Since the 2010s, feminist personal essay writing has gained considerable international visibility. Drawing on feminist theory and movement history, these essays frame lived experience as social critique and use familial memory to show how social conditioning shapes subjectivity and intimacy. They constitute an archive of their own, made like every archive by selection and ordering: opening access to feminist knowledge while also restricting, simplifying, and concealing feminist histories. The article traces this double movement through two key texts of German-language feminist essayism: Lilian Peter's Mutter geht aus (Mother Goes Out Partying, published in 2022) and Margarete Stokowski's Untenrum frei (Liberated from the Waist Down, published in 2016). Peter makes absence and ambiguity central to her poetics yet approaches her family's history obliquely. Stokowski, working in an essayistic self-help idiom, brackets contradictions in favor of coherence yet engages personal memory and experience more directly. Read against each other, these strategies show that such essays enact different epistemic and memorial modes with direct consequences for their feminist aesthetics and politics.
This article focuses on the essential, but often overlooked labor of women during conflicts by examining how Syrian women confronted food (in)security during their country's civil war. We draw from social reproduction theory to challenge the common assumption in research on conflict and food security that use of food depends merely on its acquisition. Using a qualitative approach, we analyze narratives from 27 refugees to show that conflict introduces a hidden conversion cost in the form of the immense gendered labor required to process acquired food. Drawing on Sen's entitlement theory, we introduce the concept of reproductive entitlements to refer to households' command over a combined bundle of the material resources (potable water and safe cooking fuel), household technologies (stoves, cooking utensils, and preservation technologies), and infrastructure services (piped water, electricity, and sanitation) required to convert raw ingredients into safe, nutritionally sufficient, and edible meals. These entitlements do not themselves, however, convert food into nourishment. As households lose their command over these resources in conflict settings, women have to pay this conversion cost themselves by, for example, burning shoe soles as fuel, walking kilometers for water, and storing food without refrigerators. Our findings suggest that food security in conflict zones cannot be measured only by food or market access. Rather, we need a gender lens that accounts for the infrastructure of daily life that makes it possible to prepare that food for consumption. Humanitarian policy should shift its focus on providing calories to ensuring that people have the reproductive entitlements required to consume them.
This article examines how Indonesian Muslim women doctoral (PhD) scholars navigate visibility, representation, and religious embodiment through the hijab within Western contexts of Australia. Far beyond a piece of cloth, the hijab emerges as a site of contestation, dignity, resistance, and scholarly agency. Informed by transnational feminism, Islamic feminism, intersectionality, and feminist geography, the study explores how Muslim women negotiate academic belonging and religious identity as they embody their faith through dress in predominantly secular, Western institutions. Employing Institutional Ethnography (IE) as both a methodological and analytical framework, the study traces how the hijab operates as both a personal religious commitment and a public signifier, positioning these women within intersecting relations of spiritual labour, institutional regulation, and cultural misrecognition. Drawing on interviews, fieldnotes, and everyday institutional texts, the findings reveal how hijabi PhD scholars actively negotiate norms of professionalism, visibility, and legitimacy while sustaining their academic and spiritual identities. The article argues that religious embodiment is not peripheral to academic life but constitutes a critical dimension of knowledge production and scholarly presence. In doing so, the study calls for more inclusive academic spaces that recognise pluralistic embodiments of scholarly identity and challenge dominant secular assumptions within Western institutions.
This article examines how Thai NGOs discursively produce female migrants as “victims” and “survivors” within South–South migration governance after Thailand's 2020 pro-democracy mobilization. Drawing on postcolonial feminist critiques and a poststructural discourse-analytic approach, it analyzes twelve semi-structured Zoom interviews with seventeen NGO and civil-society practitioners. “Victim” and “survivor” are treated as floating signifiers sutured—through translation and selective articulation—to liberal nodal points such as universal human rights, women's empowerment, and appeals to “the international.” NGOs operate as complicity brokers: while forcefully condemning militarized authoritarianism, they mobilize liberal repertoires that render critique institutionally legible and fundable, yet also organize gendered and racialized temporal–spatial hierarchies within the South. In these accounts, origin states are positioned as “the past,” Thailand as “not-yet,” and “the international” as the horizon of a liberal future. This civilizational ordering enables anti-authoritarian critique while narrowing the terms of migrant politics. Migration-as-empowerment discourse amplifies interventions oriented toward protection and individualized rights-claiming, while making vocabularies of labor organizing, critiques of securitized governance, and the gendered and racialized structures of global supply chains less legible or more politically risky. Empirically, the article shows that progressive advocacy during democratization can reinscribe regional hierarchies within the South even as it seeks reform. Conceptually, it specifies mechanisms of discursive brokerage that illuminate how liberal developmentalism travels and takes authority in South–South contexts.
