Womanism is a social theory based on the history and everyday experiences of black women. It seeks, according to womanist scholar Layli Maparyan (Phillips), to "restore the balance between people and the environment/nature and reconcil[e] human life with the spiritual dimension". The writer Alice Walker coined the term womanist in a short story, "Coming Apart", in 1979. Since Walker's initial use, the term has evolved to envelop varied, and often opposing interpretations of conceptions such as feminism, men, and blackness.
Postmodern feminism is a mix of post structuralism, postmodernism, and French feminism. The goal of postmodern feminism is to destabilize the patriarchal norms entrenched in society that have led to gender inequality. Postmodern feminists seek to accomplish this goal through rejecting essentialism, philosophy, and universal truths in favor of embracing the differences that exist amongst women to demonstrate that not all women are the same. These ideologies are rejected by postmodern feminists because they believe if a universal truth is applied to all woman of society, it minimizes individual experience, hence they warn women to be aware of ideas displayed as the norm in society since it may stem from masculine notions of how women should be portrayed.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specialising in race, class and gender. She is a Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and a past President of the American Sociological Association Council. Collins was the 100th president of the ASA and the first African-American woman to hold this position.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society is a peer-reviewed feminist academic journal. It was established in 1975 by Catharine R. Stimpson, and is published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press. Signs publishes essays examining the lives of women, men, and non-binary people around the globe from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as theoretical and critical articles addressing processes of gendering, sexualization, and racialization.
Amina Mama is a Nigerian-British writer, feminist and academic. Her main areas of focus have been post-colonial, militarist and gender issues. She has lived in Africa, Europe, and North America, and worked to build relationships between feminist intellectuals across the globe.
New Jewish Agenda (NJA) was a multi-issue membership organization active in the United States between 1980 and 1992 and made up of about 50 local chapters. NJA's slogan was "a Jewish voice among progressives and a progressive voice among Jews." New Jewish Agenda demonstrated commitment to participatory (grassroots) democracy and civil rights for all people, especially those marginalized within the mainstream Jewish community. NJA was most controversial for its stances on the rights of Palestinians and Lesbian and Gay Jews.
Transnational feminism refers to both a contemporary feminist paradigm and the corresponding activist movement. Both the theories and activist practices are concerned with how globalization and capitalism affect people across nations, races, genders, classes, and sexualities. This movement asks to critique the ideologies of traditional white, classist, western models of feminist practices from an intersectional approach and how these connect with labor, theoretical applications, and analytical practice on a geopolitical scale.
Black feminism holds that the experience of black women give rise to a particular understanding of their position in relation to sexism, class oppression, and racism. The experience of being a black woman, it maintains, cannot be grasped in terms of being black or of being a woman, but must be elucidated via intersectionality, a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. Crenshaw argued that each concept—being black, being female—should be considered independently while understanding that intersecting identities compound upon and reinforce one another.
Feminist Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering women's studies that was established in 1972. It is an independent nonprofit publication housed at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. Besides scholarly articles, the journal also publishes creative writing, art work and art essays, book reviews, political and social commentaries, interviews, and activist reports.
Sonia Pressman Fuentes is an American author, speaker, feminist leader, and lawyer.
Radical Philosophy is a bimonthly academic journal of critical theory and philosophy. It was established in 1972 with the purpose of providing a forum for the theoretical work which was emerging in the wake of the radical movements of the 1960s, in philosophy and other fields. The journal is edited by an "editorial collective".
Feminist Formations is a peer-reviewed academic journal established in 1988 as the NWSA Journal ; the name was changed beginning with the Spring 2010 issue. It publishes interdisciplinary and multicultural feminist scholarship in women's, gender, and sexuality studies linking feminist theory with teaching and activism. In addition to its essays focusing on feminist scholarship and its reviews of books, the journal regularly publishes special issues focused on topics especially important in the field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and also features vibrant cover art and poetry and cutting-edge feminist artists and poets. The journal is edited by Patti Duncan, a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University, and is published three times per year by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
"Africana womanism" is a term coined in the late 1980s by Clenora Hudson-Weems intended as an ideology applicable to all women of African descent. It is grounded in African culture and Afrocentrism and focuses on the experiences, struggles, needs, and desires of Africana women of the African diaspora. It distinguishes itself from feminism, or Alice Walker's womanism. Africana womanism pays more attention to and gives more focus on the realities and the injustices in society in regard to race. Africana Womanism is geared to be absolutely African-centered. Even in the naming, Africa is at the center and in African cosmology, nommo is the proper naming of a thing which calls it into existence. Clenora Hudson-Weems sought to create a ideology specific to African women and women of African descent. Hudson-Weems believes that the creation of the ideology separates African women's accomplishments from African male scholars, feminism, and black feminism. In attempt to avoid being grouped in with other groups of people, Hudson-Weems decided it was time African women had their own ideology established by them. Thus, the terminology Africana Womanism, more appropriately fits the Africana woman, who is both Self-Namer and Self-Definer. Such realities include the diverse struggles and experiences, and needs of Africana women.
Feminist Africa is a peer-reviewed academic journal that addresses feminist topics from an "African continental perspective". It is published by the African Gender Institute. Its founding editor-in-chief is Amina Mama. It was accredited in 2005 by the South African Department of Education. This allows authors publishing in the journal to collect publication subsidy. The journal is primarily online but also distributes a small number of print copies.
The African Gender Institute (AGI) is a feminist research and teaching group that studies issues related to gender in Africa. It has become a department at the University of Cape Town (UCT), administered within the School of African and Gender Studies, Social Anthropology and Linguistics. The AGI has its own dedicated staff and has a unique degree of independence from UCT.
n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal is an academic journal covering feminist art criticism and the work of women artists since the 1970s. It is published by KT press and the editor-in-chief is Katy Deepwell (London).
Taiwan has a complex history of feminist and women's-rights movements with periods of progressiveness where feminism and strong female icons flourished and periods of strict authoritarianism where equality and individual rights were devalued.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of English at Emory University with a focus on disability studies and feminist theory. Her book Extraordinary Bodies, published in 1997, is a founding text in the disability studies canon.
Zethu Matebeni is a Sociologist, activist, writer, documentary film maker and Associate Professor at the University of the Western Cape. Previous appointments include senior researcher at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at UCT. She has been a visiting Professor Yale University and has received a number of research fellowships including those from African Humanities Program, Ford Foundation, the Fogarty International Centre and the National Research Foundation.
Feminism in South Africa has been shaped by struggles for political and racial equality, as well as by national and transnational struggles for gender equality. Woman in South Africa have historically faced a myriad of state-facilitated and socially-practiced discrimination including pay discrimination, the inability for all women to vote until 1983 and cultural sexism manifesting through severe violence against women. South Africa has high rates of rape and domestic violence which frequently goes unreported. Nearly one third of adolescent girls report being sexually coerced by men by the time they turn 16 with this statistic matriculating into high rates of sexual harassment and assault experienced by women.
