Since 2015, young urban black women in South Africa have been posting images of luxury items on social media platforms such as Instagram. These women claim that their luxury items are gifts from their ‘blessers’/wealthy men in exchange for sex and companionship. This has led to the rise of the ‘blesser culture’ on social media and the prevalence of transactional sex for upward mobility and status. This article provides a post-colonial feminist evaluation of 10 young black women from northern Johannesburg. It examines their motivations for engaging in these relationships. It draws from Stoebenau et al.’s (2016) theoretical framework that describes the three paradigms of transactional sex, ‘sex for basic needs,’ ‘sex for upward mobility and status’ and ‘sex and material expressions of love’ as a continuum of deprivation, agency, and instrumentality. This analysis challenges research frameworks that limit transactional sex to matters of HIV/AIDS transmission, and the framing of women as powerless victims of men. The article reveals these women seek blessers based on relative deprivation, to access a more high-status lifestyle and upward social mobility and from a position of agency. They view blesser relationships as a mutually beneficial exchange that allows them to give sex to access the commodities of modernity.
This article presents the results of ethnographic research conducted in the southern border of Mexico from 2017 to 2019, specifically at the Estación Migratoria Siglo XXI [XXI Century Immigration Station], which is one of the biggest and most important detention centres in the country. It analyses the functioning of an immigration detention centre as a ‘total institution’ where street-level bureaucrats enforce practices of biopolitics through daily deprivation of access to vital resources and the protection of the law. The article depicts how women are treated within a detention centre and provides an explanation focusing on observing gendered power relations and practices of disgust and contempt by the Instituto Nacional de Migración, a State-organised institution in the hands of street-level local bureaucrats who work in precarious conditions. Finally, the article demonstrates the dehumanisation practices in immigration detention that are deployed as a deterrence policy through operational strategies in Estación Migratoria Siglo XXI, located in Tapachula, Chiapas.
In research about South Africa and its troubled past it has now been well established that the devastating systems of racial categorisation and oppression of colonialism and apartheid were deeply and thoroughly gendered. Colonial/apartheid logic constructs white femininity as highly vulnerable, passive and private, specifically in relation to the imputed hypersexuality of the Black man – a contrast that historically justifies and consolidates hetero-patriarchal control over the white woman (as ‘protection’) and control and surveillance over Black people (and specifically Black men) as origin of danger. Using Sara Ahmed’s theory on strange encounters, this article provides a close reading of the story of Helena Marais, a young white woman from a South African town (as narrated by herself to researchers of the Centre of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest) with a particular interest in how colonial/apartheid gender logic continues to condition the terms on which she inhabits her body and the world, which in turn, renders her both instrumental to and complicit in the reinscription of colonial/apartheid racial logic and spatialisation decades after the formal ending of apartheid. In conclusion, the article will ask what is at stake if the white woman should attempt to encounter the Black man differently.
This article takes a close look at the history and development of the Irish right to choose and anti-amendment abortion campaigns from 1979-1983. In 1980 the Women’s Right to Choose Group (WRCG) was formed and was the first Irish feminist group to openly campaign for women’s right to choose. This article will consider why campaigns for choice happened so late, and why the response by the anti-choice lobby to any right to choose activism was so fierce and dogmatic. By situating the abortion campaigns in their historical context, we can further understand the barriers that the pro-choice feminist activists faced. The activism and ideas of the WRCG, as well as those of the Women’s Right to Choose Campaign (WRCC), trade union activists, political parties etc., along with tactics of the Anti-Amendment Campaign (AAC) will be considered. The arguments used by all groups will be analysed, as will the discussion points put forward by the board-based umbrella group, the AAC. The tensions and splits in the anti-amendment side will be analysed to further understand the enduring legacies of the 1983 anti-amendment campaign for the Irish women’s movement once the 8th amendment was inserted into the Irish Constitution.
Review of the book Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa, edited by Nicky Falkof, Shilpa Phadke, and Srila Roy.
The 2018 Citizens’ Assembly on the 8th Amendment of the Constitution instigated an important process for public participation and deliberation about the legal status of abortion in the Republic of Ireland. Examining the processes of the 2018 Citizens’ Assembly, I argue that it was consistent with democratic deliberations as discrete initiatives that function alongside other deliberative processes. I identify and examine some limitations of Citizen Assembly processes, including the tendency to favour monologue over dialogue, the construction of ‘objective’ reason over the possibility of emotion in deliberations, and processes of exclusion that limited understandings and applications of Iris Marion Young’s idea about social justice. Their implications were identified as limitations in public engagement and political decision making in the Republic of Ireland in a 2017 Council of Europe fact-finding report. In future, acknowledging and addressing these limitations could enhance the use of Citizens’ Assemblies and their relationship to other systemic processes to consider constitutional change.
Review of the book Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform, by Priya Kandaswamy.
Encampment of the Rohingyas in the camps in Bangladesh has reinforced the continuum of male dominance and violence carried out on women’s bodies. This article employs Judith Butler’s concepts of precarious life and frames of recognition to analyse three layers of violence against Rohingya refugee women: the violence carried out by the humanitarian regime, by Rohingya men as spaces to express their anger and frustrations, and by local Bangladeshi men as sites to demonstrate their superiority over the Rohingya intruders into the national space. The article draws on secondary literature on Rohingya refugees’ lived experiences in camps and semi-structured interviews conducted with humanitarian service providers.
Foreword: Special Issue on Repealing the 8th: Irish Reproductive Activism
Review of the book "Peruvian Lives Across Borders: Power, Exclusion, and Home" by M. Cristiana Alcalde.
The journey of graphic narratives in India began in 1967 with the publication of the first issue of Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comics, with protagonists based on the mythological tales. These comic books glorified Indian heritage, making every mythological and historical story of India amar or immortal and claimed to present a complete picture of the culture and essence of India. However, these comics reinforced gender prejudice and conventional gender roles of a society where women are only portrayed as demure beings in a patriarchal framework. Indian graphic narratives have come a long way from solely idealising Hindu/Vedic past to the contemporary digital comics where individual stories are shared. This article aims to look at the history of graphic narration in India from a feminist perspective. It will analyse the gradual change in the representation of women from the printed comic books of 1960s to contemporary printed graphic novels as well as webcomics. While Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comics overtly sexualised and fantasised Vedic women, contemporary Indian graphic novels have made a space for the everyday woman and her struggles. This space expanded and when it branched out into the digital realm any woman could voice her own problems by using images and text. This article will attempt to understand how this change has occurred in the portrayal of women in Indian graphic narratives and how the ‘gaze’ has also undergone an evolution. It will look at the question of authorship, the different forms of media involved as well as the socio-cultural milieu that propelled the transformation in female characters over the years.
complex academic and therapeutic ideas in a way which students and readers could understand and apply to their lives.So I said 'yes' to the queer graphic book, even though it meant a lot of work and repeatedly confronting my internalised queer critic!Four years later and sadly The Secrets of Enduring Love has only just made back its advance, whereas it is the huge success of Queer: A graphic history (2016) that has meant that I've been financially able to go full time as a writer (with a good bit of downsizing!).We've already written two follow up graphic guides -on gender and sexuality -with more planned. What are the advantages of writing in a comics format?The main one for me is the potential to reach audiences who -for all kinds of reasons -would never read a purely text-based book.There are many groups of people who find regular books impossible, or immensely challenging to read.That can be due, for example, to various forms of neurodiversity; to disabilities or chronic health conditions that impact attention, fatigue, and focus; and/or to unfamiliarity with text-based books, or experiences of being shamed around reading at home or in the education system.The comics format also means that these books sell in places which reach audiences beyond those who would normally seek out social science, philosophy, or even self-help style