Plurality is a student-led journal based at the University of Edinburgh, started in 2023 we aim to create an inclusive and thought-provoking space to encourage both new and experienced writers to publish their research. The publication specializes in analyzing disciplines through an intersectional lens and publishes pieces which question how the intersectional experiences of gender can impact our knowledge and experience of the world.
"Closure to Nature" Colonial Anthropology and Sexualisation of Indeginous Women
This article examines the construction of the figure of the Indigenous woman in the colonial contexts of the nineteenth century, showing that it does not come from an empirical observation, but from a discursive and complex material device at the crossroads of anthropology, iconography, biopolitics and imperial spatialisation. I argue that the representation of the colonised woman as "closer to nature" — hypersexual and primitive — constitutes a central operator of colonial naturalism, making it possible to transform historical relations of domination into supposedly objective biological truths. First, the article analyses the emergence of physical anthropology and racial taxonomies, which replace religious hierarchies with a scientific classification of bodies, anchoring inferiority in biology. The sexuality of racialised women is constructed there as instinctive and excessive, serving as proof of their alleged civilisational backwardness. The second part examines the iconographic production of this knowledge, showing how figures such as that of Sara Baartman crystallize a racial and sexual otherness, transforming the black body into a pathological sign and an object of knowledge. This process of iconisation erases the historicity of the subjects in favour of a fixation in archetypes. The article then demonstrates that this construction is a true imperial technology. By pathologising the sexuality of colonised women, colonial knowledge organises surveillance, segregation and reproductive control devices, while stabilising the standards of respectability within European societies. Finally, the analysis of the colonial space as a sexual theatre highlights the interweaving of body and territory, where the feminisation of space and the territorialisation of the body participate in the same logic of domination. By articulating these different levels, this article shows that the hypersexualisation of colonised women is not a marginal effect, but a structuring mechanism of the colonial order, at the crossroads of gender, race and empire.
Copyright (c) 2026 Tara Laize https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This essay examines how whiteness operates as a constructed and materialised orientation that legitimises racial capitalism and settler colonialism through practices of erasure. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of whiteness and Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” it argues that racial domination is sustained not only through spectacular acts of force but through attritional, mundane infrastructures that naturalise exclusion across time and space. Through an ethnographically staged encounter with three objects - a Kodak “Shirley Card,” a Jewish National Fund (JNF) collection box, and a media excerpt framing Israel as an environmental “startup nation” - the essay traces a shared logic of racialisation that renders Black, brown, and Indigenous bodies and landscapes as absent, deficient, or in need of redemption. Across these objects, the essay argues that erasure is not accidental but systemic: a racialised ordering of visibility and belonging that privileges certain bodies while rendering others out of place. Yet it concludes by attending to embodied acts of remembrance and resistance, suggesting that while slow violence is enduring, it is not absolute.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marlene Ito https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This article investigates the South Korean 4B movement as a form of institutional feminist refusal that challenges Korea’s patriarchal system. By exploring the history of South Korean women through Confucianism, Japanese colonialism and the 1997 IMF crisis, we can see the origins of South Korean gender inequality. This article then uses John Stuart Mill’s theory of institutionalised subjection to expose how female expectations are socially constructed rather than freely chosen. Next, the article analyses the 4B movement and its future impact locally and globally. Ultimately, the essay concludes that 4B is powerful but a context-specific form of resistance.
Copyright (c) 2026 Mia Hutchins https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Fragmentation and Igbo Cosmology in Akwaeke Emzi's novel Freshwater
Akwaeke Emezi's novel Freshwater chronicles the crises of identity faced by Ada, as she is possessed by Igbo spirits, the ogbanje. After growing up in Nigeria, she leaves for America for university, wherein she further feels the rifts between Igbo and Western epistemologies. Emezi renders the manner in which the ogbanje possesses her as biological, her very existence is an iteration of Igbo cosmologies and its deities. Though Ada initially equates the fragmented identities that reside within her 'broken', as perpetuated by colonial frameworks, its upon her return to Nigeria she discovers her own 'place in this world' (Emezi 219), Through an analysis of liminality, imagery, and narrative technique, I argue that embracing the fragmentation of the self offers a more complex, nuanced conception of wholeness, grounded in the 'twoness' and fluidity of Igbo ontological structures.
