The Feminist Club Amsterdam
Introduction The fight for women’s liberation is a crucial step toward ending all forms of social oppression. However, not everyone is able to recognise the oppression of women to its full extent. Some might even say that equality has already been achieved. Feminist scholars, on the other hand, share the belief that emancipation from all […]
This article will analyze one of the most famous cases of the ECHR regarding the right to abortion. This case is the A, B, C v Ireland, 2010. Abortion was prohibited under Irish criminal law by sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. A referendum held in 1983 resulted in the […]
Written by Matisse Lefebvre In her influential 1988 work Surviving Sexual Violence, Liz Kelly introduced the concept of a ‘continuum’ to describe male sexual violence against women. This concept was originally based on two dictionary definitions. The first one denotes ‘a basic common character that underlies many different events’ and the second a ‘continuous series […]
The exceptional legislative measures taken by the French government since the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate the country’s procreative social norms: parents have been intensely supported, guided and assisted during the crisis. Not surprisingly, although procreation is addressed as a public issue, the right not to procreate has mostly been repressed. Sterilization as a definitive contraceptive method was legalized in 2001 in France, following intense debates on sexual and reproductive rights. However, does the reality of the sterilization process illustrate the straight-forwardness and accessibility of legal texts? Through a focus group I organized, participants showed otherwise: gynecologists are complicit to the pronatalist French government, which manipulates its population into procreating to activate generational renewal. This illustrates a highly complex and layered system in which culture, health and education, amongst others, intertwine with each other, striving for the accomplishment of political goals.
An article written by Matisse Lefebvre “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” (Michel Foucault, 1976) Michel Foucault, in his influential work The History of Sexuality (first volume), explores how sexuality started being conceptualized differently at the end of the nineteenth century onwards. The parallelism between “sodomite” and “homosexual” […]
This is a book review of three important books for postcolonial feminism:
Ahmed, L. (1993). Women and gender in Islam: Historical roots of a modern debate.
Delphy, C. (2015). Separate and dominate: Feminism and Racism after the War on Terror.
Mohanty, C. T. (2005). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity.