This article investigates the political practices related to abortion in Ecuador from their politicisation in 2006 until 2023, two years after the decriminalisation of abortion in all rape cases. We identify: 1) the discursive and embodied practices that construct and politicise the aborting body within feminist advocacy for legal, safe, and free abortion in Ecuador; 2) the effects of these practices; and 3) feminist challenges to conservative discourses that, in some cases, appropriate their rhetorical strategies. Based on participant observations of feminist demonstrations and the analysis of texts produced by Ecuadorian feminist organisations, we trace three 'tactical strategies' (using Lugones' conceptualization) that introduce different configurations of the body and propose different effects: 1) abortion as reparation, along with the notion of the victim body; 2) abortion as a right, along with the citizen body; and 3) abortion as dissidence, along with the configuration of the sovereign body. These tactical strategies need to be understood within the broader political context and evolving anti-choice forces. The coexistence of different strategies can lead to both complementary effects and friction. In this study, we explored how feminist collectives advocated for legal, safe, and free abortion in Ecuador from 2006 until 2023. These two years followed the decriminalisation of abortion in all rape cases. We used participatory observation and document analysis. We identified overall ‘tactical strategies’ that activists are using. The concept of ‘tactical strategies’ was developed by Latin American feminist researcher Maria Lugones to bring together both high-level strategies and the everyday practices (tactics) that social groups use to achieve their aims. The concept criticizes the divide between ‘grand’ strategies and ‘minor’ tactics. Everyday acts of resistance are seen as just as important and relevant as better known actions, such as political advocacy. Through the analysis, we identified three tactical strategies: reparation, rights and dissidence. Reparation foregrounds a girl who is pregnant as a consequence of rape or incest. She is portrayed as a victim in need of an abortion as a form of repairing the violence. Rights are associated with the woman citizen who can exercise her right to health with the support of the legal and medical system. Dissidence does not trust official or institutional structures to ensure access to safe, legal, and free abortion. It centres around autonomous networks of feminist accompaniment for self-managed abortion. Each of these tactical strategies poses possibilities and challenges. How they are used depends on the social and political contexts. Sometimes they complement each other, but at other times, they may be contradictory.
Using ethnographic vignettes from my doctoral research, this article contextualizes and analyses Britain's Black maternal health crisis- a crisis of reproductive racism- through a Black feminist lens. The inequities Black mothers face has a strong Black (and) feminist history of being analyzed in relation to the politics of anti-Black racism and misogynoir as they are upheld and sanctioned by the State and the maternity services. This article, therefore, positions Black feminist consciousness as the overarching ethical and analytical framework that contemporary researchers must (re)turn to when studying reproductive racism in Britain. In light of this argument, I draw attention to the Black feminist articulations of racism, uneven reproduction, and reproductive necropolitics (introducing the idea of "necropolitical mythopoeia"), arguing that they are robust analytical tools that can kickstart the epistemological (r)evolution that is desperately needed in the British research landscape.
Women are at a heightened risk of mental health conditions during the entire perinatal period, and are recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a vulnerable population group. Perinatal mental disorders (PMDs) are associated with profound health-related and intergenerational consequences for mothers, infants, and families, yet remain an underprioritized public health concern within healthcare and legal frameworks. This consistent neglect undermines the recognition of perinatal mental health (PMH) as an integral part of women's reproductive rights and the right to health. In patriarchal societies, social determinants of health (SDOH) such as gendered norms and imbalanced power relationships operate in multiplicative and syndemic ways, shaping both the onset of PMDs and women's access to care and treatment. This narrative review demonstrates that sole reliance on a biomedical approach obscures the structural and gendered dimensions of PMDs, resulting in legal and institutional desertion. Since PMDs largely represent gender-based health needs, this paper argues that the right to PMH constitutes an autonomous, enforceable human right grounded in feminist jurisprudence, demonstrating that the gender-neutrality of health laws results in substantive discrimination against perinatal women. Drawing on interdisciplinary feminist theories, the paper novelly integrates feminist jurisprudence with clinical and public health perspectives to reconceptualize PMH. It proposes an interdisciplinary framework to facilitate law reforms, judicial interpretations, and the development of perinatal healthcare guidelines and protocols that are responsive to women's PMH needs and structural inequalities.
