Tribute written by Tori Cann, with input from friends and family.
Catherine Wheel
You were fully committed to changing the world This was your aim That the barriers faced by young people today Would no longer remain You recognised the power of coercion and control And the damage of self-blame Your goal was to educate and validate and empower So that lives were reclaimed
There was not enough time to complete the plan As you were snatched away Despite your energy and drive to make a difference You were denied another day Everyone you touched with your warmth and kindness Misses your sunshine ray Where Catherine was materially, is now an unoccupied space But your legacy will stay
It was an absolute pleasure to work with you on your doctorate Like a Catherine Wheel firework dancing Always so passionate but pulled in different directions, all more important Than grammar rules and referencing You always had time to smile and laugh, despite the seriousness of your work Taking pleasure in achieving You will be much missed, but you leave behind an inspirational path That others are now following.
Poem by Catherine’s PhD supervisor, Professor Dawn Mannay, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
In January 2023 the world of gender and education lost one of our newest and brightest shining lights, Dr Catherine Thomas (also known as Catherine Phillips). Catherine was midway through her (posthumously awarded) doctoral research into young people’s understanding of coercion and consent within and beyond education when her life was cruelly and unexpectedly cut short. For those that worked with Catherine, news of her passing was more than a shock, not least because Catherine was perhaps the most energetic and fearless of our friends. Sometimes the word ‘passionate’ is bandied around when describing our activist friends, but for us who knew and loved Catherine, passionate is likely the word that comes first and foremost to mind when we think of her. Fiercely passionate, protective, and tireless in her fight against injustice, Catherine wasn’t shy about letting you know what she cared about, and she wasn’t going to go easy on you if she thought you might be standing in the way of equality.
One of her friends recalled that he “had the opportunity to witness her profound care and concern for people, particularly those facing disadvantages in society. Catherine would often speak passionately about the children she met during her research interviews and her desire to change societal norms and systems that posed obstacles to their well-being. She would shed tears when discussing potential harm that children might have experienced. Her face would light up when she shared stories of positive changes resulting from her work and advocacy for the well-being of women and children. For Catherine, there was no dichotomy between work and personal life. Her dedication to gender equity and children’s well-being was her work, passion, and her life”
Such was her fire that it’s impossible to imagine a future without her, but it’s also impossible to imagine a future where her legacy doesn’t continue.
I first met Catherine when she was finishing up her MA in Human Rights at the University of West England where she received a Distinction, and she was introduced to me by EJ Renold who Catherine was a research assistant for at the time. We quickly became friends and subsequently worked together on three projects on girls’ rights for the charity Plan International UK, with Catherine taking on the focus on Welsh girls and young women. Anyone who worked with Catherine loved working with her, she approached any project with absolute enthusiasm, a commitment to justice and a fierce sense of humour. As part of her doctoral journey, working under the supervision of Professor Dawn Mannay and Dr Kevin Smith, Catherine continued in this vein. In 2022 Catherine was presented the Audrey Jones Awards for the work on her thesis to date, which further demonstrates the quality of her research and writing.
Friends and colleagues from her PhD community paint a picture of Catherine as just the best person to have around, funny, smart, generous in her spirit and unwavering in her support. Catherine was everyone’s hype-girl. While there were times when it was challenging for her, Catherine, like so many of us to be the first in our family to go to university, to be a mature student, to be at once both ‘Mum’ and ‘student’, delighted in connecting with other ‘misfit’ academics. She would always be the first to let you know that she was grateful for your presence, she was never shy to call out injustice and she absolutely delighted in lifting others. Her friend recalled “When I think of Catherine, I remember her as a source of empowerment and unwavering support for the well-being of people, especially women and children. She had an incredibly kind heart and would go above and beyond to assist others. She took the time to listen and always offered her helping hand to uplift those in need. Personally, she lifted me countless times, and her caring nature left a lasting impact on all who knew her. Many people who interacted with Catherine will fondly remember her asking, “hey, are you okay?”; and “how can I help, my love?”.”
In 2022 Catherine and I published a jointly written chapter on Girls and Mental Health and it was an experience I’ll always treasure. While I was off meeting the academic conventions Catherine would pull me back to make the writing more engaging for the intended audience. Whenever I reread this piece (which I have done a few times since Catherine’s passing) I can’t help but read this line in her voice: “Say it with us. Accountability is everything.” These seven words illustrate Catherine’s approach to writing, academia and activism perfectly. She didn’t just want you to understand the problem, she wanted to hear you say how you will be part of the solution.
Prior to her arrival in academia, Catherine’s career showed her deep commitment to gender equality for children and young people. In 2017 she joined Welsh Women’s Aid as a Children and Young People Public Affairs Officer and a Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (VAWDASV) Trainer. As part of this role she worked with service providers, Welsh Government, schools and the police to advocate for young people’s rights and to train service providers in gender equality (you can read the Welsh Women’s Aid tribute to Catherine here). One of Catherine’s most valuable skills was her ability to speak across groups and to garner enthusiasm from others for gender equality work. Colleagues from Welsh Women’s Aid described Catherine as ‘unfaltering force for good’ an opinion that echoes across all of the tributes that have come from her friends and family. Her previous experience included copywriting, editing, and content management for not-for-profits and she also worked with CAFCASS Cymru on children and young people’s experiences. In 2014 she completed an internship with UN Women in New York which Catherine was immensely proud of (you can read her writing about this experience here). Catherine also took great enjoyment in writing poetry and fiction prose.
Words can’t do justice to the way Catherine made you feel; supported, loved, valued, and there remains a great sense of injustice to losing her so early. She was, and is, loved by so many and both professionally and personally, and her loss has been acutely felt, she still had so much to say and to do. So, in the spirit of Catherine, and her love for poetry I leave you with a poem of hope from Catherine herself:
Things don’t stay the same for long, so wherever you are hang on. Even if your fingernails splinter and all you feel is winter deep in your bones
When there is no comfort at home, and no love to call your own. When you feel like your soul is broken and all the words spoken are of loss
You have the power to shower yourself with all you need, you’re already complete. You are not the actions or words of others, you are not drowning in shame. You’re not to blame.
So hang on, and soon you’ll plant your feet on a different street. The season will change, cold winds replaced by birds in trees and the low hum of bees
You’ll have love at home, which will be your own. Your heart will repair and you’ll feel safe, in that place that reminds you you’re strong and you’ve found where you belong.
By Tamsin Hinton-Smith, University of Sussex; Fawzia Mazanderani, University of Sussex; Nupur Samuel, O.P. Jindal Global University; Anna CohenMiller, Nazarbayev University; and Ruth Goodman, University of Sussex
In January 2021 as an interdisciplinary team of feminist academics from participating universities in five countries, we embarked on a research project seeking to interrogate and increase gender inclusion and sensitivity in the focus and approach of higher education teaching in universities across five participating countries: India, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and UK. Set against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and with technology as the only bridge between us, our journey as a research team was not always smooth. In this blog we reflect on the challenges faced as a research team and our developing learning from being part of the research process. Gender on the Higher Education Learning Agenda Internationally is a 2-year British Academy funded research project funded as part of the Global Challenges Research Fund, with a central focus on equitable collaborative partnership between global north and global south countries to advance the Sustainable Development Goals.
Reflections on the research journey
The formal research design from the outset focused around online survey and interview data collection with university students and staff across partner institutions. However, as we undertook this research underpinned by principles of equitable collaboration, as feminist researchers we became increasingly aware of the need to focus more on reflecting on the research process and challenges within this, alongside the substantive focus.
Through our mutual reflections on our research journey, four themes emerged: communication styles and expectations, our sense of connectedness, the embodied and emotional dimensions to carrying out the research, and ethical considerations in terms of where power sat across countries and individuals.
We hope this blog provides interest to anyone concerned with the promotion of more equitable ways of researching collaboratively across intersections of gender, ethnicity, country context and academic seniority.
Complex communication
The research took place during the Covid-19 pandemic and so communication, and the majority of data collection, took place online. With all aspects of the research being conducted remotely, the ‘digital divide’ became apparent with inequalities arising both in access to internet but also confidence and experience using technical tools. Internet access and power outages compromised some colleagues in participating fully in all online meetings resulting in frustration and compromising opportunities for people to have their voices heard.
Research outputs were translated into local languages to support equity of access of research insights. However, reflecting colonial legacies, English was the first language of two of the partner countries (UK and Nigeria), the language of academia in India, and third language after French in Morocco, and after Russian in Kazakhstan, and so was the common project language shared by all research team members. The use of English as the project language represented uncomfortable communication inequalities, placing additional burdens on team members communicating verbally and in writing in a second or third language.
Beyond the need to translate languages there is also the challenge of translating cultural understandings. As the Morocco based research assistant expressed, ‘we don’t usually have the same interpretation, and this causes sometimes problems of understanding and problems of progress.’ For example, assumptions about what is meant by gender in different international contexts, for instance, whether ‘non-binary’ was a relevant and appropriate gender option for our surveys, resulted in difference of opinion and reinforced the need for clear and explicit communication and to create a space where clarifying understandings and reflecting together were encouraged. Differences in assumptions and understanding existed for research practices more broadly including frequency and conventions for communication.
Connectedness and humanisation of research process
Conducting international research as feminist scholars, connectedness and humanisation of the research process, was of strong importance influencing the way sought to carry out the research. Not all of the co-investigators had met each other in-person, and the research assistants were appointed specifically for the project and had no prior connections with any other team members, so actively creating online spaces to get to know each other was central to the success of the project as a collaborative endeavour. We met regularly as a Team via zoom, including space for informal as well as project management discussion within this, and made sure that all stages of the research process were developed as a team in a consultative manner.
Embodied experience and affect
Online research design brings the potential to disrupt the privileging of embodied presence that favours able bodies, geographic proximity and monetary access to education. Yet, working in this way brought with it challenges to managing time zone conflicts and pressures encompassed in the collapsing of work and home, that virtual communication brings about.
The pandemic required all team members to adopt new working patterns in terms of homeworking and researchers experienced intense experiences in the lifecycle of the project including childcare; illness of loved ones; and the emotional impact of fulfilling pastoral responsibilities for students in the context of the pandemic. The latter was particularly acute in India in Summer 2021 when pandemic conditions made continuing with the research in any meaningful way temporarily impossible. A humanising approach was vital to making sure that our continuation of the research through these challenging times took place in a way that recognised and supported what the research team and participants were negotiating in their wider lives.
Ethical concerns and considerations
Finally, we faced ethical challenges in moving beyond hierarchical approaches to knowledge production where research on the Global South is conducted by researchers from the Global North, to achieving equitable partnership in practice.
However diligently we sought to attend to feminist ethics around voice, power and collaboration; practicalities including technological inequalities around access, reliability and confidence continued to challenge the potential to meet the goals of equitable participation. Requirements to lead ethical approval, data storage, video conferencing hosting, and paying of budgets, all through UK lead organisations, provides a constant reminder of hierarchies of participation. One researcher expressed how:
‘Research, which is being done in the countries of Global South, it can be funded by international organizations or it can be funded locally, but what we have at the end of the day, the research outcomes, they are not widely circulated in the local communities. They go to the Global North…’ (Kazakhstan Research Assistant).
It is with this in mind that it has been particularly important in this project to ensure translation of key outputs and for the research team to support development of outputs identified by international team members as important to local agendas and audiences.
Conclusion
In this blog we have reflected on the process and experience of undertaking collaborative feminist research into gender equality in higher education, as an interdisciplinary, international research team. Through our reflective practice we hope to generate a wider understanding around the challenges of carrying out research equitably in practice, alongside our substantive focus on understanding gender (in)equality in higher education.
An in-depth reflexive exploration of the process and experience of undertaking collaborative feminist research into gender equality in higher education, as an interdisciplinary, international research team can be found in the forthcoming publication:
By Alice Little, Josh, Oscar, Elliot, Charlotte Haines-Lyon, & Nathalie Noret
Pupil toilets are a problematic space in school. Pupils often report feeling unsafe and being concerned about the cleanliness and hygiene of school toilets. As such are often reluctant to use the toilets in school time. We aimed to work with young people to explore and challenge common toilet narratives to develop healthier, more equitable toilet practice.
Working with young people, we developed a participatory research project to examine: how can young people work with schools to develop toilet policy and practice that is safe, healthy, and socially just? We successfully recruited a secondary school in South Yorkshire to participate in the project. The school had recently conducted a student voice survey and identified a problem with the school toilets. Our student as researchers group decided to investigate this further.
Consistent with our participatory approach to the project, our blog post is co-authored with members of our young people research team, Josh, Oscar, and Elliot. This approach was approved by our institutional ethics board. We highlight why the young people decided to get in the project, what they have done so far in the project, and why they feel Toilet Talk is important.
Why get involved?
Josh – My motivations for joining Toilet Talk was to gain an insight into the processes and factors considered during a research project at University standard. I joined Toilet Talk with these intentions in mind and soon became invested into the opinions and attitudes towards toilets and their usage from the answers given by students at my school and sixth form.
