Post-Feminist Practices, Subjectivities and Intimacies in Global Context
In recent decades, “post-feminism” has become a recurrent theme and a buzzword of sorts in a variety of settings, from academia and politics to media discourses and popular culture. After decades of scholarship and public debate on the matter, the task of delimiting the boundaries of what “post-feminism” means seems intellectually futile, particularly because the ambiguity of the term is what makes it intriguing and compelling as a frame of analysis.
In a particularly relevant interpretation, scholars of gender have taken post-feminism as promising conceptual lenses with which to interrogate the (un)doing of gendered subjectivities in our contemporary culture, where intersectional inequalities are (re)produced amidst the neoliberal celebration of individual agency and empowerment, as predicated on consumption and commodification of gender difference.
This Research Topic intends to intervene in this ongoing debate by focusing on the practices, subjectivities and intimacies that are shaped by post-feminist cultural and political formations, whatever these may mean across the globe, and in diverse social, cultural and political contexts. A significant body of scholarship interrogating the notion of post-feminism from the standpoint of the Global North already exists. Although we are open to new work that pushes those debates further, we are specifically interested in research that critically engages with the complexities of post-feminism from Global South perspectives . We are, therefore, keen to emphasize research that looks at the agentic subject – the politics of intimacy and gender-making in the everyday – as an object of analysis alongside, and not separated from, the more structural dimensions of discourse, representation, political culture and neoliberal governmentality.
We will especially welcome interdisciplinary interventions combining elements of cultural studies, feminist critique and media analysis with methods and analytical frames from the social sciences. A primary goal of the special issue is to encourage transnational research centred in and around the Global South and create a platform for extending our understandings of post-feminisms beyond existing western frameworks. Consequentially, we will be particularly committed to supporting early career scholars based in the Global South, including those publishing academic work for the first time.
The Research Topic will address the following indicative, but not exhaustive, themes: