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In 2012 a New Zealand feminist group launched a campaign against a series of local beer advertisements they deemed “retro-sexist.” The campaign generated media coverage across a range of viewpoints, but drew a largely negative response from the online public. This article analyses a comprehensive corpus of 753 online comments responding to news of the campaign. We discuss the dominant discursive constructions of gender and of feminists, and the ways these were deployed to trivialise the campaign, demonise the feminist campaigners, and depoliticise the issues. The comments overall, ironically, simultaneously disavow and perform sexism in this online public space. This imbrication of the denial and doing of sexism creates a hostile reception for public feminist voices, potentially dampening the field of possibility for action against sexism within mediated culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a decade and a half since Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell's (2001) “Jekyll and Hyde: Men's constructions of feminism and feminists” called scholarly attention to men's discursive splitting of feminism and feminists into good and monstrous variants. In this article, we ask whether this double vision persists and how it operates in a cultural moment when feminism and feminist issues are (re)entering the mainstream. We draw from data collected in the course of a New Zealand study exploring how young people were making sense of sexism, feminism and gender (in)equality. Our analysis of participants' accounts suggests a binary discursive formulation of feminism is alive and well: “unreasonable feminism” damns and dismisses feminism, while “fair feminism” affirms it, aligning it with equality. Where previous research has shown how such pejorative and affirming accounts are worked together in ways that dilute or depoliticise feminism, we explore how teenagers who explicitly adopted a feminist identity drew on these discourses to justify a more politicised feminist position. Many participants adopted a practice of “reasonable feminism”, embodying and evidencing feminist reasonableness through their rhetorical and performative devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a cooperative enquiry on how feminism looks like in daily practice in an educational setting in Aotearoa, New Zealand and how the application of feminism differ across academic disciplines. The enquiry led researchers through four phases that address propositional knowledge, recording and observing practical knowledge and highlighting experiential knowledge. It refers to feminism today as more about raising awareness about sexism and barriers to women's choices.

Over the past decade the relationship between feminism and eugenics has become an increasingly important site of research. This relationship, however, remains to be examined in New Zealand. This article interrogates the ways in which female reformers, colonial feminists and female health and welfare workers engaged in eugenic debates in New Zealand during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It situates the 1924 Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders in New Zealand and the sterilization debate of the 1930s as representative of women's role as both the agents and subjects of eugenics in this period. Eugenics offered women a discourse of moral and social reform that fitted neatly with the ideals of colonial feminism and, by extension, enabled them to participate in national debates about racial health. However, in their testimony before the 1924 Inquiry and in the subsequent debates surrounding sterilization, women articulated and prescribed eugenic solutions for 'deviant women' and cast themselves as the 'mothers of the race'. As authors of eugenics for other women, white middle-class female reformers, health professionals and colonial feminists complicate the history of eugenics in New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]