The feminist enterprise in law focuses on power imbalances related to gender and on unacknowledged, unrepresentative assumptions about what is reasonable and normal. On the hunch that the legally postulated “reasonable man” may not represent every reasonable person, feminist jurisprudence seeks out false (whether naïve or disingenuous) assertions of objectivity and neutrality in law and questions their premises. It rejects the retro-epistemology of evidentiary thinking, that is, the belief that there is an objective reality capable of discovery through neutral principles, logic, and clear thinking. Instead, feminist jurisprudence focuses on how language, emotion, and politics all can subtly influence law.

This chapter describes the foundations for and the possibilities of implementing a Queer AZN CRT framework in social work practice. Queer AZN CRT is rooted in critical, feminist, queer, Indigenist and Pasifika theories, and explores the impacts of colonization, imperialism, and indigeneity within intersectional Asian experiences. Six proposed tenets for Queer AZN CRT are listed along with core considerations for social work practice: (1) Queer, brown Asianization; (2) challenging mainstream ideologies about Asians, Pacific Islanders, and QTPI/QTAAm; (3) global, decolonial perspectives; (4) reconstructive histories; (5) multidisciplinary story, practice, praxis, and voice; and (6) social justice perspective. Two narratives depict the application of Queer AZN CRT in social work practice, first in a clinical social work scenario, and then within a macro practice framework. Additional reflections regarding the implications for Queer AZN CRT in social work practice and education are discussed.

It is little wonder that Los Angeles, a city of compulsive self-narration, has birthed a tradition of autobiographical literature with local particularities. A uniquely LA tradition of memoir, autobiography, and autofiction come to the fore in this chapter. Allmendinger identifies three key strands of LA life writing: the Hollywood tell-all (Barbara Payton, Christina Crawford), the gang memoir, (Rafael Pérez-Torres, Freddy Negrete) and a third, more diffuse grouping – writings by women in which frank and personal explorations of gender and sexuality predominate (Eve Babitz, Maggie Nelson, Wendy C. Ortiz). While these three forms of reflection on lives lived in Los Angeles appear disparate, Allmendinger identifies in them a shared refusal of (White, male, straight) “master” narratives of Southern Californian consciousness.

This chapter studies the 2020 photo-essay “A Primordial Culture” by Sri Lankan Canadian multidisciplinary artist Rajni Perera. It centers Perera’s work as the basis of a theory of divine adornment as a creative response to climate catastrophe. Such a theory is derived from an investment in thinking alongside Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism and demonstrates how forms of ornament might be complicated and utilized differently in response to Perera’s lone figure roaming unknown terrain following planetary collapse. The chapter weaves in discussions of both the photographs of Perera’s adorned traveler figure and her writing as a mode of describing a future world deeply rooted in, and indebted to, Indigenous, ancient, and anti-colonial feminist cosmologies.

Gwendolyn Alker considers particular aspects of Fornés’s work – including the way she asked her students to do yoga before writing, her various exercises developed to bypass the frontal cortex, and her prescient connections to the animal world – to argue for a “Fornésian ecology” and to evince its lessons for our collective futures on a damaged planet. Alker argues that the characters in Mud (alongside many of Fornés’s plays) must be understood through their relationship with each other and with their environment. Alker submits that Fornesian world-making prompts us to see the environment within the world of her plays, to be aware that we are outside that world and will never fully understand it, just as we cannot ever fully understand the animals that we encounter, even as Fornés’s plays challenge us to cultivate empathy for animals, understand their relevance, and believe in their truths, despite their otherness from ourselves.

German men and their collaborators perpetrated sexual violence during the Holocaust and throughout the war, during pogroms, in ghettos and labor-camps, as well as in concentration and extermination camps. They committed this violence against women, girls, and gender-nonconforming people as well as against minorities, such as Roma. Sexual coercion and abuse also occurred within the societies of those persecuted, for example in ghettos, camps, or partisan groups. In hiding or during liberation, people also experienced sexual violence at the hands of protectors, allies, or liberation soldiers. This chapter focuses on the experiences of women, but importantly also addresses those of male victims. It also addresses how sexual violence was part of Nazis’ and their collaborators’ acts of genocidal violence against Jews.

