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Why is the story of romance in books, magazines, and films still aimed at women rather than at men? Even after decades of feminism, traditional ideas and messages about romantic love still hold sway and, in our \"postfeminist\" age, are more popular than ever. Increasingly, we have become a culture of romance: stories of all kinds shape the terms of love. Women, in particular, love a love story. The Glass Slipperis about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Comparing influential classics to their current counterparts, Susan Ostrov Weisser relates in highly amusing prose how these stories are shaped and defined by and for women, the main consumers of romantic texts. Following a trajectory that begins with Jane Austen and concludes with Internet dating sites, Weisser shows the many ways in which nineteenth-century views of women's nature and the Victorian idea of romance have survived the feminist critique of the 1970s and continue in new and more ambiguous forms in today's media, with profound implications for women. More than a book about romance in fiction and media,The Glass Slipperillustrates how traditional stories about women's sexuality, femininity, and romantic love have survived as seemingly protective elements in a more modern, feminist, sexually open society, confusing the picture for women themselves. Weisser compares diverse narratives-historical and contemporary from high literature and \"low\" genres-discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women's magazines, and D. H. Lawrence'sLady Chatterley's Lover; Disney movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories. Ultimately, Weisser shows that the narrative versions of the Glass Slipper should be taken as seriously as the Glass Ceiling as we see how these representations of romantic love are meant to inform women's beliefs and goals. In this book, Weisser's goal is not to shatter the Glass Slipper, but to see through it.

This article discusses our development of a new form of feminist Creative Analytic Practices (CAP) by creating knowledge through interactive video installation and web-based interactive re-storytelling (https://kimchoi.net/a-story-of-ones-own/). Since the 1990s, qualitative social researchers have been developing alternative methods and forms to capture and represent the complexity of lived experiences. Through referencing feminist postconstructionist CAP, Deleuzian rhizomatic narrative inquiry, and feminist film theories and films, our project – consisting of reflexive writing experiments and re-enactment of 43 older Hong Kong women’s life stories in hypermedia – contributes to this expansive knowledge. Specifically, we describe our writing and production processes, including the strategies and tools considered, medium specificity and cinematic apparatuses used, and challenges encountered when attempting to create a nonlinear, multi-layered, polyphonic, and interactive narrative. Our main concerns are: How can researchers produce a self-conscious, research-based creative work that highlights women’s agency under socio-cultural constraints, whilst acknowledging selfhood as rhizomatic, knowledge as situated, and “truths” as partial and multiple under conditions of its own making? How can we produce alternative social science research practices that carry both logic and affect? How can we engage the audience to open up and interpret older women’s life stories in embodied and experiential ways?

This introduction frames the special issue 'Gendered Life Stories and the Politics of Imagination' within a broader crisis of narration, where storytelling is both culturally ubiquitous and increasingly unstable. Drawing on feminist theory and narrative studies, it explores how gendered life stories function as narrative technologies-forms through which marginalised subjects navigate risk, challenge dominant frameworks, and reimagine what kinds of stories can be told, heard, and believed. The introduction situates the contributions that follow as interventions into contested terrains of public storytelling, where voice, recognition, and power remain unevenly distributed.

This paper offers a critical reading of Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife through the dual frameworks of social constructionism and postcolonial feminist theory. Often classified as a testimonial narrative of domestic abuse, the novel is reinterpreted here as a trenchant critique of the ideological structures—marriage, nationhood, and language—that construct and constrain female subjectivity in postcolonial India. Drawing on Berger and Luckmann’s theory of social reality and Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, the study examines how patriarchal power operates not only through physical violence but also through discursive conditioning that enforces silence, obedience, and moral surveillance. The protagonist’s enforced roles as dutiful wife, cultural custodian, and symbol of familial honor are shown to be socially fabricated performances, normalized through repetition and coercion. Further, engaging with postcolonial feminist thinkers such as Mohanty and Spivak, the paper contends that the narrator’s acts of writing, refusal to name her abuser, and narrative self-reclamation constitute epistemic resistance. Through language, she contests the very structures that sought to silence her. When I Hit You is ultimately a radical narrative of reconstruction, where the female subject dismantles socially inscribed roles and reclaims agency through storytelling.

