Feminism(s) in the Age of Covid-19 and Beyond: an Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstracts and Biographical Notes

Feminism at the Top: Gendered Leadership under Covid-19 in Taiwan & New Zealand

Dr John Wei

It is well-documented that the impact of Covid-19 on people’s lives and livelihood is strongly gendered, and so is the political leadership as shown in male and female leaders’ approaches in managing the pandemic. Several high-profile male politicians have poorly handled this crisis, while other countries and jurisdictions have responded to Covid-19 exceptionally well.

Taiwan and New Zealand have stood out in the crisis: led by President Tsai Ing-wen and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern respectively, the two island-states have been hailed as role models whose successful handling of Covid-19 has dwarfed larger countries with much more resources and economic clout. Meanwhile, the international media frenzy has cast a positive light on female political leaders, celebrating Tsai and Ardern as well as German chancellor Angela Merkel and other women as handling Covid-19 better than their male counterparts. Gender—and female leadership in particular—has become a symbol in the public perception of effective leadership in the current time of crisis.

This paper considers gendered leadership in Covid-19 management, as well as local and global media representations and public perceptions of feminism and leadership at the time of crisis, in Taiwan and New Zealand. It casts a critical light on female leaders at the top of policymaking and implementation, focusing on how their actions, approaches, and images have reshaped people’s understandings of feminism, politics, and crisis management. The paper covers (1) gendered leadership during Covid-19; (2) representations of political leaders in media and public discourses; and (3) Asian and Western understandings of feminism and leadership in a global crisis. The paper contributes to current scholarship on feminism and political leadership, as well as politics and crisis management under Covid-19.

Biographical note:

Dr. John Wei is a lecturer in Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is the author of Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes (Hong Kong University Press, 2020).

"I'm Broken But I'm Alive": Gender, COVID-19 and Higher Education in Australia.

Dr Emily Gray, Dr Jacqueline Ullman & Dr Mindy Blaise

This paper reports on feminist research conducted between July 2020 and March 2021 that was developed within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which Australian universities responded to the pandemic. Our work demonstrates that sexist and gender-based discriminatory practices were amplified by the pandemic and that the gendered division of labour both within the (heterosexual) family home and within Higher Education were made more apparent. This paper contributes to a growing body of work on gender and the COVID crisis by reporting on a survey that moved beyond quantitative data and asked participants to reflect on their experiences qualitatively. In addition, the diversity of participants means that we are able to offer an intersectional lens to the ongoing effects of the pandemic upon Higher Education, including CALD, LGBTIQ+, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experiences and reflections. The voices of LGBTIQ+ people are a notable absence from studies of COVID and work and COVID and Higher Education more specifically. We bring an intersectional, feminist lens to our analysis of the gendered dimensions of the pandemic, domestic life, pandemic living-working, and affect, emotion and wellbeing within Australian Higher Education.

The Domestic Academics: Finding the Time to Write and Care. Storying the Gendered Inequalities of Academic Research in the Global Pandemic
Dr Vanesa Marr

I propose to share the outcome of my current collaborative digital story quilt project, which concludes in August 2021. It has invited women academics with caring responsibilities to create an artwork accompanied by a 3-minute voiceover, to show and tell their experiences of dealing with the challenge of completing and submitting research during the pandemic. It will be presented as an interactive webpage, with further plans for a physical exhibition. This project employs interdisciplinary practices across art and autoethnography to address the major injustice that threatens to significantly impede the developing careers of these women, including post-graduate students and ECRs. By its nature, research requires concentration and absorption, which is at odds with lockdown family life. Early research statistics, reported as early as Spring 2020 in Inside Higher Ed, indicated that the number of women contributing to academic Journals since the pandemic began had dropped, whereas male contributions had risen. Studies also showed that mothers in heterosexual households spent over 50% more of their time supporting home schooling and completing domestic tasks, in comparison to their male partners. This quilt targets the need for tacit knowledge of these experiences to be acknowledged and made accessible. Through creative expression it provides the bedrock for discussion and consultation, supporting the identification of actions required for reconciliation. Autoethnography stories the self (Adamson and Moriarty, 2019) whilst arts practice supports collaboration to build community during times of isolation. Together they entice change by describing and critiquing individual experiences, employing reflexivity to interrogate the intersections between society (gendered expectations) and self (lived experience) and striving for social justice (Ellis 2015). The stories told through this quilt will become voices among many, enabling participants and viewers alike to reclaim their voices and address the inequalities faced as a direct result of the COVID-19 lockdowns.

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Biographical note:

Vanessa Marr is an educator, researcher and artist based in East Sussex, UK. She is currently Senior Lecturer and Course Leader at the University of Brighton. Her research is practice-based and grounded in the practice of craftivism and theories of autoethnography, specifically their potential to entice social change. Vanessa’s ongoing practice-based and collaborative research project that explores gendered inequalities in the home by inviting women to embroider their experiences statements, images and reflections onto a yellow dusting cloth, which are regularly and publicly exhibited (see PURE Profile).

References:

Adamson and Moriarty (2019). “Storying the Self”. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Vol 12, (1-2) p. 3-7.

Ellis, C. (2004). The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.

Flaherty, Colleen (2020). “No Room of One’s Own”. Inside Higher Ed, 21 April 2020. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/21/early-journal-submission-data-suggest-covid-19-tanking-womens-research-productivity.

The Increasing Uneven Gendered contours of water and sanitation access during Covid-19 times in Accra, Ghana

Dr Everisto Mapedza

Through a gendered lens focusing specifically on women and girls in Accra, Ghana, the research engages with feminist approach focusing on unequal power dynamics in accessing water and sanitation during Covid-19 times. Water provision became of the key pillars for improving handwashing and general hygiene to fight against the spread of Covid-19. The Government of Ghana, responded by providing free access to water in urban areas such as Accra. Whilst this was a noble move, the existing feminist political economy of access to water and sanitation is based on where you live as only 40% of the urban households are connected to piped water. The Study was conducted in Ayawaso East Municipality, which was flagged as one of the Covid-19 hotspots in Accra. This offered an opportunity for an intersectionality approach looking at gender and low-income social status. The main findings of the study are that Covid-19 impacts are gendered. Women, men, youths and children are differentially affected by Covid-19 differentially within the study site. For instance, women and girls have a greater burden of collecting additional water, school going children are missing out on their education and men are staying at home more increasing the risk of domestic violence. School going girl children were at a greater risk of pregnancy with increased teenage pregnancy rates in Ghana during covid-19 and greater risk of substance use by the youths were were neither going to school or work. The Government's Free Water Initiative response has further marginalised the poor female urban citizens. Further gender disaggregation shows that male respondents' access to free water was 10 percentage points higher than for women.

