This article examines how vibrator brands use empowerment rhetoric to construct discourses on female masturbation. Through a discussion of 11 popular brand websites, it explores portrayals of the ‘ideal’ woman, positioning masturbation within neoliberal and postfeminist frameworks, and promoting consumerism as emancipation. It highlights exclusionary portrayals catering to young, able-bodied, white women, analysing commodified sexual liberation and systemic power dynamics, drawing from Michel Foucault's concept of biopower, which uses normativity for control. Findings show that brands claim liberation but reinforce norms, framing sexual freedom through consumption. This research calls for rethinking sexual liberation beyond consumerist narratives.
Using a decolonial feminist perspective, this article develops a theory of political friendship grounded in the tensions faced by white and racialised women when building affective networks for feminist action. It argues that hegemonic feminism, by failing to interrogate the colonial nature of the power geometries that shape affective capacities, reproduces exclusionary dynamics within the political friendships it seeks to promote. Drawing on Judith Butler's notion of the differential distribution of mourning and Nelson Maldonado-Torres's concept of the coloniality of being, the article introduces the notion of the coloniality of affect to explain how colonial power patterns expel those who inhabit colonial difference from the affective field, thereby obstructing the formation of reciprocal affective ties between white and racialised women within feminism. We propose revolutionary love as a methodological tool for decolonising feminist friendship and advancing toward coalitions against multiple forms of oppression.
This article is an extended meditation on JoAnne Epps’ death. I argue that popular black feminism has instructed us on how to interpret her death by training us to use an actuarial reading practice. By actuarial, I mean a black feminist deployment of arithmetical ideas to manage an uncertain future, and to predict the likelihood of what is to come, including death. I use the term black feminist actuarial to describe an interpretative framework that contains implicit ideas about life span, duration and the time of black life, and thus reads all black deaths as equivalent. The black feminist actuarial reading marks the space of risk (the university) and the practice of risk (work), and offers risk mitigation strategies (radical divestment from work, including what Tricia Hersey has called rest as resistance). This reading practice alerts black feminists that black female academics’ deaths – regardless of the conditions of those deaths – are early, premature, untimely and too soon. Yet, this article seeks to trouble that reading practice by asking us to seriously contend with Epps and her love of her work, her university and her own institutional life.
With digital feminist support theory (DFST), we bring networked/digital feminism theorizing in conversation with digital/networked health communication theorizing on social support. DFST is a theoretical departure that should enable scholars to seriously and innovatively engage with the feminized labor of digital social support, which has largely gone unacknowledged (and not analyzed) in communication/media studies and in a neoliberal order. Using reflexive critical thematic analysis, we analyzed audience discussions on a) US news outlets ( CBS , ABC , FOX , CNN ) and The Diary of a CEO podcast following the removal of black-box warnings placed on menopause hormone therapy by the Food and Drug Administration, a United States national health agency, and b) four Instagram posts by renowned Black women medical practitioners and health experts, who specialize in Black women's health. With digital feminist support theory, we unpack the discursive nature of digital social support as feminized labor and show how menopause health experiences are visibilized and forms of solidarity enactments. By this intervention, we urge scholars, platform designers and owners, and health care providers to recognize and support the possible positioning of digital spaces as potential sites for feminist praxis.
Femicide, the gender-related killing of women, is increasingly recognised as a patterned form of violence rather than a series of isolated acts. Yet it is still most often analysed through incident-based, legal or epidemiological frameworks that obscure the structural conditions under which women's deaths become predictable and recurrent. This article advances a feminist theoretical intervention by conceptualising femicide as infrastructure: a durable configuration of material deprivation, institutional governance and symbolic normalisation through which women's exposure to lethal violence is systematically produced and sustained. Drawing on feminist theories of violence, intersectionality, structural power and decolonial feminist thought, the article develops an analytical framework that shifts attention away from individual perpetrators and episodic failures towards the ordinary social, political and economic arrangements that render femicide foreseeable. Through a comparative analysis of the United Kingdom and South Africa, the article demonstrates how distinct national contexts instantiate shared patriarchal logics through different infrastructural forms: the United Kingdom as a site of visibility without transformation, and South Africa as a context of extreme violence shaped by inequality, historical violence and institutional fragmentation. Rather than positioning these cases within a Global North/South hierarchy, the article argues that femicide operates through a shared global grammar of gendered power. By theorising femicide as infrastructure, the article contributes to feminist theory by foregrounding durability, reproduction and differential grievability in the production of gendered death, and by offering a diagnostic framework for transnational feminist critique beyond reactive models of prevention and response.