Oscar – I joined Toilet Talk because I have always felt that the quality of school toilets is below adequacy – I believed that through Toilet Talk, we would be able to make meaningful change to our Sixth Form, lower school, and schools across the country. I also felt that the research aspect would be quite interesting, i.e., looking at statistics from peers etc. I was interested in seeing if my opinions on the toilets in and around Sixth Form were shared among peers.
What we have done so far
Alice, Josh & Oscar – Initially we set out to work in a participatory way where the young people could lead the direction of the project. The young researchers chose a method for collecting data about school toilets. We began collaborating on choosing questions that could be asked to other pupils within the sixth form. We discussed ethical considerations such as confidentiality and safeguarding. An aim was to provide reassurance to pupils that we would respect their anonymity when answering the questionnaire. The team of pupil researchers wanted to make sure that respondents felt comfortable and could answer truthfully without any worry of any repercussions. The sessions were held in 25-minute form time slots, which fitted into the school day and were flexible to accommodate those who wanted to take part.
Some of our findings so far
Josh & Oscar –Initially we believed that social space and toilets were connected; our finding concurred that our predictions and estimations were closely matching to the outcome of the Student Voice Survey. 62% of respondents stating that the toilets in Sixth Form were being used as a social space, with 23% specifying that the toilets do not address all needs of pupils. It would be interesting to see if these findings and statistics are generally found across the country in all genders and age brackets – it would be helpful to research further into school toilets to confirm this belief. It was insightful to discover that many of our views on the toilets were shared with our peers as well.
Why these findings are important and our next steps
Josh & Oscar –Collectively, we agreed that sharing our findings with the head of our Sixth Form would be helpful in working towards a solution with the Student Voice Surveys in mind. An intention was to specifically address the findings on social space and accessibility, as we believe these are the key elements that are contributary towards achieving a more comfortable environment for students using the toilets. We believed that through our research being conducted alongside York St John University researchers, our student voice was elevated, and responses would be better received by our Sixth Form and its management. Therefore, hopefully the findings will result in a higher chance of action being taken towards the facilities, better improving the overall conditions for ourselves and our peers. We believe a higher quality environment is deserved for pupils within our sixth form, especially with equitable toilets being a basic human right.
The young researchers facilitated a meeting with senior leadership, and it became clear that no toilet policy existed within the sixth form. An action plan was created that included the co-creation of a toilet policy, and clear expectations to be set out in whole year group assemblies. The young researchers have opened dialogue with the leadership team about expectations and conditions of the sixth form toilets and they wanted to continue this discussion moving forward.
The Toilet Talk project has highlighted the benefits of employing a participatory approach when undertaking research in schools on sensitive and challenging topics. The young researchers in this project have highlighted how important it was to feel listened to and contribute to a meaningful discussion with their school leadership on their research findings. This has led to a change in school policy and practice related to school toilets.
This research secured ethical approval from the York St John University, School of Education, Language and Linguistics, Ethics Committee in January 2022. Written consent was received from the young people to take part in the Toilet Talk project and those involved in writing the blog attended a workshop session on authorship and anonymity within academia, and verbally consented to being named co-authors.
This blog post explores the Gender and Education Association 2021 funded research project titled Toilet Talk: Empowering young people in schools to research and talk about toilet issues, led by Dr Charlotte Haines Lyon.
Many South African women live in fear due to the high levels of gender-based violence (GBV). Moreover, one in five (21%) women in South Africa who have intimate partners, have experienced physical violence by their partners. More significantly, black women are identified in South Africa’s parliament report as the most vulnerable group to intimate partner violence due to their unemployment status, which is at an alarming rate of 30%. In 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 there were 902 cases of femicide, and 11,315 were sexual assault cases committed against women.However, People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA) is not convinced of the statistics as they believe that these do not provide a true reflection of women’s plight. They do acknowledge, however, that these statistics offer a glimpse of the seriousness of gendered violence in women’s everyday lives.
Therefore, it is critical to create spaces for dialogues to engage with the numerous ways in which gender-based violence affects women in the community. Visual methods and creative arts have been central to African social life and cultural construction even before colonialism took hold of African lives. We, therefore, draw from these methods to engage and reflect on the everydayness of GBV.
A work of art
Addressing social challenges through creative arts
Visual methods offer the vocabulary to often unspoken atrocities and traumas that people have experienced in their lives. Gender-based violence is a global challenge dubbed the parallel pandemic affecting communities alongside Covid-19. In a context such as South Africa where the unemployment rate is very high, many women stay in abusive relationships as alternatives do not appear to be in place. Therefore, it is critical to create dialogues, awareness, and empowerment opportunities where women can engage on alternatives and possibilities for better and safer lives. Visual participatory projects offer an opportunity for collective reflection, creating spaces for solidarity, and thinking differently about challenges confronting women. One such visual method is embroidery. Artworks such as embroideries force people to pause and reflect on the perpetual injustices and challenges confronting us daily. Furthermore, artistic visual images such as embroidery are useful tools that can be utilised to represent people’s reflections of their everyday experiences. Embroidery has the potential to contribute to how we make meaning of everyday realities, and how we can imagine the possible transformation of society. Gender-based violence has become an integral part of our lives — it has become part of ‘the everyday’, and it is therefore important to pay attention to this everydayness – the taken for granted; and how these have detrimental effects on the functioning of individuals, families, and ultimately, the whole society.
A call for action
Visual methodologies such as embroideries precipitate social change. They facilitate the co-production of knowledge in contexts where social injustice occurs. When shared publicly or disseminated on wider public platforms, such creative images have a wider reach, aiding critical awareness of the varied forms of oppression and sometimes raising awareness on the ways in which women internalise oppression knowingly and sometimes unknowingly. With embroidery, there is space to look beyond the perceived hopelessness where women are perceived as victims who do not have the power to change their circumstances. Instead, embroidery also highlights how women resist with the courage and determination to change their circumstances. Furthermore, embroidery offers the opportunity to highlight structural violence and inequalities (for example, patriarchy, unemployment, poverty, lack of access to proper education and health systems) that directly impact people’s everyday encounters. Women coming together to make embroideries that show how gender-based violence makes a home in all aspects of women’s lives, at the personal, the collective and the structural level, is a plea for action. The coming together further allows women to analyse policies and laws on GBV and how that affects their everyday lives.
Women’s embroideries in communities may also serve as props for public community dialogues. With the various themes that the embroideries highlight (e.g. being hassled in the streets, domestic violence, being accused of witchery, human trafficking, substance abuse, to name a few) we come together as academics, school learners, and community women at various places and platforms within the community to engage on what these themes mean to all of us. We come together to share stories of survival — share networking and referral processes — to speak about possible steps that could be taken by the communities themselves and how the government can take women’s concerns and recommendations forward to effect relevant policies on GBV.
