Teen girls’ ‘sexy selfies’ have become highly politicised over the last years, and while feminist scholars have comprehensively analysed present day discourses about this topic, research about teen girls’ own reflections is still scarce. Studies that did include girls’ voices demonstrated how girls’ navigations of sexiness are related to the performance of gender and sexuality. The present article, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork among Dutch young people, contributes to and extends this strand of research by exploring how girls’ navigations (...) of sexy selfies are related to the performance of not just gender and sexuality, but also other intersecting axes of social differentiation, including axes that have remained undertheorised such as smartness, maturity and popularity. Through their navigations of sexy selfies, girls perform complex, intersectional identities in interaction with dominant discourses about sexiness, the materiality of their bodies, their social position and the specific context of self-making practices. Involving this complexity in discussions about sexy selfies can create promising opportunities for interrogating social norms, stereotypes and power inequalities. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discuss the position of ethnic minority women in relation to their career-building in the Serbian higher education system and reaching decision-making positions. The author defines two hypotheses: that there are invisible biases in the sciences that put ethnic minority women in a challenging position when attempting to build a career in academia, and that these women encounter a glass ceiling when trying to reach more senior positions. The analysis is based on 16 semi-structured (...) interviews conducted with Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian female teaching staff employed at two Serbian universities. Intersectionality as a theoretical framework and method was used in the analysis of interviews, along with narrative analysis. Analysis of the interviews showed that ethnic minority women adopt specific strategies when discussing and explaining their difficulties and opportunities in the higher education system of Serbia. The intersectional analysis indicates that ethnic minority women struggle with invisible biases at the individual level, and, due to the horizontal segregation in sciences, have to overcome a situation of double jeopardy in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics studies. The findings suggest that women from ethnic minorities face a glass ceiling in relation to obtaining decision-making positions. Namely, such positions are usually only guaranteed to them within their own ethnic enclaves at departments with majority female staff. However, positions higher than these are rarely attainable. (shrink)

Identity as expression: Narrativity, embodiment, and intersectionality How to understand intersectional aspects of personal identity such as gender, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, age and (dis)ability? In this paper, I argue that it requires a notion of personal identity as expression to do so. Most philosophical theories of personal identity do not take into account social, embodied factors such as the ones named above. In order to consider these, I suggest to start from philosophical accounts of narrative identity, notably Schechtman’s (...) and Ricoeur’s. Instead of taking narrative identity to be exhaustive, I propose to understand it as the expressed aspect of personal identity. Identity as expression does not only pertain to linguistic utterances, but also to the body. In the paper, I derive a notion of the body as ontological ground for sociality from Ricoeur’s philosophy, which includes that our body primordially is body among other bodies and makes us part of a community. Ricoeur still thinks embodiment in a general sense, however, and does not reflect upon its being gendered, being assigned a race or ethnicity, etc.. In the final part of the paper, I suggest to turn to Sartre’s philosophy of the body, because he considers this social dimension of embodiment. His notion ‘unrealizables’ offers interesting opportunities to incorporate the view of others upon us into our self-conception. Intersectional aspects of personal identity such as gender, race, etc. consequently should be seen as factors that we do not experience in the first person, but that form the limits of who we are assigned to by others, that we cannot avoid taking a position towards. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have increasingly expressed their worries about the depoliticization of intersectionality since it has travelled from its point of origin in US Black feminist theory to the shores of Europe. They have argued that the subject for which the theory was intended has been displaced, that Black feminists have been excluded from the discussion, and that white European feminists have usurped all the credit for intersectionality as theory. Intersectionality has been transformed into a product of the neoliberal academy rather (...) than the helpmeet for social justice it was meant to be. This article explores three of the bones of contention in these debates about intersectionality and its travels. The author argues that they rest on notions of ownership that, while understandable, are untenable and, ultimately, counterproductive. A case will be made for taking a less proprietary stance toward critical theories and instead treating the travels of intersectionality as an occasion for dialogue rather than a contest over ownership. (shrink)