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In this book, feminist scholar Nina Lykke highlights current issues in feminist theory, epistemology and methodology. Combining introductory overviews with cutting-edge reflections, Lykke focuses on analytical approaches to gendered power differentials intersecting with other processes of social in/exclusion based on race, class, and sexuality. Lykke confronts and contrasts classical stances in feminist epistemology with poststructuralist and postconstructionist feminisms, and also brings bodily materiality into dialogue with theories of the performativity of gender and sex. This thorough and needed analysis of the state of Feminist Studies will be a welcome addition to scholars and students in Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology. Part I: What is Feminist Studies? 1. A Guide’s Introduction 2. A Postdisciplinary Discipline 3. Undoing Proper Research Objects Part II: To Theorize Intersectional Gender/Sex 4. Intersectional Gender/Sex: A Conflictual and Power-Laden Issue 5. Theorizing Intersectionalities: Genealogies and Blind Spots 6. Genealogies of Doing 7. Making Corporealities Matter: Intersections of Gender and Sex Revisited Part III: To Re-tool the Thinking Technologies 8. Rethinking Epistemologies 9. Methodologies, Methods and Ethics 10. Shifting Boundaries between Academic and Creative Writing Practices Part IV: To Use a Feminist Hermeneutics 11. Doing and Undoing the God-Trick: Analytical Examples Nina Lykke is professor of Gender Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. She is also the author of Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace (with Rosi Braidotti) (ZED, London 1996), Cosmodolphins. Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred (with Mette Bryld) (ZED, London 2000) and Bits of Life. Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology (with Anneke Smelik) (Washington University Press, 2008).

This volume centers on theories and methodologies for postgraduate feminist researchers engaged in interdisciplinary research. In the context of globalization, this book gives special attention to cutting-edge approaches at the borders between humanities and social sciences and specific discipline-transgressing fields, such as feminist technoscience studies.

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The article is an autophenomenographic-poetic, eco-critical meditation on diatoms. It combines a reflection on the role of this algae species in the author’s posthuman modes of mourning her passed away lesbian life partner, with a discussion of philosopher Isabelle Stengers’s notion of wonder in materialist science, defined as open-ended approaches to unexpected diversity. Diatoms are single-celled aquatic algae, a kind of phytoplankton, which, due to their ability to photosynthesize, have been categorized as plantlike. However, in 2011, it was discovered that diatoms have an animal-like urea cycle, assumed to provide robustness in times of nutrient scarcity, but also making diatoms resist categorizations as either plant- or animal-like. Taking the author’s entangled commitments to human–diatom relations and this unexpected discovery as entrance point to reflect on wonder in technoscience, the article discusses ways of shifting from instrumentalizing to wonder-based algae research, asking if speculative art and poetry can open new horizons, interpellating pathways to ethically care for diatoms. The article introduces two poems, articulating the author’s relations to the diatoms of Limfjorden, the Danish fjord, where her partner’s ashes are spread. The author’s autophenomenographic-poetic work is also brought in conversation with feminist technoscience scholar Astrid Schrader’s critical research on utilitarian instrumentalism in current harmful algal blooms (HABs) research.

Since World War II, the biological and technological have been fusing and merging in new ways, resulting in the loss of a clear distinction between the two. This entanglement of biology with technology isn't new, but the pervasiveness of that integration is staggering, as is the speed at which the two have been merging in recent decades. As this process permeates more of everyday life, the urgent necessity arises to rethink both biology and technology. Indeed, the human body can no longer be regarded either as a bounded entity or as a naturally given and distinct part of an unquestioned whole. Bits of Life assumes a posthuman definition of the body. It is grounded in questions about today's biocultures, which pertain neither to humanist bodily integrity nor to the anthropological assumption that human bodies are the only ones that matter. Editors Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke aid in mapping changes and transformations and in striking a middle road between the metaphor and the material. In exploring current reconfigurations of bodies and embodied subjects, the contributors pursue a technophilic, yet critical, path while articulating new and thoroughly appraised ethical standards.

Huvuddelen av texten är en självbiografisk och poetisk beskrivning av min älskades död och mina queera möten med den mängd av normer kristna normer, heteronormer och så vidare som omger döden. Den introduceras av ett kontextualiserande förord med teoretiska reflektioner kring queer änkedom och sörjande. Texten är ett utdrag ur en längre självetnografisk och självfenomenografisk studie av queert patientskap, cancerdöd och änkedom. Att studien är självfenomenografisk innebär att min självetnografi inspireras av fenomenologisk metod och inriktas på frågor om förkroppsligande och affektivitet. Genom mitt betonande av queer änkedom och sörjande tar jag avstånd från den nyliberala, hälsonormativa och individualistiska kultur som fetischerar personlig lycka och kräver att vi bortser från sårbarhet, olycka och förlust. I linje med detta kopplar jag mina reflektioner och mitt poetiska, självbiografiska skrivande till queera undersökningar av negativa, dystra, sorgsna och mörka känslor och affektiviteter och följer queerforskaren Ann Cvetkovichs (2012) tes att detta att vila i sorgsenheten utan att kräva att den förvandlas eller uppfattas annorlunda kan öppna fruktbara möjligheter personligt, politiskt och teoretiskt. Jag ser också mina reflektioner och poetiska skrivande som queerfemme-nistiska, i enlighet med queerforskaren Ulrika Dahls (2014) tankar om femme som en feministisk figuration. Mitt sörjande formas av min queerfeminina kärlek till min älskades queermaskulinitet kärlek till min älskades queermaskulinitet och även av vårt gemensamma, feministiska engagemang och sökande efter queerfeministiska materialistiska filosofiska alternativ till de ontologier kring livet och döden som utvecklats av kristendomen och dualistiska traditioner i västerländsk filosofi.

Nina Lykke and Risk Hazekamp found each other in their love of micro-organisms, especially Diatoms and Cyanobacteria. A warm digital exchange followed, both in words and images, in which the voices of Nina and Risk eventually merged into one shared ‘I’. A speculative, passionate conversation shaped up, investigating the precarious conditions of life and death on the planet, and figuring out pathways towards more joyful and ethical co-becomings with the planet body than Anthropocene extractivism can offer.

Background Swedish Health and Medical Services act states that good care should be given to the entire population on equal terms. Still studies show that access to care in Sweden differ related to for example gender and socioeconomic variables. One of the areas in Swedish health care that has attracted attention for potential inequity in access is Cataract Extraction (CE). Previous studies of access to CE in Sweden show that female patients have in general poorer vision before they are operated and longer waiting times for CE than male patients. The aim of the study was to describe the waiting times in different patient groups with regards to visual acuity, gender, age, native country, educational level, annual income and whether the patient was retired or still working. Methods The study was designed as a register study of 102 532 patients who have had CE performed in Sweden 2010–2011. Linear regression was used to analyse the association between patient characteristics and waiting times. Mean waiting times for women and men were calculated for all groups. Results At significance level p  < 0.05 longer waiting times corresponded to patients having good visual acuity, being of female gender, high age, retired, born outside the Nordic countries and having low income and education. Calculations of mean waiting times for all groups showed that women had longer waiting times than men. Conclusions The differences between groups defined, for example, by gender, age, native country, income, education and retirement are statistically significant. We do not consider them as clinically significant, but we consider the consistent pattern that we have found noteworthy in relation to the principle of equity in health care.