Locating Feminist Power: Movements, Knowledge, and Organisational Politics

Abstract

This panel examines how women and feminist actors navigate, contest, and reshape gendered power structures across political and activist arenas through networks, social movements and communicative politics. The first paper examines women’s networks in cybersecurity through the lenses of feminist security studies and feminist technoscience, highlighting the complexity and ambivalences of the attempts to make this gendered field more inclusive and gender just. The second paper examines how women’s organizations within political parties in three European countries have shifted their focus from women’s descriptive representation to advancing gendered policy priorities and comparatively analyses their substantive representation strategies. The third paper interrogates how Zimbabwean women, through women’s movements, identify, relate and imagine their being as survivors within a repressive state. The fourth paper analyses Instagram posts by the five women leaders of Finland’s previous government through the framework of popular feminism, revealing how feminist discourse in political communication is often only a tool for other purposes. The fifth paper explores the militant protest tactics of the transnational feminist movement FEMEN, interrogating how activists reconcile confrontational and aggressive protest with feminist values.

Title	Details
Navigating Gendered Cybersecurity Culture Through Women’s Networks	View Paper Details
The role of women’s organizations: from lobbying for descriptive to substantive representation?	View Paper Details
Artivism and the Gendered Politics of Memory: (Re)Writing and (Re)Righting Zimbabwe’s Political Project	View Paper Details
Finnish Women Politicians’ Instagram Content through the Lens of Popular Feminism	View Paper Details
“My Body is My Weapon”. Confrontation, Feminist Rage, and Bodily Performance in FEMEN’s Radical Activism	View Paper Details