Amid growing awareness of gender-based violence on university campuses, teaching about this issue is urgent. Courses on gender-based violence hold transformative potential: they can foster critical consciousness, challenge systemic inequalities, and contribute to broader social change. Yet, as bell hooks (1994) reminds us, transformative teaching demands more than intellectual rigor—it requires emotional presence, care, collaboration, and vulnerability. For instructors, especially women, racialized, and/or genderqueer faculty, this work often entails significant emotional labour. This paper reflects on our experience of feminist pedagogical collaboration and support across institutions as a means of resisting the neoliberal imperative and making emotionally-challenging and potentially transformational courses more sustainable. In the fall of 2024, we taught parallel courses on gender-based violence across three universities and disciplines. We developed a collaborative model of feminist support. We co-designed our syllabi, shared teaching materials, and, as three white cisgender women, worked together to actively centre the experiences of queer and/or racialized folks and to de-colonize our course materials. We met weekly to reflect, troubleshoot, and care for one another. This paper reflects on this process as a form of feminist praxis—one that foregrounds care, reciprocity, and collective reflection as pedagogical tools. Our approach was both effective and affective and our experience contributes to feminist pedagogical scholarship by demonstrating that cross-institutional collaboration can mitigate the isolation of academic labour. This experiment both improved our teaching and helped us maintain wellness and enthusiasm while teaching difficult materials.
Mexican Gothic (2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (SMG) seems to embrace a transgressive role for the traditional Gothic heroine and for Southern mestizaje, countering colonialist forces, patriarchal subjectivities and a dominant morality. We argue instead that SMG’s perspective is not quite so inclusive and critical, and less anticolonialist than meets the eye. It is rather anchored in white feminism, and reproduces Mexico’s mestizaje system that promotes a whitening of the “race.” Mexican Gothic in particular tells a story of conflict between colonizers and colonized, but makes it a binary conflict of evil Europeans against valiant mestiza Mexicans, erasing the women of the First Peoples and of whole classes of non-whitened Mexicans. To understand this tension, we ask what is Mexican in Mexican Gothic. We begin with a discussion of the dominant narratives of Mexican identity, centred on whitening and mestizaje. Then, we look at how female characters are written in Mexican Gothic and five other novels. We outline the novel’s transnational conditions of production and reception, between Mexico (the author’s country of birth), Canada (where she lives) and the United States (where she publishes).
Violence against women is a major public health issue that causes severe physical and mental health consequences, including permanent injuries, depression, and suicide, affecting more than 35% of women worldwide (UN 2017; WHO 2021). In the post-Arab Spring era, the prevalence of sexual and physical violence against women in public spaces has prompted numerous international and national interventions. Yet, despite these efforts, only a small proportion of survivors access support services, report incidents to the police, or receive healthcare, legal, or social assistance. Research suggests that many international and humanitarian programs struggle to engage women survivors effectively, often due to limited cultural sensitivity and reductive representations of Middle Eastern societies. In response to these limitations, a range of grassroots and feminist initiatives have emerged to provide alternative spaces of support and advocacy. This study examines six local and transnational initiatives in Beirut and Cairo that use both online and offline platforms to amplify women's voices and make visible experiences of violence. Drawing on eighty-one narratives of violence collected through these platforms, as well as eleven semi-structured interviews with initiative founders, this paper explores the relationship between women’s experiences of violence and their practices of resistance. More specifically, it examines how women resist in the face of intimate, structural, and political violence. This relationship is analyzed through a critical interdisciplinary framework informed by anthropology, transcultural psychology, critical sociology, and feminist studies. Our findings demonstrate how gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, migration status, and disability shape both experiences of violence and possibilities for resistance. An intersectional feminist perspective allows us to situate these practices along a continuum ranging from highly visible acts—such as public testimonies, political activism—to less visible forms of resistance, including storytelling, solidarity, social awareness, and silence. Importantly, our analysis also highlights how silence and subtle acts of defiance—such as refusal, non-compliance, and strategic disengagement—can function as meaningful forms of resistance, particularly among women whose opportunities for overt political action may be constrained.
Colonial forces in North America have long targeted the reproductive practices of Indigenous women and gender-diverse people as part of the project to assert sovereignty over Indigenous lands and these oppressive forces continue to shape struggles for reproductive rights. While the reproductive choice movement remains predominantly focused on rights and access to abortion and contraceptives, Black women, women of colour, Indigenous women and Indigenous youth activists have taken up reproductive justice as a framework to analyze reproductive violence and advocate for reproductive freedom. Yet, missing from the extant literature are ways that Indigenous women activate reproductive justice in everyday contexts. Grounded in a collaborative, action-oriented study that amplified an Indigenous reproductive and sexual justice framework that is relational and centers self-determination, this paper examines how urban Indigenous women in Canada build reproductive and sexual self-determination through resisting colonial influences, drawing on government and community-based services, and contributing to the resurgence of Indigenous teachings and practices. Through foregrounding these material-discursive practices, our analysis highlights resistance work taking place outside of what is usually considered both reproduction and politics. In doing so, we aim to foster a broader view of ongoing resistance work, as well as illuminate future potential sites for movement-building.
Employing a survey of English faculty across Canada and data from Statistics Canada, the first one-third of this article examines the intersection of gender and parental educational level in relation to faculty members’ likelihood of having children. Although among the men reproduction was not associated with parental educational level, women whose parents possessed graduate degrees were more likely to have children than women with lower parental educational levels. The bulk of the article discusses some of the implications of these disparities. Not all women struggle equally to balance academic careers with childrearing: class privilege can compensate for some gendered disadvantages. Given their increased chances of being childfree, given their gender, and given their class backgrounds, women faculty with lower parental educational levels can end up with heavier workloads than their colleagues. With the government and universities alike failing to provide adequate childcare, university administrators routinely shift the responsibility for accommodating parents’ schedules onto childfree women and LGBTQ+ faculty. Because (heterosexual) men typically spend more of their work time than their women colleagues on research, because of gendered assumptions about service and about the pastoral care of students, and because of the time constraints of faculty mothers, a disproportionate amount of service and care work is performed by childfree women and their LGBTQ+ colleagues, hindering their ability to publish.
In this article, I investigate the complexities and challenges of a Black feminist praxis that seeks to decenter Western epistemologies by interrogating definitions of transnational feminism as a radical theoretical framework. Ultimately, by privileging situated knowledges, the paper underscores the value of dialogue or “good talk” between women as they engage in anti-global movements. The article is concerned with what a discerning transnational feminism might look like in the midst of systemic racism, patriarchal normativity, and gender imperialism.
Gender-based violence in politics (GBV-P) is undoubtedly a serious issue globally, and it remains both under-researched and under-addressed. This interview seeks to shed further light on the issue and contribute to greater awareness by engaging with the work and insights of Professor Tracey Raney, a leading scholar on GBV-P. Drawing from her extensive research, including her 2024 co-edited book Gender-Based Violence in Canadian Politics in the #MeToo Era, the discussion draws attention to this serious threat to democracy. The interview offers readers an opportunity to understand the motive, forms, and impacts of gender-based violence (GBV) in political spaces. It also emphasizes that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to addressing this issue; rather, effective responses must be context-specific and attentive to the different political levels and lived experiences of those affected. Also in this conversation, Professor Raney discusses the nature and prevalence of GBV in Canadian politics, as well as how intersecting identities—particularly gender, race, and sexual orientation—shape the forms of violence experienced by women and gender-diverse political actors. She also reflects on the role of social media and mainstream media in these harmful gendered narratives, as well as examining the existing policy responses to GBV-P and their gaps. Finally, the interview reveals the resilience and agency of women navigating political spaces despite these challenges, while emphasizing that there is still much work to do in order to fully understand and address GBV-P. Professor Raney calls for collective action and decolonial, intersectional strategies to meaningfully confront this issue. Readers can expect a critical and engaging exploration of GBV-P and the possible pathways toward change.
This article examines Nepal's maternal health policies in the context of a remote community in western Nepal. There has been a substantial decline in maternal mortality and an increase in institutional deliveries, in Nepal, but, along with these achievements, inequities in maternal health continue. Drawing on immersive participatory research conducted in 2015 in two villages in Baglung district, the study integrates observation, fieldnotes, focus group discussions, participatory workshops and interviews with women, health workers and national maternal health experts. Findings show that distance, terrain, limited health post hours, and unreliable transport make access to institutional services practically challenging in remote Nepal. Female Community Health Volunteers (FCHVs) occupy an in-between position, understanding women's lived experiences while doing their best to follow protocols and mandates. Community members express the need for home-based support when facilities cannot be reached. The disappearance of the sudheni reflects a broader policy shift that privileges service availability and biomedical definitions of skilled care. The article argues that maternal health policy must move beyond institutional targets toward context-responsive approaches that centre women's lived experiences and make maternity care accessible to remote populations.
