In 'My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix' (1994), Susan Stryker reclaims the word 'monster' to explore the physical and social/cultural/historical mutability of the transgender body. She argues that a performative 'transgender rage' propels a process of both positive and negative 'mutation' or change. In this article, I explore Stryker's engagement with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and discourses of monstrosity in her seminal 1994 article and beyond, including her 'More Words to Victor Frankenstein ' (2019) and When Monsters Speak (2024). I argue that this has been a complex engagement, which has raised as many questions as it has answered. Monstrosity, as a concept, is mutable - and therein lies its power. In a close reading of Stryker's work, I explore questions of how these discourses of mutability are employed, where they come from, and what work they do. Stryker uses her ambivalence to the transgender 'monster' to trace a deeper psycho-social change in attitudes to embodiment, otherness and changeability in Western societies. The weight of the word 'monster' has changed over the many years of Stryker's practice, as has the visibility and recognisability of transgender bodies. I examine Stryker's attempt to capture this, along with its expressions.
This article offers unique insights into anti-gender political experimentation and tactical adaptation in the context of a liberal, secular and majority pro-choice democracy. It charts a nascent trend in Australia wherein anti-trans rhetoric and arguments appear in debates over abortion, mirroring global developments and the growing anti-gender movement. It summarises the status of anti-abortion and anti-trans politics in twenty-first century Australia before exploring the way that a small but influential group of politicians and activists have woven anti-trans claims into discussions of abortion legislation. Analysing case studies from New South Wales, South Australia, and federally, it identifies two emerging tropes that have worked to unite anti-abortion and anti-trans frames in Australia: discourses of protection, and a common sense of science and medicine. It also highlights the comingling in Australia of both conservative United States style 'culture wars' politics and the gender-critical feminist modes that dominate the United Kingdom. This iteration of anti-gender politics seeks to discredit progressive movements, dispute contemporary understandings of health care, and repurpose and subvert rights discourses. These developments are strategic and opportunistic, tapping into and amplifying transphobia (particularly towards trans women) in an attempt to puncture support for abortion.
The business of beauty products, advertising, and visibility encourages forms of self-surveillance such as self-harming, cosmetic procedures, excessive supplementation, and other health risks. This article presents a case study of recent video femvertising campaigns produced by prominent personal care brands in India, including Dove, Olay, Mamaearth, and Sugar Cosmetics, along with the art-based behavioural training company Training Sideways. To offer a contemporary feminist criticism of femvertising, this article brings together an interest in contemporary Indian femvertising, the impacts of gendered heterosexuality on such campaigns, and the ways in which colorism, in combination with gender, operates in these particular femvertising efforts. We examine these campaigns through recent feminist symbols such as 'bad feminist' and the 'feminist killjoy' in femvertising, as well as the concrete beauty cages and new choices concerning marriage, workplace, and motherhood presented in these campaigns in India. Roxane Gay's concept of the 'bad feminist' describes a person who may not fit all conventional social expectations while recognising her own imperfections and contradictions in the public domain. Similarly, Sara Ahmed's 'feminist killjoy' refers to a figure who disrupts accepted forms of social harmony, comfort, and happiness by challenging racism, sexism, and heterosexual privileges in intimate and social spaces.
This paper, written by six casual academics at an Australian university, attends to the affective and embodied complexities bound to marking, evaluating, and critiquing students' work in our current moment, a moment punctured by AI lawlessness and a time where AI elides and eludes institutional(ised) norms, rules, and regulations. We reflect on what it means to abide by flexible, emergent, institutionalised AI 'ethics' while also negotiating the schisms, complexities, and contradictions of our own AI ethics. We draw on auto/biographical accounts of marking, of speaking to and with the student-cyborg, and the de/cisions we make as we go. What are our response-abilities to the student-cyborg? How do we respond, or formulate an ethics of response, to, with, and against AI-essays? How can we centre feminist, reparative approaches to critique, evaluation, and response while simultaneously committing ourselves to the political project of what we might, after Sedgwick, term paranoid-marking? We follow these questions as they sit and circulate across and between our bodies, bodies that are marked as they mark.
This article examines the strategic models employed by opposition movements against Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) worldwide. Moving beyond the assumption that such opposition seeks solely the abolition of CSE, the analysis identifies three institutional arrangements these groups aim to establish: the model of direct prohibition, the model of content censorship and limitation, and the model of limiting CSE's application. Drawing on a qualitative methodology and a global corpus of academic and technical documents, the study argues that, except in autocratic contexts favouring direct prohibition, the predominant strategy is institutional backsliding. This process involves the gradual hollowing out of CSE's substantive content and universal reach through mechanisms such as deregulation, parental opt-outs, administrative controls, and territorial restrictions. The findings contribute to understanding the evolution of anti-feminist and anti-LGBTIQ + movements, highlighting their diversification, transnational linkages, and the central role of education in contemporary cultural battles. The article concludes that defending CSE requires recognising and countering these erosive strategies to preserve its role as a transformative, rights-based, and universal public policy.