This article offers an original conceptual intervention into debates on feminist subjectivity under postsocialist conditions of weakness, uneventfulness and persistence in Eastern European contexts. Drawing on Jolanta Brach-Czaina's philosophy of the 'cracks in existence' and the everyday bustle, it argues that feminist subjectivity in postsocialist contexts emerges not through rupture, visibility or autonomy but through relational practices of care, endurance, attentiveness and tenderness grounded in everyday life. The article introduces two interrelated concepts - subjectess and tender solidarities - as contributions to transnational feminist theory. Subjectess, a neologism inspired by the Polish podmiotka and its fermentative connotations, names a form of feminist subjectivity that is processual, relational and materially embedded, coming into being through slow, repetitive and often unnoticed practices. Tender solidarities are proposed as the affective and ethical relations that sustain this form of subject formation, complementing postsocialist feminist notions of weak resistance, uneventfulness and the everyday. They describe solidarities based not on identity or strategic action but on care, coexistence and responsiveness to fragility. Methodologically, the article combines hermeneutic reading and postsocialist feminist critique, treating fermentation and bustle as subject-formative metaphors that illuminate non-sovereign modes of agency. By foregrounding weak, uneventful and relational forms of feminist becoming, the article challenges dominant paradigms within transnational feminism and offers a framework for understanding how feminist subjectivities quietly yet persistently emerge within the cracks of everyday existence.
This article examines mediated maternities in banking and telecommunications advertising in contemporary Palestine. Taking neoliberal capitalism and Israeli settler-colonialism as the political economic contexts, it suggests that current Middle East media research under-theorises and under-represents the gendered, cultural and emotional life of neoliberalism in Palestine. Thus, foregrounding neoliberalism's flexible rather than annihilatory logics, the article applies a feminist lens to interview data with advert makers and audiences, and textual analysis of adverts (2019-2023), to explore how advertising cultures represent 'private' familial intimacies to market products. My main argument is that visually mediated cultures of accumulation repurpose anti-colonial discourse's heteropatriarchal mother projects to bolster and support Palestine's current economic status quo. Whereas gendered national narratives sutured women's roles in national struggle to childrearing, the media representations on which my research focuses show how women's reproductive labour is funnelled into birthing not fighter-sons or reproductive-daughters but the consumption-ready financial subjects of tomorrow. Mobilising gendered nationalistic scripts and their historic divisions of labour, advertising media exposes how marketised power acts as the not-yet Palestinian state to position consumption, and especially the production of new consumers, as patriotic acts centred on neoliberal national futurity. Commercial culture therefore highlights how neoliberalism and nationalism converge through the mediated figure of the consuming Palestinian mother, (re)birthing the heteronormative family as a source of capital accumulation and national pride. This matters because, differently to many scholarly accounts of capital accumulation in the consumer nation, it shows how, as entangled forces, neoliberalism and nationalism need each other's focus on social reproduction to survive. Overall, then, the article contributes to feminist theorisations of the cultural politics of neoliberalisation by tracing the gendered/sexed immanence of neoliberal and national power, revealing the wider reciprocity of the two forces in Palestine and beyond.
Gender narratives in Central Asia have long been shaped by Soviet modernisation projects and Western feminist paradigms, often sidelining local epistemologies and women's lived experiences. Drawing on a multigenerational family archive of handwritten diaries and oral recordings spanning the pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-independence periods, including materials from my own maternal lineage, this article traces how cultural memory and situated knowledge persist across generations. It analyses how women documented and interpreted social change through everyday practices and personal writings that remained largely outside official archives. I argue that these materials constitute important sites of feminist knowledge production, not because they articulate explicit feminist claims but because they transmit values, practices and forms of agency that shape women's lives over time. By foregrounding family archives and embodied memory as methodological tools, I introduce Suzani Feminism as an interpretive framework for understanding feminist knowledge as relational and context specific. Inspired by the Central Asian embroidered textile tradition of suzani , where patterns emerge through the gradual interweaving of threads, this framework reads women's lives as assemblages of intergenerational memory and practice. Moving beyond binaries of tradition and emancipation, I offer a situated account of agency grounded in everyday archives and locally embedded forms of feminist knowledge.
