Pub Date : 2021-05-21DOI: 10.1177/14647001211014764
Paddy Farr
Domestic violence is commonly defined as violence ‘as a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner’. This definition attempts to formulate domestic violence in universal and neutral terms that can be applied to any identity. However, in its attempted neutrality, this definition erases concrete experience at the intersections of identity leading to material processes against the bodies of LGBTQIA/BIPOC. Through a Deleuzo-Guattarian reading of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, Jasbir Puar finds a mode of theorising domestic violence through a combined approach to assemblage theory and intersectionality wherein concepts of identity and process provide conflicting and yet inseparable aspects of critical theory. Through developing an intersectional-assemblage theory to reformulate domestic violence as a central concept in understanding the workings of power and process, the nodes and switch points of oppression can be targeted through anti-violence abolitionist praxis.
{"title":"Crashing bodies: towards an intersectional assemblage theory of domestic violence","authors":"Paddy Farr","doi":"10.1177/14647001211014764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001211014764","url":null,"abstract":"Domestic violence is commonly defined as violence ‘as a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner’. This definition attempts to formulate domestic violence in universal and neutral terms that can be applied to any identity. However, in its attempted neutrality, this definition erases concrete experience at the intersections of identity leading to material processes against the bodies of LGBTQIA/BIPOC. Through a Deleuzo-Guattarian reading of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, Jasbir Puar finds a mode of theorising domestic violence through a combined approach to assemblage theory and intersectionality wherein concepts of identity and process provide conflicting and yet inseparable aspects of critical theory. Through developing an intersectional-assemblage theory to reformulate domestic violence as a central concept in understanding the workings of power and process, the nodes and switch points of oppression can be targeted through anti-violence abolitionist praxis.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"398 - 415"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14647001211014764","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47552952","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}
Pub Date : 2021-05-18DOI: 10.1177/14647001211015841
Kathi Weeks
In the 1970s, what Marx and Engels satirised as the most ‘infamous proposal of the communists’, the abolition of the family, becomes the most scandalous demand of feminists. Ever since then, numerous US feminists have tried to walk it back. This article revisits 1970s feminist family abolitionism and develops an argument for its contemporary relevance.
{"title":"Abolition of the family: the most infamous feminist proposal","authors":"Kathi Weeks","doi":"10.1177/14647001211015841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001211015841","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1970s, what Marx and Engels satirised as the most ‘infamous proposal of the communists’, the abolition of the family, becomes the most scandalous demand of feminists. Ever since then, numerous US feminists have tried to walk it back. This article revisits 1970s feminist family abolitionism and develops an argument for its contemporary relevance.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"433 - 453"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14647001211015841","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48974494","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-29DOI: 10.1177/14647001211012940
Bonnie Mann
Rape that does not involve life-threatening physical violence, is committed by someone known to the victim, and is not reported to law enforcement (called, here, commonplace rape) raises two questions: “Why didn't she fight back or run away?” and “Why didn't she say anything at the time?” Recently, research on “tonic immobility,” based on animal predation studies, has provided a physiological explanation for experiences of immobilization during sexual assault. The juxtaposition of animal predation with commonplace sexual assault raises the question: How is it that a response reserved, in animals, for lethal, no-way-out scenarios is present in modes of violation where the victim does not report fear of death or extreme physical harm? Neither does this research help explain why women fail to report. This philosophical exploration of the meaning of tonic immobility in sexual assault helps to justify the juxtaposition of life-or-death scenarios with less-than-life-threatening violation, and sheds light on the reason for women's silence after sexual assault. Rape is accompanied by deep historical meanings that can be encapsulated in the notion of “social death,” associated in the U.S. with colonial conquest, enslavement, and impoverishment. The specter of social death haunts commonplace rape, producing life or death responses.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-27DOI: 10.1177/14647001211009006
Romina Wainberg
Over the last two decades, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has developed the concept of ‘perspectival anthropology’ to think philosophically with and through Amerindian cosmology. In this article, I arg...
在过去的二十年里，Eduardo Viveiros de Castro发展了“透视人类学”的概念，用美洲宇宙学进行哲学思考。在这篇文章中，我引用了。。。
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Pub Date : 2021-04-15DOI: 10.1177/14647001211005298
Maria Tamboukou
In this article I am thinking with Antigone, a political figuration that has been invested with many readings, interpretations and artistic expressions in feminist theory and beyond. The article draws on a research project of listening to migrant and refugee women’s narratives of displacement and travelling. What connects these stories via the figure of Antigone is women’s desire to tell their stories as an expression of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes, defend their choice of civil disobedience, grasp their passage, claim their right to have rights and affirm their determination for new beginnings. I argue that uprooted women’s narratives follow the Arendtian tripartite schema of political action by intervening in the ethics and politics of forced choices, becoming spectators of impossible actions and inscribing mnemonic traces in emerging decolonial histories and feminist genealogies.
