#FEAS – Feminist Educators Against Sexism are committed to interrupting, challenging and otherwise shouting out about sexism in the academy and other educational spaces.
#FEAS was formed in 2016 by Mindy Blaise, Emily Gray and Linda Knight and emerged out of a funded project to develop arts-based interventions into sexism in higher education. Since then, #FEAS has grown from a group of three to an international collective that includes a Facebook page with over 900 members, a monthly cite club with over 150 members as well as research and creative partnerships.
With Linda Knight stepping away from her #FEAS work and into new opportunities, our dancer stretching in the wings, Jo Pollitt, made an entrance in early 2020 to help us continue our #FEAS journey.
#FEAS develop interventions that are performed at conferences and other public events. Our interventions include Project P:, Power Dressing, #FEAS Feminist Salutes, sexist/anti-sexist bingo cards, a series of t-shirts interventions, whistles to blow when no-one is listening, butterfly nets for catching those elusive opportunities and a stand up comedy performances that aren’t really very funny at all, and that deploy the literal figure of the feminist killjoy.
By challenging sexism through humour, irreverence and collective action we highlight the inequalities, absurdities and dreary everydayness of sexisms in the academy. From the original three, #FEAS now has hundreds of international members.
For #FEAS, “Gender discrimination […] not only affects people identifying with the category of woman, but to identities within that category in different ways. For example lesbian women, masculine women and non-gender conforming women experience sexism differently to heterosexual and/or cisgender women. Additionally trans* and gender diverse people also experience gender-based discrimination within higher education institutions that takes on yet other forms. Sexism is different for Indigenous women, women of colour and working-class women. So when we speak of sexism, we are talking about something multiplicitous—we are speaking of sexisms” (Gray, Knight and Blaise, 2018).
Read an article about #FEAS from the The Age/The Sydney Morning Herald
Read a blog post by #FEAS from the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)
Read an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) article featuring #FEAS: ABC article
Read a paper by the original 3 #FEAS
Feminist Educators Against Sexism 