Conclusion
It is clear that gender-based violence affects all of us either directly or indirectly. Therefore, the call for action is a challenge to all of us to play our role in the spaces we occupy. We should refuse to keep silent in the face of injustice and instead hold each other accountable and collectively work towards sustainable outcomes. From the micro to the macro level, attention has to be given to how gender-based violence affects us. After all, Women’s rights are human rights!
This blog post explores the Gender and Education Association 2021 funded research project titled Embroidery as a visual methodology that carves a bridge for dialogue, led by Professor Puleng Segalo.
A BSA Early Career Forum Regional Event Monday, 6 June 2022 10am – 5pm Brunel University London, Kingston Lane Uxbridge UB8 3PH
Proposals for oral presentations are invited for this BSA Early Career Forum supported one-day in-person event which will drive fresh conversations around the intersection of race and social class within the sociology of education and beyond. In recent years, post-racial ideologies that deny the existence of structural racism has gathered pace in the UK.
At the same time, race- and class-based inequalities have been pitted against each other. These discourses not only fail to grasp the complexities of the issues in hand, but actively deflect attention away from the way racial and classed inequalities within education are interlocked and co-constituted. The COVID-19 pandemic too has laid bare the deep seated racial and classed inequalities in contemporary Britain, which pose challenges to existing sociological frameworks.
Against this backdrop, it is more relevant than ever before to bring together both established and early career sociologists working on the intersection of social class and race to reflect on the current state of affairs, showcase ongoing research projects in the field of education, build networks and further our collective struggle for a more just and equal society. Oral presentations must engage with issues of race and class as they are constructed, represented and experienced in diverse educational settings.
Key Dates: • Deadline for submission of abstracts (300 words): 2nd May 2022 • Decision communicated by: 9th May 2022 • Date of the event: 6th June 2022
Please send 300-word abstracts (with 50-word bio-note) and enquiries to Dr Utsa Mukherjee (utsa.mukherjee @ brunel.ac.uk)
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: • Prof Sally Tomlinson (University of Oxford and Goldsmiths University of London) • Dr Pere Ayling (University of Suffolk)
[Please Note: The event will take place at the Uxbridge Campus of Brunel University London with a possibility for remote participation, if needed]
Schooling continues to be a very important site where gender relations and sexual politics take place (Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Lesko, 2000; Renold, 2005; Ringrose and Renold, 2012; Mendes et al, 2022). This book explores the role of education amidst persisting gender inequalities in education and schooling. This book will present theoretical explorations, case studies and emerging research mapping out some of the oppressive sexist and patriarchal cultures affecting the educational lives of young people today in educational settings and across various national contexts. The book will also offer an opportunity to host an international forum on contemporary thinking on education and the inequalities that characterise processes of education around the world. The chapters will provide a modern look into education, looking at pressing gender and sexuality issues in educational sectors, including schooling. In previous works a critical feminist approach has been suggested for education (Weiler and Arnot, 1993; Walby 1997, Ng et al, 1995; Ringrose 2013), yet, it is important to continue to explore the shifting issues and concerns of the feminist theoretical debates in order to help shape future feminist agendas better suited for our changing international educational landscapes.
Crucially, the book also poses critical questions needed to frame education differently: Can schools be redefined to be more inclusive? Should the school be more accountable for instilling a sense of political agency in students so that students feel confident in challenging inequalities? Are there any ways in which schools can open up more opportunities to challenge toxic student and staff cultures? What modes of student collaboration and resistance enable an ethical response to the inequitable distribution of common rights at school? What concepts can be utilised beyond traditional concepts to better address gender inequalities in schooling? The book seeks to pose these critical questions and through its contributions help rethink education and learning beyond the curriculum, and in a way that appeals both to modern schooling, and our popular imagination on education.
Emergent inequalities in gender are associated with the interpretation of gender identities as binary opposites. This book will present scholarly challenges to these binaries which continue to uncritically construct idealised femininities and masculinities as the only possibilities to enact gender, and as necessarily oppositional. In doing this, the book is contributing to the discourse of, ‘deconstruction of binaries’, best understood through feminist scholarly research and theory (Kristeva 1981; Sedgwick, 2008; White et al, 2017; Youdell, 2006). Consequently, the book will develop its themes guided by some of the critical questions posed previously but with a focus on contemporary formations of gender identity.
In this way the book aims to illustrate how education is an important physical, material and ideological site for understanding and challenging stubborn gender inequalities. Contrary to postfeminist discourses that claim gender equity has been achieved and therefore feminism is redundant, the book positions itself within existing research outlining how gender issues and power cultures have in many cases changed from plain to more insidious inequalities (Ringrose and Epstein, 2015). The notion of education is also expanded in this book, with a focus on more alternative forms of education, such as, youth activisms, creative pedagogies and media research. The book will provide conceptual as well as pedagogical contributions which will help students and educators understand current debates and issues around gender, whilst also reflecting critically on the role of education in turbulent times.
Extended abstracts may be related to, but not necessarily limited to the following themes:
Feminist, material and affective ontologies in education
Heteronormative cultures in education
Innovative feminist pedagogies
Black feminisms in education
Gender activisms – case studies and empirical studies
Gender and sexual identities in education and schooling
Young people as agents of change
Acts of school feminisms
Gender and sexuality extra-curricular learning
Social media and digital activisms and education
Deconstructing institutional power relations
Problematising gender relations in education
New ontologies of gender and sexuality
Acts of school resistance as social justice
Repositioning extra-curricular learning in education
Emerging queer activisms in education
Theorisations against patriarchy in education
Extended abstracts of 700 to 1,000 words (inclusive of citations) are invited for selection; please email jbustillos-morales @ brookes.ac.uk to submit your abstract. Submissions should be made in Word format by 1st July 2022. Please ensure the document has the following details.
Title of chapter
Theme under which chapter is submitted
Name of author/s
Institutional affiliation
Email address – with designated corresponding author, if there are multiple authors
Brief Bio (max. 250 words)
Any other additional links or URLs relevant to authors’ bio and chapters (i.e social media campaigns, websites etc)
Suggested timeline:
Call for Chapters submission: July 2022
Acceptance of contributions: August 2022
First submission of full chapters: February 2023
Editor’s first feedback on full chapters: April 2023
Reviewed chapters sent back to editor: June 2023
Editor’s second feedback: July 2023
Second submission of full chapters: September 2023
Full manuscript sent to publisher: December 2023
Editor details: Dr Jessie Bustillos Morales Senior Lecturer in Education, Oxford Brookes University orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3355-6617
This Special Issue of the European Educational Research Journal is led by EERA’s Gender and Education Network, and it is on the theme of gender, intersectionality and educational research, a topic which was a focus of the Network at the 2019 ECER annual conference. It will feature papers from early career and established researchers.