{"title":"Antigone re-imagined: uprooted women’s political narratives","authors":"Maria Tamboukou","doi":"10.1177/14647001211005298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001211005298","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I am thinking with Antigone, a political figuration that has been invested with many readings, interpretations and artistic expressions in feminist theory and beyond. The article draws on a research project of listening to migrant and refugee women’s narratives of displacement and travelling. What connects these stories via the figure of Antigone is women’s desire to tell their stories as an expression of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes, defend their choice of civil disobedience, grasp their passage, claim their right to have rights and affirm their determination for new beginnings. I argue that uprooted women’s narratives follow the Arendtian tripartite schema of political action by intervening in the ethics and politics of forced choices, becoming spectators of impossible actions and inscribing mnemonic traces in emerging decolonial histories and feminist genealogies.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"416 - 432"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14647001211005298","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45038362","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1464700120988641
L. Nicholas
This article returns to Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical oeuvre in order to offer a way of thinking beyond contemporary feminist divisions created by ‘gender critical’ or trans-exclusionary feminists. The ‘gender critical’ feminist position returns to sex essentialism to argue for ‘abolishing’ gender, while opponents often appeal to proliferated gender self-identities. I argue that neither goes far enough and that they both circumscribe utopian visions for a world beyond both sex and gender. I chart how Beauvoir’s ontological, ethical and political positions can be used to overcome the material/cultural, sex/gender bind that the contemporary divide perpetuates. I outline Beauvoir’s ‘ambiguous’ non-foundational ontology that attends to both the cultural origins, and material effects, of both sex and gender, and to the extent that humyns are fundamentally social. After outlining Beauvoir’s definition of freedom as purposive action, I then outline how the existence of the humyn-made and intersubjectively-upheld ‘situations’ of both sex and gender delimit this, urging feminists to return to the lost question of eradicating both. I use the utopian impulse in Beauvoir to argue that an ethics of reciprocity is an alternative mode of understanding the self and others. Beauvoir also calls for a political strategy that I call a ‘utopian realism’ that I apply to the contemporary divide. A way forward that is attentive to the concerns of both positions is the pragmatic use of identity politics that is nonetheless mindful of identity’s limits, alongside Beauvoir’s proto-intersectional vision of solidarity politics based not on identity but on a position of alterity and shared political strategy. Ultimately, I use this to argue that feminism would do better to unite around a shared commitment to challenging alterity, rather than further contributing to it.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1464700121989226
K. Averett
Feminist theorists have long looked to motherhood and mothering behaviour as an important site at which to examine women’s lives, gender inequality and the social construction of gendered institutions. One important line of theorisation has concerned itself with the de-essentialisation of motherhood, a project that I argue remains incomplete, as feminist theorisation of motherhood naturalises biological sex and therefore essentialises mothering as behaviour performed by ‘female bodies’ and fathering behaviour as performed by ‘male bodies’. Using two cases from a larger qualitative interview project with LGBTQ parents, I show that current theories of motherhood fail to have explanatory power in cases – such as gay and transgender parents – when gendered embodiment and mothering (and/or fathering) fail to align as expected. I suggest that research related to queer parenting – particularly research on gay male co-parenting, on the experiences of transgender parents and their children, on non-white LGBTQ parents and on mothering from outside the nuclear family – will be especially fruitful in moving the de-essentialisation of mothering in new directions that will further contest heteronormative, cisnormative and nuclear assumptions about the family.
{"title":"Queer parents, gendered embodiment and the de-essentialisation of motherhood","authors":"K. Averett","doi":"10.1177/1464700121989226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700121989226","url":null,"abstract":"Feminist theorists have long looked to motherhood and mothering behaviour as an important site at which to examine women’s lives, gender inequality and the social construction of gendered institutions. One important line of theorisation has concerned itself with the de-essentialisation of motherhood, a project that I argue remains incomplete, as feminist theorisation of motherhood naturalises biological sex and therefore essentialises mothering as behaviour performed by ‘female bodies’ and fathering behaviour as performed by ‘male bodies’. Using two cases from a larger qualitative interview project with LGBTQ parents, I show that current theories of motherhood fail to have explanatory power in cases – such as gay and transgender parents – when gendered embodiment and mothering (and/or fathering) fail to align as expected. I suggest that research related to queer parenting – particularly research on gay male co-parenting, on the experiences of transgender parents and their children, on non-white LGBTQ parents and on mothering from outside the nuclear family – will be especially fruitful in moving the de-essentialisation of mothering in new directions that will further contest heteronormative, cisnormative and nuclear assumptions about the family.","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"284 - 304"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1464700121989226","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46858718","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1464700121997182
Sam Mcbean
On 4 January 1971, Ti-Grace Atkinson delivered a talk entitled ‘Strategy and Tactics: A Presentation of Political Lesbianism’. The talk was later published in her collected essays, Amazon Odyssey. The essay contains thirty-five diagrams: ten ‘Strategy Charts’, three ‘Tactical Charts’ and twenty-two ‘Tactical-Strategy Charts’, which map a strategy of the ‘Oppressor’ (men) and the tactics that the ‘Oppressed’ (women) might develop to lead to a revolution – lesbians, significantly, are the ‘Buffer Zone’ between these two classes. In the only reference I have managed to find to these diagrams, they are referred to as ‘crazy’. This article re-visits these diagrams, exploring the role of the diagram in how Atkinson attempts to map patriarchal relations and also imagine a feminist revolution. Taking Atkinson’s diagrams as a starting point, the article then uses them to begin to narrate a genealogy of the diagram in feminist theory, exploring a diagrammatic imaginary that is an often-used but rarely discussed tactic in feminist writing. Finally, the article opens out to consider how this history of feminist diagrams might be a precursor to more contemporary feminist data visualisations.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1464700120988636
L. Nicholas, Shelley Budgeon
Fifteen years ago, Clare Hemmings demonstrated both a teleological and binary tendency in the dominant story of ‘Western’ feminist theory: ‘an insistent narrative that sees the development of [‘Western’] feminist thought as a relentless march of progress . . . [that] fixes writers and perspectives within a particular decade’ (2005: 115). This means that ‘the specificity of feminist accounts of difference, power and knowledge at all points in the recent past . . . is elided’ (Hemmings, 2005: 131). Many of us, however, have always used concepts and perspectives from a variety of purportedly bygone eras or contradictory camps. Homogenising eras or reproducing binary oppositional camps of feminisms serves to frame whole bodies of work as ‘problematic’ or outdated, and to relegate a plethora of work as irrelevant, e.g. framing the 1970s as entirely essentialist, or the 1980s as made up of only two positions in the two factions of the ‘sex wars’. Departing with the premises of Hemmings’ challenge to these typologies, then, the articles in this special issue engage with ‘classic’ or previous feminist works in nuanced ways. Sabine Sielke proposes that there is, and has been, a seriality in feminist critique, a ‘recursiveness or insistence’ (2018: 80) that, rather than being a mere return, allows for a ‘transgressive moment of repetition’ (2018: 83). We are interested in recursive use of ideas from other eras that create such transgressive moments and that in doing so may help us to think through the feminist issues of the present. For example, Cynthia Enloe recently called for a return to the concept of patriarchy that, while often framed as unfashionably structuralist, she argues is a
{"title":"Introduction: ‘Remembering Feminist Theory Forward’","authors":"L. Nicholas, Shelley Budgeon","doi":"10.1177/1464700120988636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700120988636","url":null,"abstract":"Fifteen years ago, Clare Hemmings demonstrated both a teleological and binary tendency in the dominant story of ‘Western’ feminist theory: ‘an insistent narrative that sees the development of [‘Western’] feminist thought as a relentless march of progress . . . [that] fixes writers and perspectives within a particular decade’ (2005: 115). This means that ‘the specificity of feminist accounts of difference, power and knowledge at all points in the recent past . . . is elided’ (Hemmings, 2005: 131). Many of us, however, have always used concepts and perspectives from a variety of purportedly bygone eras or contradictory camps. Homogenising eras or reproducing binary oppositional camps of feminisms serves to frame whole bodies of work as ‘problematic’ or outdated, and to relegate a plethora of work as irrelevant, e.g. framing the 1970s as entirely essentialist, or the 1980s as made up of only two positions in the two factions of the ‘sex wars’. Departing with the premises of Hemmings’ challenge to these typologies, then, the articles in this special issue engage with ‘classic’ or previous feminist works in nuanced ways. Sabine Sielke proposes that there is, and has been, a seriality in feminist critique, a ‘recursiveness or insistence’ (2018: 80) that, rather than being a mere return, allows for a ‘transgressive moment of repetition’ (2018: 83). We are interested in recursive use of ideas from other eras that create such transgressive moments and that in doing so may help us to think through the feminist issues of the present. For example, Cynthia Enloe recently called for a return to the concept of patriarchy that, while often framed as unfashionably structuralist, she argues is a","PeriodicalId":47281,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"159 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1464700120988636","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42793999","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1464700120988643
R. Hill, Kim Allen
This article discusses the resurgence of the term ‘patriarchy’ in digital culture and reflects on the everyday online meanings of the term in distinction to academic theorisations. In the 1960s–1980s, feminists theorised patriarchy as the systematic oppression of women, with differing approaches to how it worked. Criticisms that the concept was unable to account for intersectional experiences of oppression, alongside the ‘turn to culture’, resulted in a fall from academic grace. However, ‘patriarchy’ has found new life through Internet memes (humorous, mutational images that circulate widely on social media). This article aims to investigate the resurgence of the term ‘patriarchy’ in digital culture. Based on an analysis of memes with the phrase ‘patriarchy’ and ‘smash the patriarchy’, we identify how patriarchy memes are used by two different online communities (feminists and anti-feminists) and consider what this means for the ongoing usefulness of the concept of patriarchy. We argue that, whilst performing important community-forming work, using the term is a risky strategy for feminists for two reasons: first, because memes are by their nature brief, there is little opportunity to address intersections of oppression; secondly, the underlying logic of feminism is omitted in favour of brevity, leaving it exposed to being undermined by the more mainstream logic of masculinism.
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