Copyright (c) 2026 Saanvi Sinha Sinha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
‘How does the Conflation of Morality with Legality Hinder Marginalised Communities’ Bodily Autonomy?’ An American Analysis.
This essay explores how morality, particularly that of religious morality, interacts with both U.S. legislatures and judiciary to inform socially significant legal decisions upon marginalised communities' bodily autonomy. These legal decisions relate primarily to that of women’s reproduction rights, transgender individuals' access to healthcare and state intrusion upon non-normative sexual practices within queer communities, introducing a comparative evaluation within the UK’s legal system. Morality, when interpreted literally, is understood to be “a set of personal or social standards for good or bad behaviour and character.”1 Meanwhile, bodily autonomy can be understood as one’s right of “self-governance” over the body, free from external influence.2 Thus, when a concept as inherently subjective and variable as morality- shaped by individual beliefs or ever-evolving societal standards- is imposed upon the more concrete and tangible right of bodily autonomy, conflict becomes almost inevitable. Further, it is often those already marginalised, whose autonomy challenges prevailing moral norms, who face the greatest threats under morally driven legal decisions.
Copyright (c) 2026 Beth Hutchinson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Feminist Legal Coalitions and Reproductive Rights: Intersectional Resistance in Contemporary Legal Battles
This paper aims to examine the evolution and efficacy of feminist legal coalitions within reproductive rights advocacy through an intersectional lens. Drawing on critical legal theory and reproductive justice frameworks, it analyses how contemporary coalitions navigate the complexities of inclusive representation while mounting legal challenges to restrictive legislation. By examining case studies of successful intersectional advocacy groups, the research demonstrates how coalition-building strategies that centre marginalised voices strengthen both legal intervention and community mobilisation efforts. The analysis particularly focuses on how these coalitions interrupt oppressive legal frameworks whilst building sustainable, intersectional movements for reproductive justice.
Copyright (c) 2026 Grace Law Woodhouse https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Forging Resistance: Women Welders, Workplace Coalitions, and Disruptions in Wartime Britain
This article examines Yorkshire women welders' lived experiences during the Second World War through their correspondence with former mentor Valentine Pearson, preserved in the Mass Observation Archive. Analysing letters from women at David Brown's (Penistone) and Hopkinsons (Huddersfield), this study demonstrates how working-class women actively constructed professional identities whilst navigating male-dominated industrial spaces. Employing the framework of coalition and interruption, the article reveals how these women forged tactical alliances to challenge structural workplace barriers and disrupted entrenched gender hierarchies. Moving beyond historiographical debates framing women's wartime employment through liberation-versus-constraint binaries, this study positions welders as active agents exercising agency through collective resistance and individual defiance. The welders established informal coalitions contesting wage discrimination and workplace marginalisation, engaging in sustained negotiations with management whilst creating support networks against male hostility. They challenged gendered assumptions about technical competence by asserting professional skills and demanding recognition as 'fully skilled' workers. The correspondence reveals complex gender identity negotiations, exposing how women subverted feminine stereotypes through masculine-coded qualities—assertiveness and technical expertise—whilst navigating expectations of appropriate feminine behaviour. The article seeks to move beyond traditional historiographical debates, which frame women's wartime employment through a binary lens of liberation versus constraint. Instead, it positions these women as active agents who exercised agency within existing power structures through both collective resistance and individual acts of defiance. These findings contribute to feminist labour histories by illuminating everyday acts of solidarity and resistance that operated below the purview of official narratives, demonstrating the significance of informal networks and tactical agency in the wartime experiences of working-class women.