This pilot study examines Indigenous conceptualizations of poverty in Kjipuktuk, Mi'kma'ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia) to lay groundwork for a holistic model of Indigenous poverty that can link with holistic models of Indigenous health already in use. Using community-based methods and Mi'kmaw cultural practices, the researchers conducted sharing circles and interviews with 12 Indigenous participants who had experienced or were still living in poverty. Results strongly supported the distinctiveness of Indigenous experiences of poverty and identified starting points for a holistic poverty model.
Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) is a complex medical condition that impacts women's bodies and identities, especially in relation to gendered expectations of health and femininity. Drawing on feminist and social constructionist frameworks, this study uses ideas of "doing gender" and "undoing gender," in connection with the concept of medicalization, to investigate the relationship between self-perception, medical authority, and gender norms. This qualitative study examined the embodied experiences of Indian and Indo-Canadian women living with PCOS in Edmonton, Canada, using semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and body mapping as the primary methods of data collection. According to the findings, women establish a hierarchy of symptoms, giving external symptoms like acne and hirsutism precedence over issues about fertility. This hierarchy is a reflection of internalized ideas of feminine appearance and also a rejection of feminine functionality focused on reproductivity. The women's choices of treatment, especially with regard to hormonal contraceptives, reflect a negotiation between defying and adhering to sociocultural and biological standards of womanhood. This study challenges conventional medicalized discourses on PCOS by emphasizing women's narratives, and advances a more comprehensive understanding of gender, health, and embodiment. It emphasizes the necessity of more patient-centered approaches to recognize and validate opportunities for healing that are not based on predetermined and essentialist notions of health and femininity.
Background: Western healthcare is inundated with processes that don't meet the cultural needs of racialized populations or consider non-medical aspects of health and healing. Social structures and power imbalances make it difficult to change these processes. The health experiences of Black people are affected by mistrust, racial microaggressions, and discrimination. To foster health and healing, we must consider the harm done when care is not culturally responsive. Methods: To address the lack of culturally safe healthcare, we completed a quality improvement project to develop an educational workshop about cultural safety with Black patients. The workshop was created using the theoretical lens of relational inquiry and included a literature review, environmental scan, and consultations. The workshop is designed to challenge providers to be self-reflective of their biases while developing an understanding of the health needs of Black patients, especially the African Nova Scotian (ANS) population. Results: The session has been delivered and evaluation feedback indicated positive experiences with some change in knowledge. Participants engaged in difficult discussions about bias and discrimination in their workplaces and themselves. Conclusion: Cultural safety education can positively impact healthcare providers' attitudes. Healthcare is multifaceted for Black people; healthcare providers must understand the intersection of anti-Black racism and health. Rebuilding trust with the Black community, acknowledging harm, and increasing representation in healthcare are necessary to address health disparities for Black people. Healing the relationship between ANS communities and the healthcare system requires critical reflection and targeted actions. Cultural safety education can initiate change.
This article examines the perspectives of middle-and upper-class "young-old" women (aged 60 to 69) in Thailand on "wellness" amidst the country's rapidly aging population. Drawing upon findings from my interviews with sixteen older women, it explores how self-reliance has become central to their pursuit of decent physical and mental health. Participants strived to maintain their health, preserve mobility, and reduce dependence on family members. At the same time, some served as caregivers for their families in a culture that emphasizes familial interdependence. Additionally, this paper analyzes how "mental wellness" is framed within self-reliance, shaped by Buddhist teachings and neoliberal ideals, as these women navigate life transitions and sustain their well-being amidst the disruptions of COVID-19. The study further demonstrates their rising concerns and demands for essential resources for their wellness, including health insurance, professional caregiving, and adequate housing, in the absence of sufficient public welfare. The paper offers a nuanced understanding of self-reliance and wellness in later life and promotes interventions to support older individuals. It does so by foregrounding the classed, gendered, and culturally specific experiences of aging women in the Global South, a topic rarely studied in fields such as gerontology and feminist studies.
