Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1464700120988638
Shelley Budgeon
The increased visibility of feminism in mainstream culture has recently been noted, with the presence of both online and offline campaigns embedding feminist claims in a variety of everyday spaces. By granting recognition to women’s experiences, these campaigns continue the feminist practice of generating critical knowledge on the basis of gendered experience. In the post-truth era, however, the norms governing claims-making are being significantly reconstructed, with significant consequences for critiques of gender inequality. It is argued here that these norms are linked directly to a wider context of anti-feminism in which dismissing women’s claims is consistent with the goal that opponents of gender equality have of seeking and consolidating epistemic power in the face of what is perceived as systemic male disadvantage and victimhood. Returning to earlier debates within feminism, it is argued that the kinds of post-truth rhetoric used to dismiss women’s experience provide a challenge that feminism must confront. This rhetoric is often grounded in the authenticity of individual experience; however, experience cannot provide unmediated access to truth and, therefore, cannot provide the foundation for feminist claims. On the other hand, experience cannot merely offer one of many contested versions of ‘reality’. The excesses of both foundationalist and anti-foundationalist epistemology are countered with the argument that cognition is a human practice mediated by theoretical propositions which illuminate the question of what can be known. This is the role played by feminist theory in defending the role of experience.
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Pub Date : 2021-03-15DOI: 10.1177/14647001211000015
Toni Ingram
This article explores the potential of feminist new materialisms and theories of affect for reframing how we might think about beauty and the body. Through an exploration of girls, beauty and the school ball (prom), the article engages with Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action to conceptualise beauty as an affective-material process. This perspective involves an ontological shift in how girls, bodies and beauty are understood; from thinking about beauty and the human as discursively produced, towards a relational approach that conceptualises materiality and affect as co-constitutive forces. The article is interested in how such a framing might invite ways of understanding beauty that avoid binary frameworks, such as good/bad, subject/object and discourse/matter. I consider the potential this might offer feminist analyses of beauty, where the focus is less on what beauty is or what it means, and more on how it comes to be.
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Pub Date : 2021-03-05DOI: 10.1177/1464700121995019
Tegan Zimmerman
This manuscript pairs Margaret Atwood’s poem ‘Marsh Languages’ with Luce Irigaray’s recent philosophical text In the Beginning She Was. By doing so, an important conceptual resonance emerges between the two texts on the status of the loss of a maternal language and more broadly of the founding Mother at the origins of Western thought. Advancing a feminist poetics and ethics of the maternal, with its roots in nature, Atwood and Irigaray’s works are at odds with the enlightened language of our western masculine time, which seeks to disinherit its roots or to uproot itself. Atwood’s appeal in her poem ‘Marsh Languages’ reverberates with Luce Irigaray’s argument in In the Beginning She Was, which is that it is necessary for western philosophy to return to the marshes, so to speak, to return to the Presocratic philosopher-poets in order to discern how the logic of Western truth (via the male master-disciple) formed, and consequently discredited and covered over, a ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’. Engaging with Greek myth (Hesiod’s Muses, Plato’s cave and mother-daughter duo Persephone-Demeter), Atwood as poet and Irigaray as philosopher interrogate and contest our western patriarchal tradition, for its erasure of ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’, and suggest that the ethical implications of this silencing and forgetting have led to corrupt, destructive crisis-level relations, e.g. between humans, between humans and gods and between humans and nature.
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Pub Date : 2021-03-05DOI: 10.1177/1464700121995003
Kathleen Reeves
This article proposes that Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia, published in 1984, offers a model for thinking about care during the Covid-19 crisis. Against regimes of austerity, which regard care as a cost, Utopia considers care to be world-making. Mayer’s book, which I read as anti-work and family abolitionist, imagines motherhood as a public activity and organises this social care around pleasure rather than discipline or self-possession. Utopia imagines freedom through, not in spite of, interdependent bonds of compulsion. Today, feminists are once again criticising the nuclear family’s role in privatising care, and Utopia reminds us of similar, often overlooked utopian elements in 1970s feminism. In the present crisis, when care is both vital and elusive, it is particularly essential to assert the pleasures of care and to claim this care as freedom.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-20DOI: 10.1177/1464700121994073
T. Meer, A. Müller
On the African continent, coloniality/modernity and the (un)freedom of queer peoples intersect in particular historically embedded and newly oppressive ways, making queerness a significant area for...
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Pub Date : 2021-02-20DOI: 10.1177/1464700121994076
J. Davidson
In recent years, there has been increasing discontent with feminism’s understanding of its own history and, more specifically, the place of the feminist 1970s. Feminist scholars – most prominently, Elizabeth Freeman, Victoria Hesford, Kate Eichhorn and Kathi Weeks – have sought to move beyond the feelings of progress and nostalgia that the feminist 1970s often inspires. There is a need to mediate between the urge to leave the past behind and the desire to return to it, with feminists adopting positions that ricochet between progress and nostalgia. In this article, I argue that the feminist literary utopia offers a particularly productive means by which to represent this ambivalent, paradoxical temporal understanding. The classic feminist utopias of the 1970s have become the object of critical contention in more recent speculative texts, which destabilise both progress and nostalgia in their evocation of second-wave separatism. To elaborate this claim, I turn to Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army, which critically assesses the feminist 1970s via an account of a separatist feminist enclave in a near-future Britain. The community of women is a homage to the feminist 1970s, displaying both the potentialities of the movements of this time as well as their sometimes violent limitations. The dreams of the 1970s emerge in the text as an unsettling presence in the world, a force that can neither be left behind nor fully embraced.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-07DOI: 10.1177/1464700120988639
Emma Foster
Echoing other articles in this special issue, this article re-evaluates a collection of feminist works that fell out of fashion as a consequence of academic feminism embracing poststructuralist and postmodernist trends. In line with fellow contributors, the article critically reflects upon the unsympathetic reading of feminisms considered to be essentialising and universalistic, in order to re-evaluate, in my case, ecofeminism. As an introduction, I reflect on my own perhaps unfair rejection of ecofeminism as a doctoral researcher and early career academic who, in critiquing 1990s international environmental governance, sought to problematise the essentialist premise on which it appeared to be based. The article thereafter challenges this well-rehearsed critique by carefully revisiting a sample of ecofeminist work produced between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. In an effort to avoid wholesale abandonment of the wealth of feminist theory often labelled as second wave, or the rendering of feminisms of the past as redundant as feminist theory changes over time, this article re-reads the work of ecofeminists, such as Starhawk, Susan Griffin and Vandana Shiva, to demonstrate their contemporary relevance. In so doing, the article argues that a contemporary re-reading of ecofeminism offers insights allowing for a radical rethinking of contemporary environmental governance.
与本期特刊的其他文章相呼应，这篇文章重新评估了一批由于学术女权主义拥抱后结构主义和后现代主义趋势而过时的女权主义作品。与其他撰稿人一样，这篇文章批判性地反思了对被认为是本质化和普遍主义的女权主义的无情解读，以便重新评估生态女权主义，就我而言。作为介绍，我反思了自己作为一名博士研究员和早期职业学者对生态女权主义的不公平拒绝，我在批评20世纪90年代的国际环境治理时，试图对其似乎基于的本质主义前提提出问题。此后，这篇文章通过仔细回顾20世纪70年代末至90年代初产生的生态女权主义作品样本，挑战了这种精心排练的批评。为了避免大规模抛弃女权主义理论的财富，这些理论通常被称为第二波，或者将过去的女权主义渲染为多余的，因为女权主义理论随着时间的推移而变化，本文重新阅读生态女权主义者的作品，如Starhawk, Susan Griffin和Vandana Shiva，以展示他们的当代相关性。在这样做的过程中，文章认为，当代对生态女权主义的重新解读提供了允许对当代环境治理进行激进反思的见解。
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Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1177/1464700120987387
S. Wallace
This article models a critical method of engaging with not-knowing as it relates to discourses around sexual agency and sexual violation through an analysis of Carmen Maria Machado’s short story ‘The Husband Stitch’. I argue that sexual and gender-based violation not only enforces harmful forms of uncertainty among the women of the story. It also forecloses the potentially productive capacities of modes of not-knowing. In doing so, I respond to assertions from feminist scholars as varied Linda Martín Alcoff, Mary Gaitskill, Laura Kipnis and Joseph Fischel that we need to better account for the full ‘complexity’ of narratives of sexual encounter – including violent encounters. Broadly, in a #MeToo era in which stories of sexual and gender-based violence have received unprecedented mainstream public exposure, I contend that we can both treat the testimonies of survivors as credible and authoritative, and open up discursive space for the experience and expression of not-knowing.
本文通过对卡门·玛丽亚·马查多的短篇小说《丈夫史蒂奇》的分析，模拟了一种与不知道有关的性代理和性侵犯话语的批判方法。我认为，性侵犯和基于性别的侵犯不仅在故事中的女性中造成了有害的不确定性。它还排除了未知模式的潜在生产能力。在这样做的过程中，我回应了各种女权主义学者的断言，如Linda Martín Alcoff, Mary Gaitskill, Laura Kipnis和Joseph Fischel，我们需要更好地解释性接触叙事的全部“复杂性”——包括暴力接触。总的来说，在性暴力和基于性别的暴力的故事得到前所未有的主流公众曝光的#MeToo时代，我认为我们既可以将幸存者的证词视为可信和权威的，也可以为不知道的经历和表达开辟话语空间。
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Pub Date : 2021-01-31DOI: 10.1177/1464700120987393
Ivy Ken, A. S. Helmuth
The term ‘mutual constitution’ appears with regularity in scholarship on intersectionality, but what does it mean? We could not easily answer this question in the usual way – by reading books and articles about it – because the term has not received direct, widespread or sustained engagement in feminist theory. This led us to analyse a wide range of feminist scholarship – the entire set of 379 articles in women’s studies journals that consider both intersectionality and mutual constitution – to determine whether there are patterns and commonalities in the ways this important theoretical term is used. Our analysis reveals that while there is widespread agreement that mutual constitution does not allow for an additive or binary approach, this is the only major point of shared understanding of this term. Scholars disagree over whether mutual constitution is, in fact, the same thing as intersectionality, and in practice, clusters of disciplines use the term with different norms and levels of precision. Because of the explanatory potential of this term in intersectional theory, we recommend on the basis of our analysis that social scientists reconsider the convention of asserting that entities such as race, class and gender are mutually constituted and borrow the methodological tools from feminist historians, literary critics and other humanists that would allow for a genuine determination and demonstration of when entities are mutually constituted.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-26DOI: 10.1177/1464700120987399
P. G. Leite, Priscilla Adriane Ferreira Almeida, Marina Pelluci Duarte Mortoza
Brazilian population has been experiencing extreme changes in society, especially after the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. This process has increased the polarisation between the left and right wing in terms of sociopolitical thought and behaviour. The impact of such changes can be felt in many aspects of life, but mostly in the cultural, social and educational fields. In addition to this, the process of impeachment revealed a terrible misogyny masked within society and reinforced the stereotype of women as having to be pretty and humble, and having no other ‘desirable’ option in their lives but to work as housewives. This idea can be perfectly illustrated by an article published in Veja magazine in April 2016 (Linhares, 2016) which discussed Marcela Temer, the young wife of former vice president Michel Temer. The article stressed the ‘desirability’ of such a stereotype for women by complementing Marcela for being beautiful and well behaved, and for staying at home with her children. It also hinted at the idea that all ‘good wives’ and ‘good women’ should make an effort to achieve such ‘qualities’, and that all women that escape that pattern are not really good ones.
{"title":"A few notes on women and the university in Brazil","authors":"P. G. Leite, Priscilla Adriane Ferreira Almeida, Marina Pelluci Duarte Mortoza","doi":"10.1177/1464700120987399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700120987399","url":null,"abstract":"Brazilian population has been experiencing extreme changes in society, especially after the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. This process has increased the polarisation between the left and right wing in terms of sociopolitical thought and behaviour. The impact of such changes can be felt in many aspects of life, but mostly in the cultural, social and educational fields. In addition to this, the process of impeachment revealed a terrible misogyny masked within society and reinforced the stereotype of women as having to be pretty and humble, and having no other ‘desirable’ option in their lives but to work as housewives. This idea can be perfectly illustrated by an article published in Veja magazine in April 2016 (Linhares, 2016) which discussed Marcela Temer, the young wife of former vice president Michel Temer. The article stressed the ‘desirability’ of such a stereotype for women by complementing Marcela for being beautiful and well behaved, and for staying at home with her children. It also hinted at the idea that all ‘good wives’ and ‘good women’ should make an effort to achieve such ‘qualities’, and that all women that escape that pattern are not really good ones.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"483 - 493"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1464700120987399","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41595014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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