This Interchanges piece proposes the concept of spatial terror as a contribution to feminist theory's engagement with gendered violence and space. Spatial terror names the systematic, discursive production of uninhabitable public space for women through the normalisation of sexual violence as an ambient governing risk. Drawing on Foucauldian disciplinary theory, feminist geography and postcolonial feminist critique, the piece argues that spatial terror functions as a governing technology that operates not through the prohibition of women's spatial freedom but through its disciplinary internalisation. The concept challenges feminist geography's dominant framing of women's spatial constraint as constrained access, arguing instead for a more radical account of spatial foreclosure that demands transformation of the conditions of spatial production rather than amelioration within them. The postcolonial specificity of spatial terror in India is traced through the colonial and nationalist construction of gendered space, illuminating how the postcolonial state inherits and amplifies rather than dismantles the spatial governance of women's bodies.
One of the main outcomes of in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) is the ability to reprogramme somatic (skin or blood) cells or embryonic stem cells (ESCs) into induced pluripotent stem cells; these could then yield any cell in the human body, including sperm and the egg. This potential shift in the (re)production of gametes is at the centre of this article. It is theoretically anchored in Marxist feminist historical materialism and in the transformations in labour - our relationships with machines and cooperation - and explores what it means for reproductive class struggle when the means of production change. To ground this exploration, I turn to the 'speculative futures' of gamete abundance that have emerged from contemporary bioethical and media narratives around IVG, to think through how the potential move from gametes to soma might alter the conditions of work for global egg cell donors. I argue that the current dominant narratives of IVG, entangled with accelerationist techno-productivist futures, enliven old and new debates on gender, labour and liberation under capitalism. Ultimately, this article makes the case that the speculative potential of IVG, with its unique ability to ignite our imagination, opens up new ways of thinking about feminist reproductive politics across bodies, biologies and more-than-gendered lines.
This article introduces capacity as a missing analytical category in feminist political economy: the finite, depletable resource that women rely upon to perform the reproductive, physical, relational, emotional, caring and productive labour on which institutional and social life depends. Distinct from emotional labour, burnout and social reproduction theory, capacity names what those frameworks draw on but do not name. The piece argues that women’s capacity tends towards invisibility to the person who holds it, not through misrecognition but through an absent category, and opens empirical and normative questions that the existing frameworks have not been equipped to ask.
'Gender' has been broadly understood in multiple ways: as a social construct, a prescription of social roles, an experience and an identity, among others. However, in the context of Eastern and Central Europe, 'gender' also constitutes a discourse that is intertwined with the politico-economic processes of Europeanisation and market liberalisation. Here, the notion of, specifically, gender equality entered in a particular sociohistorical moment, tracing back to the transformation period from Soviet socialism to neoliberalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviet-era 'woman question' was replaced by the gender equality framework, the latter normalised and universalised as the sole progressive approach to women's emancipation. To expose the gender equality framework's sociohistorically determined status, I turn to the contemporary 'anti-gender' campaigns, which, since the early 2010s, have been gaining traction in the region and beyond. These campaigns are united by their opposition to 'gender ideology', a catch-all term invoked to contest any perceived challenges to 'traditional' gender norms, roles and social relations. Through the conceptualisation of gender as a discourse, I argue that 'anti-gender' mobilisations, despite their reactionary framing, reveal how dominant approaches to women's emancipation - also understood as the gender equality framework or liberal feminism - are entangled with the sociohistorical contexts in which they emerge. I demonstrate how the 'anti-gender' campaigns point to a critique of the dominant liberal approach to women's emancipation as well as to an alternative understanding of oppression and gendered subjectivities. I illustrate how both the contemporary 'gender' equality and the 'anti-gender' approaches operate as knowledge-producing discourses that put forth specific understandings of emancipation, while foreclosing others.
