In 2014, we were invited to present a panel session on feminist intelligence at the International Public Relations Conference: Barcelona PR Meeting #4, where scholars were asked to consider the idea of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 2006). Opening up public relations scholarship to hybrid, generative understandings (Haraway, 1991) of how gender relations play out in everyday interactions, formal organizational processes and governance structures is a radical political act. Feminist challenges to traditional public relations scholarship require “a practical politics of change and transformation whilst avoiding the problems of universalism, essentialism and privilege” (Thomas & Davies, 2005 p. 711). This paper explores our efforts to define “feminist intelligences” or modalities for public relations and, indeed, to grapple with what a feminist public relations research agenda might entail.

We have individual and diverse understandings of feminism and feminist theory, although we agree feminism is concerned primarily with two objectives: “The first is descriptive: to reveal obvious and subtle gender inequalities. The second is change-oriented: to reduce or eradicate those inequalities” (Martin, 2003, p. 66). We approached the topic differently and in ways that built on our existing understandings, research expertise and interests. Kate Fitch, drawing on her historical research into the Australian public relations industry (Fitch and Third, 2010, 2014) as well as contemporary public relations discourse, examined processes of professionalization in order to understand the construction of gendered occupational identities. Melanie James considered the application of positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999; James, 2014a), focusing on the gendered social force of public relations positioning acts and how the assignment and taking up of rights and duties inherent in positions is undertaken. Judy Motion drew upon her background as a critical scholar to problematize how power relations and discursive struggles play out in popular culture. As a starting point for our conversation we applied bell hooks’ notions of “back talk” and “talking back” which “meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure, daring to disagree and sometimes just having an opinion … it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless” (hooks, 1989, pp. 5, 8).

These notions of resistance offer a useful metaphor for our joint endeavor as we perceive feminist theory “offers a contingent politics of constant vigilance within power relations” (Thomas & Davies, 2005, p. 711) and that feminist methodology offers “a field of inquiry. . . bound together. . . by shared commitments to questions” (DeVault, 1996, p. 30). We therefore present this paper as a talking back to public relations scholarship that we argue has inadequately theorized the significance of gender. In recent years this has begun to change but, as Hon noted in 1995, “discrimination against women in public relations cannot be separated from the organizational and societal systems that produce gender biases” (۱۹۹۵, p. 65), and this remains the situation: “most public relations researchers who study gender have focused exclusively on a female/male dichotomy in salary and job satisfaction without considering other defining human relations factors” (Pompper, 2012, p. 89). Since the conference, we have had an ongoing discussion around these ideas. This paper represents a continuation of the conversation.