Chapter 1 introduces the argument, summarises the findings, and describes the conceptual framework applied throughout the book to analyse UN mediation as a gendered-colonial institution. It begins by noting the slow progress of the WPS Agenda in UN mediation, which the scholarly literature has not adequately addressed. It also stakes out the significance of WPS in UN mediation for the realisation of women's right to political participation, the advancement of gender equality in post-conflict contexts, and the diffusion of international approaches to gender-sensitive mediation from the UN to other organisations. The next section discusses how UN mediation can be analysed as an institution and identifies the key concepts and techniques used in parsing its gendered institutional logics. It also argues for using decolonial concepts of gender in studying the UN. Next, the chapter describes the interpretive research design and considers the ethical and practical implications of this approach. Last, the chapter concludes with an overview of each chapter.

Chapter 8 draws together the major themes of the analysis and prompts further thinking on decolonial feminist modes of conflict resolution. This chapter concludes that the UN’s attempt to stay relevant through developing mediation expertise is counterproductive, and contends that it should instead adopt a solidaristic approach that foregrounds politics and aims to produce ‘knowledge encounters’ between different worlds. The bulk of the chapter discusses some principles for decolonial feminist approaches to mediation, which include encounters across different ontologies of peace, decolonising expertise, solidarity, and establishing relations of care and accountability.

This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical and methodological perspectives underpinning LGBTIQ psychology and considerations for undertaking research with LGBTIQ populations. An overview of five main theoretical approaches (essentialism, social constructionism, critical realism, feminism, and queer theory) is provided, and each is discussed in relation to its implications for understanding LGBTIQ people’s lives and experiences. The construct ‘heteronormativity’ is also introduced. The chapter also introduces a range of overarching methodological approaches used in LGBTIQ psychological research (e.g., experiments, surveys, qualitative studies) and explores the extent to which each had been used for researching LGBTIQ topics. The final section of this chapter focuses on considerations in undertaking research with LGBTIQ populations. Challenges in defining populations of interest, access to and recruitment of participants, and principles for ethical practice with LGBTIQ populations are discussed here.

The most enduring stereotypes about feminists is that they are manhaters. Interestingly, few empirical studies have examined this stereotype for its veracity. Chapter 4 critically examines the stereotype that feminists dislike men and that feminism is a movement against men. Social psychological research on women’s attitudes toward men is examined and finds that anti-feminists actually feel more hostility toward men than do feminists. The function and implication of the manhating feminist myth is critically examined in this chapter. The feminist manhater myth persists in order to undermine the feminist movement and to drive a wedge between traditional and non-traditional women. Related strategies to make feminism unpalatable, such as lesbian-baiting, are also critically examined. Chapter 4 ends with strategies to reduce the impact of the manhater stereotype and to foster gender equality. The empirical work measuring the effects of women/gender studies classes on students is presented, and teaching children about gender discrimination are some strategies presented.

The conclusion turns to the implications of this study today, both in terms of our own view of liberal democratic society and the place of women in it. Grouchy shows us, firstly, how significant ideas can persist through an era of upheaval like the French Revolution: through constant negotiation, continual re-interrogation, and a determination to hold on to core concepts while adapting and discarding others. It argues, furthermore, that Grouchy’s politics and philosophy provide further evidence that women in history have thought and acted politically, but not always in the ways we commonly understand as ‘thinking’ or ‘acting’. It expresses the hope that the example of Grouchy will provide inspiration for other historians who wish to reconstruct the ideas of those in the past – in particular women and other marginalised groups – who did not do all, or any, of their thinking over the course of long texts. The reconstruction of this rich history will, in turn, help combat the problem of authority still encountered by women today in political and intellectual spheres. Finally, it ends with the suggestion that Grouchy’s thought may be of use for those twenty-first century theorists who argue that emotions are essential to successful liberal democracies.

Gender remains absent from the agenda of Market Studies. This chapter asks (1) why gender is absent, (2) why Market Studies should bother with gender, and (3) how Market Studies scholars might go about incorporating questions of gender in their research. The chapter traces the roots of the field’s avoidance of gender issues to the idea that gender is either a problematic or an unnecessary concept. The chapter further suggests that studying the co-performation of markets and gender promises to lead to an improved understanding of both gender and markets. Imagining avenues for future research, the chapter seeks inspiration in ethnomethodological theories of gender and Butler’s theory of gender performativity as well as proposes the strategy of seeking constructivist answers to feminist questions.

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.