Editorial: Post-feminist practices, subjectivities and intimacies in global context

Résumé

In recent decades, "post-feminism" has become a recurrent theme and a buzzword of sorts in a variety of settings, from academia and politics to media discourses and popular culture. After decades of scholarship and public debate on the matter, the task of delimiting the boundaries of what "post-feminism" means seems intellectually futile, particularly because the ambiguity of the term is what makes it intriguing and compelling as a frame of analysis.In a particularly relevant interpretation, scholars of gender have taken post-feminism as promising conceptual lenses with which to interrogate the (un)doing of gendered subjectivities in our contemporary culture, where intersectional inequalities are (re)produced amidst the neoliberal celebration of individual agency and empowerment, as predicated on consumption and commodification of gender difference. Postfeminism extends understandings of the ways in which gender is performed, and highlights how neoliberal capitalism and market values intersect with identity, subjectivity and agency (Gill and Scharff 2013).This special issue intervenes in this ongoing debate by focusing on the practices, subjectivities and intimacies that are shaped by post-feminist cultural and political formations, whatever these may mean across the globe, and in diverse social, cultural and political contexts. A significant body of scholarship interrogating the notion of postfeminism from the standpoint of the Global North already exists, even if they have been critiqued for their narrow focus on white middle class subjectivities (Butler 2013). As important as those debates are, we were specifically interested in research that critically engages with the complexities of post-feminism from Global South perspectives, a work that is already being done (Dosekun 2015). This collection of research articles succeeds in bringing together voices and arguments from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe: three regions where new attitudes to the complex intersection of gender with race, class, caste, religion and more are forging new lived experiences (and therefore theoretical positions) on identity and subjectivity. As such it serves as an intervention combining elements of cultural studies, feminist critique and media analysis with methods and analytical frames from the social sciences. The collection centres transnational research in and around the Global South and offers a platform for extending our understandings of post-feminisms beyond existing western frameworks.From this collaborative conversation, one key theme that has emerged is a remixing of the familiar argument of gender as performed and performative, and gender as fluid: with postfeminism being a useful theoretical tool for exploring how gender intersects with neoliberal power and material culture in specific ways. Performed gender relates directly to the intimate, the bodily, to relationships and senses of self, and how these are shaped by tangible practices embedded in everyday life, theorised as "self-fashioning" (Dosekun 2020, Roy 2022). Relating to these insights, a first set of articles examines practices of self-fashioning and claim-making in the context of diasporic communities in the UK, feminist activists in Eastern Europe, and bisexual women in South Africa.Nandita Dutta looks at the aesthetic labour of bikini waxing, as practiced by South Asian women in London. Her ethnography presents the complexities of intimacy and disgust attendant to such personal body practices.Alla Myzelev examines the feminist politics of crafting and handwork, and argues that it can function as "a language of political and social struggle" in Ukraine and Belarus. Through "craftivism", women are able to articulate both a feminist and nationalist politics.Zuziwe Khuzwayo writes about the politics of coming out for bisexual women. Divergent views on the necessity and personal value of coming our shows that some realms of sexuality remain in opaque and difficult-to-theorise realms of intimacy.In a second set of articles, authors analyse how postfeminist formations shape practices, subjectivities and intimacies in the Global South, especially in the context of longstanding intersectional patterns of exclusion (including class, race, and caste) and in light of the neoliberal emphasis on inclusion through consumerism (Lazar 2009). It is apt that the collection emphasizes the agentic subject-as an object of analysis alongside, and not separated from, the more structural dimensions of discourse, representation, transnational media culture and neoliberal governmentality (Tasker and Negra, 2007). Postfeminist sensibilities emerge through the politics of intimacy and gender-making in the everyday and prosaic moments of lived experience. The articles are invested in examining various cultural forms and media products, from music to social media and TV shows, by which postfeminist sensibilities and gendered imaginaries are mediated and circulated to broad publics.Simphiwe Rens analyses popular Afrobeats music videos to parse the heteronormative dynamics of masculine and feminist characters. In the romances visually depicted alongside and in the songs, he argues that an ethic of "misogyrom" is in operation, which undermines the agency of the women characters in the videos.Callan Dunn and Nicky Falkof explore how young women who post self-portraits on social media work to create a sense of authenticity, which operates at both the level of feeling and appearance.Debjyoti Ghosh analyses television shows about Indian matchmaking, and teases out the web of cultural politics regarding nationhood, conservatives, caste and class, while showing how postfeminist values shape the narratives.Priscilla Boshoff and Ntombi Lina Mlangeni examine South African tabloid newspaper writings about older well-off women who have romantic relationships with younger men. The authors show that though the women seem putatively empowered, their agency women should be placed in historical and global context.The third set of articles examines how the current wave of right-wing politics and antifeminist backlash sweeping the world poses critical and specific questions to post-feminist dynamics and imaginings in global south contexts. As scholars have showed elsewhere, the contemporary political climate has invited sexist revivals and reactionary understandings of gender and gender theory (Whelehan 2000, Corredor 2019, Graff and Korolczuk, 2022. The articles in this issue address some of these questions from the point of view of NGO-led programmes and emerging digital cultures in India and Indonesia.Proshant Chakraborty writes about the "interstitial intimacies" that emerge in labour in an NGO's community-based program to prevent violence against women and girls in Mumbai's urban poor neighborhoods.Eni Maryani, Preciosa Alnashava Janitra and Reksa Anggia Ratmita discuss the rise of antifeminist discourse on social media in Indonesia. This is put into context of the religious and political complexities of Indonesian society.Through these ten articles, this research topic collection put the spotlight on transnational thinking about postfeminism, revealed the cracks, complexities and contestations that characterise debates about the economic empowerment of women in contexts of inequality. This collection also gestures towards new directions in the critical analysis of postfeminism, and theory building from the south. It has given full attention to the ways in which postfeminist practices, identities and intimacies intersect with race, ethnicity, indigeneity and caste, including practices of resistance to oppression organised along such lines. Future work must continue to develop fuller understandings of how neoliberal femininities explicitly matter in relation to racial identities and racialized experiences of life. This special issue proposes that, in the global south, postfeminism demands an expansive and inclusive understanding of the feminine to include all femininities, in order to explore what the pre-fix "post" means in relation to this inherent diversity. While the articles have tackled these questions from various perspectives and locations, more work is required to integrate trans-femininities into the work of the study of global south postfeminism, as part of a broader politics of rejecting cis-feminist exceptionalism.

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