FemResThe Living Review
10Voice and knowledge

Whose voices are heard?

From a room to write in to diaries, testimony and film, this issue follows how women’s experiences become knowledge and history, and who controls publishing, archives and public debate. Speaking requires time, resources and listeners, as well as power over interpretation and circulation. Across creative work, collective knowledge, historical records and media responsibility, we examine the distance between speaking and being heard.

Cover story
Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios

In this issue

30 items

Books8

01

Books · Sep 2001

Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios

The Latina Feminist Group

A Latina feminist collective uses testimonios to connect life stories, academic institutions and collaborative knowledge without erasing differences.

02

Books · Jan 1988

Sultana's Dream

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's 1905 feminist science-fiction story turns gendered access to education, public space, and science into a speculative experiment - and asks whether knowledge will serve everyday life or militarized power.

03

Books · Jan 2025

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

Woolf links income, institutional access and literary value to women’s writing, leaving tensions around anger and creative independence open.

04

Books · Jan 1892

A Voice from the South

Anna Julia Cooper

Through education, women’s status, and racial politics, Anna Julia Cooper asks who may speak for Black communities and how Black women can reshape knowledge and public life.

05

Books · Jan 2006

Writing Caste/Writing Gender

Sharmila Rege

Sharmila Rege reads Dalit women's life narratives as historical and theoretical knowledge, asking who gets to write caste and gender into India's feminist history.

06

Books · Feb 2001

The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave

Mary Prince

Mary Prince’s 1831 narrative links enslavement to bodily labor, family separation, marriage, and constrained freedom, while its editorial framing raises questions about testimony and authority.

07

Books · Jul 2018

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

枕草子 (Makura no Sōshi) / The Pillow BookSei Shōnagon

Written around 1000, The Pillow Book turns lists, poems, and courtly fragments into a woman's literary authority - while revealing the elite world that both enabled and limited that voice.

08

Books · Oct 1997

The Invention of Women

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí questions how ‘woman’ became a universal category, tracing Western gender theory through Yoruba history, language, and colonial knowledge-making.

Films7

01

Films · Sep 2018

Colette

Wash Westmoreland

A biographical drama about 19th-century French writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's growth and awakening. Keira Knightley brilliantly portrays this pioneering female writer who challenged gender norms, fought for authorial credit, and explored gender fluidity in her legendary life.

02

Films · Dec 2019

Little Women

Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig's 'Little Women' reinterprets Louisa May Alcott's classic novel from a contemporary feminist perspective, exploring 19th-century women's struggles between artistic creation, economic independence, and social expectations, breathing new life into the classic story.

03

Films · May 2023

Four Daughters

Les Filles d’OlfaKaouther Ben Hania

Kaouther Ben Hania uses testimony and reenactment to examine intergenerational violence, maternal authority and extremist recruitment in a Tunisian family.

04

Films · Nov 2022

She Said

Maria Schrader

A journalism drama directed by Maria Schrader, starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan. Adapted from the non-fiction book by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, following their investigation that exposed Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault scandal. The film deeply explores important issues including the #MeToo movement, gender politics in journalism, the power of women's testimony, and the courage needed to break silence.

05

Films · Mar 2024

My Sextortion Diary

Diari de la meva sextorsióPatricia Franquesa

Patricia Franquesa turns the digital traces of intimate-image blackmail into a documentary about consent, gendered shame and reclaiming authority over one's own story.

06

Films · Feb 2009

The Milk of Sorrow

La teta asustadaClaudia Llosa

Through an Indigenous Peruvian woman living with inherited fear, the film examines how wartime sexual violence survives in bodies, households, music, and unequal relations of service.

07

Films · Oct 2020

The Forty-Year-Old Version

Radha Blank

Nearly 40-year-old African American playwright Radha decides to reinvent herself as a rapper after facing setbacks in New York's art world. This semi-autobiographical black-and-white film deeply explores ageism, intersectional oppression of race and gender, artistic autonomy, and middle-aged women's identity reconstruction in male-dominated industries.

Videos2

Podcasts2

Articles5

01

Articles · Mar 1691

Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz: Learning, the Convent and Women’s Intellectual Authority

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

In her 1691 reply to Sor Filotea, Sor Juana uses autobiography, theology and classical learning to defend women’s study. This reading keeps the convent setting, her elite position and the argument’s limits in view.

02

Articles · Sep 2024

Bintou Sanankoua: A Woman at the Heart of History

Madina Thiam

Historian Madina Thiam’s three-part profile follows Bintou Sanankoua’s scholarship, teaching, feminist organizing and political life in Mali.

03

Articles · Jan 2015

Histories of the Self: Women's Diaries in Heian Japan

Sonja Arntzen

Sonja Arntzen reads three Heian women's diaries through poetry, marriage, court labor, and reading, showing how literary form shaped self-writing while exposing questions of class and representation.

04

Articles · Sep 1832

‘Why Sit Ye Here and Die?’ / ‘Lecture Delivered at Franklin Hall’: Knowledge, Work and Black Women’s Speech

Maria W. Miller Stewart

In an 1832 Boston address, Maria W. Stewart uses Christian rhetoric to call Black women and men toward learning and public participation while exposing how racialized labour restricts Black women’s opportunities.

05

Articles · Apr 2021

The Chilling: Online Violence Against Women Journalists and Press Freedom

Julie Posetti, Nabeelah Shabbir, Diana Maynard, Kalina Bontcheva & Nermine Aboulez

UNESCO and ICFJ combine survey, interview and social-media evidence to show how online violence silences women journalists and threatens the public’s right to know.

Papers6

01

Papers · Oct 1998

Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of 'Difference' and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position

Sharmila Rege

In this 1998 EPW essay, Sharmila Rege asks how Dalit women's situated experience can become collective feminist knowledge without turning identity into either silence or an unquestionable credential.

02

Papers · Oct 1995

Dalit Women Talk Differently

Gopal Guru

Gopal Guru’s 1995 EPW essay links Dalit women’s autonomous organizing to caste-shaped knowledge, gendered exclusion within Dalit politics, and the conditions of feminist solidarity.

03

Papers · Nov 2014

Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Through Kwezens’s maple-sap story and her own schooling, Simpson shows how land, kinship and Nishnaabeg knowledge shape education - and how colonial schooling suppresses Indigenous intelligence.

04

Papers · Jul 1987

Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

Carol Cohn

Carol Cohn's fieldwork traces how U.S. nuclear strategists' euphemisms, sexualized metaphors, and domestic imagery make mass violence appear technical, controlled, and rational.

05

Papers · Jan 2021

Engaging Girls with Disabilities through Cellphilming: Reflections on Participatory Visual Research as a Means of Countering Violence in the Global South

Engaging girls with disabilities through cellphilming: Reflections on participatory visual research as a means of countering violence in the Global SouthXuan Thuy Nguyen, Marnina Gonick, Tuyen Bui

Nguyen, Gonick and Bui examine how disabled girls in Vietnam use phone-made short films to represent violence and exclusion, and ask whether participatory images can shift who gets to narrate research.

06

Papers · Jan 2024

“Like Seeking Out a Lost Friend”: Reconsidering Pioneer Arab Feminists and Their Networks as Part of a/the First Wave

Roxanne Douglas

Roxanne Douglas reconstructs journals, salons, correspondence, and organizing across Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon to place Arab feminist networks inside - not after or outside - the history of feminism’s first wave.