This chapter explores the contraception campaigns of feminist groups in the 1970s including the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, Irishwomen United and the Contraception Action Programme. It places the activities of these groups within the wider historiography of feminist health activism. Drawing primarily on oral history interviews with former members and feminist magazines, newspaper sources and the Roisin Conroy/Attic Press Archive, this chapter illuminates the personal experiences of Irish feminist activists. It illuminates the personal experiences of Irish feminist activists and illustrate the nuances of feminist demands for reproductive rights within the Irish case study. Moreover, as well as service provision, later groups such as IWU and CAP drew attention to the important class and geographic inequalities with regard to access to contraception in Ireland.

In this chapter, the author examines clinical psychological, traumatic developmental, and sociocultural perspectives of a serial murder. This includes media dynamics and feminist perspectives. The author discusses malingering, or the faking of mental illness. The case of female serial killer (FSK) Aileen Wuornos is revisited to illustrate clinical psychological issues. The cases of male serial killers (MSKs) Ronald Dominique and Dennis Rader (BTK Strangler) highlight phenomena from the chapter.

Critical accounts of the modes in which modernist poetry responds to the First World War continue to place an emphasis on men’s responses to war, either non-combatants such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, or those who served, among them Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis. This chapter does consider the men of the poetic avant-garde but also focuses on women of the avant-garde – H.D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Juliette Roche – to unearth the generative impact of the First World War on their poetry. As this chapter explores, the war features as subject matter and stimulus for the poetries of modernism and in the pages of modernist magazines, generating new forms and perspectives alongside the vivid expressions of anger, trauma, loss, and disillusionment. However, as this chapter also argues, women poets wrote the conflict differently; in confronting both patriarchal and military violence, the First World War became a key impetus for their feminist avant-garde poetic.

This chapter sets out the central argument of this book – that personal bioinformation has critical roles to play in our construction of self-narratives that are capable of remaining coherent and inhabitable when confronted by our embodied and socially embedded experiences and of supporting us in making sense of and navigating these experiences. It suggests that our lives and experiences are inescapably those of embodied beings and outlines what is entailed by this claim. It proposes that any satisfactory account of narrative self-constitution must accommodate the significance of our embodiment as the context in which we construct our self-narratives and as the source of both narrative contents and limits upon unfettered self-definition. From these premises, this chapter argues that personal bioinformation – to the extent that it provides reliable and meaningful insights into our bodily and biological states, capacities, and relationships – can provide vital constitutive and interpretive tools for the interpretation and construction of our embodied self-narratives. This discussion distinguishes its position from suggestions that personal bioinformation gets us closer to narrative ‘truth’ and responds to concerns that proposing a narrative role for bioinformation commits us to the view that our identities are defined by our biology or bodies as objects.

This chapter introduces a set of six principles to guide the evaluation and design of rights-based care and support policy in liberal welfare states. The principles build on and extend the reconciliation efforts discussed in earlier chapters, using the common thread of social citizenship rights claims that runs through the feminist, carer and disability rights perspectives. The principles provide criteria for evaluating the extent to which existing policies encompass the concerns of multiple care and disability perspectives, including whether they ease policy tensions between supporting women’s unpaid care and paid work and between meeting the claims of carers and those of people with disabilities. The principles can also inform the design of policies that promote equal social citizenship rights to care, support and paid work participation for all parties to these relationships. The principles address matters including access to financial resources and good quality services; flexibility in how life is organized; time for unpaid care, paid work and self-care; incorporation of the ‘voice’ of all affected people in the policy design; and responding to difference associated with gender inequality, disability and impairment, and citizenship status.

This chapter explores the importance of women’s leadership with a focus on community-building activities. The term leadership is examined in relation to sex/gender, feminism, the qualities and styles that align with women’s gendered socialization, gender scripts and worldviews. Using a case example, we illustrate how feminist community leaders might select among six approaches to build trust and optimism in their followership. These frameworks include Transformational leadership, Servant leadership, Collaborative leadership, Innovation leadership, Diversity and Inclusion leadership, and Emotionally Intelligent leadership. Each leadership approach is synergistic with a feminist framework. The chapter discusses how women leaders can draw on these frameworks to maximize their effectiveness. We also discuss strategies to develop women as community leaders with consideration of the unique circumstances and needs of women underprivileged backgrounds.