Copyright (c) 2026 Júlia Norman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Knowledge is Power: Secret Schooling as Feminist Resistance in Afghanistan
This piece examines the role of secret schools in Afghanistan in feminist resistance against gender apartheid, concluding that their functions are not just educational, but political too. In it, I argue that their use in the first and second Taliban occupations has had three major impacts - establishing mutual aid and community, providing an alternative to masculinised conceptions of resistance, and challenging narratives that cast Muslim women as victims. First, I outline extreme legal and institutional efforts to repress Afghan women’s voices, control their movements and remove their agency, culminating in a state of ‘gender apartheid’. Next, I investigate the characteristics and core functions of secret schools, situating them as coalitions vital to both education and political mobilisation. Finally, I analyse secret schooling through three lenses. The first evaluates secret schools as sites of community and mutual aid, given they build networks, deliver education, and foster political action. The second positions secret schooling as a direct challenge to masculinised conceptions of resistance involving violence and militarisation, given its community and care-based nature. The third, and final, lens presents secret schooling as an antidote to the pervasive narrative that Muslim women are victims in need of saving, as they showcase the agency and activism of Afghan women. This piece concludes that secret schools play a vital role in counteracting the Taliban’s gender apartheid by ensuring they are not silenced, and preventing the government from achieving full control over their lives. Their effects extend beyond Afghanistan’s borders, though, in helping us to reimagine ‘resistance’ beyond violent, masculinised images, and reframing Muslim women as actors with agency and strength.
Copyright (c) 2026 Rachel Barlow https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Spatial Politics and Locality in Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God sees its protagonist Janie Crawford navigate the stormy American South through three marriages and an all-powerful hurricane in a transformative and volatile journey of self-realization. In the novel, Hurston uses the spaces Janie encounters to both construct and contest power structures, interrogating the validity and reproduction of the oppressive social hierarchies that govern her autonomy. This essay seeks to analyze Hurston’s use of three primary spaces— sorted into the geographical, liminal, and corporeal—as a means of understanding and dissecting intersecting forms of authority. The geographical, explored through the town of Eatonville, is used to visualize class relations and the mechanisms of power. The liminal is represented by porches—key sites of performance and play in which social dynamics are both challenged and maintained—through which Hurston contends with the performativity of power and gendered roles of speaker and subject. Finally, the corporeal sees the body as an active entity through which Hurston explores how violence—both physical and sexual—reinforces ideas of identity and perpetuates subjugation, as well as how autonomy is physically embodied. Crucially, this essay explores how Hurston’s use of space is dynamic, meaning the spaces in the novel are not static, fixed entities, but transformative sites in which the rigid structures and hierarchies governing Janie’s self-expression can be not only destabilized, but dismantled.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jada Horan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
A Beauty Coalition? - Deconstructing Marinella’s Essentialist Beauty
This essay argues that, despite her commendable attempt of subversion, Lucrezia Marinella’s thesis that “women possess superior spirituality owing to their higher physical perfection,” while “men who are moderate creatures can raise themselves to the knowledge and contemplation of the divine essence,” ultimately perpetuates a dependency on patriarchal definitions of identity and virtue that cannot be reclaimed as empowering. It becomes critical to make it clear early on that this paper does not assess her project in terms of historical intent or feminist success. Rather, it interrogates the aesthetic logic she mobilises and the structural limits of subversion grounded in visual and bodily hierarchies. To this end, the paper first outlines Marinella’s argumentative strategy, identifying its internal tensions and contradictions, and examines the aesthetic trap of beauty as empowerment and the theoretical implications of failed subversion.
Copyright (c) 2026 Roopsha Deshmukh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Thinking Beyond (More-than-human) Intersectionalities
Outlined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw as an alternative to divisive identity politics, intersectionality theory acknowledges that different social identities overlap to shape individuals’ experiences under systems of oppression. Building on Maneesha Deckha’s proposal for a more-than-human intersectionality, this essay examines the limitations of intersectionality theory as a framework for radical social change. Deckha asserts that an effective intersectional politic must consider multispecies and environmental rights; while her argument makes important connections between speciesism, racism, and sexism, it reveals that intersectionality theory is ultimately a politic of recognition. Because it relies so heavily on sanctioned identity categories, it can only be useful for political advocacy within present social institutions and structures – it cannot push for a reevaluation of those same identities. Thus, I turn to Donna Haraway’s notion of situated knowledges to suggest an addendum to intersectional frameworks. Rather than relying on preconstructed identities of race, class, gender, or even species to form relationships and solidarity, we can return to the theoretical body – positioned in networks of care and community – in order to imagine a society outside of existing hierarchies. As intersectionality theory guides us towards material change and reform, (re)grounding ourselves in the theoretical body may lead us towards a world liberated from repressive identities.