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Biographical Note:

Everisto is a Senior Social and Institutional Researcher with a PhD from Edinburgh University (UK). He is working for the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) based in the West Africa Office in Accra, Ghana. Everisto’s research interests are Gender, Institutions and Governance. Everisto has experience in leading and coordinating multicultural teams. Everisto strongly believes that the social sciences have a key role to play in resolving gender, institutions and governance issues in natural resource management in Africa. Before joining IWMI Everisto was a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE).

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#longcovid: Life Writing and Digital Health Activism

Dr Katja Herges

The public debate, research agendas and policy measures on covid-19 have been largely based on epidemiological and medical discourses on acute illness, incidence rates, ICU admissions and mortality data. However, a large number of patients, in particular women, that officially survived covid-19 are still affected by a wide range of debilitating and recurring symptoms months after they were infected with the virus. #longcovid is the first patient-named pathology and has come to constitute a pressing clinical and public health phenomena. An international patient movement emerged from patients’ experiences and knowledge and their (dismissed) needs for care as they found other people via various social media platforms. Inspired by AIDS activism and feminist grass-root health movements this “collective thinking from the sickbed” (Callard 2020) creates visibility and awareness and leads to citizen-science alliances in which activists collaborate closely with scientists and health professionals for funding and research. At the same time, diverse creative responses based on personal experiences with Long Covid are getting published in the digital realm. Drawing on scholarship on life writing, graphic medicine and feminist disability studies, this presentation analyzes the function and aesthetics of the emerging, often collaborative and digital practices of life writing as part of this global activist health movement.

The life writing practices include coronadiaries and “covid-19 symptom threads” (Pearl 2020) about experiences with long-covid (e.g. Monique Jackson’s @_coronadiary comic on Instagram, Morgana Wingard’s website “survivor diaries” with illness narratives and photographs, and Karoline Preissler’s twitter threads under the German hashtag #coronatagebuch). In this presentation I argue that the intersection of digital creative practices and Long Covid constitutes a productive site to rethink medical knowledge production and foregrounds the interaction and transformation of knowledge between biomedical research, feminist health activism and creative practices.

Biographical note:

Katja Herges is a researcher at the Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. Previously, Katja has practiced as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in different clinical settings. In addition to her medical degree (University of Heidelberg, 2007), she earned a Ph.D. in German studies and feminist theory and research from the University of California, Davis in 2018. Her academic interests include medical humanities, life writing, visual cultures of illness, gender studies and mental health. Her edited volume on German life writing (together with Elisabeth Krimmer) is forthcoming with Camden House. Katja is working on a book project on visual life narratives and chronic illness in contemporary Germany.

“Periods Don’t Stop for Pandemics”: The Impact of COVID-19 on Menstrual Activism

Dr Maria Tomlinson

Menstrual activism, which is profoundly shaped by intersectional feminist ideologies and practices, aims to reduce social inequalities amongst menstruators, eradicate menstrual stigma, and raise awareness of related issues such as the environmental impact of single-use products or health conditions including endometriosis. The pandemic, however, has exacerbated social inequalities and created new barriers for activists. In March 2020, grassroot activities in communities and schools came to a halt. Activists had to quickly rethink how to achieve their objectives through digital means and social distancing. With a view to unpacking the present and long-lasting impact of COVID-19 on menstrual activism, this paper presents findings from 25 interviews with menstrual advocates that were conducted between May and September 2020. Drawing on critical menstruation studies and adopting an intersectional feminist framework, my paper examines the obstacles and opportunities encountered by these 25 activists during the pandemic. For instance, the move to online events has been an equaliser for disabled women, whereas it has led to the further marginalisation of ethnic minority groups who do not have internet access and/or who experience acute menstrual stigma. In addition, the pandemic has highlighted the importance of physical spaces in the menstrual activist movement, such as for encouraging particular groups of women to speak openly about their menstrual experiences or encouraging them to use menstrual cups. Overall, my findings illustrate that, despite the many problems that the pandemic has posed, it also has provided opportunities for activists to critically reflect on their practices and to strive to create a better future for menstruating women.

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Biographical note:

Maria Tomlinson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield and is leading her own research project entitled: “Menstruation and the Media: Reducing Stigma and Tackling Inequalities”. She has published articles in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, L’Esprit Créateur, and Social Semiotics. Her upcoming monograph, From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French, is soon to be published with Liverpool University Press. She is also the co-editor of Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture (Peter Lang).

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COVID-19: Global Pandemic, Governmental Response and Rights of Pregnant Indian Women

Soumya Kashyap & Dr Priyanka Tripathi                                                    COVID-19 has proved to be global emergency that has fractured the healthcare systems to an extent that its impact is too difficult to be encompassed right now. India declared a nation-wide lockdown on 24th March, 2020 to curtail the spread of coronavirus, this sudden and unplanned lockdown had left pregnant women vulnerable to desensitized care. The first wave of coronavirus revealed that despite several guidelines issued by the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in context to the maternal services, administrative apathy endangered the lives of pregnant women and had secondary impact on their sexual and reproductive health. However, the second wave has emerged to be a larger threat to the lives of pregnant women as every second patient walking in is found COVID positive. This time it has proven to be more transmissible and, in some case, it escapes the RT-PCR Test thus, threatening their lives, especially those who have comorbid conditions such as gestational diabetes and respiratory complications. The current maternal health scenario in India showcases how pregnant women have lost their lives when safe delivery, neonatal services became inaccessible. The clinical impact of COVID-19 and the case of vertical transmission being vague places the brunt of dehumanised care, obstetric violence, lack of PPE kits as some of the secondary factors, proving that the collateral destruction caused by the pandemic is greater than the pandemic itself. The article through the content analysis methodology and by resorting to netnographic and discourse analysis aims to first evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on pregnant women in India, within and beyond the intervention of government policies and schemes and secondly, it also aims to discuss the rights of Indian women in this context which constitutes an integral part of public health issues in need of urgent attention during the pandemic.

Key words: COVID-19, vertical transmission, obstetric violence, RT-PCR Test.

Biographical notes:

Soumya Kashyap is a Research scholar (PhD) in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Patna (India). For her PhD dissertation, she is working broadly in the field of Medical Humanities. She intends to analyse issues of infertility, maternal health etc. with special reference to Indian Women’s writing.

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Priyanka Tripathi is an Associate Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. She has published extensively with Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), English: Journal of the English Association (Oxford Academic), Journal of Graphic Noves and Comics (Taylor & Francis), Feminist Theory (SAGE), Economic and Political Weekly amongst others. She is also the Book Reviews Editor of Rupkatha Journal  on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. Currently she is also working on an ICSSR funded project entitled, “Mapping Domestic Violence in the times of Covid-19: A Study from Bihar”. She works in the area of South Asian Fiction, Gender Studies, Place and Literature and Graphic Narratives. Her email id is priyankatripathi@iitp.ac.in. Her ORCID iD is https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9522-3391

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¡No estamos solas! Motherhood, Domestic Labour, and the Pandemic in the 2020 Work of Josephine Landertinger 

Dr Karol Valderrama-Burgos & Dr Emma Staniland

This paper focuses on the most recent projects developed by the Colombian filmmaker, writer, activist, and feminist Josephine Landertinger, in which experiences and struggles of women in the age of Covid-19 become central to each narrative. On the one hand, her documentary Ellas (work in progress) emphasises the existence of the female pronoun, in plural, as the centre of the film – as seen through its title. More specifically, the documentary aims to make visible around 100 Spanish-speaking women that responded to Landertinger’s 2020 call – i.e., share photos or videos made at home during lockdown and answer questions about their experiences of living through the pandemic while being pregnant, in postpartum period, with younger children, in vulnerable situations, in charge of other people (emotionally or physically), whilst grieving, or whilst simultaneously being mothers and members of staff in the healthcare system. On the other hand, her book Cartas de cuarentena [Lockdown Letters] (Landertinger & Contreras, 2020), showcases the exchange of a series of letters between the filmmaker - who resides in Barcelona - and the cultural journalist Lilian Contreras - who resides in Bogota - sharing their thoughts and daily lives at home, while debating gender equity and postfeminist beliefs about women in response to real life experiences. Thus, this paper analyses the autobiographic nature of both cultural productions, how they can be understood as means of collective female enunciation and denunciation through diverse female testimonies, and therefore, how they all contribute to alternative, fluid, and ongoing meanings of feminisms in Hispanic contexts during the pandemic. In short, this paper aims to evaluate how Landertinger’s work provides mechanisms to re-read and recognise female subjectivities in the age of Covid-19. 

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Biographical Notes:

Dr Karol Valderrama-Burgos is a Lecturer (Education) in Spanish at Queen’s Belfast University. She has research interests in Colombian and Latin American cinemas, women filmmakers’ productions, and representations of gender.   

Dr Emma Staniland is a Teaching Fellow in Spanish & Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester. She has published in the fields of Latin American literature and Latinx Studies, with a particular focus on gender studies and feminism.

Feminist Activism on Violence against Women: Women in the Frontline of the Domestic Abuse Sector in the UK during COVID-19 

Prof Eylem Atakav, Dr Victoria Cann & Karoline Pelikan 

Drawing on video data collected between June and September of 2020, this paper reveals the unique challenges presented by COVID-19 frontline domestic abuse workers in the UK and provides critical reflections on the feminist nature of their work. Our study uses participant-led data collection (in the form of self-recorded video diaries) and filmed interviews with CEOs of UK charities, parliamentarians, the Police, and NHS professionals, which resulted in a documentary entitled, Lifeline (directed by Eylem Atakav and Karoline Pelikan).  Drawing on the knowledge produced from these focus groups and video-diaries, foregrounding the voices of the women who work in this sector, this research sheds light on the experiences of vicarious trauma (in particular, distressing calls ‘contaminating’ their homes), the gendered nature of domestic abuse work as vocation and as a feminist act, and funding challenges exacerbated by COVID-19.  

 In this paper, we will open up critical and reflexive dialogue between the producers of the film about the process of creating the film and the challenges involved with representing such important work. We will also consider the emancipatory potential of film making in the production of knowledge, not only for advancing understandings of the victims of domestic violence but importantly for those who support victims/survivors and advocate for an end to domestic violence. We consider how the film-making process allows provides an opportunity for solidarity and consciousness-raising in a context where the conditions of lockdown were making connections between service-providers all the more difficult.   

Biographical notes:  

Eylem Atakav is Professor of Film, Gender and Public Engagement at the University of East Anglia where she teaches courses on women and film; women, Islam and media; and Middle Eastern media. She is the author of Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation (2012) and editor of Directory of World Cinema: Turkey (Intellect, 2013). She is the director of Growing Up Married – an internationally acclaimed documentary about forced marriage and child brides in Turkey; and Lifeline, a new documentary that reveals the reality of working in the frontline of the domestic abuse sector in the UK during the pandemic. 

Dr Victoria Cann is an Associate Professor in the Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities at the University of East Anglia where she is Course Director of the MA Gender Studies programme. She researches and teaches in the fields of cultural studies, sociology and gender studies and is author of the book Girls Like This Boys Like That: The reproduction of gender in youth taste cultures (2018).  

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Karoline Pelikan is an award-winning German-Peruvian documentary filmmaker. The films of her production company Pelikan Pictures focus on social injustice and inequality, films for educational purpose, violence against women and LGBTQI rights. Karoline founded the award-winning empowerment project EmpoderArte, a series of film workshops for women from disadvantaged regions in Peru. 

Developing ‘Hybrid’ Workshops for Online Feminist Consciousness Raising During Covid-19: Reflections from our Work with the Malaysian Youth Council

Dr Syafiqah Abdul Rahim & Dr Hannah Walters

The outbreak of Covid-19 signalled a rapid shift to online spaces for our work, social and educational lives. While these shifts have rightly garnered attention, an area which has received less focus is that of activism, and how the virtual world interacts with processes of establishing supportive spaces for political action, civic engagement and consciousness raising.

In this paper we discuss how, in response to these challenges, we developed a series of ‘hybrid’ events for feminist consciousness raising with different youth groups across Malaysia, a cross-border initiative aimed at fostering a sense of solidarity and connection amidst a global crisis. We developed a number of tactics aimed at combating issues common to online spaces (unidirectional communications; hierarchical structures; feeling distanced by time and space), focusing on ways to share the ‘power’ and bring a sense of real-worldness and materiality to virtual environments. This included encouraging the use of online annotation/chat tools during the workshop, and mailing poster-making kits to participants ahead of workshops, which were opened and used at the same time during the event. These strategies were then used to produce a ‘hybrid’ feminist consciousness raising event with members from different youth movements from across Malaysia, guided by the statements: ‘Feminism as an everyday practice’, and ‘Feminism is for everybody.’

We hope our work will speak to some of the challenges other feminist activists, as well as youth, gender and education researchers, have met since the outbreak of Covid-19 and consequent rapid shift to online spaces. More broadly, we hope to contribute ideas and strategies for educators, activists and researchers to make the most of virtual environments -a way to bring a sense of real-worldness and materiality to a virtual space, in particular around the processes involved in feminist consciousness raising.

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Biographical Notes:

Dr Syafiqah Abdul Rahim is a researcher with the Malaysian Youth Council. She completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow where her research focused on young people’s participation in youth movements in Malaysia. More broadly, her research interests include young people’s activism in relation to their learning experiences, transformative agency and collaborative activities, with expertise in youth transitions, youth development, the political economy of youth, activism and related fields. Syafiqah is currently part of an expert panel in the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Malaysia.

Dr Hannah Walters is a Junior Research Fellow with the UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies where her work focuses on the intersections of class and gender in educational and social contexts. Her PhD explored the educational journeys of working-class girls navigating highly classed and gendered pathways. In 2017 she co-founded Girlhood Gang, a feminist collective which organises research and events around girls and girlhood, and she is co-founder and co-convenor of the BSA’s social class study group. Her research interests centre on intersections of gender, class and youth across various contexts, as well as feminist, creative and participatory research methods.