This study examines the effect of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) controversies on ESG investment, and the role of female representation across different organizational levels in shaping this relationship. Based on a sample of firms listed on the UK capital market in 2005–2023, we find that ESG controversies are associated with increased ESG investment, suggesting that controversies prompt firms to rapidly reshape their ESG practices. This result holds consistently across several robust analyses. Female executives, departmental managers, and workers have a direct positive effect on ESG investment, whereas female directors and newly hired women show no significant association. ESG controversies' impact on ESG investment is positively moderated by female managers and new female employees, while the interaction with female workers is negative. Further analyses indicate that ESG controversies' impact and the moderating role of gender diversity significantly vary across firms depending on industry type, the adoption of an ESG-linked compensation policy, and the adoption of gender-equality policies. Finally, we find that available cash and performance volatility are two mechanisms through which ESG controversies affect ESG investment.
This study explores the empowerment of divorced women in Pakistan, focusing on the influence of access to education, experiences of violence, perceived inequality, and acts of resistance. Using a quantitative survey design, data were collected from 285 divorced women residing in shelter homes across four major cities in Punjab. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was employed to examine the relationships among key variables. The findings reveal that access to education and perceptions of inequality are the strongest predictors of women's empowerment, while violence and resistance also contribute significantly. Empowerment emerges indirectly through resistance, rather than as a direct consequence of violence, consistent with process-oriented feminist theory. The model demonstrated a reasonable fit (RMSEA = 0.074), and all hypothesized paths were statistically significant. These results underscore the importance of structural and personal factors in shaping post-divorce empowerment. The study highlights the need for gender-sensitive policies, educational interventions, and culturally informed support systems to foster resilience and agency among divorced women. It offers a critical perspective on how empowerment can emerge in restrictive social contexts through both systemic support and individual resistance.
This article contributes to women's studies by highlighting the precarious work and inequalities faced by female second-generation Romanian graduates who, having arrived as children in Spain, where they completed their education, cannot find work suited to their educational level. Fifty in-depth interviews with women aged 23 to 32 show that these women face greater difficulties in finding employment than their Spanish counterparts. Gender, ethnicity and class produce both precarious work and legal inequalities. As an innovative element, the article introduces the term of “search for a just place” to express these young women's demands for equal employment and opportunities. The analysis reveals two types of searches for a “just place” among participants: (a) seeking the same employment opportunities as their Spanish counterparts; and (b) having the chance to obtain dual citizenship without losing the link to their identity. The conclusions indicate a new way of thinking about the inclusion of young foreign women who graduated in Spain, while also opening avenues for research into the role of young foreign women in global society.
Why do women managers constrain their own networking, even when they recognize its professional value? Drawing on feminist institutionalism, we conceptualize professional networking as a gendered informal institution governed by legitimacy norms. We develop the concept of gendered self-regulation, an anticipatory process through which internalized informal rules shape behavioral inhibition before any overt sanction occurs, based on a gendered logic of appropriateness. We rely on a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design combining multigroup structural equation modeling on a sample of 313 managers in Spain (191 women and 122 propensity-score-matched men) and 33 in-depth interviews with women managers in a leadership program. The quantitative findings show that moral conflict and modesty operate as normative orientations with gender-asymmetric, networking domain-specific behavioral consequences. These two normative orientations constrain women's networking but not men's, particularly in networking domains where relational instrumentality and visibility signaling are most salient. By contrast, extroversion predicts networking similarly for women and men, supporting the claim that the observed pattern is specific to internalized informal norms rather than sociability as a trait. The qualitative phase identifies four gendered self-regulation mechanisms through which women navigate legitimacy pressures across networking domains, namely backlash avoidance, authenticity concerns, internalized meritocratic ideals, and positional self-doubt. This study advances feminist institutionalism by specifying how informal institutional norms become behaviorally consequential at the individual level, not primarily through external enforcement but through gendered self-regulation.
This article critiques the Gender Parity Index (GPI), a globally dominant measure of gender equality, for its narrow conceptual foundations, by showing that its focus on numerical balance conflates sex with gender, reduces complex social relations to simplified ratios, and obscures the structural processes that produce and sustain inequality. It examines the impact of measurement assumptions, constructs, and governance practices on definitions of gender equality through statistical indicators related to education. It asks two questions: How adequate is the GPI as a measure of gender equality? How might a re-gendered alternative look? To address these questions, the article develops a nested dual-index measurement system (SPI-RGPI). The Sex Parity Index (SPI) captures sex-disaggregated participation, while the Re-gendered GPI (RGPI) incorporates the contextual conditions under which participation occurs. The SPI-RGPI creates a nested interpretive structure that separates parity as a statistical condition from equality as a socially produced process. This approach not only deepens analytical precision but also reveals distinct configurations of gender equality, including progress, retrogression, crisis-led equality, and latent potential, that conventional box-ticking parity metrics would otherwise conceal.
