Abstract
This collection, one of the expanding population of large expensive handbooks in ever more specific sub-fields, each speaking to its own importance and peculiar audience, is in fact both vital and urgent. The research it represents is a powerful testament to the diversity and dynamism of contemporary feminist, gender and women’s studies, and shows the conceptual and geographic range of these fields as they continue to develop in critical, transnational and interdisciplinary directions. A collection such as this, which so clearly states and restates the theoretical and empirical significance of feminist research and gender studies, should make apathy to the issues addressed impossible. Yet however much feminist analysis promises and delivers, its ontologies, epistemologies and politics still generate high levels of fear or animus in our academic niche of organizational analysis (Bell et al., 2020). The editorial labour behind this volume brings together ideas, data and analyses regarding Albania, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Czech Republic/Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, India, Iran, Jordan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Uganda and the UK from 40 authors. In doing so, two key points are demonstrated: first, that feminism is being practised around our world whatever the social, economic, political or organizational context, including in locations where it is either illegal or physically dangerous; and second, that our entire world continues to need feminism to be practised in and around it, perhaps especially in the societies and cultures with the highest structural barriers to feminism’s practice, or in those cultures most hostile to gender studies.
Thus for us, this collection’s primary achievement is to speak to the individual and collective will, the continuing and justifiable personal and professional anger, of editors and contributors in a world where many research fields, many societies and many universities remain more-or-less hostile towards feminism’s philosophies, purposes and practices. The collection’s conceptual range demonstrates the scope of contemporary feminist analysis: across 25 chapters, contributors offer accounts of the world that are more-than-human, queer, trans, decolonial and interdisciplinary, addressing young femininities, interactive methods, pornography, solidarity, Whiteness, gender-based violence and transnational organizing to understand better the last 4 decades of progress and frustration.
Reviewing this genre of book for a sub-discipline such as organization studies is both a privilege and a challenge. We approach that task here by focusing on 6 chapters that we as readers found most meaningful, based on our current research and teaching or learning interests; the other 18 chapters are equally meritorious, and different reviewers would choose different exemplary chapters. Each shows how decentring Eurocentric feminist thought enables different debate and action, challenging the normalization of gendered violence, including that perpetrated by the (neoliberal) digital structures within which many now live, work and organize, and problematize binary thinking, often through intersectional analysis.
First, we found Blanka Nyklová and Iva Šmídová’s analysis of the Czech ‘feminist scene’ – a wide angled summary of the co-production of feminisms in contexts by individuals and groups within or around institutions – empirically fascinating and conceptually compelling. Second, in a distinctive contribution, Pedro Vasconcelos and Sofia Aboim’s analysis of trans recognition and the gender order disentangles issues of identity, justice, politics, law and power in innovative ways. Third, taking a contrasting approach, Anne-Charlott Callerstig and Kristina Lindholm’s fascinating, detailed discussion of the relationship between gender studies and gender equality policies or politics brings new insight and provokes new thinking.
Three further chapters illustrate these dynamics. Anika Thym, Andrea Maihofer and Matthias Luterbach argue, somewhat provocatively, that responses to attacks from anti-gender movements are too often defensive, proposing instead that such crises should be treated as opportunities to engage in self-critique, rearticulate goals and sharpen understanding of emancipatory struggles. This debate is only becoming more urgent during 2025 and beyond. In a very different style, Deevia Bhana writes of ‘girly girls’ and ‘raw girls’ to understand and problematize dominant binary understandings of femininity that emphasize either being prim, proper and respectable, or loud, aggressive and assertive. Drawing on Butlerian gender performativity, this chapter demonstrates in wonderful empirical depth how more nuanced, contextualized approaches to the construction of femininity interweave with class, race, sexuality and violence. Finally, Karen Gabriel’s argument that a fuller, feminist understanding of the ‘precarious worlds of pornography’ mean reading pornographic materials not just as representational ‘pleasure-texts’ but as forms of precarious labour, particularly in the Global South. Gabriel demonstrates how the production of pornography, consensual and otherwise, is embedded in profoundly gendered, exploitative, neoliberal economic structures, paying particular attention to the Indian context through her detailed fieldwork. This remarkable chapter challenges Global North-centric views as it exposes the coercion, unpaid labour and stolen agency often hidden in discussions of porn, contributing to broader feminist concerns with labour justice, ethical representation and the structural conditions shaping gendered vulnerabilities in the Global South.
