Lexicon's of Women's Empowerment Online

Discourse, Context & Media, 2019

Vagina Varsity is a South African online campaign aimed at selling Libresse sanitary products to ostensibly young women in South Africa, primarily through the medium of YouTube. In this paper, we investigate the privileging of white women's bodies over those of women of colour in the campaign. In so doing, we tease out how patriarchy is multi-layered and experienced differently by women depending on their race and class. Moreover, we see that black South African women's issues are being served by the campaign only to the extent which they coincide with those of the dominant group, i.e. white women in South Africa. To critically investigate this phenomenon, we use an intersectionality framework (Crenshaw, 1989) to discern latent differences in the treatment of black and white women's bodies in the campaign. Multimodality (Kress, 2010; Iedema, 2003) allows us to analyse texts, sounds and images used in the campaign. Importantly, however, we also adopt Kulick's (2003) notion of 'dual indexicality' to explore what is absent or silent in the campaign. We argue that the model of capitalism which commodifies women's empowerment serves to multimodally exclude black women's lived experience of patriarchy and pain.

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2019

Discourses of female empowerment are increasingly prominent within ethical capitalism, which seeks to remedy global crises with private-sector solutions and their commodities. This article examines the intersecting manifestations of female empowerment, commodity activism, and ethical capitalism with case studies on Born Free Africa, a fashion collection combatting mother-to-child HIV transmission, and THINX, which sells "period-proof" panties. Each company articulates empowerment through a binary between the Western feminist savior and "in-need" woman of the global south. This article argues that this iteration of empowerment not only reinforces logics of neo-colonial capitalism, but also masks disciplinary regimes for individual feminine subjects.

Sex in the States: Manners, Morals and Morés, 2020

Contending with assaults from various fronts, the "hood" shows signs of impending doom. Attacks on the hood are, in effect, attacks on the people who comprise them, and we can observe the dispossession of our fruits right before our eyes. Since the beginning, mankind has attempted to use his power to capture, contain, direct, or otherwise wield complete control over many natural processes traditionally free and accessible to all by birth. This chapter deconstructs the systems of power at work in contemporary societies that seek to rename and redefine what sex is so as to redefine what reproduction is and who can justifiably engage in producing the next generations. We draw upon methods in the Critical Discourse Analysis tradition to analyze the agitation and integration propaganda infiltrating public discourse aiming to remold women into objects handled and controlled by centers of transnational global power.

FKW Journal for Visual Culture and Gender Studies, 2022

This special issue inquires into the challenges of a global and decolonial as well as anti-discriminatory feminism and its dissonances – between lived bodies and public voices, between genealogical reference and (neoliberal) valorisation machinery. The focus thus lies on both the politics of recognition and irritation, the public scope of which extends from sexism to new strategies of visibility and the compulsion to achieve visibility. (Co-ed. with Valeria Schulte-Fischedick): Wie ://sprechen wir #feminismus?// Neue globale Herausforderungen — Ein Glossar // How://Do we speak #feminism? // New global challenges—a Glossary. FKW Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und Visuelle Kultur// FKW Journal for Visual Culture and Gender Studies, Nr. 70 February 2022: https://www.fkw-journal.de/index.php/fkw

Many feminist writers and activists have recently romanticized an invitation to a 'transnational feminist' response to universal types of oppression facing "all" women across the world. Contrastingly, other voices have expressed concerns about discursive and theoretical flows from North to South.

Journal of Communication

The mode of 'development' under question in Stream 16 at CMS7 challenges the integrity of sustainability claims to be found in the most rapacious of industries that together form 'the global economy'. This 'economy' is driven by a neo-liberal logic that promises a trickle-down effect that will enrich all and take care of the environment. Nowhere yet has this promise been fulfilled.

Hypatia

's anthology Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization addresses a broad range of issues that underscore the importance of decolonizing feminist theory. Chapters included in this book examine a wide variety of approaches to decolonizing feminism from a transnational and global perspective. Theorists champion Indigenous feminism, global and communal forms of knowledge, collective movements that emphasize women's rights, citizenship, care chains and democratic processes, home in a global worker context, and the plight of refugee women, to name a few. These issues demonstrate the need for feminism to have a transnational, decolonial, and global lens. McLaren and the authors in the anthology face these challenges head-on. The result is a bold and innovative anthology that makes a significant contribution to feminist philosophy. Decolonizing Feminism links feminism and decoloniality by joining the conversation about decoloniality begun and sustained by Anibal Quijano,

Feminist Media Studies , 2024

This paper seeks to reflect on the ways in which a non-metropolitan academic feminist community engages with digital media to reimagine the discipline of Women’s Studies, and consequently feminist politics. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Women’s Studies Centre at a university in Tamil Nadu, India, this paper moves away from the framework of the digital as simply enabling or empowering, and instead seeks to examine these digital cultures as shaped by the particularities of their geographic coordinates, and as part of a larger media environment which is characterised as much by continuities as it is by innovations. In doing so, it attempts to understand feminisms as media phenomena that are actively shaped by and shaping media technologies and discourses. It argues that Women’s Studies scholars in these locations, operating from hybrid geographical and digital places, enable the possibility of decentring feminist scholarship and thus allow for a reframing of the digital. To do this, it focuses on three distinct areas of engagement— the co-creation of knowledge in Tamil language Wikipedia, interactions on social media platforms, and their engagements with little magazines in their online avatars.

My mission is neither to reproduce the history of the feminist movement nor to pro- vide abbreviated and therefore inadequate accounts of its primary figures. Instead, I have chosen a sampling of fairly narrow subjects, each intended to embody an aspect of a contemporary feminist theory, critique, and practice. Each chapter is intended to be read as a thread included in a complex weave of ideas and thinkers, as a complemen- tary, mutually reinforcing part of an evolving project. My primary aims are threefold. First, I will demonstrate the relevance of feminist theorizing to issues that may seem less directly about the status and emancipation of women––for example, terrorism, species extinction, or climate change –– but which, especially in a globalized econ- omy, are more relevant now than ever. Second, I will show how feminist thinking can usefully illuminate the conceptual, political, economic, and morally relevant links between a range of pressing contemporary issues: for example, the connection between ongoing environmental deterioration and the role of human beings with respect to nonhuman nature, or our attitudes toward reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization with respect to who has access to them or what role sexual identity, economic class, and geo- graphic location play in determining this access. Lastly, I will argue that a feminist theorizing that is adequately equipped to confront the issues of a young but rapidly changing century offers real hope to a future that is challenging, but by no means hopeless. These are familiar issues, of course, but I plan to show how a feminist approach can elucidate some of the key relationships among seemingly disparate issues that are likely to define the twenty-first century, and to demonstrate that such an approach has the power to unite its sister movements into a coherent, ethically defensible, emancipatory “not-quite-whole” (McClure 1992: 342). The point of philosophy, Karl Marx argued, is not merely to under- stand the world, but to change it––for the better.Yet, while I still think this is true, I also know that the world imagined by Marx is very different from the world in which we live; and moreover I know that what is absent, elided, distorted via what it means to have access to the Internet is itself an essential part of what we must come to understand if this change is really to be possible.What I’m after is no less the continuing revolution imagined by my foremothers, yet one that includes many a subject matter beyond what my foremothers could have imagined. Sexual identity and politics, reproductive technology, economic inequality, the culture industry, religious fundamentalism, and the status of nonhuman others –– why these six issues? The ways in which each issue has an impact upon human and nonhuman life has under- gone significant transformation, particularly with respect to technology.The technologies, for example, of sex reassignment have changed immensely over the last quarter-century and have become fully com- modified in a globalized market largely devoted to the reproduction of Western conceptions of sexual identity, attraction, beauty, and cul- ture. Similarly, the technologies through which religious fundamen- talism has become an exportable good––including communications technology on the one hand, and weapons of mass destruction on the other––have changed the very ways in which we think about religion and the implications of religious conviction. How we define what counts as “fanaticism,” for instance, intersects with questions central to the feminist and anti-racist movements, particularly in terms of the conditions that may help to create soldiers for God, foster the misogyny of the Taliban, or engender backlash against what is perceived to be unrestrained Western materialism. Much the same, of course, might be said for other issues –– say the continuing exploita- tion of women, girls, and some men, in pornography. But while pornography has certainly seen an incalculable expansion of its range via the Internet and other forms of communications technology, it has not,I suggest,undergone as revolutionary a transformation as,say, our thinking about climate change in virtue of our access to information about melting ice caps or vanishing polar bears. Access to pornog- raphy has become easier, and the amount of pornography has grown –– this is nothing to be underestimated, and there are some serious social consequences. However, the amount of information on climate change isn’t just greater, or access to it easier; rather, we start to think about the world in ways we may have never considered before, especially with respect to how our vision of the “good life” intersects and affects the environment and its dependents on a global scale. Some of the thinkers appearing in the following pages claim feminism as a way of life; others don’t, but they have had or may yet have considerable influence on future theorizing and activism. Some are well known within feminism and/or within philosophy; others are less well known but, in my view, deserve greater attention. Several are voices from the sciences. This work, then, is not really about feminism, but aims instead –– following the example of Wittgenstein –– to exemplify feminism as the critical practice of a life worth living. I am an unapologetic, politically active, ecologically oriented feminist; the following interrogates what such a position might consist of, and in that sense it might offer an example––though surely not an uncontestable one –– for my reader. In the end, my project is as traditional as Socrates’ exhortation to the examination of conscience, and as radical as Wittgenstein’s insistence that we “go look and see.” But there’s one more thing. While it might be tempting to read the forthcoming discussions of sexuality, gender, race, and economic status as “old hat” for a feminism long engaged with these themes –– as if most readers had largely settled all the relevant issues of equality and identity –– I think that would be a mistake. Had we settled these issues, a political figure like Sarah Palin would not have gained the attention –– even devotion –– that she has from the “base” of her party. Indeed, she’s wildly popular where I live.“Out here,” in rural Pennsylvania, “feminism” is deployed as a term of derision; “not- Christian” is readily translated into “minion of Satan,”“pro-choice” means “baby-killer,” and “environmentalist” means “whacko-tree- hugger.”“Gun culture” isn’t merely alive and well in my town; it sig- nals an entire way of life that revolves around a very narrow conception of a Christian god who determines the “place” of each member of “his” creation –– and its adherents shop at Walmart for ammo. My point is that change can count as neither progressive nor enduring until it comes here, that is, to the countless “heres” that characterize the hearts and minds of millions of people who, mostly just trying to get by, don’t have a lot of time to think about what “equality” means for women, non-Caucasians, even poorer people –– let alone nonhuman animals and the environment itself.This book, then, is not a manifesto –– that would be addressed to folks already convinced that the revolution is worthwhile. No, this book is about a modest list of topics that I think matter in ways that touch almost all of us in one fashion or another; yet, understood in the light of a theory and practice devoted from its inception to emancipation–– namely, the feminist, gay, environmental, animal-welfare, and civil- right movements –– these topics reveal some new avenues of analysis, and thus some new ideas for forming workable coalitions in pursuit of a more just future.