Critical Femininities

What would change about our existing world if we re-imagined and re-valued femininity? Critical Femininities presents a multidimensional framework for re-thinking femininity. Moving beyond seeing femininity as a patriarchal tool, this book considers the social, historical, and ideological forces that shape present-day norms surrounding femininity, particularly those that contribute to femmephobia: the systematic devaluation and regulation of all that is deemed feminine. Each chapter offers a unique application of the Critical Femininities framework to disparate areas of inquiry, ranging from breastfeeding stigma to Incel ideology, and attempts to answer pressing questions concerning the place of femininity within gender and social theory. How can we conceptualise feminine power? In what ways can vulnerability act as a powerful mode of resistance? How can we understand femininity as powerful without succumbing to masculinist frameworks? What ideological underpinnings maintain Critical Femininities as an emergent field, despite traceable origins pre-dating second-wave feminism? As the provocative entries within this volume will certainly generate additional questions for anyone invested in society’s treatment of femininity, this book offers a launching pad for the continued growth of a field that cultivates insight from a feminine frame of reference as a means of rendering visible the taken-for-granted presence of masculinity that remains pervasive within gender theory. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Psychology & Sexuality.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies, 2nd Edition will be a broad, interdisciplinary product aimed at students and educators interested in an interdisciplinary perspective on LGBTQ issues. This far-reaching and contemporary set of volumes is meant to examine and provide understandings of the lives and experiences of LGBTQ individuals, with attention to the contexts and forces that shape their world. The volume will address questions such as: What are the key theories used to understand variations in sexual orientation and gender identity? How do LGBTQ+ people experience the transition to parenthood? How does sexual orientation intersect with other key social locations (e.g., race) to shape experience and identity? What does LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy look like? How have anti-LGBTQ ballot measures affected LGBTQ people? What are LGBTQ+ people’s experiences during COVID-19? How were LGBTQ+ people impacted by the Trump administration? What is life like for LGBTQ+ people living outside the United States? This encyclopedia will be a unique product on the market: a reference work that looks at LGBTQ issues and identity primarily through the lenses of psychology, human development, and sociology, and emphasizing queer, feminist, and ecological perspectives on this topic. Entries will be written by top researchers and clinicians across multiple fields—psychology, human development, gender/queer studies, sexuality studies, social work, nursing, cultural studies, education, family studies, medicine, public health, and sociology—contributing to approximately 450-500 signed entries. All entries will include cross-references and Further Readings.

The term "femme" originates from 1940s Western working-class lesbian bar culture, wherein femme referred to a feminine lesbian who was typically in a relationship with a butch lesbian. Expanding from this original meaning, femme has since emerged as a form of femininity reclaimed by queer and culturally marginalized folks. Importantly, femme has also evolved into a theoretical framework. Femme theory argues that "femme" constitutes a missing piece in queer and feminist discourses of femininity. Attending to this gap, femme theory centres queer femininities as a means of pushing against the deeply embedded masculinist orientation of queer and gender theory. Thus, femme theory offers tools to shift the way researchers and readers understand femininity as well as systems of gender and power more broadly. This book is an introduction to femme theory, showcasing how femme can be used as a theoretical framework across a variety of contexts and disciplines, such as Film & Media Studies, Psychology, Sociology, or Critical Disability Studies; from countries, including Canada, China, Guyana and the USA. Femme theory asks readers to reconsider how femininity is conceptualized, revealing some of the many taken for granted assumptions that are embedded within cultural discourses of gender, sexuality, and power. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

This volume addresses how the rhetoric of feminist empowerment has been combined with mainstream representations of food, thus creating a cultural consciousness around food and eating that is unmistakably pathological. Throughout, Natalie Jovanovski discusses key texts written by women, for women: best-selling diet books, popular cookbooks produced by female food celebrities, and iconic feminist self-help texts. This is the first book to engage in a feminist analysis of body-policing food trends that focus specifically on the use of feminist rhetoric as a harmful aspect of food culture. There is a smorgasbord of seemingly diverse gender roles for women to choose from, but many encourage breaking gender norms and embracing a love of food while perpetuating old narratives of guilt and restraint. Digesting Femininities problematizes the gendering of food and eating and challenges the reader to imagine what a genderless and emancipatory food culture would look like.

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this collection of essays examines the ways in which popular media re-construct ideas and ideals of femininity in the post-socialist cultural space. The authors explore a comprehensive range of questions including: How have post-socialist women engaged with media as media producers and consumers, as well as objects of media representation? What are the consequences of the commodification of femininity in the post-socialist context? How does the female body serve as a battleground for the enactment and renegotiation of gendered identities and ideologies? How can we understand and theorize post-socialist women’s activist movements? In seeking answers to such questions, this volume highlights the need to reconsider feminism as a political and theoretical project with many faces. It bridges research on the mediation of post-socialist femininities with broader concerns about the transnational trajectories of feminism today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

Older women have never been so visible, or so problematised, in popular media culture as now; but what kinds of representations are being offered, and how can we make sense of them in the context of post-feminism and global economic change? Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations offers a timely intervention into the hiatus between the visibility of aging femininity in contemporary circuits of culture and its marginalisation in cultural theory. From “graceful agers” and Saga subscribers, to make-over models and pop divas, each of the essays in this collection interrogates the different manifestations of “aging femininity” in terms of both its historic invisibility and its new visibility. The book forges links between contemporary “lived” experience and feminist cultural theory and research, often through the direct and autobiographical knowledge of the writers themselves. Divided into four sections – Cultural Herstories, Regulations and Transgressions, Problematic Postfeminists? and Divas and Dolls – plus a thought-provoking photo essay, it wrests the discourse of aging away from the twin hegemonies of consumer culture and gerontology to present a diverse selection of essays and positions. Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations establishes the long overlooked richness and the complexity of this field of study.

Arguing for a recognition of the contradictory and ambivalent identifications that both attract and repel those who live the social category "girl," Marnina Gonick analyzes the discourses and practices defining female sexuality, embodiment, relationship to self and other, material culture, use of social space, and cultural-political agency and power. Based on a school-community project involving collaborative production of a video which tells the stories of several fictional girl characters, Gonick examines the contradictory and textured structure of the discourses available to girls through which their identities are negotiated. Woven throughout the book is the integral concern with the way in which ethnographic writing as a discursive practice is also implicated in the production and signification of social identities for girls.

Celebrating more than two decades of feminist theory and gender research, this book provides an essential overview of current theoretical positions, hot topics and state-of-the-art perspectives in the field of Nordic Gender Studies: an area currently facing the challenges of internationalization and destabilized well-fare states, intersectionality, materiality, and academic transformation. Forming an overview, the introductory texts collected here are intended for Nordic and international students and teachers specializing in gender studies or related areas of interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences. With vibrant contributions from Nordic and international key scholars, think pieces and position papers culled from NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, are in fact essential reading for anyone in need of accessible yet condensed guidance on key discussion points such as post-constructionism and new materialism, neo-liberal academia and interdisciplinarity and the role of critical gender theory and posthumanism. The volume also looks at the differences within Nordic Gender Studies of today. This book is made up of material that was previously published in various issues of NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.