Anorexia has a higher mortality rate than any other mental illness and most deaths occur in women. The feminist view is that we are all at risk of developing eating disorders and that the battle for control over the young woman’s life between mother and daughter is key in how anorexia begins. However, current evidence suggests mothers have been unfairly blamed, and that genetic factors play a powerful part in our vulnerability to eating disorders, with genes interacting with environmental factors. Services and expertise to treat young people with eating disorders are lacking and talk of ‘terminal anorexia’ is abhorrent. The fact that these disorders affect more women than men has influenced the level of clinical and research funding that they get. Services must move away from their reliance on BMI to decide who gets care, and their practice of only accepting those who fit into rigid diagnostic boxes. We all must all challenge, as feminism urged us, our society’s obsession with body image. However, feminism also needs to embrace the science that explains how some women are much more vulnerable to developing eating disorder than others, and why biology also matters.

This chapter examines several feminist approaches to the study and practice of international relations. It highlights the similarities between these approaches, but also the differences. It does this first by tracing the interventions made by feminists into international relations and the creation of a distinctly feminist IR agenda. Second, it uses the ‘gender lens’ to demonstrate and analyse how experiences and understandings in international relations can be ‘gendered’. Finally, it explains and examines the critiques made by the different feminist approaches to international relations.

Women figure prominently in Kerouac’s work, from novels explicitly about women he had encountered in his life (Maggie Cassidy and Tristessa), to short stories like “Good Blonde,” to the lengthy, often lyrical passages about women in The Subterraneans and On the Road. This chapter explores Kerouac’s controversial representations of women, which are often sexist, misogynist, essentialist, racist. Women in Kerouac’s works, even at their most indelible and dramatic, are, as the Beat writer Joyce Johnson termed them, “minor characters”; they catalyze or support action, struggle for recognition, then disappear from the story. Even when the female characters are presumptively protagonists, as in Maggie Cassidy or Tristessa or “Good Blonde,” they are still not much more than objects of narrative delectation or vehicles for emotional expression.

This chapter answers the question ’does central Europe exist?’ by first drawing a literary-historical line between Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, focusing particularly on the critical tensions in Kundera’s construction of a vanished culture and on the West’s mythologizing of central Europe. It then turns to two Prague-set novels, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, which explores the condition of stubborn aesthetic individualism under communism, and Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space, set in the months following the splitting-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992. Beyond the Czech lands, the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, a significant work of avant-garde feminism, offers a doomed fantasy of post-war Austro-Hungarian relationships. Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, set in the Polish–Silesian borderlands, is a revenge thriller whose narrator is inspired by the radicalism of William Blake. These case studies signal the ways central Europe has been confabulated by British writers; they also show how an evolving canon of fiction-in-translation is appropriately pluralizing and updating the West’s idea of the ‘middle’.

This chapter investigates Gwen Harwood’s subversion of gendered presumptions of authorship and style. After discussing her skilful redress of a male-dominant literary culture through hoax poetry, it considers how Harwood mobilised male personae to critique the cultural valuing of science and reason, explore sexual immorality, and address women’s experience of domesticity. It discusses how Harwood celebrated motherhood but was also one of the earliest writers to articulate its associated realities of exhaustion, loss of self, and feelings of despair and rage. The chapter argues that Harwood lays important groundwork for second-wave feminism while representing the ambiguities of care and connection. The chapter also engages with Harwood’s later exploration of death and the dynamic between sex and spirituality.

This chapter outlines how the 1970s brought radical expression, new explorations of poetic persona, and increasing belief in the poet’s role to advocate for rights and freedoms. It argues that anthologies seeking to capture the zeitgeist failed to do so, sometimes due to using frameworks borrowed from North America that elided local diversity. The chapter asserts that small press culture constituted a provisional, heterogeneous commons that undid traditional definitions of authorship and form, and offered a space to air the previously taboo. It traces the turn to America as well as to popular culture, other media, and documentary. Through an examination of Michael Dransfield’s reception, it demonstrates how umbrella terms delimit complex individual poetics while demonstrating affiliations in Dransfield’s self-examination with contemporaries like Pam Brown, Nigel Roberts, and Vicki Viidkikas. The chapter also considers the impact of the first anthology of women’s poetry, Mother, I’m Rooted. It redresses the elision of its editor, Kate Jennings, from other anthologies and critical framings of the period, as well as the marginalisation of Kevin Gilbert.

