Special Edition: Fighting Feminism – Organised Opposition to Women’s Rights; Guest Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

<p>This special issue presents a series of papers by scholars who participated in a workshop entitled ‘Men's Groups: Challenging Feminism’, which was held at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, 26-27 May 2014. The workshop was organised by Susan B Boyd, Professor of Law and Chair in Feminist Legal Studies at the UBC Faculty of Law, and was sponsored by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, the Peter A Allard School of Law, the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies at UBC, and the <em>Canadian Journal of Women and the Law</em>. The aim of the workshop was to bring together feminist scholars from multiple disciplines and multiple national contexts to explore a source of resistance to feminism that has been largely overlooked in scholarly research: the growing number of nationally situated and globally linked organisations acting in the name of men's rights and interests which contend that men are discriminated against in law, education and government funding, and that feminism is to blame for this. This special edition presents eight papers inspired by the workshop, authored by scholars from Canada, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden and the United States. A second special issue comprised of eight other papers inspired by the workshop was published in the <em>Canadian Journal of Women and the Law</em> as volume 28(1) in 2016.</p><p>To find out more about this special edition, download the PDF file from this page.</p>

Sluts and soyboys: MGTOW and the production of misogynistic online harassment

“…Incels have been attributed responsibility for inciting several high-profile incidents of male violence – the 2014 Isla Vista killings (Blommaert, 2017) perpetrated by Elliot Rodger and later the 2018 Toronto van attack perpetrated by Alek Minassian (Jaki et al, 2018). These attacks have put a spotlight on MRA and Incel groups within the Manosphere, and the literature has begun to conceptualise the link between these subcultures and how they may encourage and propagate violence (Dragiewicz and Mann, 2016; Kalish and Kimmel, 2010; Nicholas and Agius, 2018). Furthermore, platforms such as Reddit have begun to respond to the threat posed by radical Manosphere groups, closing the r/Incels subreddit and suspending r/TheRedPill.…”

Addressing Sexual Violence at Ontario Universities in the Context of Rising Anti-Feminist Backlash

“…Rather than framing MRAs and incels as anomalous "fringe" movements, they must be understood as ex isting on a spectrum with more subtle mainstream ex pressions of popular misogyny (BanetWeiser 2018;Dragiewicz and Mann 2016). Michael Messner (2016, 16) points to the emergence of a more insidi ous version of antifeminism that is grounded in neo liberalism and maintains male privilege by "skirt[ing] analysis of structural inequalities in favor of a com monsense celebration of individual choice for women and men."…”

GROW: a model for mentorship to advance women's leadership in global health

“…An overarching theme of GROW is feminist praxis . Research documenting the inequalities, injustices, and violence faced by women and girls, and advocacy for women's equality, has been met with scrutiny, and even backlash [ 18 ]. GROW trains scholars to develop new theory and to apply rigorous methods, producing exceptional evidence to meet this resistance and to inform debates that advance women's interests.…”