Race, class, and gender were once seen as separate issues for members of both dominant and subordinate groups. Scholars now generally agree that these issues along with ethnicity, nation, age and sexuality and how they intersect are integral to individuals’ positions in the social world (PH Collins 2006; Arrighi 2001; Collins 1993; Cuadraz, G. H., & Uttal, L. (1999). Ore 2000; Rothman et al.2005; Weber 2004) Scholars using the intersectional approach will socially locate individuals in the context of their ‘real lives’ (Weber 2006). They also examine how both formal and informal systems of power are deployed, maintained, and reinforced through axes of race, class and gender (Collins 1998; Weber 2006). Research using the intersectional approach broadly extends across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Understanding of the cumulative impact of structural inequalities arising from gender, race, class, disability and LGBTQI+, on educational institutions and student and staff participation, experience, and achievement within education, requires that intersectional perspectives are further developed (Fuller 2017, Showunmi 2017, Lumby 2011). Historically, critical researchers, especially feminist and race scholars, have decried the inability of the educational sector to challenge power hierarchies and undermine the dominance of white, masculine, heterosexual and ableist knowledges and practices. These reproduce the negative intersecting effects of gender, race, class, ethnicity, disability and LGBTQI+ (hooks 1989; Abu-Lughud Soziologin 1991; Kandiyoti 2002; Narayan 1993; Skeggs 1997; Smith 2012). However, there are a myriad of reasons why intersectional understandings have not successfully challenged the status quo. Arguably we lack the core theories to enable us to engage with the complexity of dominant processes and develop effective transformational praxis relating to different forms of intersectionality (Abbas, Taylor and Amande-Escot, 2019).
There are three areas that are pertinent to transforming educational systems through intersectional approaches and where there are promising existing bodies of research to build on. They are relevant across Europe and to all educational sectors: from early years to all types of post-compulsory education. Firstly, in relation to exucational leadership, we need to increase the number of people with lived experience of combined intersectional inequalities at all levels of education. Senior positions are dominated by White men, and Black women have the lowest representation of any ethnic and gender group (Lumby 2011). In addition, LGBTQI+ and people with disabilities are virtually invisible publically and in the research literature regarding leadership (Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, 2017 Lee, 2020). Secondly, a wealth of research suggests that pedagogies and curricula that are inclusive, inspiring, and representative of diverse students, their cultures, communities, and ways of knowing, are needed if future generations are to succeed in building equity from their intersecting identities and positionalities (Abbas, 2019). Change and social justice cannot be achieved unless we understand how intersectional lenses can enrich and inform praxis. Finally, how do we understand and prevent the marginalisation of critical intersectional knowledges in research and teaching? It is important to focus inclusively on each marginalised group in the context of intersectionality. In the past, Black women, LGBTQI and those with disabilities, for example, have been neglected in relation to all of the fields we have identified.
We would like to invite researchers, theorists and evidence-based practitioners to submit discursive papers that engage in issues regarding the development of intersectional approaches. We are interested in papers that generate new analytical, critical and methodological perspectives. The aim is to highlight ways of combating the role of education in generating and increasing inequalities.
The following themes are relevant:
Exploring the combined effects of forms of inequality in education
The role of curricula and pedagogies in challenging the dominance of whiteness, ableism, masculinity, cis-genderism and other structural inequalities
The value of broader or narrower notions of intersectionality
How insights into intersectionality can effectively tackle the marginalisation of critical and equalising knowledges within educational contexts
Intersectional approaches to gender, race, disability, sexuality, socio-economic backgroundand leadership
EXPECTED DATE FOR SUBMISSION FIRST FULL DRAFTS:
January 2022
References
Abbas, A. (2019) ‘Tackling intersecting gender inequalities through disciplinary-based higher education curricula: A Bernsteinian approach’ in Taylor, Amade-Escot and Abbas (eds) (2019) Gender in Learning and Teaching: Feminist Dialogues Across International Boundaries. Routledge.
Abbas, A., Taylor, C. & Amade-Escot, C., 26 Apr 2019, Introduction: Debates across Anglophone and European Didactics traditions in Taylor, Amade-Escot and Abbas (eds) Gender in Learning and Teaching: Feminist Dialogues Across International Boundaries. Routledge.
Arrighi, B. A. (Ed.). (2001). Understanding inequality: The intersection of race/ethnicity, class, and gender. Rowman & Littlefield.
Collins, P. H. (1993). The sexual politics of black womanhood. Violence against women: The bloody footprints, 85-104.
Collins, R. L. (1998). Social identity and HIV infection: The experiences of gay men living with HIV.
Collins, P. H. (2006). Sisters and brothers: Black feminists on womanism. The womanist reader, 57-67.
Cuadraz, G. H., & Uttal, L. (1999). Intersectionality and in-depth interviews: Methodological strategies for analyzing race, class, and gender. Race, Gender & Class, 156-186.
Fuller, K. (2017). Women secondary head teachers in England: Where are they now?. Management in Education, 31(2), 54-68.
Weber, L., & Fore, M. E. (2007). Race, ethnicity, and health: An intersectional approach. In Handbooks of the sociology of racial and ethnic relations (pp. 191-218). Springer, Boston, MA.
Ore, T. E., & Kurtz, P. (2000). The social construction of difference and inequality. Mayfield Publishing.
Rothman, S., Lichter, S. R., & Nevitte, N. (2005, March). Politics and professional advancement among college faculty. In The Forum (Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 1-16).
Showunmi, V., & Kaparou, M. (2017). The challenge of leadership: ethnicity and gender among school leaders in England, Malaysia and Pakistan. In Cultures of Educational Leadership (pp. 95-119). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Weber, L., & Fore, M. E. (2007). Race, ethnicity, and health: An intersectional approach. In Handbooks of the sociology of racial and ethnic relations (pp. 191-218). Springer, Boston, MA.
Developing ‘hybrid’ workshops for online feminist consciousness raising: Reflections from our work with the Malaysian Youth Council
by Dr Syafiqah Abdul Rahim (Malaysian Youth Council) and Dr Hannah Walters (UCL)
Two youth researchers in different time zones login to a Zoom meeting. For one, it is 6.45am, rainy and still dark, as she sits alone in her living room in Glasgow waiting for the meeting to start. For the other, it is 2.45pm and a warm Kuala Lumpur afternoon, where she anxiously waits with other members of the Malaysian Youth Council secretariat, head buzzing with the thought of technical issues and other members’ expectations of the event ahead.
Working together over a distance of over six thousand miles, they have spent the last few months preparing to hold a hybrid event aimed at bridging the material and virtual worlds in an effort to create a safe space for feminist discussion and consciousness raising activities with members of different Malaysian youth organisations from across the country.
In this blog post we discuss the aims of the workshop, the methods we developed to meet these aims, and where we see the project going in the future. In doing so we hope our work will speak to some of the challenges other youth, gender and education researchers have met since the outbreak of Covid-19 and consequent shift to online spaces for so much of our educational lives in recent times. More broadly, we hope to contribute ideas and strategies for educators, activists and researchers to make the most of online spaces – a way to bring a sense of real-worldness and materiality to a virtual space, in particular around the use of arts-based and participatory methods.
Themes and goals of the workshop
The current project started with a simple conversation around the place of feminism in Malaysian youth movements. We were cognisant that, in spite of its focus on intersectionality, Fourth Wave feminism as a movement for the most part remains entrenched in ‘Western’ ideas of gender and equality. We were curious as to how contemporary feminist debates were mobilised in Malaysian youth groups, and which issues were important to these young women and girls. It was out of these discussions came our plan to design an event that was part-consciousness raising, part-creative, participatory workshop.
To this end we defined the broad theme of ‘What it’s like to be a girl in a youth movement’ for the event. We hoped this question – aimed at encouraging participants to interrogate their gendered experiences within their youth activism – would serve as a catalyst for consciousness-raising discussion and activities around feminism. We wanted to define a safe space which would allow participants to: discuss their feelings around their gendered experiences and standpoints; discuss their feminism/feminist identities; and/or facilitate feminist consciousness raising for those new to feminist theory and movement. Simply put, we hoped all participants (including organisers) would leave the event with a renewed energy and investment in their feminist identities as part of their broader youth activist work, regardless of whether these ideas were relatively new or well embedded in their practice.
Based on these principles, we developed a module guided by the following key statements:
Feminism as an everyday practice
Feminism is for everybody
We wanted to ‘normalise’ feminism and emphasise the idea that feminist work can be part of routine, everyday activities and interactions which promote solidarity between women and girls, embed an ethos of support and care, and raise the profile of feminist causes. In doing so, we hoped to modify preconceived notions around what feminism is/means, and what kind of people feminists are, for participants. This served to (in part, at least) eschew problematic images of feminist-as-man hater, feminist-as-angry, feminist-as-dogmatic – commonplace ‘backlash’ narratives worldwide, which one of us had witnessed in the Malaysian context through the online scrutiny of young women who ‘called out’ sexism on social media. At the same time, we wanted to make it clear that we can all be part of a feminist cause without the need to take part in public modes of feminist politics, such as marches, protests, public discussions, campaigning, training and so on. Simply put, we hoped to encourage the feeling that feminism is for everybody, that feminists are just like me and you, and that the barrier to entry into feminism as a meaningful political movement are low, i.e. can be enacted as routine; in the everyday.
During the event, this took the form of sharing and prompting for examples of feminism as an everyday practice. We shared feminist memes and gifs; we discussed how solidarity could be as simple as a supportive text to a friend; participants raised and made visible examples of feminism in action in their own work (including those who might not have identified as feminist). We believe that this was an effective consciousness raising activity which served to make feminism both palatable and accessible, while still maintaining the meaning of the movement: equality and solidarity for and amongst women and girls.
Bringing the virtual to life – finding real-worldness in online spaces
We did not want to replicate the online events we had seen elsewhere. It was important to us that the event felt interactive, and that the participants were partners in co-producing a safe space for feminist discussion. Consciousness raising activities were thus designed to probe our – both participants’ and facilitators’ – relationships with and understandings of feminism, feminist activism, and how gendered inequalities impact our lives. Taking this a step further, we developed a range of strategies designed to make the discussion feel less hierarchical, and encourage open communication between participants. We encouraged participants to use the chat box to respond to ideas raised, and to use the stamp function on Zoom to draw attention to items of interest on the screen.
Alongside these tactics for breaking down the artificiality of online spaces, we also wanted to bring in a sense of materiality. To do this we developed a poster-making workshop by creating craft packs which we sent out to participants in advance.
The packs contained hard backing paper, craft paper, scissors, glue, washi tape, glitter, pipe cleaners, stickers, pages from magazines pages and felt-tip pens. We also included items in line with an ethos of self-care and feminist caring practices, including face masks (one clinical, one sheet mask) and hand sanitiser.
A strategy was adopted from the YouTube ‘unboxing’ trend, whereby all participants who had been posted the pack were asked not to open it until the event. Opening it together, all at once, gave the event a sense of being not only linked by the material sense of touching, feeling and engaging with the same materials, but also that we were working in a shared realtime.
Following the discussion, we all opened our packs together. The enthusiasm in the space was tangible, as participants excitedly opened the package to discover the contents.
We shared some images of simple feminist posters as inspiration, and discussed the ethos of DIY projects and ‘craftivism’ in feminist movement. Listening to a feminist-inspired playlist, broadcast via Zoom, we began making our individual posters.
So, what did we learn and what’s next?
This was our first hybrid workshop and it taught us about the specific value of a feminist ethos in online spaces. Everyone, participants and facilitators, were working hard to be present in the virtual meeting space, and to build real connections online – in spite of our shared awareness that sometimes, as with many virtual events, we can feel like disconnected faces on a screen. We learned valuable lessons in the construction of a safe space to discuss feelings around sexism, feminism and gendered experiences, as well as a space in which to energise and inspire each other in our broader activist work. We were required to navigate the competing public and private spaces at work in activist circles, and respect these barriers when discussing complex, sometimes sensitive topics. This included considering the nature of sexism at work in activists’ lives, and the relationship these experiences had to their broader feelings about activism.
We felt the posters that came out of the event demonstrated a keen awareness of specific feminist issues arising in participants’ lives. People explored body image issues, femininity, gender in workplaces, as well as broad themes of solidarity and sisterhood. Posters were as diverse in design as the topics discussed and there were many innovative and creative responses to the brief. Some made TikTok videos of their poster-making, sharing these online and bringing the virtual back in! More broadly, we felt the hybrid nature of the workshop, with physical craft packs and the tactile experience they facilitated, altered the feel of the event. It allowed for a greater feeling of connection between us all, and a sense that we were working in a shared space, with the same tools.
We had a few technical hiccups during the workshop, but believe that the feminist ethos of the event supported us to overcome them, with participants jumping into facilitator roles when technical issues occurred, and vice versa. We felt the way others stepped in when we as facilitators were faced with technical issues resonated with a broader feminist ethos of support. It highlighted the importance of solidarity and emphasised a feeling of: “it’s OK when things go wrong”. The less-/non-hierarchical facilitation allowed us to pass around the ‘power’, both in terms of making contributions to the content of the workshop, as well as in the facilitation of the event.
We hope this ethos will continue into our future projects, and currently have two upcoming events :
1) an interactive movie screening featuring dialogue, discussion and debate around themes of feminism and sisterhood; and
2) A workshop on feminism and media, accompanied by an interactive workshop on gif and meme creation as a feminist practice.
For updates on these projects follow @beliaMBM on twitter, Facebook and Instagram!
Critically Exploring Co-production : A special issue of Qualitative Research Journal
The Gender and Education Association have been asked to share this call for papers for an exciting special issue of Qualitative Research Journal on co-production. Guest edited by Harriet Rowley, Kate Pahl, Gabrielle Ivinson and James Duggan, this special issue invites contributions that question whether university structures can accommodate research that is genuinely co-produced, highlight tensions in on-the ground co-productive practices, describe the often circuitous ways alliances emerge, and speculate about the limits and possibilities of co-production.
This special issue invites people who are involved in co-production as practitioners as well as more academic pieces to contribute ideas. The editors envisage shorter pieces together with dialogues as well as asking discussants to reflect on some of the pieces. Experimentation with form is welcome. Initial abstracts are invited as part of this process.
Contributions may cover the following areas:
· Critical enquires into the role of the university in co-produced research projects
· Co-production; research method or socio-political practice
· Ethnography and co-production
· Critical pedagogy and co-production
· Arts practice and co-production
· Creativity and co-productive practice.
· Failure and co-production
· Ethical dilemmas and co-production
Submissions and deadlines
1. 500 word abstracts due 1st November 2020 – these can be sent to k.pahl@mmu.ac.uk .
2. Full papers of 3,000 to 7,000 words due 10 January 2021.
In the UK, the prominence of a number of anti-trans feminist voices in social and mainstream media has led American journalist Katelyn Burns to term anti-trans ideology as ‘the de facto face of feminism in the UK’ – but this belies a history of feminist and trans entanglements and alliances as well as the continued and resilient support of women for trans people to self-identify their gender. In June, the GEA Executive were amongst tens of thousands of individuals and organisations who wrote to the UK Prime Minister urging the government not to rollback trans rights or disregard the results of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) consultation. For now, this show of support appears to have prompted the government to affirm that they will not restrict healthcare for young transgender people. Much more needs to be done however to safeguard and build upon existing protections for trans and non-binary people to ensure they can live their lives free of oppression, restriction and violence.
While the drive to uncover histories of anti-trans feminism offer
valuable insights, scholars and activists have also sought to acknowledge the
fruitful connections that exist between different struggles for gender justice
(Halberstam 2017). Trans and women’s liberation have always been intimately
linked by their struggle to escape patriarchal norms. The term gender (as now
commonly understood) was developed by feminists from work by psychologists on
trans and intersex subjects. Ultimately, women’s and trans liberation are both
concerned with equity of rights and life opportunities, freedom from hegemonic
gender and sexuality discourses and questions of power. Yet, the women-led
social movements that arose during the 1970s have been persistently painted as
inherently hostile to trans experiences, despite many trans and feminist
scholars having challenged this characterisation.
Withers’ work highlights that the grand narratives ‘invoked
within the paywalls of academic feminist theory or the rabid annals of twitter’
rarely do justice to the rich ‘conceptual and lived resources’ produced within
the WLM which contributed to contemporary transfeminist discourse. Drawing on
archival materials, they illustrate how the emergence of ‘women’s culture’ and
women-only spaces was part of the ‘trans-formation of sex’ allowing for
intensified experimentation where the ‘female sex was bent into new, irreversible
shapes’. Women-only networks facilitated practices such as learning ‘how to fix
PA systems, repair faulty car engines, explore the contours of a drum kit, or
mend the plumbing’ which expanded the material politics of the female body and
what it could do, be and become. Significantly, these spaces and networks were
not marked by the same categorical differentiations between cis and trans women
that shape contemporary feminist debates. Withers draws attention to
testimonial and archival evidence that illustrates the presence of trans
activists within the WLM noting, for example, that the keyboardist for the Northern Women’s Liberation Rock Band was a trans woman.
In a special issue on Trans/Feminisms, Stryker and Bettcher (2016) along with Cristan Williams (2016) and Emma Heaney (2016) map the involvement of trans activists in US-based lesbian feminist autonomous organisations in the early ‘70s. They explore, for example, the contributions of the lesbian trans folksinger Beth Elliot, Angela Douglas (the founder of the Transexual Action Organisation) and the trans inclusive politics of the radical feminist lesbian separatist music collective, Olivia Records. In an interview for Vice magazine, former Olivia Records engineer and pioneering trans studies academic Sandy Stone tells her story of living among lesbian separatists in the ‘70s. She details how revelatory it felt to discover ‘that you could be a woman without stereotyping anything, without encountering traditional cis female culture at all’ and travel through a ‘rhizome’ of ‘lesbian safe houses’ from ‘coast to coast and never encounter someone presenting as male, like a wonderful parallel subculture—or superculture.’
When trans exclusionary feminists such as Janice Raymond began threatening and harassing Olivia Records, Stone details that she initially ‘felt really protected by the women of the Collective’. However, the unrelenting nature of the attacks and the risk of boycott action led Stone to leave. Following on from Olivia Records, Stone went on to earn her doctorate with supervision from Donna Haraway and in a faculty comprised of legendary feminist academics such as Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldua and Teresa De Lauretis. Stone proceeded to publish one of the founding essays in transgender studies, The Empire Strikes Back: A (post)transsexual manifesto.
A place for trans lives in all feminisms
These
collective and inclusive herstories question the current common understanding
that particular strands of feminism are necessarily trans exclusionary. Furthering
the view that there is no inherent need for tension between lesbian feminism
and trans-inclusion, and calling for a revival of (a trans-inclusive) lesbian
feminism, Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 227) notes: ‘I would suggest that transfeminism
today most recalls the militant spirit of lesbian feminism in part because of
the insistence that crafting a life is political work’. Ahmed’s assertion that
transfeminist texts ‘assemble a politics from what they name’ (ibid), showcases
one of the many commonalities between lesbian and trans feminisms. Both lesbians
and trans people have been rendered menacing and monstrous killjoy
figures within and outside of feminist spaces (see Mitchell and McKinney 2019;
Stryker 1994).