This chapter focuses on the fiction of women’s liberation and its representations of vegetarianism. The first part offers readings of the fiction of Brigid Brophy, a pioneer of the animal rights movement, and Isabel Colegate in the context of the British class system; the second uses several novels by North American writers (Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Alison Lurie) to offer a rethinking of Carol J. Adams’s theory of feminist-vegetarianism before suggesting the ways in which Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn helps us to link vegetarian/vegan theory with decolonial theory and practice.

This chapter picks up the discussion on gendered violence and gendered order established by the Nazarbayev regime. Never before did any movement pay so much attention to this agenda. Never before in the contemporary history of Kazakhstan did protest movements call out openly on double oppression of the regime – through its patriarchal and authoritarian nature of governing. In this chapter, I also focus on the ideas of class, inequality, and transnational dialogue of Oyan, Qazaqstan and Qazaq Koktemi with other protest movements in the world. Dwelling further on my argument about Qazaq Koktemi representing the fading of the post-Soviet era, I also analyse in detail the 8 March 2021 Women’s Rally in Almaty and the many actors united behind its call for de-Sovietizing and de-stereotyping this vital day of mobilization. I believe that the 2021 Women’s March opened many eyes to the fact that there is a vibrant plurality of views and activist forms within Qazaq Koktemi and that these forms are no longer chained by the old paradigms of the ‘gender’ question in Nazarbayev’s terms, with the tokenization of female politicians and persistent sexism in the political domain.

This chapter explores William Morris’s developing views about the ‘woman question’ across his life, focusing in particular on his comments within press interviews, his literary works, and his interpersonal relationships, be this with employees, friends, or family. It considers the past scholarship on this topic, which has tended to focus on debating whether Morris can be considered a ‘feminist’ or not. It emphasises that although Morris agreed in the need for adult suffrage for all and at times actively promoted progressive causes such as equal pay and the need for sexual freedom (even within marriage), he did still believe women had different roles to play to men in society, although these views could be inchoate and ill defined. The chapter showcases how Morris’s views were shaped by the male-orientated networks he inhabited in his political and professional life and by contemporary anxieties about the supposed effeminacy of artistic men. Moreover, it examines his views in relation to others within the networks of fellowship which made up the socialist and women’s movements, to situate and compare his views, and to best explore how Morris’s writings and ideas contributed to public discourse about women and gender at the brink of the twentieth century.

This chapter provides an overview of how various aspects of sexuality are dealt with in different Islamic traditions. If first looks at the Qur'an, the Sunna and pre-modern Islamic legal sources. It then focuses on how some medical and erotological sources dealt with the issue in the past, and finally looks at how contemporary feminists are pushing back against patriarchal interpretations of Islamic traditions. The chapter argues that pre-modern texts can help explain how sexuality is understood in contemporary Muslim-majority societies, where continuities are as striking as ruptures, especially when coming to religious or legal sources. It also reminds us of the danger of essentialism, oversimplification and lack of historical contextualization when looking at Islamic and religious traditions in general.

This chapter describes the repression of the diversity of sexualities and the affirmation of heteronormative and patriarchal sexuality as a central element in dictatorships in the twentieth century.In authoritarian and dictatorial contexts, masculinity and virility serve as a basis for political power. This has led to historical contexts in which misogyny, patriarchy, and heteronormativity are highly valued socially, and diverse sexual practices and gender identities criminalized, with the imprisonment of women who assume roles and actions that are considered outside their remit as women. The first part of the chapter offers examples of how authoritarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar, were particularly violent against diverse gender and sexualities. The second part highlights the Dictatorships in Latin America, including the importance of the Cold War and anti-communism and the connection of both with moral issues, founded on doctrines of national security. The final section discusses how LGBTQ+ people, often allied with feminists, started organisations that questioned these repressive discourses and practices, and thus contributed to the end of the dictatorships, although that role has barely been recognized by leftist parties and resistance organisations, in what remains a very tense relationship.

The relationship between feminism and sexuality in the long twentieth century is both complex and multifaceted. Whether sexuality is understood as congenital or acquired, defined by object choice or aim, central to the character of an individual or the health of a population, it is a highly contested and contradictory set of discourses and institutional practices. Feminism is similarly impossible to define as a coherent ideology or political praxis. At once a historically specific political and cultural phenomenon emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century, feminism is also a highly differentiated transnational event that belies a single origin, set of beliefs, or constituency. Organized around two key historical figures–the modern girl and the feminist-as-lesbian–this essay draws on feminist, queer, and historical studies of the world-wide feminist movements of the 1910s-1930s, and of the women’s liberation era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to trace the connections between the commodification and politicization of women’s sexuality as two axes around which the unsettled and generative relationship between modern sexuality and feminism revolves.