Copyright (c) 2026 Aileen Kuang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The emergence of the history of emotions as an academic field in the late twentieth century coincided with the rise of postcolonial and orientalist critique in historiography. Although rarely in explicit dialogue, these intellectual traditions share a similar critical engagement with universalist explanations of human experience and the naturalisation of feeling. This essay examines how postcolonial and orientalist critique reshaped both the methodologies and conclusions of the history of emotions by challenging claims about the biological universality of emotions and the teleological narratives around them. Early work in the history of emotions often assumed the universality of emotional experience and situated emotional development within a civilising teleology, equating emotional restraint with Western modernity. Postcolonial and orientalist critiques, notably by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, exposed the epistemological violence inherent in such universalising frameworks and revealed how they naturalise power hierarchies. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentrism further emphasised the need to treat Europe as one case among many rather than a universal model. Drawing on these insights and poststructuralist theories of discourse and power, historians of emotions developed analytical paradigms that reconceived emotions as socially constructed, historically situated, and deeply implicated in power relations, challenging assumptions of both universality and linear teleology. This shift enabled new questions about how emotions circulate, stick to bodies and objects, and serve as technologies of governance and resistance. By systematically engaging sources beyond purely textual analysis and embracing multi‑modal archives historians of emotions have responded to critiques about the limits of linguistic and postcolonial methodology. Joanna Bourke’s work on pain, for example, demonstrates the value of combining textual, testimonial, and embodied evidence to capture the historically contingent and socially mediated nature of feeling. In doing so, the field has opened space to interrogate the embodied and somatic dimensions of emotion and to access the emotional lives of marginalised and subaltern groups in ways that extend and at times transcend postcolonial frameworks. Ultimately, this essay argues that the history of emotions owes its initial conceptual and methodological toolkit to postcolonial theory, but that its subsequent evolution—marked by interdisciplinary innovation and pluralistic source engagement—points beyond those origins to a more dynamic field that both honours and critiques its intellectual debts.
Copyright (c) 2026 Isabelle Davies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This essay argues that contemporary Western narratives framing non-cisgendered and racialised bodies as "unnatural" are deeply rooted in the enduring legacy of colonial ideology, which privileges a white, European, cisgender norm. In response, it positions pre-modern trans historiography as a critical intervention that challenges and destabilises these narratives by demonstrating the historical presence and cultural legitimacy of diverse gender expressions across time and place. Ultimately, the essay contends that pre-modern trans historiography not only recovers marginalised identities but also actively reclaims the "othered" body as natural, complex, and historically grounded. In doing so, it challenges the authority of contemporary exclusionary discourses and contributes to a broader reimagining of gender beyond colonial binaries.
