2024

Feminisms and development: a necessary cartography of power in international cooperation

The world in which international cooperation was born has changed substantially. However, and although the development and international aid agenda has undergone major changes, they have not been sufficient to advance collective and fair responses to current global challenges. It is paradoxical that when cooperation, collaboration and solidarity efforts are most necessary, development cooperation is going through a deep crisis of legitimacy, results and identity. The current unavoidable challenge of the system is to fully transform itself in the face of the risk of becoming a completely irrelevant policy, or of losing its distinctive character. The transformations that development cooperation needs transcend the changes in the aid measurement system, and emphasize the need to address a deep debate around its orientations and objectives, the power relations established between countries and actors, or the norms, instruments and procedures that are its own (Alonso, Aguirre and Santander, 2019; de la Cruz, 2015; Martínez, 2019; Pajarín, 2021; Ramos, 2024; Unceta, Martínez and Goiria, 2021; Zabala and Martínez , 2017).
In this context, the proposals for change that aim to strengthen the role of international cooperation in the formation of a new framework of international justice, as well as its contribution to the transition towards models of production, consumption, organization and coexistence, are of special interest. global alternatives (Martínez, 2019) focused on social justice, gender, racial and environmental justice. From this perspective, an exploration and a more forceful and systematic commitment to formulas of Education for Global Citizenship or Global Justice is necessary. Feminisms, and specifically, transformative feminist education, constitute the essential compass in this process. A new model of international cooperation must be oriented towards the structural causes of inequalities and violations of rights, as well as the generation of critical, responsible citizens, with conscience and global ties. Once again, the feminist emancipatory project as an experience of an advocacy social movement with global links and, at the same time, with proposals for transformation that are based on knowledge and daily and localized experiences, becomes the axis of a truly transformative change (Pajarín , 2022)

Violence against women and feminicide

Conceptualizing violence against women constitutes the most transformative contribution of Feminism to women's human rights. By defining violence against women as a consequence of discrimination, Feminism managed to remove it from the scope of the private sphere and point out its structural nature, rooted in practices and institutions; as well as differentiating it from other types of social violence.

2023

“Commercial surrogacy: a new form of gendered surplus value

More than three decades ago, Carole Pateman (1988) identified two founding institutions of the Sexual Contract and female subjection: marriage and prostitution, private and public women. The private ones ensured the offspring of the man within the framework of the marriage union and, therefore, should not and cannot be publicly accessible. The second, defined as public, guarantee the patriarchal privilege of a woman's sexual availability at any time and occasion. Faced with the private-good woman, devoted to her husband, to the family and with a public projection of her honor and dignity closely linked to the interdict of her sexual freedom, the public-bad woman was constructed as a sexualized opposite and complementary. But, as Ekis Ekman (2013) points out, the gestational industry has broken this binary to reinvent itself a new model: the good “public” woman, a supportive pregnant woman who gives up her body, her reproductive capacity, puts her health at risk and empathically assumes the physical and psychological consequences of hyperhormone, pregnancy and childbirth to fulfill the wishes of paternity/maternity of unknown persons, relinquishing custody and filiation through an intermediary company. tion of their daughters.

Ecocriticism: From Feminism(s) to Ecofeminism(s) Literary and Cultural Analyses

This issue on ecofeminism(s) is inserted in the framework of the essays that promoted the equalization of women and that have appeared since the modern era in various European countries, such as that of the French author François Poullain de la Barre in On Education of the ladies (1671) or The Equality of the Sexes (1673) or with the British Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694-97) and Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and with many other thinkers who since the Renaissance emphasized the need for women to be considered equal both from the intellectual point of view and their civil rights as citizens. The woman or the animals were often equated and considered as subsidiary beings, with the purpose of caring, helping or supplying in the patriarchal society. The defense of animals had already been valued by the British suffragettes, who -in addition to claiming the right to vote- were clearly opposed to the vivisection of non-human animals as conduct lacking in ethics and empathy.

2022

Feminist communication studies. New challenges and scenarios.

In recent years, Feminist Communication Studies have been immersed in a process of evolution to respond to an increasingly complex context. From the media as a thematic and interpretation framework, these studies have gone on to integrate the digital medium in its various forms and manifestations. It's not by chance. The Internet has acquired a central position in contemporary societies. The high volume and intensity of connections and interactions on online platforms and services have positioned them as the main spaces for socialization, giving their content and relationships a performative character. In this context, it is necessary [and urgent] to analyze social platforms, the Internet -and by extension- new technologies from a feminist perspective. And this is the fact of the monograph “Feminist communication studies. New challenges and scenarios”. Through the contributions of national and international researchers, analyzes and reflections of various phenomena are presented that allow us a valuable approach to the communicative phenomenon today from a feminist perspective.

2021

Pornography: a sexual geography of power

The title of this monograph is a nod to a central element of pornography defined by Andrea Dworkin in her book Men Possessing Women (2015/1981), who knew how to perceive that what pornography draws is sexual geography of power, which is constituted, in its original foundation, of the violence exerted by the phallus and of a sadistic discourse against women and the feminine. The need to deeply map the concepts that emanate from the pornographic discourse, from the production of its gigantic industry, from its cultural influence, or from the impacts on the sexual imaginary, has prompted the elaboration of the compendium of articles that we present below. As a sum of this, carrying out feminist geography of pornography and defining the sexual landscape it generates is an interesting line of research that we want to stimulate with the publication of this monograph.

2020

Special Issue: Care at the crossroads of social change

Care has been an object of interest of feminist and gender studies since its beginning, thus being one of the main concerns among the pioneers of Sociology, but it also had a particular relevance in the feminism of the seventies. Currently, the care crises, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, has highlighted the pertinence of this research topic in which various theoretical paradigms and contributions that critically question the foundations of the sexual division of labour, the basis of the State (particularly, the Welfare State) and public policies.

2019

Special Issue. Health in the Feminist Theory and Vindications

In contemporary feminism, the field of health is one of the areas under study and also under critical analysis, theorization and research. Feminist studies and research have shown that discourses on women's health, their  general discomfort  and female diseases, clinical and professional practices, health sciences and policies have historically been indispensable tools of patriarchy for control and subordination of women. . Therefore, the field of health is also the object of feminist mobilization, vindication of public policies aimed at the transformation of sciences and health institutions, the training of professionals in the feminist paradigm and the creation of new protocols for attention to Women's health issues.

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