So pleased to see the paper I co-authored with Jennet Kirkpatrick out in WSIF!

The paper is titled Beauvoir and Lorde confront the honorary man trope: Toward a feminist theory of political resistance. In the paper, we aim to re-imagine resistance by focusing on women's embodied experiences. We contest the honorary man trope that recognises women as true or real resisters only if they act like men and free themselves from the limitations ordinarily associated with their female embodiment and gender roles. We draw on Simone de Beauvoir and Audre Lorde to outline how acknowledgment of embodied agency can deepen our understanding of women's resistance activity in concrete instances and situations of resistance struggles.

Thinking resistance as embodied allows us to shed light on women resisters' novel possibilities for action, reveal their gendered vulnerabilities and delve into the difficult dilemmas they encounter in their resistance activity. Ultimately, our aim is to offer conceptual tools for scholars and activists to think beyond the honorary man framework. We believe these conceptual tools could be of use to feminist historians of resistance as well as feminist scholars across the social sciences, including the fields of political theory, sociology, and anthropology, and activists involved in multipronged struggles for freedom and justice today. We hope our critique of the honorary man traditions and our vision of embodied resistance will lead to a greater appreciation and further explorations of the complexities of resistance as experienced by women and other non-normate actors.

The paper is available open access; you can read it here.