Similarly, and contrary to the popular belief that radical feminism and anti-trans feminism are somehow synonymous (not least due to the infamy of the moniker ‘TERF’), radical feminism does not necessitate hostility towards trans people. Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, two of the most prominent and celebrated radfems, were both supportive of trans inclusion. In 2015 McKinnon stated “I always thought I don’t care how someone becomes a woman or a man; it does not matter to me. It’s just part of their specificity, their uniqueness like, everyone else’s. Anyone who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.”
Intersectionality and the category of
‘woman’
In the aforementioned TSQ special issue, Stryker and Bettcher (2016) also credit the intersectional feminist analyses promulgated by US feminists of color in the 1970s and 1980s with laying the foundation for transfeminist theories and practices. They observe that by raising the question of ‘whether “woman” itself was a sufficient analytical category capable of accounting for the various forms of oppression that women can experience in a sexist society’, Black feminists ‘called for an account of multiple “differences” of embodied personhood along many different but interrelated axes’ (Stryker and Bettcher 2016, p. 8).[1] Transfeminist scholars and activists have not only drawn from the work of Black feminists but also contributed their own intersectional analyses to the fight against racism, state violence and other oppressions (Bettcher 2007). Angela Davis recently credited trans and non-binary communities with contributing to abolitionist feminism by demonstrating that it is possible to imagine more socially just worlds that challenge ‘that which is totally accepted as normal’.
Article on Angela Davis in Women’s LibeRATion magazine (1970)
Black feminist and trans scholars have also explored the historical imbrication and interplay between Blackness and transness (Riley Snorton 2017; Bey 2017; Sharpe 2016). Marquis Bey (2018, p. 165) illustrates that the ‘subjective nexus of Black and woman, for example, irrespective of an identified trans gender, also experiences the surveillance and invasion of their bodies going through airport security (e.g hair searches), expulsion from bathrooms, housing discrimination and historical invalidation of their womanhood’. Scholars including Lola Olufemi (2020) and Alison Phipps (2020) have noted the ‘whiteness’ of the UK anti-trans feminist movement. Phipps further suggesting the paucity of British intersectional analysis, relative to the US work noted above, as a contributing factor to the prominence of ‘gender critical’ views in the UK. Dr. Gail Lewis observes how Black women’s work in Britain was denied credibility and respect by white feminists as they entered the Academy and formed women’s studies networks and reading lists.
Continuing to learn from one another
OWAAD poster (1980)
Given the marginalisation of Black British feminist thought within the Academy, it is important to re-visit and learn from the Black and working class women-centred social movements, such as Wages for Housework and the Black Women’s Movement, that thrived alongside the predominantly White and middle class WLM in 1970s Britain. Significantly, these movements did not share the same unease with trans subjectivity as expressed by minority factions of the WLM. Lewis, who was a co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) and member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group, highlights that the Black Women’s Movement always questioned limited articulations of gender and notes her surprise at those who have been so troubled by trans* politics. The Black Women’s Movement and Wages for Housework were characterised by coalitional working between contingently autonomous groups, activating ‘an organizational tactic to mobilize across and beyond existing racial, gender, sexual, and class configurations while recognizing the irreducible differences’ (Capper and Austin 2018, p. 449). Wages for Housework, for example, was an international movement comprised of autonomous groups such as Black Women for Wages for Housework, Wages Due Lesbians (now Queer Strike) and the English Collective of Prostitutes.
Transfeminist scholars and activists have turned to the organisational tactics and theoretical interventions of these Black and working class women-centred social movements for inspiration. Dr. Nat Raha, for example, observes how the Wages Due Lesbians campaign provided important insights into queer social reproduction by challenging the heteronormativity within Marxist feminist conceptualisations of unwaged domestic labour. Unlike the lesbian separatist movements referenced earlier, the largely Canadian / UK-based Wages Due campaign did not advance lesbianism as necessarily liberatory in itself. Instead, they noted how economic power continued to shape and limit women’s sexual choices (Caper and Austin 2018, p. 449). Raha draws on the work of Wages Due in order to advance a radical transfeminism and highlight the limits of trans liberalism. Rather than focusing on securing a particular ‘packet of entitlements’ and rights for trans people, a radical transfeminist agenda explores possibilities for common struggle across the intersecting issues of precarious working conditions, transmisogyny and sexism, white supremacy, ableism and sex work. Raha looks to contemporay and historical queer and trans-focused mutual aid support as a strategy for survival and world-building.
Conclusion
We are undoubtably living through a moment where trans lives are subject to unwarranted scrutiny and conjecture; where the historical imagining of trans as threat has reemerged and rejuvenated. That this image is often promoted by a small section of women from within the feminist movement remains disappointing. However, in the prevailing social and traditional media narrative it is easy to overlook the uplifting herstory of trans-feminist alliances which have been integral to the women’s liberation movement and which continue to inform and enrich our understandings; it is easy to overlook the collective struggles endured and the support and solidarity enjoyed. Scholars and activists demonstrate that it is in feminisms’ recognition of difference and shared experience that it is at its most sophisticated and demanding. At its best feminism is a movement that understands its role as a collective liberator of the margnalised and resists being reduced to a parochial border guard preoccupied with reserving womanhood for a privileged few.
Bio
Claire Thurlow is a PhD candidate in the School
of Law and Politics at Cardiff University. Her current research looks at
contemporary feminist reactions to trans identities in the UK. Her wider research
interests concern the intersections and divergences of feminism, queerness and
LGBTQ. She is a white cis-gender queer whose pronouns are she/her.
Kate Marston
is a PhD candidate in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. Her
research draws on feminist posthuman and new materialist theories to explore
young people’s digital sexual cultures through creative, visual and arts-based
methods. She is a white middle-class genderqueer lesbian
whose pronouns are she/they.
References
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Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Bettcher, T. 2007. Evil deceivers and
make-believers: Transphobic violence and the politics of illusion Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy, 22 (3), pp. 43–65.
Bey, M. 2018. “Other Ways to Be: Trans.” Women and
Language 41(1), pp. 165 – 167.
Bey, M. 2017. “The
Trans*-Ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-Ness.” TSQ:
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Capper, B. and Austin, A. 2018. “Wages for
housework means wages against heterosexuality”: On the Archives of Black Women
for Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 24(4), pp. 445 – 466.
Halberstam,
J. 2017. Trans: A Quick and Quirky
Account of Gender Variability. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Heaney, E.
2016. Women-Identified Women: Trans Women in 1970s Lesbian Feminist Organising TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(1-2),
pp. 137 – 145.
Lugones, M.
2016. The Coloniality of Gender in Harcourt, W. (Eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements
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Mitchell, A. and McKinney, C. 2019. Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts,
Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Olufemi, L. 2020. Feminism Interrupted:
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Phipps, A. 2020a. Me, Not You: The trouble
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2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.
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