Copyright (c) 2026 Emma Stinchon https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This essay examines how Posthumanist theories of subjectivity are challenged and reconfigured through Cassils’ Becoming an Image (2012–ongoing). It begins with the observation that contemporary digital cultures increasingly frame the human subject as an informational pattern rather than an embodied agent, where visibility is assumed to be continuous, transparent, and reproducible. Against this assumption, the essay argues that Cassils’ performance introduces a condition of intermittent visibility that disrupts the link between seeing and knowing. Through close analysis of the work’s structure — performed in darkness and revealed only through photographic flashes — the essay demonstrates that visibility is neither stable nor guaranteed but produced through sustained physical effort. Each image emerges from labour, exhaustion, and material resistance, making embodiment inseparable from the conditions of its appearance. In this way, the performance reveals the energetic and temporal cost of becoming visible, challenging the notion of frictionless digital representation. The theoretical framework draws on the works of N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway to articulate two distinct yet complementary approaches within posthumanist thought. Hayles exposes the risks of reducing subjectivity to disembodied information, emphasising that such abstraction obscures the uneven distribution of vulnerability across bodies. Haraway, in turn, proposes the cyborg as a model for understanding embodiment as relational, hybrid, and politically situated within technological systems. Read together, these perspectives shift the focus from whether bodies persist to how they are mediated, regulated, and made legible. The essay further situates Cassils’ work within the politics of archival visibility, showing how systems of documentation produce the conditions under which bodies become knowable. By separating reproducible photographic images from fleeting embodied perception, Becoming an Image exposes the limits of visual evidence and resists demands for stable legibility. Ultimately, the essay argues that posthumanist frameworks reveal embodiment not as a stable given but as a contested process shaped by power, mediation, and material vulnerability. Cassils’ practice demonstrates that visibility is always grounded in labour and risk, insisting on the continued political significance of embodied life.
Copyright (c) 2026 Zhuyuyue Gao https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This essay argues that enclosure was not a natural or inevitable stage of economic development, but a revolutionary reimagination of landscape that transformed land from a shared ecological resource into exclusive property. In pre-enclosure England, common rights structured collective relationships to land through practices of shared use, which were later delegitimized as inefficient or uncivilized. Through both ideological justifications and material technologies, enclosure redefined what counted as ‘natural,’ recasting communal practices as disorderly while elevating privatized, controlled landscapes as markers of progress. Extending this analysis to the American West, the essay demonstrates how barbed wire and Lockean property theory facilitated the violent exclusion of Indigenous peoples and the imposition of colonial spatial orders. Engaging with Marxist, revisionist, and environmental historiography, it challenges narratives that portray enclosure as agricultural improvement, instead emphasizing how discourses such as the ‘tragedy of the commons’ stigmatized communal land use and legitimized dispossession. Ultimately, enclosure is understood as a process that combined coercion and ideology to naturalize inequality, erase alternative ecological knowledge, and enforce new regimes of access, producing long-term social and environmental consequences.
Copyright (c) 2026 Conger Wang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Frances Ha, Denaturalisation, and Queering the Bildungsroman
This essay examines how Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha denaturalises and queers the literary coming-of-age genre by rejecting chrononormative models of adulthood in favour of non-linear, affective, and relational modes of living. Utilising queer theory – particularly Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of chrononormativity and Jack Halberstam’s continuation of queer time – the essay argues that Frances Ha subverts the conventions of the Bildungsroman, a genre historically invested in linear progression, heterosexual coupling, and economic productivity as markers of maturity. To come to this conclusion, this essay conducts an interrelated close reading of the film’s narrative, cinematography, and choreography. Together, they evidence that meaning is not defined by chrononormativity, but rather can emerge through typically underrepresented bonds, improvisation, and temporal moments of joy. The film ultimately reimagines the natural not as a fixed destination governed by institutional milestones, but as an ongoing, improvisational process shaped by intimacy, affect, and alternative temporalities.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ellie Sutherland https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
There’s no place like home: How Women took part in the colonisation and settlement of theAmerican Frontier.
Women played a vital role in creating frontier communities through taking on roles necessary for a town to survive as well as being heavily involved in the suppression of the Native American population which ultimately led to the colonisation of Western land.
Copyright (c) 2026 Molly Ebdy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Home is where the hair is: an exploration of androgyny, self-identity andgender display
Self-identity and womanhood (feeling ‘at-home’ in your body) are strongly related to appearance and external perception whether we like it or not, an issue which is arguably even more tricky to navigate as an androgynous woman of colour facing Western beauty standards.
Copyright (c) 2026 Apsara Shah https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Neo-colonialism in Skala Eressos: Is there a home somewhere for lesbians?
The lesbians who came to Eressos symbolise a particular neocolonialist movement, and their homosexuality has rendered them “excusable” to the broader world but they are not to be detached from the European desire for the hegemony of their culture, and the questioning and alteration of both original pilgrimages to Lesbos and modern tourism fall into the scope of de-colonial studies.
