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.
‘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
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
How to Understand Jinv’s Resistance towards Heteronormativity in China
This paper explores the intersectionality of the Chinese political, social, cultural, and digital landscape, which is reflected in jinv’s resistance to heteronormativity. Jinv refers to a group of Chinese radical grassroots feminists active on social media. The production of a Chinese woman ideal constructed through Confucian ideals, social norms, and policies that expect women to marry and bear children is explained, alongside an analysis of jinv’s localised response and resistance on social media. The paper also discusses the potential limitations of jinv’s resistance, particularly its emphasis on individual agency over structural problems, and briefly suggests possible reasons for such a limitation. The essay concludes by suggesting that a broader understanding of Chinese cultural and social environments, as well as further research into jinv as a unique feminist group, is essential to fully understand jinv’s feminist struggle.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tongyu Hu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
To Witness Submission in Human Conditions: A Gendered Redefining of Levinas’ Responsibility in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight.
Emmanuel Levinas presents the human condition as fundamentally shaped by responsibility (Morgan 114). In this, we are born with a “debt contracted before any freedom and […] consciousness,” paid off in an endless passivity to the needs of those around us (Morgan 125–29). While he frames this as a universal philosophy, extending beyond social structures and institutions towards an abstract ‘meaning’ (Morgan, 130), he articulates submission using gendered language:—‘Eros, the feminine, modesty, the caress’ (Morgan 125). This has since been the target of gendered critiques by feminist philosophers such as Irigaray, who maintains that “Levinas considers sexual difference as secondary to ethics, [establishing] paternity as the paradigm of self-transcendence” (Vasseleu 110). Thus, the seemingly “universal” state of Levinas’ ethics highlights an important overgeneralization: submission is more readily described as feminine because it disproportionately applies to women’s experiences compared with men. Under these sexual assumptions, I wish to defend the notion that Levinas’ philosophical framework unknowingly functions on the “effacement of the feminine” before the establishment of social and ethical relations (Vasseleu 111). Accordingly, this essay argues that ‘Levinasian’ responsibility is not an entirely universal human condition but rather a distinctly feminine way of being. To demonstrate this, I examine Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight, where the female protagonists are so deeply constrained to ‘passive’ responsibility that they come to see themselves as sexual and social objects. This self-objectification then mutates in various ways—through imagined futures, ‘dark’ female counterparts, and a painfully embedded subordination, they become reduced to spectators of their own lived experiences. Reframing Levinasian responsibility as extreme feminine passivity, I contend that these women are burdened with the role of observer in order to live ‘meaningfully’. Consequently, the ‘feminine’ drive toward death in these texts is not simply suicidal, but a rejection of the masculine demands that dictate a woman’s world.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jack Lyall https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Lost Paradise: The Role of the Witness in Shaping the Historiography of Jerusalem
Jerusalem is not merely occupied; it is actively rewritten. This piece examines how Palestinian witness testimony defies the gradual violence of erasure, transforming the city from a site of dispossession into an assertion of historical continuity. Drawing from decolonial theory, phenomenology, and political philosophy, I argue that testimony is not merely an act of remembrance but an epistemic and ontological intervention that challenges both material oppression and the state’s monopolization of historical truth. I interrogate the material conditions of occupation, positioning them within a broader philosophy of spatial domination: the destruction of Palestinian homes, the calculated deprivation of infrastructure, and the juridical apparatus that renders Palestinian existence precarious. Drawing on Nur-eldeen Masalha’s concept of memoricide, I examine how settler-colonial power operates not just through territorial expansion but through the systematic erasure and reconstruction of historical narratives, turning Jerusalem into a battleground of meaning as much as land. Testimony emerges here not as passive recollection but as an act of existential resistance. The act of witnessing asserts both the primacy of lived experience and the refusal of epistemic erasure, positioning Palestinian memory as a challenge to the structures that seek to render it illegible. Judith Butler’s work on ‘grievability’ is mobilized to interrogate how international frameworks of recognition operate to exclude Palestinian suffering from the category of the politically visible. Further on, I situates testimony within digital landscapes, analyzing the El-Kurd family’s plight in Sheikh Jarrah as an extension of what James C. Scott terms ‘hidden transcripts,’ a counter-history that bypasses the gatekeepers of official discourse. ‘Digital sumud’ is introduced as a contemporary iteration of Palestinian endurance, where social media functions not just as documentation but as a subversion of hegemonic narratives. Ultimately, this essay argues that Palestinian testimony does more than document loss. It disrupts, resists, and reclaims. The struggle over Jerusalem is not just territorial; it is a war over meaning itself, and through the voices of those who refuse to be erased, the city remains a living archive of defiance.