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The Crisis of Covid Caring:   

Career and Other Impacts on Mothers Working at Higher Education Institutions

Kris Kovarovic & Mothers and Mothers-to-be Support Network (MAMS)  

Durham University, UK  

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Working mothers are faced with well-known challenges. The competing demands of one’s children and career, alongside systemic gender discrimination in the workplace, underlie a documented “slow down” in many women’s career trajectories. In Higher Education Institutions, which are by nature hierarchical and goal-driven, mothers may be particularly disadvantaged by the rigidity of their roles and promotion criteria, as well as cultural expectations for the acceptable timeline of career progression. These types of injustices predate the Covid-19 pandemic, but mounting evidence demonstrates that they have been exacerbated since early 2020 when Covid-19 resulted in lockdowns and other restrictions, during which women undertook the majority of domestic and family-related duties, including home-schooling. The aim of our research was to explore how such “Covid caring” impacts on the career and wellbeing of mothers in the HE sector, and what HEIs were doing to address the inequities. We conducted an online survey of 2,888 mothers and interviewed eight senior leaders in UK HEIs. The research sample was self-selecting and ethical approval was granted. Reports of exhaustion, increased workloads, and confusion around furlough and other lockdown-related programmes were frequently reported. Staff praised institutions that communicated clearly and consistently, were fair in adjusting workloads, and where the realities of working from home whilst simultaneously undertaking childcare duties were made visible. Our study also identifies ways forward in addressing the Covid-related exacerbation of entrenched inequities faced by mothers as we move on from the pandemic. 

Biographical Note:

Kris Kovarovic is an Associate Professor of Human Evolution in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University. She is also co-chair of the university's Mothers and Mothers-to-be Support Network (MAMS), a staff network of over 170 mothers. Kris and the network recently received second place in the Making Opportunities for Mothers in Academia (MOMA) award from the International Association for Maternal Action and Scholarship (IAMAS).

Considerations of Queer Sociality During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Clara Schwarz

This past year, networks of sociality and care have been restricted for everybody to a certain degree, but queer people in particular are suffering from isolation from their communities and queer friends. For queer people, friendships often signify trust, security and normalcy. Additionally, as Foucault pointed out, friendships between queer people have the potential to disrupt social norms that fix queer interaction as always and necessarily sexual. For my PhD research, I spoke to groups of LGBTQ friends about their experiences with the pandemic, with community and with friendship. As queer communities in London are often confined to a limited and shrinking number of public spaces, which were amongst the first to close (e.g. nightclubs and bars), queer people found innovative ways to remain social during the Covid-19 pandemic. Research participants reported creating a sense of queer normalcy in the home through avoiding heteronormative content. They also set up online spaces for shared activities ranging from book clubs to licensed group therapy sessions.

The creativity and innovation with which queer participants have tackled this crisis of sociality demonstrates the commitment inherent to queer communities – as queer individuals support and care for each other. While these examples demonstrate the commitment of queer people to one another, the necessity for these innovative approaches stems from a deep-rooted lack of institutionalised care networks for queer individuals. This is why, as some participants reported, being surrounded mostly by their friends and partners, they have felt more at ease than before Covid, when every interaction with society reminded them of their atypicality in a heteronormative society. Thus, this presentation discusses the complexity of queer experiences with sociality and friendship during the pandemic and how this illustrates greater issues of care that impact queer communities in the UK and elsewhere.

Biographical Note:

Clara Schwarz is a doctoral candidate at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. They hold an MSc in Gender and Sexuality from the London School of Economics and a BA in Sociology from Goethe University in Frankfurt. Their research centres around queer friendships and queer experiences of the pandemic, and their research interests include femme, queer, and trans studies.

Queer Cares In and Beyond Crisis

Dr Maddie Breeze & Prof Yvette Taylor

Inequalities in care-giving and receiving are illuminated and sharpened during the Covid-19 pandemic, and care work is subject to heightened feminist attention. Research and policy discourse positions LGBTQ+ people as particularly vulnerable during the pandemic. Yet LGBTQ+ people have been collectively responding to and creatively negotiating care crises far beyond this particular crisis, including how care provision via the state, private sector, and normative family forms can erase LGBTQ+ care needs and giving. Queer care-giving during Covid-19 must therefore be situated in relation to: austerity-driven cuts, transphobic backlash and efforts to dismantle trans healthcare, histories and presences of HIV/AIDS activism, struggles for ‘inclusive’ health and social care, discriminatory provision of reproductive and sexual healthcare, and the heterosexual family model as a privileged location of care. As well as shifting and contested ways that class, gender, and sexuality contour access to care and recognition of care giving. In this context we discuss our recent qualitative research with LGBTQ+ care givers, including LGBTQ+ staff and students in higher education with caring responsibilities and those involved in queer and trans mutual aid. Our research documents diverse experiences of LGBTQ+ care giving in Scotland, tracing the distribution and social negotiations of unpaid care-giving within, at the edges of, and beyond the welfare state and family. In doing so we analyse how class, gender, and sexuality care norms are reproduced and transformed in queer care practices, exploring the limits, possibilities and (mis)recognitions of queer cares. While dominant approaches to care can re-enact a privatising vision, our analysis is grounded in queer feminist sociological methods that attend to collective action, social change and agency. We question which queer cares are celebrated, which are taken-for-granted, and who is re-positioned as careless or care-free, and contribute to contemporary debates on social reproduction and the transformation of intimate relationships.

Biographical Notes:

Maddie Breeze is currently Chancellor’s Fellow, School of Education, University of Strathclyde. She won the 2016 British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize  for her first book exploring gender and women’s sport, and co-authored Feminist Repetitions  in Higher Education: Interrupting Career Categories (2020) with Prof Yvette Taylor. Maddie  researches inequalities in higher education and has published widely on imposter ‘syndrome’, widening participation, and queer feminist approaches to education.

Yvette Taylor is Professor, School of Education, University of Strathclyde, UK. She is a  feminist sociologist and researches intersecting social and educational inequalities, including manifestations of gender, social class and sexuality. She is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Visiting Professor, Centre for Feminist Research, York University (2020), and held this position at the Australian National University (2018).

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Precarity, Marginality and Solidarity: Indian Women-in-Tech during the Pandemic

Dr Rianka Roy

I examine how women in the Indian tech industry have dealt with precarity and marginality during the pandemic. My study is based on 15 in-depth interviews of women and men tech workers in India, and seven hours of recording of online events organized by tech workers’ unions. Unemployment, overwork in work-from-home and domestic labor have exacerbated women’s precarity. Before the pandemic, women-in-tech utilized the liminal spaces between work and home for leisure, but the pandemic eliminated these spaces by merging the two sites of work. Additionally, men’s obliviousness to women workers’ crisis, de-gendered discourses of ‘merit’ (Upadhya 2007) and the unions’ limited focus on women’s issues have left women with little support. In this context, Indian women-in-tech have built online solidarity networks to discuss everyday problems that are generally overlooked by employers, men workers and unions. These networks have members from various companies, cities and states. Sometimes these groups are formed on the basis of ethnic and linguistic affiliations, making situated intersectionality a necessary approach for analysis (Yuval-Davis 2015).

Can these digital networks be globally expanded? The racialized distribution of labor in the neoliberal tech market (Banerjee 2010) makes women’s precarity a locally-lived phenomenon. Maintenance-oriented and low-waged projects are assigned to Global South workers. Interaction with clients located in the Global North requires late night attendance. These conditions are not central to the Global North tech industry. Indian women-in-tech have combatted their marginality with everyday solidarity networks, but neoliberal structures of precarity undermine prospects for cross-border feminist solidarity even during a global crisis.

References

Banerjee, Payal. 2010. “Transnational Subcontracting, Indian IT workers, and the U.S. Visa System.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 38(1/2): 89-110.

Upadhya, Carol. 2007. “Employment, Exclusion and ‘Merit’ in the Indian IT Industry.” Economic and Political Weekly 42(20): 1863-1868.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2015. “Situated Intersectionality and Social Inequality.” in Raisons Politiques 58(2): 91-100.

Biographical note:

Rianka Roy is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests are in labor, social movements, gender, immigration and media. Her current project is on trade unions in the Indian tech industry. She completed her previous doctoral research on social media surveillance at Jadavpur University, India. She worked as an Assistant Professor of English.

“It's my only hour of quiet”: The women’s online book club on ‘domestic noir’ during the Covid-19 pandemic

Katharina Hendrickx

Drawing on recent PhD fieldwork conducted with women readers over three months in the form of ‘domestic noir’ book clubs in Brighton and Hove, this paper focuses on one of the all-women’s ‘domestic noir’ reading groups that was organised at the beginning of 2020. This study aims to understand women’s interaction, interpretation and experience with the crime subgenre and, as the last in the series of six ‘domestic noir’ book clubs, this group started just before the first lockdown began and quickly moved online. In this book club the house and the home became the focal point of the discussion on ‘domestic noir’ but also the participants’ experience of the current situation and the claustrophobic feeling of having to stay inside all day every day with very few, only necessary exceptions. Domestic noir’s thematic portrayal of the dangerous and claustrophobic Gothic home, domestic violence as well as limiting and stereotyped femininity were specifically highlighted during the discussions and functioned as catalyst for exchanges of personal experiences of misogyny, loneliness, gendered fears as well as burnout for the participants. Importantly, the book club created community and solidarity with each other’s experiences, which then developed into a regular crime reading group and still continues online every month. This paper then argues that women’s online reading groups continue to be an excellent tool for women to build communities and spaces to talk about experiences of misogyny, gendered violence and sexual harassment as well as, in the current situation, their heightened struggles around the home, domestic duties and childcare. The book club meetings enable the participants to create space and time for themselves, away from their childcare and household duties, which is often even more difficult to find during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Biographical note:

Katharina Hendrickx is a doctoral researcher in cultural and media studies at the University of Sussex, investigating the literary heritage, popularity, and readership of domestic noir. She served as one of the general editors for the Excursions Journal theme issue on “Fake” (2019) and has recently published on Gone Girl, Gothic excess and readership in recent Clues special edition on Domestic Noir (2021).

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Every Covid Has a Silver Lining: Women’s Lived Experiences and Potential Feminist Futures Beyond the Pandemic

Dr Marina Cano

This paper examines some women’s lived experiences of lockdown, social distancing and the Covid-19 pandemic era more generally. It is based on the results of an online survey conducted by the author in June-July 2021, when restrictions of the second or third lockdown were beginning to ease in most places. The survey, which asked participants about their gains and losses since the start of the pandemic, their experience of gender relations and their thoughts about the future of feminism, received over 100 responses from respondents all over the world (from Colorado to Zimbabwe). Thus, it provides snapshots of what life was like during the crisis for women, and some men, in a variety of situations and locations. The results obtained are highly mixed and sometimes contradictory, which means that the present essay resists universalising narratives about the pandemic and the negativity generally reported in the media. Producing a truly grassroots account, which includes gains as well as losses, the essay brings into conversation women from diverse parts of the world on topics such as work, relationships and feminism. It concludes that these tensions and contradictions themselves offer a glimmer of hope for our feminist futures, which post-Covid-19 gesture towards the French feminism of the 1970s.

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Biographical note:

Dr Marina Cano is Associate Professor of English at Volda University College, Norway. She has also taught at the University of Limerick (Ireland), the University of St Andrews and Edinburgh Napier University (Scotland). She is the author of Jane Austen and Performance (Palgrave, 2017) and the co-editor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance (Palgrave 2019). During 2013–16, she was a researcher in the international, interdisciplinary project “Travelling Texts 1790–1914: Transnational Reception of Women’s Writing at the Fringes of Europe” (European Commission, HERA).

Confined Temporalities. Reflections from a Pandemic Present through an Affective & Embodied Auto-Ethnography

Paula Satta

Our lives were deeply affected from the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 to the point of exposing the material and emotional crisis of our most intimate existences.

The apparent detention of social and productive time, for some authors "des-aceleración" (slowdown) of time (Rivera Garza, 2020), the constant control over our bodies to prevent the spread of the virus and the reproduction of commercial logics and unequal structures of oppression involves social and subjective effects still in constant change. How could my feminist research not to be affected since pandemic started?

My embodied experiences are the vehicle I found to understand this social, emotional and cultural experience. I will use a self-ethnographic methodology to carry out a theoretical-methodological reflection that is also personal and academic through an intersectional regard. I have to do a critical review of my identity as a Latin University student, lesbian, migrant, scholar, from an age group not exposed to the danger of the virus, in order to reflect on the creation of “other temporalities” during the pandemic. It is also an opportunity to reflect on my personal and collective experiences of feminist affective research practices also as a creative & invisible standpoint to resist the normative, linear & productive temporality we live and (re) produce. A feminist decolonial methodology is a political departure to me, that avoids the binaries of sex/gender, body/mind, nature/culture and science/storytelling and discuss a monolotic and colonial way of thinking about time/ temporalities, created by the western, white and colonial epistemologies. An attentive look, affected in the sense of letting ourselves be crossed by this new "normality", allows us also to reflect on the vulnerability of this unprecedented moment.

Biographical note:

I have a Degree in Sociology (UNLP) and a Diploma in Gender, Politics and Participation (UNGS), both from Argentina where I came from. I am a Transfeminist activist, and a lesbian researcher, actually finishing the Master Erasmus Mundus GEMMA Women’s and Gender studies (UNIBo.Italia-UGR.España). I was part of feminist local and international collectives since 2013. My last experiences were in the Feminist Forum against the G20 and the Social Mobilization Team of DAWN feminist, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era in 2018. Then I was an activist in Non Una di Meno in Bologna, Italy. I have publications in the field of memory and gender, sexual and reproductive rights, feminist economics, decolonial and queer epistemologies. 

Reflecting on My Journey as a Novice Algerian Feminist: Challenges and Successes during Covid-19

Khadidja Kelalech

Doing a PhD, living alone, and working on women’s education during the breakout of Covid-19 have been exhaustive challenges that marked disappointments and successes in my journey as a feminist researcher and a PhD student.

My PhD work focuses on exploring female students’ narratives of their experiences of misogynistic social media representations of them. I started working on this topic hoping that I might contribute to an improving discourse about women’s education in Algeria where some regions still expect from women to adhere to patriarchal social norms. The process of understanding the phenomenon from a feminist perspective took countless efforts of reading and reflection as I tried to situate women’s situation in Algeria within a global feminist narrative.

The academic struggle became worse after the breakout of Covid-19 where I had to stay home, living alone in a foreign country for more than one year. The fear, the uncertainty, the exhaustion, and the “pretending to be well in front of my parents’ smiley faces from their end of the camera” were all vivid challenges that I have been going through every single day. To cope with these challenges and complete my feminist work, I came up with mechanisms that focused on three things: 1) reminding myself that my research about women’s education matters and that I have to keep working on it to make it matter; 2) coming up with a “study at home” routine despite being a library person; 3) seeking self-emotional support.

In this presentation, I will reflect from an intersectional viewpoint on both challenges and successes that I have been witnessing as a feminist researcher during Covid-19. While uncertainties and challenges are part of any research during all times, the Covid-19 situation has its special restrictions AND benefits that makes it worth reflecting on.

Biographical note:

Khadidja Kelalech, PhD candidate at the University of Leicester, UK. She received her BA and MA degrees in Didactics of English and Applied Linguistics from the University of Mascara, Algeria, in 2015 and 2017, respectively. She is currently researching women's education in Algeria and MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries while working as a curriculum consultant at the University of Leicester at the same time.

The Heteronormative Effects of the Pandemic and Feminist Scholarship as Solace Alexandra Pugh

In this paper, I will firstly explore the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic has entrenched heteronormativity. When university students were asked to return to their family homes during the UK’s first wave, this strengthened the family unit as the primary structure around which our society is organised. The order to lock down was an order to inhabit domestic space, to use our bodies in an orderly fashion, and to become impenetrable, disconnected beings. If Jack Halberstam defines queer time as an eccentric recalibration of the relationship between the present and the future, an alternative to ‘the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance’,1 then the pandemic is surely the straightest time of all. Time functions linearly as we privilege survival and scientific progress. We have learned to assess the risk of every human interaction in an effort to avoid infection; we have had to become atomic individuals.

In these circumstances, the affective and collaborative dimensions of feminist scholarship have been particularly important, as has its adaptability. When the pandemic first struck the UK, I was studying for a master’s in Women’s Studies. My cohort was suddenly scattered across different cities and countries, and our feminism necessarily took on new forms. We wrote letters to the university articulating a joint response to the outbreak of Covid-19, which influenced divisional policies; we connected and shared work with the incoming Women’s Studies cohort; we produced a zine, remotely, which blended critique, research, auto-fiction and auto-art. We felt anger, sorrow and regret at the effects of the pandemic on our studies and our lives, but this was combined with determination and fierce hope. Reflecting on my own experience, then, this paper will posit feminist scholarship as a form of solace against the backdrop of the heteronormative pandemic.

Biographical note:

Alexandra Pugh is a PhD candidate in the Department of French at King’s College London. She is supervised by Professor Siobhán McIlvanney and Dr Ros Murray, and is funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. She is interested in queer theory, feminism and contemporary literature, and her PhD thesis is provisionally entitled ‘Reimagining bodies and boundaries through the work of Virginie Despentes: towards a queer-feminist aesthetics’. She has an MSt in Women’s Studies and a BA in History and French, both from the University of Oxford.

Coming Together while Staying Apart: Feminist Memes as a Means of Community Formation during COVID”

Dr Shana MacDonald & Brianna Wiens

In the current era of social media activism, feminist memes perform digital resistance against misogyny most often through an appeal to collective experiences of humour and rage. These memes often employ a visual signifier, or figure, to hold the complex entanglements of affect and critique they advance. Within the context of the current global pandemic, one sub-set of feminist memes have reflected issues of labour inequities around caretaking and the impossibilities of work-life balance. These memes speak directly to the rage felt at these inequities by often working with humour and sarcasm. This paper proposes to examine in particular the outpouring of these frustrations within meme-based discourse that circulated immediately in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and have continued to shift and re-circulate over the last fourteen months. We will look at a group of Instagram accounts that represent a wide-cross section of feminisms (@frizzkitart; @fleurdelisspeaks; @betches; @trophybarbiewife) to trace the changes in conversations over the life-span of the pandemic in order to note what conversations have emerged, which have been redirected, and which have continued. By doing so we hope to get a sense of what the lasting impacts of the pandemic are on feminist dicussions of domestic care labour are and what perhaps the focus of our recovery will look like. We explore these questions from an intersectional, trans, queer feminist lense and offer a small-data, humanities informed hermeneutics of these meme accounts which takes up specific questions of text, context, and their paratexts. What we hope to argue is that feminist memes are socio-cultural performatives that iteratively circulate and (re)organize forms of cultural knowledge into dynamic flows of discursive resistance and feminist refusal and that they do so through the production of networked communities.

Biographical notes:

Dr. Shana MacDonald is Associate Professor in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her interdisciplinary research examines intersectional feminism within social and digital media, popular culture, cinema, performance, and public art. Dr. MacDonald is a director of the qcollaborative (qLab), a feminist design lab dedicated to developing new forms of relationality through technologies of public performance, where co-runs the online archive Feminists Do Media (Instagram: @aesthetic.resistance). She has published in Feminist Media Histories, Media Theory Journal, Feminist Media Studies and is lead author on the forthcoming book Networked Feminist Activisms (Lexington Press).

Brianna Wiens is a doctoral candidate in Communication and Culture at York University and co-director of the qcollaborative, a feminist design lab. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation research draws on her experience as a mixed-race queer activist-scholar to analyze the future of feminist technologies and methods for digital activisms; this research was recently awarded a Provost Dissertation Scholarship. Wiens’s collaborative work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique, and Leisure Sciences, and she is a co-editor of the forthcoming collection Networked Feminist Activisms (Lexington Press 2021).

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Feminist e-activism in the age of pandemic: Virtual cultural engagement with the Street

Girls in Egypt

Reem Kassem & Prof Katarzyna Kosmala

This paper discusses new forms of feminist creativity through e-activism that materialised as a response to the pandemic. Seeking alternatives ways for feminist-inspired research in the age of Covid-19 and beyond, this paper discusses a model for virtual cultural engagement connected to resilience building and illustrates in what ways it can help a group of young women from disadvantaged communities develop coping mechanisms during the crisis. We will draw on the Street Girls project case study, run by Hope Village Society, an Egyptian non-profit organization founded in Cairo in 1988. The organisation's role is to offer pastoral and financial support for young mothers and neglected girls deprived of family care. Over the past few years, working in collaboration with the HVS, we have engaged in development of a series of crafts-based workshops for street-based young women from Alexandria, offering craft-based training as well as personal skills development. The wide reaching effects of pandemic and the economic impact have had a particularly negative effect on gender equality, widening the gender gap across these women’s communities, already precarious before the pandemic. 

The paper discussed the impact of a two weeks long, green crafts recycling workshops, adapting virtual cultural facilitation methodology structured around non-formal education techniques, to provide a timely pilot analysis of how virtual formats of cultural engagement can help street-based young women build resilience, develop coping mechanisms and emerge stronger from crisis. We will draw on the focus groups and interviews with 18-25 years old young women from Alexandria, integrated into e-pedagogic interventions designed around arts-based creative learning, supporting resilience building. Findings evidence the ways in which arts-based pathways can be utilised in crisis situations, to raise awareness and counter the regressive effect of COVID-19 pandemic on widening gender equality.

Biographical notes:

Reem Kassem is a doctoral candidate at the University of West Scotland’s School of Business and Creative Industries and an Egyptian cultural manager and researcher based in Abu Dhabi. Named one of 50 most inspirational women in Egypt in 2020/2021, in recognition for her excellence and innovation in the field, efforts in empowering women and her inspirational role in advancing gender equality. She is the founder of AGORA for Arts and Culture, an international fellow of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management, a global fellow of the International Society for Performing Arts, a Chevening Scholar, a Clore Cultural Leadership Fellow, a Tandem Shaml and a Robert Bosch Stiftung Alumni. She won the Pioneer of Egypt award from the Synergos Institute, the Nahdet Elmahrousa and Barkley's Bank award on social innovation for employment, and the Anna Lindh Foundation Award for intercultural dialogue. 

Katarzyna Kosmala - Chair in Culture, Media and Visual Arts at the School of Business and Creative Industries, the University of the West of Scotland, a curator, and art writer. Previously, Prof Kosmala was a Visiting Research Fellow at GEXcel, Institute of Thematic Gender Studies, Linköping University & Örebro University, Sweden and Visiting Professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She researches and publishes internationally on heritage and identity, cultural labour and discourses of creativity and community in the context of a globalising network society, heritage and participation, art production and enterprise, arts-run projects, as well as gender and politics of representation.

Feminist Activism in a Post-Conflict Space: Prefigurative and Coalitional Political Strategies 

Dr Maria-Adriana Deiana & Dr Claire Pierson

The resurgence of feminist activism in the past ten years in Northern Ireland shares many characteristics with what has been termed as the ‘fourth wave’ of feminism, at the same time the region is distinct in terms of abortion and LGBT rights, and the particular post-conflict political landscape with its entrenched sectarian political and conservative gender order. This paper will present a framework to examine feminist activism in Northern Ireland, focusing on ideas of prefigurative and coalitional politics, and applying these to examples of abortion rights activism and feminist conflict transformation. The paper whilst situated in a local context will explore how the particular form that feminist activism takes in Northern Ireland can provide lessons for global movements. The authors whilst working in academia are also involved in feminist activism in Northern Ireland and will reflect on the particular relationship between political knowledge building between academia and activism. 

Biographical notes:

Claire Pierson is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Liverpool. Her research focuses on abortion and reproductive justice, activism and the rights of women in post-conflict societies. She is co-chair of the Feminist Studies Association and a board member of Alliance for Choice Belfast. 

Maria-Adriana Deiana is a Lecturer in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research focuses on gender politics and feminist activism in contexts shaped by conflict, international intervention and peacebuilding. She is co-director of the Centre for Gender Politics at Queens University Belfast.

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“Sex Workers in Spain: The Others of the Spanish Feminist Movement”

David Sanchez Garcia

Right before the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, the self-proclaimed feminist Spanish Ministry for Equality published the draft bill of the much-awaited Sexual Liberty law, putting ‘consent in the centre’. In October 2020, this bill was amended, introducing prison sentences of up to four years for prostitution-related charges, regardless of the consent of the prostitute, effectively criminalizing several forms of sex work. During the pandemic, prostitutes have been excluded from the discussions drafting this law, have been denied access to the guaranteed minimum income scheme unless they declared they were victims of trafficking, and brothels have been closed, allegedly for reasons of public health, while street prostitution is criminalized through neoliberal municipal ordinances and the punitive ‘Gag Law’. Some prominent feminists in favour of the abolition of prostitution have referred to the virus as the ‘abolovirus’. Prostitutes, the vast majority of whom are women, seem to be intelligible only as victims to be saved. In public interventions, the Minister for Equality repeatedly conflates prostitution and sex exploitation, neglecting the existence of freely consented prostitution. Moreover, other aspects such as the fact that 80-90% of prostitutes are foreigners and many are trans, are overlooked. The institutional treatment of sex workers can be read as instrumental for neoliberal state policies increasing precarity and migratory laws strengthening the Spanish border regime. Drawing on archival research, public interventions by politicians, Twitter, and media and cultural representations of prostitution, I explore how the production of victimhood and the institutional instrumentalization of the voices of prostitutes help give shape to a discourse that enables racist migratory policies. Sex work is now one of the main fractures of the Spanish feminist movement; understanding the stakes of this debate is thus central to establishing new alliances within and beyond feminism, and developing alternative visions of belonging.

Biographical note:

Originally from Madrid, Spain, David has just started an MA in Liberal Arts at The New School for Social Research, focused on Gender and Sexuality, and funded by a Fulbright Scholarship. Previously, he studied an MPhil in the Sociology of Marginality and Exclusion at the University of Cambridge, where he was the LGBTQ+ Officer at Wolfson College and co-organiser of the Wolfson Interdisciplinary Gender Hub. His research explores the discursive practices of the Spanish antiprostitution movement and how they relate to notions of victimhood, agency, biopolitics and the border regime.