Copyright (c) 2026 Rita Merle Destremau https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Racial Borders: The policing of identities in everyday spaces
Knowing borders as ‘racial’ refers to the manner in which language of difference, conceived in the creation of the ideology of race, is now applied through tightening and restricting migrants and migration across national boundaries. This piece will introduce the concept of racial borders through the definitions posed by Mezzandra &amp; Neilson, and E. Tendayi Achiume, and then contextualise the vitality of deconstructing racial borders through an examination of how racial bordering works in everyday spaces of community within the UK.
Copyright (c) 2026 Annwen Thurlow https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Beyond Sexuality: A Queer Reading of the Plays ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’.
Although Delaney and Shaw do not explicitly confirm the existence of queer characters within their plays, A Taste of Honey and Mrs Warren’s Profession, this essay will argue they can nevertheless be read as ‘queer’ plays, using See’s assertion that it is possible to read plays as ‘queer’ regardless of whether they include a definitively queer character, if they ‘cleave, fracture, and re-mold conventional identity models’ (33). This essay will posit that A Taste of Honey and Mrs Warren’s Profession can therefore be read as ‘queer’ in their depiction of non-conventional, non-nuclear family units, their non-conventional female protagonists (Jo in A Taste of Honey and Vivie Warren in Mrs Warren’s Profession), and in each woman’s non-conventional relationship with her mother.
Copyright (c) 2026 Violet Blackburn https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Books and the Home: Literary Taste as an Expression of Female Identity.
The personal, often contradictory responses to MO directives reveal how women navigated the relationship between reading, identity, and social expectations, particularly in their engagement with genre fiction such as Mills & Boon. With additional time, it may be illuminating to extend a similar methodology into a study on reading habits in the twenty-first century, focusing in particular on the influence of social media on the position of romance novels within the literary hierarchy. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates that MO material, by preserving the idiosyncrasies of personal experience, illustrates the different ways in which women asserted personal autonomy through their choice and organisation of literature.
Copyright (c) 2026 Cerys Jones https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Halfway Home: The Fractured Family in Queer Chinese Media
The structure and dynamic of a traditional Chinese family is incongruent with the normative coming-out trajectory of Western perception, due to the complex influence of Confucian values, collectivist ideals and historical implications of filial responsibilities. Queer Chinese individuals still retain and desires to maintain familial harmony (和諧; hexie), while tactics such as reticence (含蓄; hanxu) and tolerance (寬容; kuanrong) as confrontational tools to abate queerness create fraught tension within the familial dynamic. This is explored through the analysis of two queer Chinese films, The Wedding Banquet (1994) and Saving Face (2004). An innovated imagining of familial acceptance and the possibility of a dynamic restructuring of the traditional Chinese family is also proposed through analysis of the two films.
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrea Cheng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
There's No Place Like Home: Dorothy's Journey and Domestic Ideology in TheWizard of Oz
"There's no place like home." With these words, Dorothy Gale clicks her heels three times and vanishes from the colorful, magical land of Oz, returning to the gray Kansas prairie where she began. This iconic moment from L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has resonated through generations as a comforting affirmation of home's irreplaceable value. Yet beneath this sentimental surface lies a more troubling narrative: Dorothy's circular journey represents not a heroine's triumphant adventure, but a story of feminine containment that ultimately reinforces early 20th-century domestic ideology. While Oz offers Dorothy agency, power, and significance, Baum's text systematically devalues these experiences, positioning the impoverished Kansas farm as the proper "home" for a young girl. This narrative structure reveals profound anxieties about female autonomy and exposes the mechanisms by which the cult of domesticity was maintained at the turn of the century, even as women increasingly challenged their confinement to the private sphere.
