European Journal of Women's Studies

Is there a feminist ideological undertone when women choose to organise separately, or are their motivations purely instrumental? While this question has been addressed by numerous researchers, most studies are mono-national; most extrapolate meaning from different types of networks/groups, and most do not carry out close examination of network members’ orientations. This article explores varieties of orientations to feminism among members of four networks for business and professional women in the UK and Germany. The findings suggest that even within a single network, members’ feminist orientations can vary, and can be different from the publicly/officially declared organisational position.

Central to scholarly discussions within the field of feminist epistemology is the question of a researcher’s positionality and the subsequent impact on knowledge production. In particular, Donna Haraway’s elaboration of ‘situated knowledge’ has been highly influential. As an epistemological principle, this concept emphasizes the researcher’s embodied location within the research context. Yet the question remains, how does one apply this principle within the concrete practices of knowledge production? In a research project based on Norwegian transnational adoptees’ identity work, the author, being an immigrant, was situated as an ‘outsider within’. How does this positionality influence knowledge production? The concept of ‘outsider within’ comes from standpoint epistemology and has been taken up within black feminist thought to authorize knowledge about dominant society produced from a position of marginality. However as a concrete situatedness, can an ‘outsider within’ position also be used to think about the production of situated knowledge? This article offers an exploration of these questions. The author argues that one way to put feminist situated knowledge to use within an empirical study is through the conceptualization of ‘outsider within’ as a situated interactive space instead of a fixed standpoint.

In Belgium, a service voucher scheme – known as Titres Services – was launched in 2004 in order to create employment and regularize the labor conditions of domestic workers. The extent to which this scheme has represented an improvement in domestic workers’ labor conditions, however, is still a matter of debate. This article explores the workers’ experience of the changes introduced by this scheme. It focuses on Latin American migrants that are currently working under this scheme in Brussels, situating them in relation to their previous experiences and the experience of other migrants who currently work in the informal market. The authors distinguish two tropes in their informants’ discourse, which describe their ambivalence regarding these changes. Using the Titres Services scheme’s rhetoric, the first one seeks to increase the social status of this occupation by presenting it as a ‘profession’. Contrarily, the second trope highlights the limits to professionalization.

‘Doing gender’ has often been used as the theoretical entrance for research on gender issues in the social sciences. However, research has been accused of using the concept in a ‘ceremonial’ way, treating gendered structures as static. In response to this claim, this article investigates the process of ‘hierarchization’, or how gendered and racial hierarchies occur through everyday practices and political and economic contexts in the rural, wild berry industry in contemporary Sweden. The industry has gone through a thorough transformation, from irregular and small-scale production to regularized and large-scale production, which has affected the intersection of gender and racial structures. In particular, Thai women have gone from being active participants both as entrepreneurs and as workers, to working under native men, or being passive receivers of men’s remittances. The mechanisms behind the intersection of gender and racial structures are a complex interplay of economic, social and institutional factors, which act on nested global, national and translocal scales.

This article sets out to critically examine the accounts of well-being produced by a middle-aged Swiss woman living in precarious prosperity. By taking on a feminist reading of the narrative on well-being, the article challenges the taken for granted assumption of the powerful agent in thriving societies. Insights from literature on happiness in nations and gender beliefs enabled addressing the woman’s capability to exert agency, while acknowledging the influence of the context in which narratives are embedded. In addition, the presence of a non-national interviewer appears to be an incentive for the interviewee’s compliance with cultural meta-narratives. The approach of well-being as ‘agential flourishing’ proved helpful in assessing the woman’s capability on a gendered career path in atypical employment to deal with precariousness.

This article analyses the cost of motherhood borne by Polish women. The cost of motherhood is defined as a drop in earnings caused by the presence of children. The findings show that motherhood in Poland is associated with a drop in women’s net monthly earnings of around 13–19%. The results also show that the cost of motherhood varies with the number of children and the drop in wages is particularly high for mothers of three or more children. The investigation of mother’s self-selection into employment suggests that the estimated cost would be higher if the choice could be accounted for.