From critiques of baked-in sexism in data science, to the use of data in the service of feminism, feminist data activism has emerged as a new form of feminist activism. This paper approaches feminist data activism from a data imaginary perspective, focusing on a prominent feminist initiative from Australia called She's A Crowd, an organization that claims to have crowdsourced the world's largest dataset of gendered violence. Through interviews with 11 participants who volunteered their “datafied stories” to the organization, I explore the grassroots imaginaries about what data is and what it can do for the collective struggle against gendered violence. I show that participants’ experiences with not being believed led them to see data-driven stories as having superior epistemic value over qualitative narratives. Paradoxically, even when data is viewed as superior due to its detachment from the personal, concerns about its authenticity and quality persist. Consequently, participants advocated for increased data collection as the ultimate solution to address these limitations. Thus, if the imaginary of a binary between “data” and “stories” privileges data as a superior epistemic solution, the imaginary of limitation reinforces more data collection as the only solution imaginable. I argue that at stake is how these imaginaries locate the legitimacy of marginalized experiences within the dataset, obscuring how data collected from the grassroots might circulate within and be interpreted by hegemonic knowledge practices. This paper opens a conversation about feminist data activism and the power relations it is enmeshed within, an area that remains under explored.

Stories told about violence, trauma, and loss inform knowledge of post-conflict societies. Stories have a context which is part of the story-teller’s life narrative. Reasons for silences are varied. This article affirms the importance of telling and listening to stories and notes the significance of silences within transitional justice’s narratives. It does this in three ways. First, it outlines a critical narrative theory of transitional justice which confirms the importance of narrative agency in telling or withholding stories. Relatedly, it affirms the importance of story-telling as a way to explain differentiated gender requirements within transitional justice processes. Second, it examines gendered differences in the ways that women are silenced by shame, choose silence to retain self-respect, use silence as a strategy of survival, or an agential act. Third, it argues that compassionate listening requires gender-sensitive responses that recognize the narrator’s sense of self and needs.

Although the fantastic in print looks back upon a tradition of commenting on issues of race and gender, films that use the mode tend to be more conservative in their approach to subverting the patriarchal script, that is, the tendency of patriarchal society prescribing certain normative behaviors based on gender while punishing deviations from these norms. While this is especially true for blockbuster movies, independent filmmaking has come to appreciate the subversive potential of fantasy. The present study will scrutinize the fantastic as a storytelling mechanism in recent Hungarian cinema, with special emphasis on the uses of the quest formula and its intersections with gender scripts in the films Hurok [‘Loop’] (2016), and Liza, a rókatündér [‘Liza, the Fox-Fairy’] (2015).

On August 17, 1945, Indonesia proclaimed its independence from Dutch colonial rule. Five years later, the Republic of Indonesia was recognized as a unified, sovereign state. The period in between was a time of aspiration, mobilization, and violence, in which nationalists fought to expel the Dutch while also trying to come to grips with the meaning of \"independence.\" Rifle Reports is an ethnographic history of this extraordinary time as it was experienced on the outskirts of the nation among Karo Batak villagers in the rural highlands of North Sumatra. Based on extensive interviews and conversations with Karo veterans, Rifle Reports interweaves personal and family memories, songs and stories, memoirs and local histories, photographs and monuments, to trace the variously tangled and perhaps incompletely understood ways that Karo women and men contributed to the founding of the Indonesian nation. The routes they followed are divergent, difficult, sometimes wavering, and rarely obvious, but they are clearly marked with the signs of gender. This innovative historical study of nationalism and decolonization is an anthropological exploration of the gendering of wartime experience, as well as an inquiry into the work of storytelling as memory practice and ethnographic genre.

InUnsettling Assumptions, editors Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye examine how tradition and gender come together to unsettle assumptions about culture and its study.Contributors explore the intersections of traditional expressive culture and sex/gender systems to question, investigate, or upset concepts like family, ethics, and authenticity. Individual essays consider myriad topics such as Thanksgiving turkeys, rockabilly and bar fights, Chinese tales of female ghosts, selkie stories, a noisy Mennonite New Year's celebration, the Distaff Gospels, Kentucky tobacco farmers, international adoptions, and more.InUnsettling Assumptions, folkloric forms express but also counteract negative aspects of culture like misogyny, homophobia, and racism. But expressive culture also emerges as fundamental to our sense of belonging to a family, an occupation, or friendship group and, most notably, to identity performativity and the construction and negotiation of power.

The young widows in 1 Timothy 5 are required not to be gossips and busybodies, and to watch their reputation. I will suggest that the author here downloads a misogynie topos from his contemporary cultural encyclopedia connecting women to gossip in a twofold way: 1) there are strong tendencies in ancient literature to draw caricatures of women's speech; and 2) a woman was also responsible for behaving in a way that did not generate gossip about her. Instead of searching for 'the opponents' in the Pastoral Epistles, I read the letters' rhetoric as a way of turning 'those who are different' into opponents. The widows are to be found among them. The main task of these letters is to limit those others' influence, through 'othering' them in various ways. One of the author's means is to use gendered power language, where women are connected to gossip. The letters can not be read as historical sources giving us direct access to Early Christian 'reality,' but have to be read within the framework of a hermeneutic of suspicion.