Labiaplasty has expanded worldwide, provoking debate over whether it reflects women's liberation, reinforces objectifying beauty norms, or medicalizes normal vulvar variation. Clinicians lack integrative guidance linking outcomes with feminist ethical analysis. To synthesize evidence on labiaplasty through feminist frameworks of liberation, objectification, and medicalization; evaluate functional, sexual, and psychological outcomes; and propose a clinical framework centered on relational autonomy and non-pathologizing education. A narrative review of peer-reviewed literature (2002-2025) was conducted using PubMed and Google Scholar, with screening of relevance based on predefined thematic domains including motivations, outcomes, sociocultural influences, and ethics. Empirical studies on motivations, outcomes, and educational interventions were included as clinical evidence, while feminist theoretical and ethical analyses were used for interpretive synthesis. Data were synthesized thematically along three axes: Liberation/autonomy, objectification/sociocultural pressure, and medicalization of normal anatomy. Utilization of labiaplasty has increased markedly, including in adolescents, although population-level rates remain underreported. Patients commonly endorse overlapping functional, aesthetic, and psychosexual motivations; many have labial dimensions within published normative ranges. Prospective cohorts and meta-analyses show high satisfaction and improvement in pain, functional symptoms, genital self-image, and sexual function, with low rates of major complications or long-term sensory loss when nerve-sparing techniques are used. However, elevated body-image distress and clinically significant body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) occur in a substantial subset. Media, pornography, and clinical marketing narrow perceptions of "normality," while language and diagnostic labels can pathologize benign variation. Labiaplasty sits at the intersection of liberation, objectification, and medicalization: Many patients experience benefit, yet decisions are shaped by sociocultural forces that constrain autonomy and recast normal anatomy as abnormal. The proposed L.A.B.I.A. framework (legal safeguards, autonomy assessment, body-image/BDD screening, informed consent and non-pathologizing education, and aftercare) offers clinicians an ethically grounded approach to counseling, patient selection, and follow-up while underscoring the need for education and policy that normalize vulvar diversity.
The experience of urban stress can profoundly influences health and well-being of city residents. Importantly, stress is experienced differently depending on social and individual factors, making certain groups more vulnerable than others. This paper presents a literature review of wearable biosensing research on stress in urban settings. It analyzes how physiological measures, including heart-rate metrics (HRV/ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA) and electroencephalography (EEG), have been used to link built environments to individual stress experiences. Drawing on feminist theory, the review asks whether biosensing research acknowledges that stress is not experienced uniformly but reflects social inequalities. The findings show limited attention of published studies to different perceptions of stress. Most studies analyze urban stress in an aggregated form with only about one-third of the identified publications focusing on subgroup differences related to age, mental health, or gender. The paper argues that future research should use biosensing not only to map stress but to create insights into how underrepresented groups physiologically respond to urban space by systematically focusing on social and cultural contexts and embodied differences next to environmental aspects.
Disparities in Black maternal mortality in the United States are a health injustice. To understand Black women's communicative experiences of birthing with their providers, we interviewed 20 Black women who had given birth within the past three years. Our analysis reveals how interconnected domains of power shape Black women's uncertainty, fear, and experiences during reproductive healthcare interactions. Participants described racializing encounters with their healthcare teams marked by dismissal, silencing, and impersonal care. In resisting these problematic encounters, Black women employed communicative strategies, including researching birthing expectations, identifying racially concordant providers, and utilizing friends, family members, or doulas to negotiate for themselves or on their behalf during birthing. We advance the literature on uncertainty communication by arguing that the matrix of domination offered by Black Feminist Thought shapes uncertainties in reproductive healthcare communication encounters for Black women in the United States.