books.The book sells in comic bookshops, in queer/feminist sections of mainstream bookshops, and in galleries and museums, for example.We were also fortunate to hit the shelves at a time when non-fiction comics were becoming much more of a thing, when there was an increasing social media engagement with feminist and queer politics, and when more and more organisations and institutions were keen to put on LGBTQ events for Pride, LGBT history month, and the like.So booksellers were looking for books like ours, particularly ones which were eye-catching as Queer is.These graphic guides are designed in a way that tells a story over the course of the book, but also in a way that means every page could be read independently to give the reader a sense of one key idea in words and pictures.This was to ensure that they would work on e-readers where people don't always read from beginning to end.The advantage of this is that many people have said they enjoy reading slowly and spending a lot of time on each page to take it in.It invites quite a different kind of reading.It also means it works as something of a coffee-table -or bathroom -book which people can pick up briefly and flick through.One innovation I made with Queer, which I've developed through the subsequent books in the series, was to visualise the imagined readers as a group of four people who we follow through the book as they grapple with the ideas they're being introduced to.I actually did this initially to help myself to remember that I wasn't writing the book for my internalised critical queer theorist!I wanted to write it for a person who was queer themself, for a student who was struggling to understand queer theory, for an older person who was feeling lost in all the new language around gender and sexuality, and for somebody who was questioning their own gender and sexuality.But this approach to writing the book also meant that the books feel friendly to all these kinds of readers.Following the 'story' of these characters, such as it is, is also part of what makes the books an entertaining rather than purely informative read.Some of the others ways we made it entertaining were to put in visual references to popular culture, as well as visual jokes and some of the puns that queer theorists seem to be so fond of! Are there any disadvantages in relation to this format?No format is going to work for everyone.I'm passionate about getting better understandings of gender, sexuality, relationships, and mental health out to as wide an audience as possible, and I have to acknowledge that comics are not going to reach all audiences.Just as comics feel more friendly and accessible to some people, they're going to be off-putting to others who don't have a background of reading comics, for example, or who find them geeky and alienating.Also, of course, a visual medium isn't great for anybody who is visually disabled.Even describing such books in audio formats doesn't necessarily work well for such audiences given that it still has a visual starting point, rather than meeting them where they are.This is why I've explored several other mediums with my work in recent years.Where I've ended up is with three to four different strands.There are the written self-help books and zines which I now write primarily with my co-author (or 'artner') Alex Iantaffi.There are the graphic guides which I collaborate on with Kiera and illustrator Jules Scheele.There's the sex and relationship podcast which I produce with Justin Hancock.And I'm also playing with writing erotic fiction which also include reflections on the key themes in my work, like consent, gender, and relationship dynamics.Hopefully between them these mediums reach audiences who engage primarily in visual or auditory ways, as well as those who get more out of words or images, and those who take information in better in the form of non-fiction or stories.With a visual medium like comics there's also a vital question of representation.Something we've engaged with from the start is how to ensure that readers from diverse groups see themselves represented in the books, so that they know these books are for them.Some things that we've attempted to do is to ensure that people of colour are thoroughly represented throughout each book, both in our group of main characters and in the experts who they're learning from, rather than in any kind of tokenistic manner.Where there have been historical issues in the Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 4(1), 02
This article conducts a comparative analysis of the Egyptian webcomic superhero, Qahera with Marvel’s X-Men superhero, Dust by analysing the symbolic meaning of the veil in their storylines. By applying existing research from both comic scholars and postcolonial feminist researchers, this article illustrates how the veil can be used as a tool to perpetuate colonial prejudices as we see with Dust - or subvert them in the case of Qahera. Through both humour and political allegory, Qahera the Superhero has created a sensitive narrative for the veiled superheroine which speaks to the everyday life of a veiled Muslim woman in Egypt.
