ABSTRACT The modern drag scene is facing significant challenges due to negative media coverage and a contentious political climate, threatening its cultural standing. Comprehensive empirically based studies on drag performers, including participants with diverse gender identities, i.e. drag kings, queens, and ‘bio’ or hyper queens, have remained scarce. This qualitative study investigated the impact of participation in drag on shaping resilience, gender identity, and advocacy among cisgender and transgender performers. Using social media and snowball recruitment, we conducted 11 in-depth interviews with drag performers of varied gender identities, ages, and performance experiences. Reflexive thematic analysis through a constructivist lens revealed three major themes: 1) The Big Drag (Queer) Family (i.e. the creation of chosen families), 2) Me and My Drag (i.e. personal journeys and growth), and 3) The Drag Medium is the Message (i.e. the use of drag as a platform for advocacy and social change). Key findings included significant personal development, strengthened resilience, and enhanced self-expression among performers. These findings underscored the significance of drag, highlighting its role in supporting LGBTQ+ identities in public spaces and its capacity to challenge societal norms, inviting reflection on the power of drag to shape and challenge societal norms.

ABSTRACT As a Chinese woman returnee and aspiring academic, this autoethnography examines my job interview experiences in Chinese academia from August 2023 to April 2024. Drawing on Judith Butler’s seminal work, Giving an Account of Oneself (2001), I explore narratives that illuminate the evolving contours of self-perception. These narratives trace my journey of personal growth and emotional shifts, highlighting feelings of marginalization, emotional violence, and the navigation of my vulnerabilities, while resonating with the broader emotional turns in higher education. In this autoethnography, I aim to uncover broader socio-cultural dynamics and delve into the complex reasons behind the vulnerable emotions I faced during the interview process. Inspired by Butler, I advocate for establishing a more ethical academic space for PhD holders amidst the current climate of uncertainty. This work will resonate with those who have completed studies overseas and returned to their home countries, as well as with academics navigating the competitive job market and gendered systems. My analysis of these lived experiences sheds light on the challenges of the competitive PhD job market within Chinese academia, offering valuable insights for women PhD returnees, early-career women academics, and policymakers in Chinese Higher Education Institutions (CHEIs).

ABSTRACT In fall 2019, U.S. House of Representative Steve King (Republican) from Iowa addressed a local group of constituents by discussing his long-held beliefs about abortion, in particular his opposition towards exceptions for rape and incest. ’What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?’ he asked at the event in Urbandale, Iowa. His comments quickly made national headlines and colleagues on both side of the political isle publicly shunned his statement. Upon closer examination, however, King’s comments were not necessarily out of line with a growing far-right movement in the United States that has linked access to reproductive health care, including contraception and abortion, to white population decline. In this analysis, denial of reproductive and gender-based health care, as well as a rise in discourse sanctioning the loss of democratic power constitutes gender-based violence in support of white supremacy. I contend that making these connections provides a critical framework for understanding the centrality of increased reproductive control in the US and around the globe decades to come.

ABSTRACT This article asks how museums can mobilize memories of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) for progressive social ends. My case study is the ‘Violence and Gender’ exhibition, which ran at the Military History Museum of the Army in Dresden, Germany, in 2018. First, I introduce the memorial context, demonstrating the persistence of ‘conservative’ tropes that use memories of women’s suffering to buttress patriarchal and national agendas. Subsequently, I investigate how ‘Violence and Gender’ dislodges these conservative frames, focusing on its inclusion of complex victims and the links drawn between historical conflict and broader cultures of violence. Such contextualization and heterogeneity are key to ‘transformative memory’. I develop this term with reference to a recent scholarship on transitional justice to highlight the need for memory initiatives that broaden societal understandings of the forms and roots of CRSV, contributing both to more inclusive justice and to efforts to combat gendered violence and discrimination in the present. In view of its scope, ‘Violence and Gender’ offers the chance to reflect on the potential and pitfalls of various strategies for challenging visitors to check their assumptions and recognize their implications in global networks of insecurity and violence.