Intimate partner violence, which includes physical assault, sexual violation and coercion, economic abuse, as well as psychological aggression within romantic relationships, remains a pressing public health issue, affecting millions of adults in the United States each year. The costs of such experiences are high, contributing to risk of adverse physical and mental health outcomes, decreased economic and educational attainment, as well as risk of early mortality. Evidence suggests that intimate partner violence and its deleterious consequences are experienced more frequently by those holding historically and systemically marginalized social identities, including people of color, sexual and gender minorities, as well as immigrants and refugees. Yet, more research is needed to both understand why these disparities emerge; and from a clinical perspective, how to effectively address violence within historically and systemically marginalized communities. To achieve these aims, we must look outside the boundaries of psychology toward feminist and interdisciplinary frameworks. Such perspectives illuminate how structural and institutional forces interact and shape our individual and interpersonal experiences, including interpersonal violence. Integrating these perspectives into existing ecological frameworks illuminates how structural and institutional forces interact and shape survivors' individual and interpersonal experiences, including intimate partner violence. Our goal is to advance justice-oriented research and practice by both identifying the drivers of violence-related disparities and advocating for community healing and engagement as essential components of trauma-informed care for survivors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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This article is a reconsideration of the object of the so-called feminist "sex wars", past and present. Building on the transfeminist effort to broaden our understanding of "sex" beyond a limiting sex-as-biology and gender-as-culture framework, this article seeks to show the importance of the pleasures of having a sex - a sexed body and role - to the sex wars. In order to do so, it reads two pieces of sex wars era polemical feminist literature in parallel, arguing that while the two texts represent radically different outlooks on ethics and possibility of enjoying having a sex and being sexed, they both show the importance of this question to the sex wars. Finally, the article argues that this broadened perspective on the sex wars can help us make sense of the contemporary feminist conflicts over sex, both as a desire, and as an embodiment - especially trans embodiment.
This paper analyses two Indian documentaries-Re-Imagining Leadership (2022) and Uttarakhand Women End Water Woes (2021)-to interrogate how the state-sponsored and non-governmental organisation-led discourses of women empowerment and environmental conservation frame women's ecological labour, particularly in the state of Uttarakhand, India. While the 2022 documentary presents a near-utopian model of women-led rural governance promoting subsistence economies, its narrative subtly tucks away the reliance on state support, frequently hinted at by the women leaders. This complicates its vision of a sustainable-financial independence and the promise of probable autonomy at the centre. The latter, documenting grassroots water revival initiatives by non-governmental aid, similarly highlights women's labour as an empowering solution for systemic failures and presents it as an embodied technology for guaranteed success. Drawing on Feminist Postcolonial Ecology, Feminist Science and Technology Studies and Postcolonial Development theory, I argue that these narratives aggrandise women's subsistence practices/labour as 'embodied technologies' to sustain ecological viability, hinging on a promise of increased agency at the centre. By contrasting romanticization of women's care work as 'empowerment', the study exposes the tension between celebrating localised women empowerment and the state's systematic obscuring of structural dependency and land dispossession. The study, therefore, contributes to debates on feminist sociological debates on gender, decolonial sustainability, and the political economy of visual storytelling.
This article examines loneliness in lesbian aging in order to challenge individualistic and miserabilist understandings of both loneliness and later life. Drawing on a lesbian feminist materialist perspective, it conceptualizes loneliness as a relational and political condition embedded in the intersecting social relations of gender, sexuality, age, and class. The analysis is based on a two-year ethnographic study conducted in Barcelona, combining participant observation within an association of older lesbians and 30 in-depth interviews with lesbians aged between 55 and 80. The findings show that loneliness cannot be reduced to an individual feeling or to the absence of social ties. Rather, it reveals the material and symbolic costs associated with lesbian life courses and with occupying a position outside the heterosexual organization of intimacy, family, and care, including experiences of invisibilization, economic precarity, and the unequal organization of care. At the same time, loneliness emerged as an ambivalent experience that could also be associated with autonomy, self-preservation, and forms of learning acquired through lesbian life courses. The study further highlights the central role of caregiving and the ways lesbian loneliness is shaped by asymmetries of recognition and reciprocity. Finally, it shows that feminist and lesbian spaces do not simply alleviate loneliness but provide collective infrastructures through which it can be negotiated and experienced with others. By approaching loneliness as an analytical lens rather than as an individual deficit, the article contributes to feminist, queer and critical gerontological debates and argues for a politicized understanding of aging and loneliness beyond cisheterosexual and heteronormative frameworks.