We’ve emphasized institutional hostility to feminism and gender studies here, but the editors’ introductory notes rightly pay homage to the small number of key institutional locations that do host and support feminist analysis, especially ISCSP Lisbon, host to the RINGS network of advanced gender studies institutes. This introduction sets the scene through a brief discussion of recent legal changes in favour of women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights, the increased visibility of women’s, feminist and gender studies, the backlash starting to manifest before publication in increased persecution, a rise in physical attacks, and increased questioning of academic legitimacy today experienced by many committed to feminism or gender studies. This also demonstrates how the subtitle frames the collection, ‘recording and analysing the recent history of feminist, gender, and women studies seen in a global perspective’ (p. 1), illustrated with stories of political, social, religious and economic contexts that help us understand patterns and outcomes.
The editors note five cross-cutting themes in the collection: the institutionalization of gender studies, continuous backlash, younger women and new agendas co-existing alongside ‘old’ issues, international organizations/organizing and the continuing (worsening?) marketization of higher education. They also flag elements readers might focus on, such as the theoretical and methodological contributions, the novel research questions raised, interdisciplinarity, paradoxes and tensions and the persistent gaps between rights and their realization. Finally, gaps and exclusions are acknowledged in terms of geography and geopolitics, especially in the lack of representation from Asia, Pacific and South or Central America.
In making sense of a handbook of this scale and scope, we can ask where it takes us from and to, as researchers and educators focused on the importance of organization in (re)producing the gendered inequalities and challenges that condition our everyday experiences of life and work. On our reading, this collection emphasizes one direction of travel that is, perhaps paradoxically, sharpened by the attention paid to specific national contexts by particular contributions throughout the collection: that feminism and gender studies are, always have been, and should always be transnational. The same, as contributors note, is obviously true of organizing, bringing together ‘immediate, local social relations’ (p. 379) and transcendent social analysis that crosses, dissolves and reconfigures borders. Only in this way can gender studies and feminisms make their full contributions to understanding and changing our worlds, including our organizational settings, locally and globally.
The tension between the specific and universal shows in a desire to emphasize Global South experiences and theory, to counter the still-dominant Global North orientation of scholarship empirically and (more so) conceptually. Across the six chapters we have described in more detail here, theoretical frameworks and references tend to speak particularly to the work of Butler, Connell or Ringrose. For us, at the risk of cavilling, we wonder if this landmark handbook is as successful as it might be in tracking this difficult tension between universality and specificity. We think of the important work in business school and organization studies contexts as to the nature of whiteness in feminist organization studies (Liu, 2020; Swan, 2023). We think of the under-researched and under-recognized landscape of feminisms in China, especially in English language publications (Zhu and Xiao, 2021). And we think of the Democratizing Work movement (Battilana et al., 2022) led initially by organization scholars Isabelle Ferreras, Dominique Méda and Julie Battilana, but since expanded in both disciplinary and gendered scope to now connect in common cause (primarily pro-feminist) women and men across the wider social sciences and humanities, economics and most recently earth and environmental sciences.
As final words, then, while emphasizing one last time the wonderful content here and the editorial efforts that have gone into bringing gender studies and feminisms to the point of this collection, we hope and trust that the acknowledged absences will become presences in the future, perhaps in a companion volume or in a second edition of this one. Rather than detract from the achievement of this book, we hope that talking about the still significant absences emphasizes opportunities for future work that builds on the strong foundations laid here.
