Kristeva’s abjection theory is a popular framework for grappling with leaking bodies. Yet while exploring the significance of women's involuntary urination during sport, abject theory's insistence that pissing oneself must be identity shattering failed to convince us. Indeed, some women find pissing themselves to be identity forming as it marks the threshold beyond which one becomes a ‘serious’ athlete. Drawing on Sedgwick, we frame abjection as strong theory—able to explain some aspects of the experience well but unable to account for other aspects. To supplement our approach, we draw on sexuality studies for inspiration regarding how to approach involuntary urination during sport through weak theory. Rather than trying to proffer a totalizing explanation, weak theory foregrounds near and specific phenomena, allowing for variation and complexity. In this case, weak theory is analytically useful as it allows us to consider women's diverse responses to urinary leakages alongside mainstream cultural responses (disgust at the leaky body) and subcultural sporting norms (prioritization of sport performance). Further, weak theory allows us to attend to the gendered specificities of peeing in sport. Drawing on interviews with women strength athletes, we question what women's responses to their nuanced, specific experience of peeing themselves while resistance training tells us about women's place in sport and their bodily capacities. Ultimately, we argue that far from being abject, bodily leaks can be transformative, creating new subjectivities and new understandings of what women's bodies are capable of: namely, being simultaneously strong, beautiful, and leaky. This article contributes a grounded exploration of the limits of abjection theory by highlighting the necessity of considering cultural context and specific phenomena, arguing that weak theory is a useful lens through which to do so.
At a simulation-based training centre in Lyon where the unemployed engage in practice work, four women of Arab and African origin living on benefits refused to participate in the game of workplace rehearsal. Challenging utopian visions of ‘practice makes perfect’, the women refused calls for mastery. They questioned its so-called egalitarian premises and pointed to historical accounts of injustice that prevented them from striving towards fantasies of self-improvement. Experiencing recurrent dismissal by their colleagues and trainers at the centre, the women responded by doing the bare minimum. This article investigates what it might look like to study bitterness ethnographically, by paying attention to its relational formation. I move away from attempts to understand bitterness as attribution and as grounds for a passive subjectivity to examine instead its collaborative nature and how it crops up as a practice that can gesture towards an otherwise. Drawing on feminist and queer theoretical debates on refusal, ugly feelings and failure, I suggest that bitterness is best understood as an ‘affective refusal’ that is contingent on historical formations of racial and gendered injustice and relational encounters of dismissal.
Individualised and neoliberal epistemologies of motherhood position mothers as sole bearers of responsibility for their children's outcomes, with detrimental consequences for maternal physical, mental and social health and wellbeing. The imperative to ‘be it all’ reproduces isolation, guilt and shame amid eroded support structures. This article intervenes by mobilising posthuman feminist theory to collectivise agency and foreground fluidity and emergence in the becoming-mother. Drawing on collaborative collage making with mothers, the article engages in situated, embodied and collective knowledge production. Through this analysis, we draw three interrelated posthuman feminist figurations – contingent needs, distributed agency and emergent knowing – which together materialise as mothering villages that enact collective response-ability. These figurations challenge liberal humanist models of agency and responsibility by foregrounding relationality, interdependence and the uneven material conditions through which mothering is enacted and sustained. We argue that response-ability for motherhood is a collective, materially embedded capacity that is differentially supported and politically structured. In doing so, the feminist village figurations contribute to feminist theory by reconceptualising maternal subjectivity as emergent, transversal and more-than-human, while insisting that care and accountability must be understood as political and collective. Together, they offer an agenda for future feminist theory, scholarship and social and political action orientated towards affirmative parenting futures.
This article examines how colonial histories endure within the intimate sphere, shaping desire and romantic attachment in the postcolonial present. Through a decolonial autoethnography, I reflect on my own experiences as a Filipina who, often half-jokingly, tells friends that ‘I only date colonizers.’ What begins as humor becomes a critical site of inquiry: Why does whiteness continue to hold affective and aesthetic power? What does it mean to seek love from those who historically occupied the role of colonizer? Engaging the work of Frantz Fanon, María Lugones, Chela Sandoval, Ann Laura Stoler, and bell hooks, I explore how the remains of empire manifest not only in beauty ideals and racialized fantasies but also in the emotional economies of care, validation, and belonging. I argue that coloniality persists not only through institutions and representation but also through the affective dynamics of intimate life. Through a series of autoethnographic vignettes, I examine how colonial histories become visible in experiences of attraction, misrecognition, desire, and care, while considering the possibilities of decolonial love as a practice of critical awareness. By bringing decolonial feminist theory into conversation with autoethnographic reflection, this article advances decolonial love as a feminist analytic for understanding how colonial histories continue to shape intimate life.
In recent years, feminist politics have faced a renewed reactionary backlash. Drawing on Jilly Boyce Kay's articulation of the ‘femosphere’ and Asa Seresin's ‘heteropessimism’ as key theoretical frameworks, we explore how women in the femosphere advance reactionary politics by promoting bioessentialism, political fatalism, and neoliberal ideology. To do so, we explore the contours of ‘dark femininity,’ a digital feminine aesthetic blending femme-fatale imagery with advice promising women romantic and financial success if they ‘tap into’ their ‘dark side’ to attract a ‘high-value’ man. Using a critical thematic analysis of 1946 Instagram posts from a prominent (yet anonymous) dark feminine influencer, we investigate how this influencer participates in, and advances, gender regulation, heteropessimism, and neoliberal ideology in backlash times. We argue that the dark feminine influencer's aesthetics and discourse reveal mediated anger about heterosexual relationships but submit to the fatalistic belief, just like her manosphere counterparts, that heterosexual culture is beyond repair and must therefore be gamified and ‘beat.’ In closing, we propose hetero respair as an alternative social imaginary and political project that offers a caring, hopeful vision for heteroculture.