Nowhere has the tension surrounding the figure of the transgender child seen a more destructive manifestation than in the rise of the gender critical mom on the American right. Wielding rhetorics of regret, concern and parents' rights, these authoritarian shock-troops seek to fuse maternal oversight with state power in order to remove the very thinkability of transness from public life and, in so doing, to re-establish the total authority of the parent over the possibilities of the child. I argue that such attacks are fuelled by a kind of grief experienced by the gender critical mom when she encounters the bodily freedom of trans life, a grief born of her apprehension of the coercive social topography that structures her own lived reality. This article undertakes a discursive analysis of the right-wing anti-trans advocacy organization Moms for Liberty to explore how anti-trans activists seek to annihilate trans desires to ameliorate their own bad feelings of grief. In so doing, I show how Moms for Liberty is seeking to cast trans life into the domain of unthinkability such that they can recapture the taken-for-granted nature of a cisnormative gendered embodiment.
This article interrogates the contradictions of migrant belonging in post-9/11 Australia by situating them within the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism. Through a close reading of Senator Mehreen Faruqi's memoir, Too Migrant, Too Muslim, Too Loud, it argues that practices of recognition and inclusion function less as remedies to racial exclusion than as techniques through which settler sovereignty is stabilised. Faruqi's political visibility is celebrated as evidence of multicultural progress even as her speech, faith and presence are repeatedly marked as excessive - too migrant, too Muslim, too loud - revealing belonging as conditional, evaluative and perpetually provisional. Drawing on Indigenous critiques of recognition alongside postcolonial feminist and critical race scholarship, the article reframes migrant belonging as an epistemic problem in which inclusion into the settler state is misrecognised as justice, thereby displacing demands for decolonisation on stolen land. Against this backdrop, Faruqi's loudness is read as a feminist practice of refusal that exposes the affective and disciplinary economies through which Australianness is conferred and withdrawn. Rather than resolving the contradictions of belonging, the article holds them open to demonstrate the limits of migrancy and recognition as frameworks for justice in settler-colonial contexts. Anchored in Australia, it offers an account of migrant refusal that is attentive to the specificity of settler colonialism while illuminating the broader post-9/11 governance of difference in liberal democracies.
At the height of the #MeToo movement, a story of comedian Aziz Ansari pressuring a woman to have sex with him was released on Babe.net. Part of what this story revealed was its ubiquity; it gained traction because it resonated with many people who could relate to the experience. Close to 10 years after #MeToo, conversations about sex similar to the type described in the Babe.net story remain difficult to have. This is due to the difficulty in making this type of sexual experience legible as one of harm. This article serves two main purposes. First, I use Elise Woodard's concept of 'Bad Sex' to further explain a type of heterosexual sex characterized by pressure and coercion, and move to theorize it explicitly in terms of the moral harms it causes. Drawing on Linda Alcoff, Ann Cahill, Manon Garcia and Alexandra Kogl, I theorize the moral harms that I argue result from Bad Sex as dehumanization, demobilization and the experience of a lack of agency. I then use examples of heterosexual sex from Peggy Orenstein's Boys and Sex and testimony from Stormy Daniels in the trial of Donald Trump to illustrate how these three moral harms manifest in cases of Bad Sex. Second, I argue that understanding Bad Sex as a source of moral harm does not work to ameliorate it as a structural and political problem. I go further to theorize Bad Sex as an assertion of heteropatriarchal power. To do this, I look at the ways that sex is used as a means of asserting heteropatriarchal power. I conclude by calling for a collective reimagining of what sex is and can be, while underscoring the importance of avoiding using the legal system as a way to ameliorate Bad Sex.