Writing on the Wall: Feminist Collage in Covid-Era France 

Dr Jennifer Carr

Though the phenomenon of feminist collage in France predates the Covid-19 pandemic, it has accrued urgency in the last year, as issues ranging from domestic violence to state-sanctioned islamophobia have repeatedly surfaced in public discourse. Envisioned as acts of resistance and reclamation, many of these collages are the work of les colleur.euses, feminist collectives whose members have pasted messages of protest on the walls of cities across France, even creating “digital collages” on social media during periods of strict lockdown. Decentralized in structure, these collectives operate in various locales across France and beyond its borders. And though the origins of the movement are often traced to Marguerite Stern (and the year 2019), many participants have since distanced themselves from her, denouncing her trans-exclusionary rhetoric. My paper approaches feminist collage both diachronically and synchronically, situating the practice in a lineage of subversive recuperations of public space, while analyzing its heightened charge in the time of Covid-19. I trace a through-line, for instance, from les colleur.euses to Act Up-Paris to the Mouvement de libération des femmes. My primary focus, however, remains the contemporary moment.  

I argue that these collages register as especially poignant now because, in foregrounding issues like domestic violence, they reveal the porosity of the public and private spheres at a time when the French State has insisted on their separation (notably through periods of confinement and the attendant regulation of public space). I then situate this collapsing of the public and private within the larger sweep of feminist conversations in contemporary France, which—in the wake of #metoo, the Movement for Black Lives, and texts such as Vanessa Springora’s Le Consentement and Camille Kouchner’s La familia grande—have insisted with renewed vigor that the personal is political and that our “domestic” lives are never a purely private matter.  

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Biographical note:

Jennifer Carr obtained her Ph.D. in French from Yale University in 2019. She also holds an M.A. in Cultural Translation from the American University of Paris. Her research interests include contemporary French and Francophone fiction, feminist theory, experimental writing practices, and the intersection of literature and the visual arts. Her work has recently appeared in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and the Hong Kong Review of Books. She currently teaches at the University of Alabama. 

‘More Than Digital Self-Defence’: (Re)Thinking Feminisms in the Post-Covid-19 Media Swirl 

Ellen Bishell

As we near the end of a biennium in which physical mobility has been restricted yet our global mediascape saturated by multidirectional flows of audiovisual content, never have digital spaces been more crucial for feminist and queer creativity. With the world firmly plugged into a cyberspace that crosses geographic and linguistic borders, identities marginalised by (post)colonial hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality are carving out new potentialities for expressions of power. Via the context of recent and emergent queer interventions in the historically male-dominated Caribbean music genre of reggaetón, this paper argues for the increased importance of music video as an investigative medium in intersectional feminist studies as we move into the post-Covid-19 ‘media swirl’ (Vernallis, 2013). It pays specific attention to non-binary Puerto Rican artist Ana Macho’s Bairopolis project, a music video filmed over just two days (due to Covid-19 related complications) and released in October 2020. Whilst music video has been central to the circulation of reggaetón – and hence to the perpetuation of its misogynist tendencies – since the establishment of YouTube in the early 2000s, the formal and thematic analysis of this cultural text sheds light on the kinds of agency that women and queer artists are able to claim through enhanced audiovisual production. Extrapolating from gender-abolitionist collective Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto (2018), a radical technomaterialist feminism that cuts across gender, race, and class, this paper considers the paradoxical ‘emancipatory potential’ that can be realised within and beyond the current physical restrictions and resulting digital congestion. Ultimately, it is at the interstices of audiovisual studies and critical gender and race theory that new, dynamic forms of activism emerge. It is at this juncture, then, that we can assimilate, elaborate, and/or cultivate understandings of intersectional feminist epistemologies. 

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Biographical note:

Ellen Bishell is an AHRC-funded PhD student in Modern Languages at Newcastle University. Her recent MLitt research explored ‘constrained freedom’, socio-spatial politics, and articulations of race, gender, and sexuality in reggaetón music video from Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Her PhD project extends this thesis to investigate queer performance in contemporary music video from Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas more broadly. She has published in Spanish and Portuguese Review and has contributed to a dossier for Latin(o/a/x) American, Spanish, and Portuguese film/media website Mediático.  

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(Breaking out of) the Heteropatriarchal Lockdown: Wendy Delorme’s Viendra le temps du feu 

Dr Michèle Schaal

For centuries, lockdown has constituted a recurring analogy in French and global (pre)feminisms. Writers, theorists, and activists have posited women as imprisoned by patriarchy. Simultaneously, feminists have devised alternatives to break out of, if not utterly eradicate patriarchal domination. However, BIWOCs (Black, Indigenous, Women of Color) and LGBTIQAP+ feminists, among others, have underlined how such visions or metaphors ignored, instrumentalized, or further marginalized all those who did not hold racial, social, sexual, or class privileges within patriarchy. Those in the margins are also constrained by whitesupremacy, classism, or heteronormativity. Feminist intersectional reflections on lockdown ring all the truer in the context of the global COVID-19 crisis. 

For nearly two decades, Wendy Delorme has been one of these feminists, queer voices from the French margins, her work specifically illustrating the matrix of oppression and resistance within contemporary heteropatriarchy. Theorized by US Black feminists, this matrix reveals how, while many intersections grant privileges and/or cause disadvantages, marginalized communities have, simultaneously, used their subjugated situation as a basis for empowerment and resistance to hegemony. Such is the case in Delorme’s latest novel Viendra le temps du feu (2021), both thematically and metadiscursively. A feminist and queer dystopia, the narrative vividly illustrates the meaning, and deleterious consequences, of being locked down in heteropatriarchy through the first-person perspectives of six marginalized characters. In letters, diaries, or graffiti—prohibited forms of knowledge production in the narrative yet that oppressed communities have historically used for resistance—they depict their lives and survival in a gated, totalitarian city. In a striking echo the recent confinements, this self-labeled safe, nurturing society is nothing but a heteropatriarchal, racist, ableist, and classist prison, impacting all but even more so the most vulnerable ones. The inhabitants are indoctrinated into heterosexuality, reduced to being “contributors” of children. Sexual and other dissidents are brutally repressed within and without the city’s walls; people of color or those unable or unwilling to procreate live in the most impoverished neighborhoods and work in service jobs catering to the (white) privileged; migrants are all ruthlessly killed at the borders. Nonetheless, the six characters, through their forbidden writings and later actions, resist this crushing system, demonstrating that (fragile) alternatives exist, and that one can break out of heteropatriarchy. Metadiscursively, Viendra le temps du feu, as a queer, feminist narrative, becomes itself a vector for resistance to heteropatriarchal and androcentric fiction. As in her other books, Delorme centers her latest novel on women, gender non-conforming people, and sexual dissidents, thus having her readers identify with the most marginalized. 

Biographical note: 

Michèle Schaal is Associate Professor of French and Women’s and Gender Studies at Iowa State University. She specializes in 21st century French women writers and feminisms, as well as in contemporary French feminist manifestos and essays. She is the author of Une Troisième vague féministe et littéraire (Brill, 2017), the co-editor of the first scholarly volume dedicated to Virginie Despentes (Rocky Mountain Review, 2018), and a special issue on contemporary francophone feminisms (French Cultural Studies, 2020). Dr. Schaal is currently working on her second monograph, The Art of Genre- and Genderbending: Virginie Despentes’s Authorial Politics (Peter Lang, 2023).

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