In 2016, Scottish actress Louise Linton released her self-published memoir entitled In Congo's Shadow: One Girl's Perilous Journey to the Heart of Africa, detailing her few months volunteering in Zambia in 1999. Zambian observers quickly critiqued an excerpt of her book for its White savior undertones. After reviewing the controversy surrounding Linton's romanticized biography using grey literature from the Global South, we analyze one of the only available copies of Linton's book through the concept of "maternal white savior narrative". To do so, we define and examine four indicators: centering oneself as the central motherly character of the story; ‘Africa’ as savage and dangerous for women; reinforcing racial hierarchies; and distancing oneself from overt discrimination. This research is based on a discourse analysis of Linton's memoir, supported by public commentaries and 140 tweets (social posts) since 2016.
This article examines how women's civil society groups in Indonesia successfully achieved two watershed violence against women (VAW) reforms since the collapse of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998: Law 23/2004 on the Eradication of Domestic Violence and Law 12/2022 on Sexual Violence Crime. It compares the strategies deployed by proponents to explain variation in the pace and outcomes of these reforms and to account for continuity and change in VAW reform strategies. Combining a feminist institutionalist framework with Htun and Weldon's typology of gender equality policies, I argue that VAW reform in Indonesia sits at the intersection of status politics, which involves transforming gender-discriminatory institutions, and doctrinal politics, which challenges the patriarchal traditions of religious groups. The analysis demonstrates that the success of each reform depended on how proponents negotiated tensions between a women's rights agenda on the one hand, and a conservative Islamic morality agenda on the other, within a male-dominated political landscape. This study identifies several strategies employed by reform proponents across the two reforms: vernacularizing international women's rights discourses; building coalitions with critical actors within and beyond formal political arenas; strategically leveraging electoral politics; framing reform as compatible with religious norms; and refocusing the institutional arena of legislative deliberation. The deployment and effectiveness of these strategies were shaped by intersecting factors, including the gendered dynamics of democratization, the influence of international norms, and the power of informal rules such as patriarchal religious doctrines.
Menstruation management in on-demand food delivery work remains understudied in platform work scholarship. While prior studies have focused on algorithmic time pressures and spatial mobility, much less is known about how menstruating workers navigate gendered bodily experiences within these physically demanding temporal–spatial conditions. Public infrastructures are designed around a non-menstruating body, while algorithmic time control presumes a continuously efficient worker ideal that implicitly privileges male bodies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 34 female food delivery workers in Hong Kong, this study examines the time–space–body dynamics of how menstruation is experienced and managed at the intersection of gendered urban infrastructures and platform temporality. Findings show that when challenges are mainly spatial, female couriers respond through informal infrastructural mapping and route adjustments, accepting some time sacrifice. When algorithmic temporality intersects with spatial constraints, spatial and temporal pressures converge, compelling couriers to manage menstruating bodies through temporal–spatial strategies. Couriers must constantly weigh whether to go offline to prioritize their health or stay online and endure menstrual pain to prevent income loss. Each decision carries significant consequences, either incurring long-term financial penalties under ranking-based platform systems or compromising their gynecological health. This study shows how menstruation management pressures, shaped by infrastructural constraints and algorithmic demands, are internalized by women as the price of flexibility, ultimately undercutting the promise of autonomy in platform work.
This article examines the lived experiences of Rohingya refugee women in Malaysia's urban shantytowns, drawing on long-term feminist ethnographic fieldwork in Kuala Lumpur. It argues that statelessness, gender, and urban informality converge to produce two distinct spatial conditions: gendered containment, through which women's mobility is disciplined by the threat of arrest rather than social sanction alone; and carceral domesticity, through which the home becomes not merely a site of patriarchal control but a space structurally produced by state enforcement. Extending recent feminist geography scholarship on carceral domesticity to the specific condition of urban statelessness, the article shows how domesticity and incarceration become, in practice, the same condition for women whose legal non-existence renders movement through public space a criminal risk. At the same time, Rohingya refugee women's everyday practices of care, solidarity, and collective memory transform these spaces of confinement into sites of resistance and community. The article contributes to feminist geography, critical refugee studies, and scholarship on gendered statelessness beyond formal camp settings.
This article examines the role of collective memory in the resilience of gender-focused civil society organizations (CS0s) faced with unfavorable political climates. Based on interviews with members of gender-focused CSOs in Turkey, we discern that collective memory first serves as a resource for resilience by giving meaning to current actions in light of past achievements and thereby providing a sense of empowerment and hope for the future. Second, collective memory helps demonstrate the role of local processes and accomplishments in the incorporation of global rights and principles. The use of collective memory thus authenticates and indigenizes the claims made and justifies current stances and claims. Third, collective memory helps members of gender-focused CSOs make claims on the basis of the narration of the past. In other words, collective memory provides a roadmap and political implications for the future. Here, we see variation among organizations as history is told differently, with different implications in different cases, demonstrating the internal diversity of gender-focused CSOs. The article aims to fill a significant gap and initiate a new line of research as neither the existing literature on countering democratic backsliding, nor the one on responses to gender backlash systematically consider the role of collective memory in the process.