Ableism has been theorised, criticised and discussed between disabled people's activism and academia, mostly within the field of Disability Studies and less within Intersectionality and Gender Studies. Disabled people's social movements have criticised ableism for decades to highlight their oppression based on binary ideas of the normal and the deviant. Disability Studies has conceptualised ableism as a profoundly naturalised system of thought based on the hierarchisation of embodied abilities and the fetish of independence and productivity. The current study is part of a larger research project conducted by a feminist research group, and our research question was: how, by/for whom and for what purpose has ableism so far been intersectionally conceptualised in theory, research, activism and artwork? One of the project's aims is to combine a variety of sources on and approaches to ableism, which is why we conducted a) a systematic search of academic databases and b) a purposeful selection of additional sources based on our situated knowledges to identify sources on ableism's intersectionality, particularly the intersections of dis/ability and gender. Based on documented discussions of our final sample of 24 different sources on ableism in our research group, we organised our findings around two overarching aspects: Shaping and enforcing intersectional ableism and Surviving and disrupting ableism. While our research highlights the adverse impacts of intersectional oppression, it also emphasises the power and strength rooted in intersectionality. Disability as experiential background is not limited to discrimination either - it comes with joy and community and is an ever-present part of human life beyond the meaning given to it by the neoliberal imperative of independence and self-sufficiency. Ableism, in turn, does not only exist in the lives of disabled people; in its intersectionality it affects the way society is shaped as a whole.
Over the past decade, Chilean youth have turned to funas - public digital denunciations of sexual misconduct - as a contentious yet powerful feminist practice. This article examines how these practices configure intimacy, consent and gendered subjectivities among young heterosexuals in Santiago. Drawing on qualitative research with 60 participants, I argue that funas should be understood not simply as emancipatory or punitive but as ambivalent affective regimes that shape desire, fear and accountability. By bringing together critiques of consent culture, debates on digital denunciation and feminist theories of subjectivity, the article theorises funas as gendered mechanisms that both expand possibilities for feminist justice and reproduce new forms of surveillance and moral regulation. This situated analysis advances feminist theory by conceptualising consent and digital justice as unstable, affectively charged terrains where intimacy and politics are continuously negotiated.
This article examines how corporate-sponsored queer visibility reshapes queer politics in London, UK. Drawing on discourse analysis of two advertising campaigns, Sensodyne's 'Life's Too Short' and Harrods' 'Set Your Stage', I show how racialised queer visibility is increasingly mobilised through market logics that link happiness, authenticity and anti-normativity to productivity and consumption. Rather than assimilating queer subjects through sameness or respectability, these campaigns celebrate queer difference. This marks a mutation of homonormativity, which I term extraordinary homonormativity, a formation in which queer anti-normative ideas are no longer positioned outside of homonormative inclusion but are valorised as a market asset. Ultimately, these regimes of corporate-sponsored visibility depoliticise queer struggles and detach them from broader movements: raising urgent questions about the political limits of visibility under neoliberalism.
Sex is routinely framed as a site of repair: with the right communication, technique or therapeutic work, intimacy will heal damage and secure coherence. This article asks what happens when that promise wears thin. Reading Berlant and Edelman's Sex, or the Unbearable alongside Berlant's later work and Freeman's notion of chrononormativity, I theorize contemporary sexuality as a scene of maintenance structured by cruel optimism and organized by time. I argue that erotic optimism now attaches not only to the fantasy of 'better sex' but also to a chrononormative arc in which desire should build, crest, resolve and, with sufficient labour, eventually arrive. Therapy culture, sex education and platformized dating translate structural non-relation into ongoing self-regulation, recoding endurance as an ethical project of continuous improvement. Drawing on disability and illness discourses, I show how crip and sick temporalities trouble this mandate by improvising non-teleological tempos that dominant scripts then misrecognize as lack. Across these sites, sexual subjects are compelled to stay 'in circulation' - tracking, optimizing and narrating their erotic lives - even as the structural mismatch between what sex is asked to do and what it can do persists. In this way, swipe culture, intimacy industries and therapeutic sex education materialize cruel optimism in erotic time.
An initial project that began as a literature review on news media reporting of sexual violence extended into a critical collaborative duoethnography due to several unfolding interruptions throughout the research process. As early career scholars, we were motivated to pursue this duoethnography because the interruptions we experienced and their implications were embedded within the continuum of violence. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate and reflect on how violence in multiple forms has multilayered impacts, functioning as a tool of disturbance. The interruptions became integral to the journey. We revisit the stages of researching, writing, and revising the literature review. We were interrupted during this process by multiple cases and examples of violence: the story of Lisa Banfield, dehumanization and heightened violence against Palestinians, and state-sanctioned murders of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Each of these interruptions impacted our experiences as scholars and demonstrated how the challenges of reporting practices around sexual violence extend to multiple forms of violence and are entangled in insidious ways.
