Since the mid-20th century, Europe has changed dramatically, in many ways.1 It has lost its colonies, and as it established crony-ship with the world’s dictators and autocrats, and continued unabashedly to plunder the world’s riches, it slowly but surely lost its self-proclaimed patina of ‘civilization.’ Its symbolic value as a protector of equality and human rights around the world had all but disappeared

How might the idea of recognition offer a fresh slant on contemporary women’s writing? In this essay, we bring theories of recognition into dialogue with two literary works: Chris Kraus’s widely reviewed memoir I Love Dick and The Other Woman by the well-regarded Swedish novelist Therese Bohman. Our analysis focuses on recognition within the texts as well as its relevance to relations between texts

The aim of this article is to offer a comprehensive analysis of the European Union’s neo-abolitionist approach to prostitution, drawing on the literature that addresses the global rise of neo-abolitionism and using key concepts developed by the gendered approaches to the European Union in order to adapt them to the particular context of the European Union. To do so, the article undertakes a critical

This conversation reflects on the importance of transnational Black solidarity in a global moment where the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed structural inequalities that sustain Black death and the global movement for Black lives has focussed attention on anti-Blackness. We reflect on the legacies of past and contemporary Black, Indigenous, People of Colour activism and the role that this has played in

Using microdata from the Wage Structure Survey, we analyse the gender wage gap in the private and public sectors, considering the whole wage distribution. The main contribution is to assume that the decision to work in a sector is a prior process determined endogenously in the model. Thus, the usual Ordinary Least Square estimation is inconsistent, and it is necessary to use alternative techniques

Thirty years after the Velvet Revolution, Slovak feminist activists look back to the 1990s and early 2000s as the time of exceptional capacity building and knowledge production which was barely sustained in later years. The last decade of feminist organizing has been marked by waning financial resources for civil society organizations, and appropriation of feminist and gender equality agenda by the

In mid-June 2020, a piece of news from the United Kingdom hit the media in Europe (and perhaps beyond) – a Black man, a protestor in support of the Black Lives Matter movement saved an injured white man, taking him out of a sea of demonstrating people to safety. It reminded me of news, from some time ago, about another Black man, a migrant from Mali in Paris, who saved a child from falling off a fourth

Gender imbalances persist throughout the world, particularly at leadership level, and equally also visible in the case of trade unions. This article focuses on CGTP-IN, the largest Portuguese trade union confederation, and sets out analysis incorporating both figures from this organisation and accounts by female members of CGTP-IN unions. Results confirm the existence of gender asymmetries, especially

No matter how many different opening sentences I typed and deleted, as we approach the end of 2020, a year that many have described as a science fiction dystopic nightmare come true, there seems only one apt way to open this editorial:

On 11 June 2020 in Lisbon, 4 days after the anti-racism demonstrations that took place in several Portuguese cities following the killing of George Floyd, the statue of the Priest António Vieira (1608–1697) was splattered with red spots and inscribed with the word ‘decolonise’. Considering Portugal’s prominent role in the transatlantic slave trade, the country’s enduring celebration of the ‘Discoveries’1

In order to stand up for the freedom and justice of Black people in Germany we organize together, lovingly and sustainably. Our work deliberately aims to form and promote a black community in the fight against racism and deprivilegation. That includes knowing “our” history. (BLMB, undated)

The violently unjust and unlawful murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 by police officers in Minneapolis, United States, brought a simmering pot of exasperation, passion, and fury to boiling point as protests erupted around the world. Protesters demanded justice for not only George Floyd, but the countless other victims of racial inequality and police brutality, including Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery

Explicit racism’s increased presence in Dutch public space did not lead to public recognition of the existence of structural forms of racism in the Netherlands until recently. Previously, I argued this denial was historically rooted in the construction of the Dutch self-image as charitable and open versus the framing of migrants as “weak”, “disadvantaged” others who need help from the majority group

Madhok S (2020) A critical reflexive politics of location, ‘feminist debt’ and thinking from the Global South. European Journal of Women’s Studies 27(4): 394–412. DOI: 10.1177/1350506820952492.

In this article, I would like to take a somewhat closer look at the politics of hashtags surrounding wave of street actions known as Black Protest (Czarny Protest), held nation-wide in Poland on October 2016. Analysing the use of social media as the form of digital activism, I strive at both mitigating the fallacy of digital dualism and demystifying the notion of ‘Twitter revolutions’. The term was

This artice critically and intersectionally reviews Frank Wilderson III’s influential text “Afropessimism”. I conclude that the book has serious theoretical shortcomings.

This article aims to develop new conceptions of the psychosocial dynamics that drive the re-romanticization of domestic femininity in current financialized capitalism. Feminist scholars have described this heightened cultivation of mothering as a reparative move in response to irreconcilable tensions between cultural ideals of the ‘balancing mother’ and ‘lean-in femininity’. This article adds a ma

This article investigates related contexts and connections that both hide and display the coercion and sexual violence manifest in Western cultural and aesthetic artefacts during ancient Greek and ...

The aim of this article is to discuss the position of ethnic minority women (Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian) in relation to their career-building in the Serbian higher education system and reachin...

Whether hailed for transitioning to the ballot box, or condemned for failing to hold elections, Africa’s postcolonial states exhibit profound contradictions in the arena of gender politics. Where reforms have been achieved, implementation remains minimal, as undemocratic state structures and uncivil societies alike lack the political will to change. This article addresses the emergence of feminism

In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a ‘feminist debt’. The ‘feminist debt’ is to the politics of location, and the question asks: what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for knowledge production and for doing feminist theory? I suggest that there are at least three stipulations/enablements that a critical reflexive

This article examines the religious and gendered identities of female immigrant Muslim boxers. We aim to investigate the power relations, dominant ideologies and prejudices that are underpinning th...

The origins of my approach to academic scholarship were established by my parents’ commitment to the revolutionary politics of social change and care. Though their perspectives differed in terms of their individual and structural analyses – whether through popular culture, the news, or reflections about the persistence of inequalities – dialogical interventions about the possibility of a more equitable

Although single articles about gender in the Global South have been published once in a while in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, this is the first special issue dedicated entirely to feminisms in and of this part of the globe. It is based on a lecture series organised by the editors in the summer of 2018 at the Cornelia Goethe Centre in Frankfurt/ Main, Germany. Germany is not the only European

In this article, I focus on the work of the South Asian Network for Gender Transformation (SANGAT) to show how it goes beyond the current turn to the Global South in much contemporary transnational feminisms. It does so in two ways. One, as evident in the name, it defines a regional imaginary, which is place-based and informed by the long history of interactions in the area beyond the colonial, postcolonial

The article takes as its subject the trials of Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede for the murder of the English student Meredith Kercher in Perugia on 2 November 2007. Through a Foucaul...

The events that followed the revolution of 25 January 2011 demonstrated the tenacity and resilience of gendered dissent and its centrality to collective action and civil disobedience, thus enriching the transnational feminist archive with the experiences and praxis of gendered revolutionary action. Paying particular attention to women’s activism during the uprisings in Egypt, this article focuses on

This qualitative study analysed the agency of eight non-abusing mothers in the Turkish Cypriot Community after disclosure that their child had been sexually abused by someone outside the family. Th...

This article provides an analysis of the perception of fear in nightlife spaces, its relationship with sexual violence and the strategies that young people implement to combat these situations in t...

The sexual assaults reported on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne posed major challenges to feminists struggling with the tensions and entanglements of feminism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, Islam...

This article contributes to the debate about the role of affect in transformative change towards gender equality, by comparing the building of affect in two recently founded women’s networks in Ita...

The article addresses the gendered implications of Covid-19 in the Global South by paying attention to the intersectional pre-existing inequalities that have given rise to specific risks and vulnerabilities. It explores various aspects of the pandemic-induced ‘crisis of social reproduction’ that affects women as the main caregivers as well as addressing the drastic increase of various forms of gender-based

Recent years have brought enormous growth in the number of women-only art exhibitions. These exhibitions are accompanied by discussions that concentrate on curatorial feminist activism. In this tex...

Scholarship on gender mainstreaming (GM) in the European Union (EU) consistently highlights the disappointing implementation of gender mainstreaming. This article contributes to that discussion thr...

In this article I take the notion of the mobility assemblage as a theoretical lens through which I consider entanglements between refugee and migrant women on the move, intense experiences of gendered labour, and affective encounters in crossing borders and following lines of flight. The analysis revolves around the life-story of a young refugee woman, who recounts her experiences of travelling to

Whereas intersectionality presents a fruitful framework for theoretical and empirical research, some of its fundamental features present great confusion. The term ‘intersectionality’ and its metaph...

The transnational anti-gender movement often has a strong connection to conservative religious organisations. However, even if the anti-gender movement is easy to recognise in Sweden, it is impossible for it to propagate significant opposition to gender mainstreaming and gender studies by using the Church as a reference due to white Swedish people’s established and neo-colonial image of Sweden as exceptional

This article examines the webpages of Russian reproductive clinics and surrogacy agencies that offer surrogacy to foreign clients. Theoretically and analytically, the article is anchored in the wor...

Scholars describe Global North feminisms as mostly ‘secular’ and often opposing religion. Contemporary feminist intersectional movements seem to offer different approaches able to overcome distance...

