Community Activism And Feminist Politics

This collection demonstrates the diversity of women's struggles against problems such as racism, violence, homophobia, focusing on the complex ways that gender, culture, race-ethnicity and class shape women's political consciousness in the US.

This volume brings together essays of remarkable variety and fresh insight by leading feminists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, North America, Europe and Scandinavia. With clear-eyed realism and passionate optimism these articles raise crucial historical, organizational, ethical, conceptual, strategic and practical issues facing feminists today. The personal accounts, political speeches and academic articles collected here reveal a vibrant and multifaceted transnational feminist community redefining wealth, work, peace, democracy, sexuality, family, human rights, development, community, and citizenship. They provide a sense of inter-related issues being addressed at local, national, regional and global levels in generative ways which both honor local and global movements.

In the late 2010s, the United States experienced a period of widespread silencing. Protests of unsafe drinking water have been met with tear gas; national park employees, environmentalists, and scientists have been ordered to stop communicating publicly. Advocates for gun control are silenced even as mass shootings continue. Expressed dissent to political power is labeled as “fake news.” DREAMers, Muslims, Trans military members, women, black bodies, the LGBTQI+ community, Latina/o/x communities, rape survivors, sex workers, and immigrants have all been systematically silenced. During this difficult time and despite such restrictions, advocates and allies persist and resist, forming dialogues that call to repel inequality in its many forms. Addressing the oppression of women of color, white women, women with (dis)abilities, and LBTQI+ individuals across cultures and contexts remains a central posit of feminist struggle and requires “a distinctly feminist politics of recognition.” However, as second wave debates about feminism have revealed, there is no single way to express a feminist politic. Rather, living feminist politics requires individual interpretation and struggle, collective discussion and disagreement, and recognizing difference among women as well as points of convergence in feminist struggle. Badass Feminist Politics includes a diverse range of engaging feminist political projects to not only analyze the work being done on the ground but provide an overview for action that can be taken on by those seeking to engage in feminist activism in their own communities. Contributors included here are working for equality and equity and resisting violent, racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and sexist language and action during this tension-filled political moment. Collectively, the book explores what it means to live and communicate feminist politics in everyday choices and actions, and how we can facilitate learning by analyzing these examples. Taking up current issues and new theoretical perspectives, the authors offer novel perspectives into what it means to live feminist politics. This book is a testament to resilience, resistance, communication, and forward thinking about what these themes all mean for new feminist agendas. Learning how to resist oppressive structures through words and actions is particularly important for students. Badass Feminist Politics features scholars from non-dominant groups taking up issues of marginalization and oppression, which can help people accomplish their social justice goals of inclusivity on the ground and in the classroom.

Preface Introduction: Feminist Activism in Canada Jeri Dawn Wine and Janice L. Ristock Section I Frameworks and Strategies for Social Change Introduction 1. Feminist Practice: A New Appro

Political participation in America—supposedly the world’s strongest democracy—is startlingly low, and many of the civil rights and economic equity initiatives that were instituted in the 1960s and '70s have been abandoned, as significant proportions of the populace seem to believe that the civil rights battle has been won. However, rates of collective engagement, like community activism, are surprisingly high. In Resisting Citizenship, renowned feminist political scientist Martha Ackelsberg argues that community activism may hold important clues to reviving democracy in this time of growing bureaucratization and inequality. This book brings together many of Ackelsberg’s writings over the past 25 years, combining her own field work and interviews with cutting edge research and theory on democracy and activism. She explores these efforts in order to draw lessons—and attempt to incorporate knowledge—about current notions of democracy from those who engage in "non-traditional" participation, those who have, in many respects, been relegated to the margins of political life in the United States.

Trott interrogates how feminist activists navigate complex technological ecosystems to build awareness of misogyny, violence against women, and oppressive experiences women face both online and offline while cultivating transnational feminist networks and carving out spaces upon which to build and elevate women’s voices. This book is guided by a few key questions: how is feminist activism transforming and being mutually shaped by a dynamic and volatile platform ecosystem? How are activists attempting to negotiate this terrain? And, how are (anti)feminist politics contested within the platform society? These questions are addressed through analysis of three key case studies: the international feminist organisation Hollaback!; the #EndViolenceAgainstWomen campaign; and the global #TakeDownJulienBlanc movement. Building on the intersecting fields of feminist media studies, platform and internet research, and political communication, this book addresses cultural and social questions about how digital platforms shape the values of our communities and how stakeholders negotiate and engage in civic practices. This timely and important work interweaves activist discourses, women’s voices and scholarly literature together to provide insight into the realities of operating within a platform society. It will be of interest to students and scholars of journalism, gender studies, media and communication studies, culture studies, and sociology.

This is a nuanced and compelling analysis of grassroots feminist activism in Russia in the politically turbulent 2010s. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, the author illustrates how a new generation of activists chose feminism as their main political beacon, and how they negotiated the challenges of authoritarian and conservative trends. As we witness a backlash against feminism on a global scale with the rise of neoconservative governments, this highly relevant book decentres Western theory and concepts of feminism and social movements, offering significant insights into how resistance can mobilize and invent creative tactics to cope with an increasingly repressed space for independent political action.

This collection of essays offers a range of reports on feminist theory and activism, with case studies investigating the characteristics and strategies that have effected positive social change with an eye to understanding how persons who want to initiate constructive social change might do so.