Showing papers in "Feminist Theory in 2008"

Intersectionality as buzzword A sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory successful

Abstract: Since its inception, the concept of `intersectionality' — the interaction of multiple identities and experiences of exclusion and subordination — has been heralded as one of the most important cont...

Regulation and rupture Mapping tween and teenage girls' resistance to the heterosexual matrix

Abstract: Recent feminist theorizing has pointed to a `resurgent patriarchy' within neo-liberal postfeminist times, which re-orders and restabilizes the heterosexual matrix through a politics of `postfeminist masquerade' demanded of girls and women (McRobbie). This paper seeks to complicate this thesis, exploring the regulation and rupture of Butler's `heterosexual matrix' as a complex performative politics through which girls' conflictual relationships with themselves, and other girls and boys are staged and through which dominant versions of tweenage and teenage femininity are reinscribed but also reworked, in race and class specific ways. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's powerful conceptual repertoire for disrupting Oedipal logics in Anti-Oedipus, we offer a `molecular mapping', illustrating cracks and ruptures in what is a porous heterosexual matrix, exploring a rhythm of `deterritorializations' and `reterritorializations' of the normative in our respective ethnographic and narrative interviews with girls. We also trace more sustained ruptures of heteronormative femininity drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of `lines of flight' and Braidotti's concept of `alternative figuration'. We argue ruptures and alternative figurations are not constitutive of total `molar' resistance to norms, but are significant spaces of doing girl differently and crucial to map if we are to perceive the malleability and multiplicity of contemporary girl subjectivities, which exceed heteronormative femininity and phallogocentric desire.

Woman-friendly policies and state feminism Theorizing Scandinavian gender equality

Abstract: The overall aim of this article is to explore the analytical potential and normative value of Helga M. Hernes' concept about woman-friendly welfare states in analysis of Scandinavian countries. The...

We are all equal now Contemporary gender politics in Canada

Abstract: This article examines the Canadian case, focusing on the ways in which the political rationalities that have informed the Canadian variants of post-war social liberalism and neoliberalism have opened and then closed spaces for the articulation and institutionalization of gender-based equality claims-making. The article recounts how the Canadian welfare state underwrote a unique gender equality infrastructure inside the state and a thick field of gender organizations in civil society and later how this potent political and symbolic node of social liberalism became a critical field of contestation for those promoting neoliberal political rationalities. The article describes a protracted war of position in which the gendered politics and identities of the 20th century have been displaced and marginalized, but not fully consumed by neoliberal idioms, representations and policy interventions.

`Showing the girl' The new burlesque

Abstract: This paper examines the cultural phenomenon of 'new burlesque', a subculture in which young women take part in striptease performances which invoke the iconic styles and routines associated with mid-20th century cabaret. By reading burlesque websites alongside the celebrity culture and advertising, the article examines how the retro styles of dress and make-up associated with this subculture have circulated through a range of media sites as an alternative mode of femininity. By focusing on the intersections between online fan communities, popular images of burlesque, fashion, and beauty, I argue that burlesque styles involve a reclaiming of traditionally normative sites of identity production and that computer technologies are an extension of the technologies of dress, cosmetics and movements through which femininity is produced. I go on to suggest a re-framing of burlesque as a site of parody and resistance which 'troubles' critiques of femininity within both feminist theory and queer theory.

`I am not a woman writer' About women, literature and feminist theory today

Abstract: This essay first tries to answer two questions: Why did the question of the woman writer disappear from the feminist theoretical agenda around 1990? Why do we need to reconsider it now? I then begin to develop a new analysis of the question of the woman writer by turning to the statement `I am not a woman writer'. By treating it as a speech act and analysing it in the light of Simone de Beauvoir's understanding of sexism, I show that it is a response to a particular kind of provocation, namely an attempt to force the woman writer to conform to some norm for femininity. I also show that Beauvoir's theory illuminates Virginia Woolf's strategies in A Room of One's Own before, finally, asking why we still should want women to write.

Neoliberalism, welfare policy, and feminist theories of social justice Feminist Theory Special Issue: `Feminist Theory and Welfare'

Abstract: An overview of the feminist theory literature on welfare policy and politics is presented. This introductory essay places a particular emphasis on the works that fall within the political sociology and normative political philosophy genres. In a lengthy digression, the article offers a tribute to the work of Iris Marion Young. It examines the centrality of her thinking about distribution, cultural marginalization, the welfare state bureaucracy, transnational responsibility and solidarity, and the pitfalls of maternalist discourse for this field. In the conclusion, the article makes brief remarks about each of the contributions to the special issue on Feminist Theory and Welfare.

Social rights and gender justice in the neoliberal moment: A conversation about welfare and transnational politics

Abstract: Social rights and gender justice in the neoliberal moment: A conversation about welfare and transnational politics , Social rights and gender justice in the neoliberal moment: A conversation about welfare and transnat... , کتابخانه دیجیتال دفتر تبلیغات اسلامی

Archaeological possibilities for feminist theories of transition and transformation

Abstract: Archaeology takes up material fragments from distant and recent pasts to create narratives of personal and collective identity. It is, therefore, a powerful voice shaping our current and future social worlds. Feminist theory has to date made little reference to archaeology and its projects, in part because archaeologists have primarily chosen to work with normative forms of gender theory rather than forge new theory informed by archaeological insights. This paper argues that archaeology has considerably more potential for feminist theorizing than has so far been recognized. In particular it is uniquely placed to build theory for understanding change, transition and transformation over extended time periods, a potential explored through an archaeological case study of Pacific Northwest Coast people. In conclusion, some possibilities for expanding this case study into a wider comparative perspective are sketched out.

Feminist heterosexual imaginaries of reproduction Lesbian conception in feminist studies of reproductive technologies

Abstract: Reproductive technologies, such as self-arranged donor conception, clinical donor insemination and in vitro fertilization, now have an established place in lesbian reproductive practices, providing a route to conception which separates reproduction from heterosexual intercourse. This article explores how lesbian reproduction figures within feminist studies of reproductive technologies. It critically engages with representations of reproduction and structures of sexuality in early and more recent feminist studies of reproductive technologies. Specifically, the article investigates constructions of reproduction, technology and sexuality in key ethnographic studies by Sarah Franklin, Charis Thompson and Rayna Rapp. The findings suggest that heterosexuality is foundational to, and yet invisible within, this feminist research into reproductive technologies. Endorsing Chrys Ingraham's concept of a `heterosexual imaginary', I argue that this research reproduces a heterosexual imaginary of procreation, continuous...

Weaving relational webs: Theorizing cultural difference and embodied practice

Abstract: Through illustrating the similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural contexts (such as `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery), feminist theorists ...

Gender justice and the welfare state in post-communism

Abstract: Some Romanian feminist scholars argue that welfare policies of post-communist states are deeply unjust to women and preclude them from reaching economic autonomy. The upshot of this argument is tha...

Narrative as a site of subject construction The `Comfort Women' debate

Abstract: The ordeal of `Comfort Women' who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Military during the Second World War became widely known in the 1990s through these women's accounts of their experience. Instead of considering their narratives as historical data which reflect the `true' historical past, this article locates them within a broader framework of thinking of narratives. Drawing on the understanding of narrative as a key to the self and the subject which has been developed in narrative research, as well as Judith Butler on interpellation and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on subaltern agency, this article argues that the `Comfort Women's' testimonies should not be read one-dimensionally in the light of `truth' and `falsity', but should rather be considered as the site of their subject-formation. Their narratives are where agency concurrently emerges, and `Comfort Women' are thus not powerless victims but are active participants in their creation of their own narratives and their own selves.

Gender in the making of commercial worlds: Creativity, vitalism and the practices of marketing

Abstract: If capitalism is being increasingly understood as performative and processual, and if these understandings are being folded into capitalism's production of itself, what place does gender have in performing the commercial world? This article argues that the significance of gender as genre or type has been overlooked in the recent literature on the performance of the market or market relations. While the role of economic theories and management practices in making markets has been examined, and the place of women in organizations has been explored, little attention has been paid to how gender as a productive process marks the creation and maintenance of market relations. Using material from a recent ethnographic study of the advertising industry, I examine how advertising practitioners incorporate vitalist understandings of market relations and of knowledge-producing activities into their practices. Framed as `creativity' and `innovation', these discursive practices perform what practitioners understand as ...

Neoliberalism and the jurisprudence of privacy: An experiment in feminist theorizing

Abstract: This essay demonstrates, and critiques, the pervasiveness of economic assumptions in the jurisprudence of privacy in US constitutional law as it extends from birth control and abortion rights to the so-called right to die. Finding in these cases metaphors of neoliberal productive practices and the assumption of the self as human capital, the self understood as a site of investment rather than a repository of worth, the essay brings privacy law into conversation with Kristin Luker's empirical work on abortion politics and teenage pregnancy. The essay does not treat the right to die as a moral or political problem to be resolved, but is instead interested in the revelatory character of the jurisprudence of privacy — namely, in what it can tell us about the contemporary political economic order. Are recent developments in contemporary political economy, in the emerging neoliberal order, potentially illiberal?

[Review] Elaheh Rostami-Povey (2007) Afghan women: identity and invasion

Abstract: response – namely, US military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. Timothy Kaufman-Osborn’s chapter on the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and especially the participation of file clerk Lynndie England in the abuse of those prisoners, focuses closely on the military’s use of emasculation techniques. According to Kaufman-Osborn, photographs of England holding a dog leash with a male prisoner shackled at the other end showed how women in the US military learned (along with their male counterparts) that fear and degradation could operate to subdue, subjugate and feminize Iraqi men. The volume devotes considerably less attention to the domestic, longitudinal and comparative politics dimensions of Bush’s presidency. The editors’ introduction refers to budgetary decisions that reduced funding for proequality initiatives, at the same time bolstering subsidies for policies favoured by the Christian right. Unfortunately, readers are left to wonder how rhetoric and action emanating from Washington since 2001 compare either with developments during the Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton years at the federal level, or with trends among US sub-national governments. The regressive nature of Bush’s judicial appointments is noted in passing, but the volume contains no systematic analysis of their impact. Curiously, for a book that directly criticizes the US-as-superior stance of the Bush administration, the volume ignores developments in other Western democracies. Did Bush’s Iraq war allies in the UK or Australia employ similar discourses? How did feminist organizations fare in the US versus these other places? Without pursuing such questions, we can only gain a very partial understanding of security state dynamics and their implications for women as citizens. That being said, the Ferguson and Marso volume offers an insightful and stimulating first step toward this larger analytic challenge.