This article proposes a reconceptualisation of children's surname attribution as a gendered site of symbolic power within heterosexual family life. While naming is commonly framed as a private and consensual decision, feminist scholarship has shown that family practices are structured by persistent asymmetries of care, authority, and recognition. Yet the symbolic dimension of naming remains underexamined. Building on feminist theories of care, symbolic violence, and situated knowledge, this article introduces the concept of naming under constraint to analyse how naming decisions may be produced under conditions that limit deliberation and agency. Drawing on a case in Portugal, it shows how a naming decision taken immediately after childbirth-under bodily vulnerability, institutional urgency, and unequal care relations-becomes stabilised as a consensual outcome. The article further develops the notion of delayed articulation to theorise the temporal gap between living inequality and naming it as such, highlighting how care-intensive life stages constrain feminist critique. By shifting attention from naming as a neutral outcome to naming as a situated process, this article contributes to sociological debates on gender, care, and symbolic power, and highlights the importance of attending to the temporal and relational conditions under which inequality becomes intelligible.
This paper examines the methodological approach from a doctoral research project based on an ethnography conducted with children and young people living in shelters for domestic violence. Guided by the principles of critical social work research, this study was co-constructed in partnership with a feminist umbrella organization representing shelters across the province of Quebec, Canada. This collaboration ensured that the research had meaningful outcomes for both theory and practice. In this paper, I discuss how methodological and theoretical decisions worked to reduce power imbalances throughout the research process, emphasizing the critical role of interpersonal relationships in data collection. Drawing on feminist care theory (Brannelly and Barnes, 2022) and principles of feminist intervention in shelters (Côté, 2017), I highlight the importance of play, adopting a "least adult" posture (Mandell, 2003), supporting the mothers and a child-centered approach to establishing connections and navigating traditional power dynamics. This approach enabled a deeper understanding of the children's and young people's lived experiences in shelters. The findings suggest that research with children and young people necessitates adapting traditional research methods to better align with their realities. This requires critical reflection and proactive actions - such as thoughtful methodological and theoretical choices - to address power imbalances between adult researchers and child participants.
The Judeo-Christian and Shona indigenous religious spaces often reinforce the disempowerment of people with disabilities in general and women and girls in particular. In Zimbabwe, women experience the double vulnerability of being a woman in a patriarchal society and living with disabilities. Disability may increase poverty, while poverty may delay health-seeking behaviours and expose people to health risks that culminate in disability. The article explores how the Ngezi Baptist Church is re-appropriating its theology of disability to mitigate the stigmatisation, exclusion and discrimination of women and girls with disabilities, thereby reducing poverty among them. It employs the feminist disability theology in reshaping disability perceptions in Zimbabwe. Research data were obtained through focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with purposively selected participants. Local churches have great potential to reinterpret their doctrines and harness their spiritual capital to initiate inclusive social and economic initiatives aimed at improving the well-being of women and girls with disabilities. Ngezi Baptist Church is embracing the feminist disability theology that conceives of God as contextual. It encourages reimagining God in various forms of human variation in its drive to unlock the potential of the vulnerable categories. It inspires the able-bodied and the differently abled persons to work together towards alleviating poverty. The research provides a unique feminist disability theological analysis of the contribution of a local church towards reshaping community perceptions about women with disabilities and empowering them through upholding their dignity and reducing poverty among them.
Generative artificial intelligence(GenAI) is increasingly being used in the health sector. Much of the current discourse on GenAI is focused on technical accuracy and bias in its outputs. This editorial argues the need to go beyond bias mitigation and take a pro-justice approach for ethical GenAI use in health and medicine: one that actively confronts injustices, addresses structural inequities, and considers our intrinsic intergenerational responsibilities towards nature, humans everywhere , and other species. The piece draws from feminist ethics, justice theories, and decolonial practices to outline four key principles for a pro-justice approach for ethical GenAI use in medicine and health: intersectionality, epistemic justice, environmental justice, and social justice. It highlights the importance of such an approach, particularly for women's health. Research to develop, validate, and implement generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools is becoming increasingly common. However, most discussions about GenAI focus on whether it works accurately and whether it produces biased results (responsible AI). While these issues are important, this editorial argues that this is not enough for the health sector. It outlines the need for asking deeper questions about fairness and justice, that go beyond individual-level benefit-harms assessment. Drawing on feminist ethics, justice theories, and decolonial perspectives, the editorial outlines four principles for pro-justice ethical GenAI use: intersectionality (recognising how different forms of disadvantage overlap), epistemic justice (being inclusive of different types of people and diverse kinds of knowledge), social justice (fair distribution of resources, health and social benefits across populations), and environmental justice (considering intergenerational responsibilities toward humans everywhere, the nature, and other species). Considerations around ethics, governance and policy for GenAI use are also outlined.