ABSTRACT This exploratory study investigates the intersection of feminism and intellectual disability. Despite the feminist movement’s commitment to inclusivity, women with intellectual disabilities often remain marginalized within feminist discourse and activism. This study aims to understand how women with intellectual disabilities perceive feminism, their identification with feminist movements, and the social issues they prioritize. Drawing on eight interviews with women in Alberta and Ontario, Canada, we identified four primary themes: varying degrees of familiarity with feminism, the feeling of being left behind by mainstream feminism, the importance of feminism for personal autonomy and rights, and the association of feminism with being an independent woman. Participants’ experiences highlighted a need for greater inclusion and understanding within feminist activism and scholarship, as many felt overlooked and unrecognized by the movement. Findings emphasize the critical role of self-advocacy among women with intellectual disabilities to influence change. The study calls for a more inclusive feminist ethos and practice that actively incorporates and advocates for the rights and needs of all women. By foregrounding the knowledge and experiences of women with intellectual disabilities, the research contributes to a redefined understanding of feminism that works to dismantle ableist barriers and advocates for diversity and equality.

ABSTRACT This commentary proposes an approach to reflexivity in positionality in critical algorithms research that situates our ‘fieldwork’ at the intersection of the different sites where algorithmic practices materialize. Drawing from feminist epistemologies and transgender sensibilities, I suggest foregrounding researchers’ embodiment and vulnerability as a way to access and represent vulnerabilities, contradictions, textures and frictions present in the ‘field’, which algorithmic logic itself tends to erase. For that, I describe a speculative pre-fieldwork exercise based on my own position as migrant, transgender researcher, studying platform labour and preparing to start fieldwork in a potential hostile environment. Transgender and other border-dwelling identities are particularly attuned to the very fluid and contextual nature of our positionality and the co-constitutive aspect of our encounters with research participants and the social-political-affective economies in which our research unfolds. I argue that we approach the anticipation work around fieldwork anxiety, unpredictability and vulnerability generatively, and incorporate them as tactics for a more nuance and grounded approach to the study of algorithms as situated practice.

ABSTRACT In October 2017, in parallel to the viralization of the #MeToo hashtag, feminist movements in Peru flooded social media using another hashtag to confront rape culture. #PerúPaísDeVioladores – #PeruCountryOfRapists, in English – worked as a cry of outrage after a third case of sexual violence broke the news in the same month. This case study explores the role of the hashtag #PerúPaísDeVioladores in challenging hegemonic discourses on sexual violence and articulating asynchronous and multisited actions. By analysing Twitter posts and reviewing news and opinion columns associated with this social media campaign in three key moments in 2017 and 2020, I contend that the hashtag establishes an alternative interpretive framework that not only makes legible a range of cases as expressions of rape culture but also confronts dominant narratives that re-victimize survivors and conceal the systemic roots of sexual violence. Acting as a means of (dis)organization and overflowing of information, this hashtag creates a constellation in which digital content, in situ performances, and civil mobilizations integrate to denounce systemic violence against feminized bodies in Peru.

ABSTRACT In this moment of acute epistemic violence against the notion of transgender being, opaque and shifting solidarities are afoot in the anglophone Shi’i community. Sayed Ammar Nakshawani, a cosmetically-enhanced religious lecturer and social media bombshell, has articulated a position against discursive violence perpetrated against transpersons through the sectarian religious doctrine of tabarra (dissociation), while many prominent anglophone Sunni leaders have joined the anti-trans panic. Nakshawani has instead focused on promoting the nikah mutʿah (‘temporary marriage’) as a spiritually pious sexual practice, and when asked about desires for and of transfemmes, affirms their permissibility. This essay engages recent digital media productions featuring Sayed Ammar Nakshawani, and reads his aesthetic performance as theophanic sexual pedagogy. All of the videos discussed are publicly available on YouTube. The message received by the viewer of these videos is as follows: under the right circumstances, sex with trans girls is halal. As the Western majoritarian narratives sharpen their knives to excise the spiritual and social legitimacy of transfemmes, Nakshawani makes space – however imperfect – for transgender desires, through embracing the mutability of gender, the ambiguities of biological sex, and the spiritual reward of pleasure.