Lena Wånggren

Intersectionality and dissensus: a negotiation of the feminist classroom

Purpose – The paper aims to examine the potential feminist politics of teaching: is there a clear connection between feminism and teaching, and is there a particular feminist way of teaching? Through notions of engaged political pedagogy (as developed by bell hooks Jacques Ranciere), it proposes an intersectional and dissensual approach to teaching, as a primary way of practising feminist politics within academia.Design/methodology/approach – The paper sets out to explore the possibility of a feminist pedagogy of teaching. Drawing on works by social and feminists theorists as well as by radical pedagogues, it negotiates these various standpoints, finding similarities and differences, in order to formulate ways in which we can more fruitfully conceive of teaching as politics.Findings – The paper proposes that the classroom proves one of the most radical spaces for possibility within academia. Through an engaged, dissensual pedagogy, in which both students and teachers work together in mutual recognition of...

Our Stories Matter: Storytelling and Social Justice in the Hollaback! Movement.

ABSTRACT As feminist and anti-racist scholars and activists have long known, which stories predominate and which are marginalised is always a question of power and authority – about who is entitled to speak, and who has the authority to decide the meanings of words and actions. Storytelling can be used as a tool for social justice, as exemplified by the international feminist movement Hollaback! and its regional and worldwide struggle to end street harassment and make public spaces accessible for everyone. This article examines the practice of sharing stories within one specific Hollaback! group, highlighting the timeliness of the online storytelling technologies promoted by the movement and considering this work as an example of extra-academic feminist education. The article concludes by questioning to what extent feminists manage to formulate their own localised struggles through storytelling within the feminist movement as a whole.

Feminist Work in Academia and Beyond

This chapter explores feminist work in academia, couching personal experiences of early career feminist academics in methodological discussions of Dorothy Smith’s feminist approach to institutional ethnography. By using Smith’s expanded notion of ‘work’ which includes the invisible emotional and social labour that is essential to the running of the university, yet is often unpaid and underappreciated, the authors provide a feminist critique of the neoliberal university. Doing this, they identify issues such as casualisation, workload and preconceptions around the academic ‘lifestyle’ as feminist issues, especially for early career feminists in higher education. Reflecting on their own experiences as early career feminist academics, they explore the negotiation of feminist aims within institutional boundaries. Work carried out by women, casualised staff, and postgraduate students in higher education is essential yet often unacknowledged or valued as ‘proper’ academic work. By asking who organises the post-seminar wine reception, whose shoulders we cry on, and whether or not this is considered work, they highlight the gendered, racialised, and classed hierarchies of academia and their institutional reproduction. The authors of this chapter state that their work might be co-opted by the neoliberal university, thus becoming complicit themselves in furthering the institution’s aims. However, in identifying the spaces where invisible work is done and underappreciated, the authors argue that feminists can find space to resist and agitate for change. In combining feminist research with activism, specifically through teaching, collaboration projects with activists, and trade union organising in higher education, this chapter challenges the dichotomies of feminist theory and praxis, feminist academia and activism.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

This book examines late 19th-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siecle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key 19th-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the crisis in gender or sexual anarchy of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine, As this monograph demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in this technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation

The ‘Freedom Machine’

The Victorian fin de siecle was imprinted by one particular mode of transport: the bicycle, which had its boom in 1895–7. Different kinds of cycles had existed before the introduction of the modern ‘safety’ bicycle in 1884, but neither the high-wheeler (commonly called the ‘penny-farthing’) with its large front wheel nor the more expensive tricycle was widely adopted — these were reserved for men and women of a certain wealth. It was John Kemp Stanley’s low-wheel Rover safety design of 1884, with a chain drive to the rear wheel and a year later featuring a diamond frame, that made the bicycle available to almost everyone. Coupled with John Dunlop’s pneumatic tyres, which were added in 1887, the safety bicycle became standard.1 Easier and safer to ride than earlier models, the bicycle now, very importantly, was also affordable.