This paper examines the archival practices of Patlatonalli, Mexico's groundbreaking lesbian feminist organization founded in Guadalajara in 1986, as a form of radical memory work. Through analyzing the organization's comprehensive collection-which includes photographs, meeting minutes, correspondence, and cultural production -, I argue that Patlatonalli's documentation practices function simultaneously as historical preservation, decolonial epistemic practice, and ongoing political resistance against erasure. The archive's significance lies not only in its unprecedented status as the only lesbian collective archive housed at a public university in Mexico, but in what its specific contents reveal about knowledge production from the margins of the margins: lesbian women organizing in a conservative provincial city, outside the circuits from which Mexican feminist and lesbian activism were being mapped and named. The current digitization project has processed 3,336 documents across eight thematic sections while navigating Mexican archiving legislation to protect personal information. This case study illustrates how memory work in Global South lesbian communities operates as decolonial practice, and examines the tensions and opportunities that arise when grassroots lesbian memory work interfaces with academic institutions.
This paper interrogates the discursive construction of the relationship between sexual violence and 'mental health' in case law and legal policies from England and Wales. It shows that the law invariably enacts a binary discursive construction of those who have experienced sexual violence where mental health evidence is introduced. Individuals are constructed as either experiencing 'normal trauma' or an 'abnormal diagnosis'. These findings are contextualised within recent feminist legal reforms to the treatment of mental health evidence in sexual violence cases, and emphasise the pressing need to centre the experiences of those who identify with psychiatric diagnoses in feminist anti-sexual violence politics.
This article explores how menopause is narrated, embodied, and re-signified by minority ethnic women in the UK, drawing on in-depth qualitative research with participants of Chinese and Black ethnicities. Dominant narratives in the Global North frequently frame menopause through a biomedical lens of loss, dysfunction, and hormonal deficit, or more recently, as a postfeminist site of "ageless empowerment" marked by pharmaceutical rescue. This study challenges both framings by foregrounding the culturally situated accounts of women whose experiences remain marginal within mainstream menopause discourse. Participants often interpreted menopause as a rite of passage - inflected with spiritual, moral, and generational significance - and located this transition within the wider reproductive life course and within culturally distinct epistemologies. Chinese-heritage women drew on the cosmology of Traditional Chinese Medicine and seven-year life cycles, while Black participants evoked ancestral wisdom, intergenerational legacies, and culturally embedded notions of "strength". While clinical encounters were often fraught with misrecognition or silence, most participants refused narratives of decline and framed their decision not to use Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) as a moral and culturally grounded choice rather than an outcome of exclusion. The paper argues for a reconceptualisation of menopause as a culturally mediated life transition and calls for greater narrative plurality in feminist and clinical understandings of ageing. By centring women's own meanings and metaphors, this research contributes to an emergent body of work that resituates midlife not as rupture or rescue, but as a site of reflection, reckoning, and redefinition.
This study draws on data from a study about the experiences of pregnant people in United States immigration detention from 2017 to 2022. While the original research questions focused on the impact of US immigration enforcement on pregnant migrants, interviews with healthcare workers offered unexpected insights into their own responses to the moral distress they felt when caring for pregnant women in immigration custody. Their responses were varied, from distressed observation to humanitarian mitigation to circumscribed advocacy to active resistance; for a few labour and delivery nurses, this resistance entailed significant professional risk-taking on behalf of their patients. Healthcare workers navigated the power dynamics of healthcare institutions which mandate compliance with law enforcement and their own fears, misgivings and conditioning as they attempted to blunt and subvert the violence and reproductive oppression of the carceral state's immigration enforcement regime. Drawing on recent literature on abolition nursing, medicine and midwifery, and in the context of Donna Haraway's philosophical contributions, this article will explore how healthcare workers engaged in a constellation of practices towards a situated, feminist abolitionist ethic of care.