Laura Bates:Men Who Hate Women – From Incels to Pickup Artists, The Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us AllSimon & Schuster, London, pages 360, Price: 199,95 DDK at SAXO
Editorial note:In our interview with Anne Fausto-Sterling and Julie Nelson, "The Gendering of Objectivity and Resistance to Feminist Knowledge", we would like to correct an error on Anne Fausto-Sterling's request. In the discussion about Hubert Humphrey, it was not he who spoke about women leaders, but his physician – the white House doctor.
Doing feminist work from within patriarchal institutions comes with unique challenges. We invited two activists and feminist studies professors, Rosi Braidotti and Nina Lykke, to reflect on feminists' long march through patriarchal university institutions. Concretely, we asked them to reflect upon three themes. Firstly, we asked them to situate themselves and their work – and reflect upon what it takes to do feminist work which troubles mainstream epistemologies. Secondly, we asked them to explore how the conditions for feminist research have changed over time – and what the current neoliberal and right-wing backlash does to feminist research. And finally, we asked how coming of age might have influenced them, and how they looked upon intergenerational exchanges in the feminist movement. The aim of the dialogue was to look back at how the feminist studies movement in academia emerged, while at the same time looking forward to explore which new political and ideological conditions have arisen and how these might affect future possibilities for conducting feminist research within academia.
In: Skewes , L & Adrian , S W 2021 , ' The Long March Through the Patriarchal Institutions : A Dialogue Between Rosi Braidotti and Nina Lykke ' , Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics , vol. 5 , no. 2 , 20 . https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/11156
Doing feminist work from within patriarchal institutions comes with unique challenges. We invited two activists and feminist studies professors, Rosi Braidotti and Nina Lykke, to reflect on feminists' long march through patriarchal university institutions. Concretely, we asked them to reflect upon three themes. Firstly, we asked them to situate themselves and their work – and reflect upon what it takes to do feminist work which troubles mainstream epistemologies. Secondly, we asked them to explore how the conditions for feminist research have changed over time – and what the current neoliberal and right-wing backlash does to feminist research. And finally, we asked how coming of age might have influenced them, and how they looked upon intergenerational exchanges in the feminist movement. The aim of the dialogue was to look back at how the feminist studies movement in academia emerged, while at the same time looking forward to explore which new political and ideological conditions have arisen and how these might affect future possibilities for conducting feminist research within academia.
In: Skewes , L & Adrian , S W 2021 , ' The Long March Through the Patriarchal Institutions : A Dialogue Between Rosi Braidotti and Nina Lykke ' , Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics , vol. 5 , no. 2 , pp. 1-12 . https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/11156
Doing feminist work from within patriarchal institutions comes with unique challenges. We invited two activists and feminist studies professors, Rosi Braidotti and Nina Lykke, to reflect on feminists' long march through patriarchal university institutions. Concretely, we asked them to reflect upon three themes. Firstly, we asked them to situate themselves and their work - and reflect upon what it takes to do feminist work which troubles mainstream epistemologies. Secondly, we asked them to explore how the conditions for feminist research have changed over time - and what the current neoliberal and right-wing backlash does to feminist research. And finally, we asked how coming of age might influence them, and how they looked upon intergenerational exchanges in the feminist movement. The aim of the dialogue was to look back at how the feminist studies movement in academia emerged, while at the same time looking forward to explore which new political and ideological conditions have arisen and how these might affect future possibilities for conducting feminist research within academia.
Nina Lykke is Professor Emerita at the Unit of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden.She has been an engaged feminist researcher, educator, and activist since the 1970s, duringwhich time she has developed important critiques of epistemologies in science and technology.She has covered topics as diverse as the space race, reproductive technologies, cancer, and death.Lykke has published widely in both Scandinavia and internationally within the field of feministcultural studies of technoscience. Her most well-known publications within the area include themonographies Cosmodolphins (2000) co-authored with Mette Bryld, and Kønsforskning (2008)(in Engl: Feminist Studies (2010)), as well as the edited volumes Between Monsters, Goddessesand Cyborgs (1996) co-edited with Rosi Braidotti, Bits of Life (2008) with Anneke Smelik, andAssisted Reproduction Across Borders (2017) with Merete Lie. She has been pivotal in establishingthe Unit of Gender Studies at Linköping University, with which she has been affiliated sincethe unit's inauguration in 1999. She has played a major role in the development of the PhDprogramme in interdisciplinary gender studies at Linköping University, which has a strong profilewithin feminist STS. In 2007, she started the Center of Gender Excellence GEXcel, initiallyfunded by The Swedish Research Council, Vetenskapsrådet, and later by the participating Universities,Linköping University, Örebro University, and Karlstad University, Sweden. She has alsobeen the director of the Nordic Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 2004-2009,and from 2008-2017 she was the director of InterGender, the Swedish-International ResearchSchool in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. We met with Nina Lykke in Copenhagen, in orderto let her unfold how her own interest in Feminist STS/Feminist Technoscience Studiesemerged, and how she has put feminist cultural studies of technoscience to work from the1980's until today, through research, teaching, and activism.
In: Skewes , L , Fine , C & Haslam , N 2018 , ' Beyond Mars and Venus : The Role of Gender Essentialism in Support for Gender Inequality and Backlash ' , PLOS ONE , vol. 13 , no. 7 , e0200921 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200921
It has been argued that gender essentialism impedes progress towards greater gender equality. Here we present a new gender essentialism scale (GES), and validate it in two large nationally representative samples from Denmark and Australia. In both samples the GES was highly reliable and predicted lack of support for sex-role egalitarianism and support for gender discrimination, as well as perceived fairness of gender-based treatment in the Australian sample, independently of two established predictors (i.e., social dominance orientation and conservative political orientation). In addition, gender essentialism assessed by the GES moderated some manifestations of the backlash effect: high essentialists were more likely to respond negatively towards a power-seeking female political candidate relative to a male candidate. Given the implications for possible workplace interventions, further work could usefully explore whether gender essentialism moderates other well-established forms of gender bias.
In: Adrian , S W , Skewes , L & Schwennesen , N 2018 , ' Introduction to Feminist STS at Work : Challenging Dichotomies and Privileges ' , Kvinde, Køn og Forskning , no. 1 , pp. 3-13 . https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v27i1.106340
What critical questions and potential worlds are emerging out of feminist STS today? What political agendas do we challenge when we draw attention to processes of inclusion and exclusion within the sciences, and what political work needs to be done and undone through sciences and technologies? These are the questions that have inspired us to propose and edit this special issue of Women, Gender & Research entitled Feminist STS at Work
We designed this study to measure the degree of backlash a specific Danish university would encounter in response to gender equity interventions. To capture this resistance we used two standardized questionnaires: the Modern Sexism Scale, which measures explicit denial of gender discrimination and resentment towards gender equity demands (such as gender interventions) andthe Support for Discriminatory Practices which measures peoples explicit preferences for hiring men over women. We also asked an open question about attitudes towards the university's current gender policies. The questionnaire was sent to 15,493 employees. With one prompt 1,805 completed the entire questionnaire. We found that university employees scored above the midpoint on modern sexism, indicating that, on average, they held sexist attitudes. We further showed that modern sexism scores varied depending on beliefs about what was being done forgender equity in the organization, such that those who thought that enough or too much was being done had significantly higher sexism scores than those who thought that not enough wasbeing done. Over all, our findings document explicit sexist attitudes within the target university and suggest that gender equity interventions are therefore likely to be met by great resistancefrom some.