Copyright (c) 2026 Kayla Greer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Reclaiming the Void: Nihilim and Liberation in Convenience Store Woman
This paper explores the interplay between nihilism, liberation, and identity in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman through the philosophical framework of Keiji Nishitani. Keiko Furukura’s life embodies the paradox of existing both within and outside societal norms, revealing a confrontation with the “nihilism of death” that evolves into the “nihilism of life.” Her immersion in the routines of the convenience store becomes a radical means of self-reconstruction—an affirmation of being through repetition and mundanity rather than through transcendence or rebellion. In contrast to feminist figures such as Yosano Akiko and Hiratsuka Raichō, whose visions of liberation centered on creativity and motherhood, Keiko’s path rejects both frameworks, illustrating an alternative mode of authenticity beyond gender and societal expectation. By embracing her role as a “cog” within the capitalist machine, Keiko redefines meaning and freedom as self-determined rather than socially or ideologically prescribed. Ultimately, this essay argues that Keiko’s overcoming of nihilism lies not in escaping the void but in reclaiming it—transforming emptiness into a space of liberation where existence is affirmed on one’s own terms.
Copyright (c) 2026 Almudena Mahou https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Belonging Otherwise: Autistic Mothers and the Feminist Politics of Home
This essay uses a feminist lens to examine how home and belonging are produced, negotiated, and contested in the lived experiences of autistic mothers. Drawing on a synthesis of qualitative, participatory, and autistic-led research, the analysis foregrounds first-person accounts to redress epistemic injustice and decenter clinical and institutional framings. I build a tripartite framework—domestic home, institutional structures, and peer/digital communities—to trace three interrelated dynamics: (1) the ambivalence of the domestic sphere as both refuge and site of exclusion, shaped by spatial constraints, gendered expectations of maternal home-making, and unequal access to material supports; (2) intensified surveillance and governance in institutional contexts, where ableist and gendered norms produce moralizing scrutiny, service withdrawal, and a felt sense of non-belonging; and (3) the emergence of autistic-led peer networks and online forums as subaltern counterpublics that contest professional authority, redefine maternal competence, and co-construct alternative forms of belonging. An intersectional reading highlights how race, class, and socioeconomic disadvantage compound barriers across all arenas. By centering autistic mothers’ knowledge, the essay argues that maternal “success” and home belonging are socially and institutionally produced rather than intrinsic.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sommer Lugert https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Overcoming Inferiority through the Past-Orientalisation and the Present-Occidentalisation
This article examines the erasure of Japan’s premodern homosexual culture, known as nanshoku, through the lens of Orientalism. It argues that the decline of nanshoku through Japan’s westernisation following the Meiji Restoration (1868) entailed a process of "past-Orientalisation" and "present-Occidentalisation." While Edward Said theorised Orientalism as a Western discourse that subjugates the "Orient," this study extends his framework to analyse how Japan internalised Orientalist logic to distanse itself from its own past. By historicising its own sexual past as an "Othered" element belonging to an inferior “Orient” (“past-Orientalisation”), Meiji Japan sought to align itself with the dominant Western cultural and ideological framework ("present-Occidentalisation"). Drawing on the discourse of Orientalism and expanding its application to Japan’s internalisation of Oriental inferiority, this study explores how Japan’s restructuring of its sexual norms was not merely a process of westernising the past norms but a subjective redefinition of its own identity. This article further contends that this pattern persists in contemporary Japanese society, where discourses on gender and sexuality essentialise Western paradigms. By illustrating how Japan’s internalisation of Western ideology contributed to the persistent suppression of its cultural autonomy over sexuality, this article contributes to the discourse on how societies in the non-West have shaped modernity under the enduring legacy of Orientalist frameworks.
