making it increasingly classifiable and commercially portable. It concludes that feminist retelling is politically productive precisely because recovery and commodification remain structurally entangled.
Women's political visibility does not by itself explain how women are represented as credible political authorities or which gendered expectations accompany that representation. This study examines affirmative discourse of Sherly Tjoanda in two Indonesian-language texts: a Fimela.com inspirational feature published on 16 April 2026 and an institutional-government article published by the Government of North Maluku Province on 9 June 2026. Feminist linguistics provides the primary linguistic orientation, Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) the critical framework, and selected Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) concepts the analytical toolkit. Fairclough's account of discourse as social practice guides contextual interpretation; van Dijk is used more narrowly to consider ideological social representations where the textual evidence warrants it. Close analysis of nomination, predication, agency, evaluation, role association, intertextuality, nominalization, and institutional self-presentation identifies four patterns: empowered womanhood through agency and self-development; competence represented through personal achievement and institutional action; the negotiated compatibility of motherhood, relationality, and leadership; and empowerment articulated through skills, employability, integrity, and public responsibility. The Fimela article also lists government programmes and service achievements, which are analyzed as source-reported claims rather than independently verified outcomes. The comparison suggests that positive representation can make female authority intelligible within a text while attaching it to cultural, moral, economic, and institutional expectations. Two texts cannot establish a stable public discourse, audience reception, policy effectiveness, or achieved political legitimacy. The proposed Feminist Linguistic Legitimation Model (FLLM) is therefore a preliminary analytical heuristic, not a causal or generalizable model.
Women and girls are the most vulnerable to exploitation, constituting approximately sixty to eightypercent of identified trafficking victims (UNODC, 2020). Yet scholarship on trafficking fiction remains largely confined to a victimhood paradigm, leaving the transition from vulnerability to resilience under-theorized. This article addresses the gap through Ruchira Gupta's I Kick and I Fly (2023), which depicts the intergenerational prostitution and trafficking of Nat girls in a small village of Forbesganj, where such exploitation is normalized as women's inevitable destiny. Contesting generational norms, the narrative traces the transformation of girls from vulnerable subjects to resilient survivors through martial arts training and collective female solidarity. The study first reads Judith Butler's concept of precarity alongside Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality to show how colonial criminalization of the Nat community and its postcolonial neglect produce a caste and gender specific susceptibility of women to trafficking. It then develops a framework of embodied resilience, joining Martha McCaughey's theory of physical feminism with bell hooks' feminist sisterhood to theorize self-defense training and female solidarity as practices that subvert exploitation. Read together, these frameworks trace a single arc from structural vulnerability to embodied and collective resilience, moving beyond the conventional trafficking narratives that dwell on suffering to account for the conditions under which vulnerable girls reclaim agency.
Despite sustained investment in gender-equity initiatives, hierarchies of authority, legitimacy and reward remain entrenched in higher education. This paper synthesises two staff surveys conducted in Athena Swan-accredited institutions in the United Kingdom and SAGE Athena Swan-accredited institutions in Australia. We develop a processual account of how gendered advantage is accumulated and defended within institutions recognised for equity progress. Across the studies, encouragement, sponsorship, workload protection and recognition operated as informal judgements of deservingness that shaped who entered formal evaluation with credibility and institutional momentum. Resistance became more visible when equity initiatives rendered these arrangements contestable, appearing through appeals to merit, reverse-discrimination claims and institutional withdrawal. We theorise these mechanisms as operating at different organisational speeds: deservingness is slow, cumulative and ordinarily obscured, whereas backlash is faster, reactive and more visible. Backlash is therefore treated as diagnostic evidence of the status, resources and authority being defended. This framework explains how accreditation can generate substantial activity while leaving informal distributions of legitimacy comparatively intact.
This study examines how coastal women in Telaga Biru Village, Madura, Indonesia, use natural-dye batik as an everyday practice of livelihood adaptation, ecological knowledge transmission, and community sustainability. Rather than treating women only as vulnerable subjects of climate and coastal change, the article asks how women's craft labour enables them to negotiate socio-ecological uncertainty within unequal gender relations, unstable markets, and limited institutional support. Based on feminist ethnography, the study draws on participant observation, in-depth interviews with 15 women batik artisans, and supplementary interviews with the village head and a local batik business owner. The findings show that women's natural-dye batik work operates as intergenerational eco-craft: it sustains household livelihoods, preserves coastal motifs and natural-dye knowledge, supports small-scale waste management, enables limited digital marketing, and anchors community-based environmental care through women's informal and organisational networks. At the same time, the article cautions against romanticising women's resilience, as their adaptive labour remains under-recognised, poorly supported, and shaped by patriarchal household and community structures. By conceptualising natural-dye batik as intergenerational eco-craft, this study contributes to feminist climate scholarship by showing how women's craft labour connects ecological knowledge, livelihood adaptation, cultural continuity, and coastal sustainability in the Global South.