Copyright (c) 2025 A Hijazi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Resisting Surveillance: Can Abolitionist Self-Care Truly Provide Liberation from the Male Gaze Within Oppressive Structures?
This paper explores the pervasive nature of the male gaze within patriarchal structures, claiming that women and other marginalised groups are subject to constant surveillance. This leads to the internalisation of the male gaze, which effectively creates women to become their own witnesses in response to societal expectations. By building on Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze, the paper applies this theory to social dynamics beyond the original cinematic context. It applies theories of alienation to argue that the male gaze functions as a form of estrangement for those living within systematised oppression. The paper examines how different intersectional identities-such as women of colour and queer individuals- experience its effects in distinct ways. These experiences diverge significantly from those of cisgender, heterosexual women, highlighting the complex intersections of identity within patriarchal systems. The paper makes a clear point that defiance does not erase the gaze but affirms its power as something that must be resisted. Once you become aware of its presence, it cannot simply be forgotten. The author concludes the paper in an optimistic tone, suggesting that abolitionist self-care practices can provide individuals with radical tools to dismantle oppressive structures. Abolitionist self care in isolation finds it difficult to challenge the male gaze, however, activist spaces offers a beacon of hope as means for women to resist the male gaze through mutual recognition and meaningful, interpersonal relationships.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mia Taylor https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Into the Queen’s Court, Granny: Crones and Coalitional Possibilities in the Wife of Bath’s Tale
In the Wife of Bath's Tale, after a knight commits rape, he confronts a court filled with ladies twice: once, to mete out his punishment, and again, to fulfill the terms of his plea deal. The outcomes of these two encounters, wherein justice and mutual aid is mediated through a group of women, result in drastically different levels of practical success. This essay explores the figure of the crone, who appears in the second courtly encounter, as an agent of speculative possibilities that enables successful mutual aid and coalition-building. Drawing on Ursula K. Le Guin's 'Space Crone' and Dean Spade's Mutual Aid, this essay argues that the old woman takes on speculative possibilities due to her status as a person who has 'acted the entire human condition--the essential quality of which is Change' (Le Guin 6). Her presence as a change agent enables coalition-building and successful mutual aid efforts, as well as justice, to occur without being 'co-opted' by the dominant power structure. In performing this analysis, this essay not only examines the figure of the old woman, but investigates the possibilities presented by speculative bodies within middle English literature that result in practical outcomes of resistance enacted by coalitions of women.