Copyright (c) 2025 Yuna Watanabe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Witnessing Erasure: Diasporic Memory and the Algerian Struggle Against French National Amnesia
The concept of diaspora, often entangled within the nation-state's rigid boundaries, presents a crucial yet often overlooked lens to denaturalise ossified narratives associated with the linear progression towards the centralised ‘neutral’ state. In crossing borders and boundaries, the Algerian diaspora in France occupies a liminal space that continuously reimagines, challenges and deterritorialises notions of ethnicity, citizenship and belonging. Pierre Nora’s seminal work ‘Lieux de Mémoire’ provides an important theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between locations, events and symbols as central to the collective memory of the nation. It is notable that he, being a member of the French settler community in Algeria, was deeply entwined with the history of French colonial rule. However, Nora’s works often anchor themselves in a collective memory that has sanitised the traces of empire as if deemed unworthy of remembrance or simply considered marginal. Whilst Nora’s works are central to the field of memory studies, his perspective risks perpetuating a vision of France that obscures the foundational violence of its colonial enterprise and the enduring liminality of its post-colonial subjects. Although post-colonial perspectives have gained traction within and amongst French academic circles, they often challenge key aspects of French national character. The relegation, erasure and essentialization of ‘non-European’ history are not merely semantic, but emblematic of institutionalised reductionism and dismissal. Ideas of progress and modernity are presented as inherent and universalistic. I propose this constitutes a dual process of historical erasure, firstly the erasure and essentialization of ‘non-European’ history and secondly the erasure of the memory of the atrocities committed during French colonial rule. This dynamic ultimately affirms the positional superiority of France through disseminating a worldview that privileges Western epistemologies. This dual process of erasure is particularly pronounced when understanding the experiences of the Algerian diaspora whose presence actively challenges the memories and imaginaries of French colonial rule and modern claim of neutrality. The Algerian diaspora dispels the myth of a static, territorially bound nation-state by merely existing within French borders. The post-memories and mythification of Algeria in the consciousness of second and third-generation Algerians challenge the assimilationist policies of the French state whilst unsettling what ‘home’ means for these communities. Thus, diasporic memories are a form of resistance, recasting the past in a light that illuminates the pluralistic and often contentious nature of identity and belonging.
Copyright (c) 2025 Melissa Kocacinar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Beyond Victimisation: Exploring Narratives on Northern Nigerian Women in the Context of Boko Haram
This essay examines the portrayal of northern Nigerian women in the context of Boko Haram and the related conflict, arguing that they have been predominantly framed through a narrative of victimisation, overshadowing their agency and diverse experiences. It first explores the historiography of northern Nigerian women before Boko Haram, highlighting their marginalisation in both historical and international discourse. It discusses how the limited accounts, shaped by colonial and Western perspectives, depicted these women primarily as oppressed and in need of external intervention, thus solidifying a restricted, homogenised portrayal of their experiences. The essay then focuses on the 2014 Chibok Girls’ kidnapping, which brought global attention to northern Nigerian women and reinforced their portrayal as victims. This perception was intensified by Boko Haram’s use of women as suicide bombers and the human rights violations committed by all sides of the conflict, further reinforcing the view of women as passive victims trapped in a cycle of violence. Finally, the essay highlights limited but important sources that discuss northern Nigerian women’s agency, including their voluntary association with Boko Haram and active roles in counterinsurgency and peacebuilding efforts, challenging the dominant narrative. By exploring these examples, this essay underscores the multifaceted roles these women have played in the conflict and emphasises the importance of incorporating their agency into discussions to move beyond reductionist portrayals and fully appreciate their diverse experiences and contributions to conflict dynamics.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Braun https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“I Ran to the Comments”: Social Media Culture, Hate-Speech, and Hyperreality
While social media has allowed our world to become more interconnected and informed on global issues than ever. It has also aroused much criticism in the way it facilitates unrestricted hate-speech and violent rhetoric, especially towards historically oppressed groups. While the abundance of hate-speech online may be credited to the facelessness facilitated by internet profiles that negates accountability, this essay argues that there is a more cognitive and deeper explanation for how people are able to engage so violently with one another online. It will explain this through the framework of Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation”, elaborating that this discourse on social media exists within a hyperreality in which people are trained to jump to comment in a discriminatory way as soon as they witness the existence of a represents historical traits of otherness. The essay situates this idea of otherness in literature concerning the social architecture of gender, race and sexuality. Due to this process of reproduction of information, people are able to comment so aggressively as they are not witnessing another human being but instead, through the hyperreality they are only witnessing an image of a historically category of other, and thus they do not authentically engage with what they see but instead play into the simulation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ruby Scott https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0