The workshop panel 'Fishy Feminists: Drawing on the Past to Imagine Feminist Futures of Seas and Coasts' organized and chaired by Dr. Christine Knott and Dr. Madeleine Gustavsson was held on June 27, 2019 as part of 2019 MARE People & the Sea Conference. It brought together new and seasoned researchers who are building on historical feminist informed lenses to further our understanding of fisheries and aquaculture workers and communities in new ways. 

The session included presentations by Paul Foley 'The substance of (sea) life and capitalism: Ecological-social reproduction, power and global change', Jana Kopelent Rehak 'Smith Island: Family Frames and Gendered Knowledge#conferences', Annet Pauwelussen & Yoshitaka Ota 'On fluid bodies and disgruntled spirits: manifestations of gender in human-sea interactions' and Jennifer Lee Johnson 'Big Women, Small Fish, and the Myth of Banana-Based Patriarchy in Uganda'.

Feminist Theory and Fisheries

Feminist theory has a long history of informing gendered aspects of fisheries in select pockets of mostly social science literatures (Frangoudes and Gerrard 2018). The development of these literatures over time have included a broadening of analysis in regard to both topics and subjects, moving away from focusing on just women in female dominated roles to understanding the ways in which changes to fisheries have gendered consequences, including masculinities (Fabinyi 2007; Power 2008; Turgo 2014). The variety of topics that have been taken up include, for example, waterscapes, climate change (Musinguzi et al. 2017), aquaculture (Williams et al. 2005), food security (Allison 2013; Harper et al. 2013) and ocean governance and conservation (Gissi 2018). More recently efforts to understand how individuals lived experiences within multiple sometime conflicting identities offer experiences of privilege and/or discrimination via intersectionality (Lokuge 2017). Some of the recent work also provides unique feminist theoretical viewpoints (Probyn 2016), and critiques gender as a practical or applicable concept in some fishery communities (Bennett 2005).