While populism has accumulated an extensive research, its gender dimension has remained largely understudied. Only recently has a literature emerged that focuses on the gender dimension of radical right populist parties in Europe, where they have risen from marginal to government positions. In this article, I provide a guide to the topics and results of this recent development and delineate future

At present, women serve in a variety of combat roles, combat-support positions, and administrative roles in various militaries around the globe. This book looks at Israeli women’s military service as a gendered rite of passage through which these women learn to become gendered citizens. Stated differently, through military service, Israeli women learn the meaning of citizenship for themselves. The

Readers who are following gender politics in Europe and around the world will hardly have missed the rise of so-called anti-gender movements and the worries this conglomeration of right-wing populists, nationalists and conservative Christian mobilisation is causing both to larger fields of gender, feminist and women’s studies, and individual researchers. Indeed, after nearly half a century of relative

Increasing numbers of women in Turkey are murdered by their relatives, spouses or significant others. The perpetrators plead provocation for their crimes, claiming their actions are provoked by wom...

Austerity in Greece resulted in poverty, political and social turmoil and intense debates about collective identities, citizenship and the future. One of the main arguments has been that the Greeks...

More than ever, ‘the headscarf’ is a dominant trope in contemporary ‘Western’ discourses on migration. Within controversies on Muslim ‘others’, ethnicity and gender frequently interweave. In discus...

Obstetric violence – psychological and physical violence by medical staff towards women giving birth – has been described as structural violence, specifically as gender violence. Many women are aff...

In response to the phenomenon of women converting to Islam, a body of research has emerged, engaging with the question, ‘Why are Western women, raised in liberal contexts, converting to Islam?’ Thi...

This article analyses the gendered nature of teachers’ views on schools and security. Current research on security emphasizes masculinity and the absence of femininity in relation to the security f...

The present article is part of a preliminary study concerning the discursive manifestations of US President Trump’s sexist beliefs. While many studies have focused on Trump’s usage of hostile sexis...

Drawing upon lived experiences, this article explores challenges facing feminist academics sharing work in the media, and the gendered, raced intersections of ‘being visible’ in digital cultures wh...

Over the past decade several studies by Spanish/European scholars (Pura Fernández, Maite Zubiaurre, Serge Salaün, Christine Rivalan-Guégo) have explored fin-de-siècle literary, artistic and cultural production as a source for new perspectives in cultural and gender studies. Among them, the work of Isabel Clúa stands out as an inspiring contribution to the field. Clúa’s main line of research focuses

construction of a ‘real self’ for a large audience. Thus, far from just feeding a patriarchal economy of desire by legitimating their position as passive objects of consumption, celebrity status enables a process of transcendence beyond the stage through which actresses emerge as individuals able to manage their careers, to achieve financial autonomy, and to intercede in the production of gender roles

The authors identify a pervasive tendency, especially in the world of development and humanitarian response, to hierarchize or prioritize certain types of victims of sexual violence in armed confli...

minoritarian insurgent genealogies of thinking and imagining. If use is a frame, Ahmed asks us collectively to queer our use of practices of citation to create frames through which we can envision other possibilities. She closes with a return to the image of queer use on the book cover, a postbox with a makeshift sign that asks that the postbox not be used because birds are nesting within – inviting

For over four decades, feminist studies of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have been interested in the ethical, political and personal implications of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other infertility treatments. Most work on the implications of ART for women has focused on the demanding cyclical process of trying to become pregnant by using the technology. However, less attention has been

The performative representation of the Spanish Roma woman reveals a historical journey that brings her closer to many symbolic elaborations of the feminine, giving her a special affinity with the imaginary concerning the colonized woman, particularly with the Orientalist vision. Developed initially by the travelling intellectuals in Spain who sought a fusion of the topics of sexualized exoticism, the

Induced abortion is a worldwide practice and its legalisation is a persistent demand of the women’s movement. Although in the academic literature there are numerous studies that address the study of fertility, nowhere near as much attention has been given to the analysis of induced abortion and its determining factors, and even less to the consideration of gender equality as a variable through which

Feminist scholars have increasingly expressed their worries about the depoliticization of intersectionality since it has travelled from its point of origin in US Black feminist theory to the shores of Europe. They have argued that the subject for which the theory was intended has been displaced, that Black feminists have been excluded from the discussion, and that white European feminists have usurped

Lack of recognition of queer families in Poland impacts their daily experiences in a distinct manner. However, the importance of geo-location and a Central and Eastern European perspective have bee...

Drawing on the author’s archival research in Germany and the US, empirical data about US-allied troop sexual violence during post-World War II occupied Germany suggests a complex interplay between gender, security, silence production, and state identity. Through a feminist security studies lens, this article theorizes about an unexplored, obscured form of de-securitization: the unmaking of a security