Copyright (c) 2026 Piper Farmer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Taken for Granted? National(ist) Coalitions and Interruptions of Gender Equality in the Nordic Countries through Nation Branding
The gender equality models of the Nordic states, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, have been described as an ‘egalitarian blueprint’ by international commentators. This is in part a result of Nation Branding efforts of these countries. Nation branding constitutes a nation’s image, where narratives, and claims of differences and relevance create a distinct national ‘brand’. This paper assesses these Nation Branding efforts and realities that advertise the Nordic Countries as heroes of gender equality. It is argued that nation branding has shaped the meanings of gender equality making it coterminous with the Nordic gender equalities models and the Nordic national identities, thus giving gender equality a national(ist) face. These hegemonic discourses emphasise the coalition between these nation state and gender equality efforts, and have some strengthening effects for the goals of gender equality. However, the interruptions gender equality Nation Branding presents to the realities of gender equality in these countries are highlighted. This, as shown, is a result the nationalist tone gender equality efforts adopts when in collaboration with a nation state. First, the realities of the Nordic States’ gender equality model and efforts, which involve coalitions between the state and feminism (referred to as state feminism) are introduced. Then it is revealed how these countries have proliferated an image of their states’ coalitions with feminism, discussing how hegemonic discourses have been created to paint these countries as the epitome of gender equal states, and in turn impact ideas around gender equality. Then, the strengthening effects of Nation Branding for the efforts of gender equality are discussed, how the advertising of these coalitions have strengthened them and impacted the world stage. Finally, it is revealed that Nation Branding has also interrupted the goals of gender equality through the nationalist tone proliferated in the advertising of coalitions between the nation state and gender equality efforts. It is shown that Nation Branding has weakened gender equality by obscuring the imperfections of these countries’ gender equality models, excluding ethnic minority women and feminisms, and playing a part in far-right discourses. The paper reveals that the advertising of the coalition between the Nordic States and feminism has some benefits, but also serves to interrupt gender equality by giving it a distinctly and exclusionary nationalist tone. Thus, the use of gender equality in nation branding shapes the meanings, practices, and understandings of gender equality locally and globally, which secures commitments within this framing, such as international interventions, but weakens commitments outside of it.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elizabeth Hamilton https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Girlcore: the Right Way to be Female? Examining the Effect of Choice Feminism on What it Means to be a 'Woman' through the Language and Trends of Tiktok
Since the beginning of the 2010s and the advent of what many call the fourth wave of feminism, “choice feminism” has accounted for an increasingly large segment of people who call themselves “feminists”. This movement can widely be observed through commentary on femininity on social media such as TikTok and women choose to use the platform. Since the rise of TikTok in 2020 many different trends and debates have appeared in relation to what it means to be a “girl” or “woman”, and these instances can be observed and analysed to ask a larger question of what being female and identifying as such means in the modern era and years to come. In a world more and more defined by our online presence and the use of social media, there is a landscape in which there is increasing desire to market oneself. In using micro-labels, micro-labels here referring to the hyper-specific aesthetic or identity related categories that have risen in popularity over the last couple years on social media (Sojit Pejcha, 2023), we transform ourselves from human beings to concepts. This process seems to be specifically taken up by women who exercise their “choice” to objectify themselves in a radical new way; something that I argue is much more comfortable than having to deal with the true acceptance of the human experience and what it means to be a woman.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ruby Scott https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Myth of the 'muse': a History of the Gender Roles Conceptualised in Art
The muse has been historically defined as a source of divine inspiration to the artist, a passive and voiceless object art is made in reflection to but not about. The dynamic is almost always gendered with the female counterpart of the muse being frequently left silent. She takes on a sexualised role, posing nude, as often the relationship between muse and artist extends to romantic one. An erotised and romanticised version of womanhood litters nude paintings of the past, highlighting how the role frequently stripped women of their identity as they were portrayed through the eyes of the male artist. However, there are artists who have challenged these assumptions. Tracing the life of artist Lee Miller and the work of Shigeyuki Kihara reveals how the binaries between the roles of artist and muse are not as rigid as previously thought but are influenced by societal constructs limiting how we perceive and use the role of the muse.
Copyright (c) 2024 Martha Gane https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Considerations of Intersectionality in Psychological research
At the forefront of the increasingly popular intersectionality agenda in psychology is the wellbeing of individuals. The British Psychological Society states that a key principle of psychological research is to “consider societal benefits” and “contribute to the common good” (BPS, 2021). There is an abundance of evidence on the harmful outcomes of negative intergroup relations and systemic oppression on marginalised individuals. For example, marginalised groups often experience educational and economic disadvantages (Porter, 2011) alongside both physical and mental health disparities (English et al., 2022; Mitchell et al., 2021; Stevens-Watkins et al., 2014). Consequently, psychology as a discipline should prioritise advocating for a more equitable society.
Copyright (c) 2024 Abigail Nicoll https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0