Founded in 2017, Feminist Encounters is a journal committed to argument and debate, in the tradition of historical feminist movements.In the wake of the growing rise of the Right across the world, openly neo-fascist national sentiments, and rising conservative populism, we feminists all over the world are needing to remobilise our energies to protect and advance gender rights.Feminist Encounters provides a forum for feminist theorists, scholars, and activists to communicate with each other, to better educate ourselves on international issues and thus promote more global understanding, and to enhance our critical tools for fighting for human rights.Feminism is an intellectual apparatus, a political agenda, and a programme for social change.Critical analysis of how gender discourses produce cultural identities and social practices within diverse lived realities is key to this change.We need to think more sharply in order to strategise well: as the discourses of conservatism renew and invigorate themselves, so we as feminist scholars need to be refining our amazonic swords in order not just to respond effectively but also to innovate our own ideas for equality and social justice.We are, of course, committed to intersectionality, a vital lens through which to see the contours of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, age/ability, and explore how gendered scripts get lived, and filtered through these specificities of cultural organisation.Lived experience is never codified in terms of gender alone, and so our research will always be sensitive to the nexus of lived oppressions.The journal has a large editorial board and journal team, consisting of over forty scholars in twenty countries.This is deliberately inclusive in order that we can promote diversity and engage with different concerns from across the world.Our aim is not to simply talk to ourselves, reconfirming our localised assumptions, but to generate feminist encounters across regions, even if this is sometimes uncomfortable.Globalisation has been a triumph of neoliberalism, but digital technologies have also flattened and reduced the distance between us in dramatic ways, so that now we can talk to each other with unanticipated ease.This new access to each others' voices has also brought challenges to the way we think and do things, so that being a feminist today might be quite a different prospect to a person living in China, Iran, Norway, South Africa or the UK.Second Wave Feminism used the idea of 'sisterhood' to invoke solidarity between women.I've always rather liked Andrea Dworkin's claim, though, that: "Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore."The notion of sisterhood was challenged by Black feminists in the 1980s as being too conceptually white, thus bell hooks' trenchant critique that: "the idea of 'common oppression' was a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women's varied and complex social reality".In the 1990s and 2000s it has been fair to say that feminist theory and Feminist Studies since have engaged more intentionally and deliberately with intersectionality -though Jennifer Baumgardner did caution us that: "Sisterhood was never about everybody agreeing ....".For our journal, sisterhood must expand and embrace our transgender allies and our men friends, reminding us that sibling relationships are rarely straightforward or inevitably blessed by golden moments of total affinity.Thus, Feminist Encounters welcomes the opportunity for new kinds of international discussions in the spirit of collaboration and critical intellectual enquiry.We hope for productive agreement and disagreement, and the shared struggle of fighting gender oppression, with our minds, hearts, and bodies, as the times demand.
Review of the book "Rewriting the Victim: Dramatization as Research in Thailand’s Anti-Trafficking Movement" by Erin M. Kamler.
This work contains illustrations of Shromona Das, who was seven when she was sexually abused by her uncle. Years later suffering silently with the burden of keeping her trauma a secret, Shromona has finally gathered the strength to call out her abusers via her powerful illustrations.
The following article is based on interviews and visual analysis of a collection of comics illustrated by Nepali women artists Bandana Tulachan, Kanchan Burathoki, Kripa Joshi, Preena Shrestha, Shraddha Shrestha and Sangee Shrestha, as well as my own work. These artists have been selected in terms of their visibility and prominence in the comics scene in Nepal. These artists have produced comics with personal narratives of their everyday life, thoughts and emotions. I address the questions if, through comics, individual visual accounts of the everyday experience can be understood as an act of feminism, and whether Nepali comics are a tool for encouraging feminist beliefs in Nepal. The article will give a brief introduction to Nepal’s feminist movement and assess whether or not the comics, that have been studied, can be characterised as part of Nepali feminism. For the purpose of this paper, I have categorised my visual inquiry under the areas of satire as counter culture, body image, self expression and sexuality, real life, real issues, metaphors and the comical side of life.
In the present work we analyse the exhibition Puras Evas: Sobre mariposas (Only Evas: About butterflies) by the Mexican artist Cintia Bolio. This exhibition was presented from November 14, 2018, to March 3, 2019 at the Museum of Women, which is located in Mexico City, in the context of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Woman, a date which commemorates the Mirabal sisters, known as ‘The Butterflies’, who were murdered in the Dominican Republic by the dictatorship of Leonidas Trujillo on November 25, 1960. The exhibition was presented in a context characterised by the growing number of women victims of violence in Mexico. As we are going to see, in the exhibition analysed, Cintia Bolio seeks to publicise the types of violence that exist and why the struggle of the Mirabal sisters led us to reflection on gender violence in our daily life.
