Abstract Domnica Rădulescu’s (1961-) memoir, Dream in a Suitcase, is about her journey from communist Romania to the United States. Without bothering much about ‘political correctness,’ Rădulescu offers her readers an intimate account of her life that is filled with gendered and epistemic dimensions of displacement. By critically engaging with the memoir, we intend to discuss how Rădulescu navigates and negotiates the oppressive patriarchal structures of her homeland, i.e. Romania, and the host land, i.e. the United States, that subjugate women through cultural exoticization, economic precarity, and academic exclusion. The essay is divided into several subsections. The first section uses Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice to analyse how Rădulescu resists both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. By taking a feminist approach, the second section situates migration with other interconnected issues such as gendered labour, precarious citizenship and the racialised migration dynamic to show how patriarchal oppression cuts across national boundaries. Lastly, the third section explores Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as an analytical framework to examine how the memoir itself can be seen as a subversive counter-space that counters hegemonic power structures, dismantles many stereotypes regarding Eastern European women, and recuperates migrant female agency in translational contexts.

Debangana Chatterjee's 2024 study Lives of Circumcised and Veiled Women, offers a nuanced analysis of the female body as a contested site where various political ideologies, cultural practices, and discourses of freedom and oppression converge.Focusing on practices such as female circumcision (FC) and female genital cutting (FGC), as well as on the problematic custom of "veiling" as a common practice in Islam, this volume examines their impact on the construction of gendered identities and their representation and self-representation across various media.It also investigates how the female body is disciplined and fully controlled through such institutions as law, education, and medicine.By drawing comparative insights from both Eastern and Western frameworks of representation and cultural practices, Chatterjee argues that the female body remains an inescapable site of political negotiation.

Abstract The displacement of Ukrainian women scientists due to the war has created a liminal state of multilocal entanglements, where they sustain emotional and professional ties to Ukraine while navigating the precarious realities of host countries. Despite contributing to Ukraine’s resistance through science diplomacy and advocacy, they face existential dilemmas around return, employment, and family care. EU-based temporary protection and funding schemes offer Ukrainian (women) scholars short-term relief but rarely lead to long-term institutional embeddedness. Instead, these scholars are caught in an intersectional trap, where gender, nationality, and non-hegemonic academic backgrounds hinder access to long-term or tenure-track positions. Based on interviews, autoethnography, and participatory observations in Germany and Italy as contrasting examples, in our study, we explore three coping strategies: engaging with and managing multiple transnational workload shifts, prioritizing professional self-actualization, and exercising a political voice for civic engagement internationally. The findings highlight the need for institutional responses that recognize the structural hierarchies shaped by epistemic injustice and the (in)visible burden of sustaining professional identities across intersecting axes of inequality.

Abstract The Barbie movie swept across the world and became the highest grossing movie of 2023, but it is also considered a controversial film, as the public and academic discourses around it show. Can Barbie be feminist? Is Barbie feminist enough? The expectations levied against the movie come from outside of it, reflecting on Barbie’s history from 1959 until today. Barbie embodies patriarchal views of women but she also showcases the way women entered the workforce, became less reliant on men, and more independent within society. While many critics blame Barbie for unrealistic body standards and capitalist overconsumption, I argue that the doll’s evolution also reflects the way women’s roles changed over the last sixty years. The aim of this paper is to analyze the way Barbie grapples with questions of beauty and femininity in 2023, with a sixty-year-old past of constantly changing definitions of what it means to be a woman.