'Feminism' tag archive

Gender as Performance An Interview with Judith Butler ludithButlerteaches in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France ( J987) traced the dialectic ofpro- and anti-Hegelian currents in French theory across the writings ofa wide range ofthinkers. She is best known, however, for […]

The Meaning of Political Ecology Tim Hayward ‘Political ecology’ is an expression which has become quite familiar in recent years, but does not appear to have acquired a clear and settled meaning. * Evidently it is used to point up some kind of connection between politics, or the political, and ecology, yet the project of […]

Studying Child Sexual Abuse: Morality or Science? Sue Clegg Child abuse has become a major topic of public polemic and academic research. I Modem feminists, like their nineteenthcentury sisters, have singled out sexual abuse for special attention. 2 After decades in which sexual abuse was the concern of a limited number of professionals who dealt […]

Fleshy Memory Kelly Oliver Freud conceived of the ego as energetically self-contained, though formed in relations with the maternal and paternal figures of the Oedipal situation. In his Hegelian reading of Freud, Lacan emphasises the relationships that give rise to (and undermine) a sense of ego identity with his famous account of the infant’s self-recognition […]

• Feminism and the Enlightenment Pauline Johnson The recent turn taken by feminist theory towards a critique of the spirit of humanism would have surprised de Beauvoir and the early delineators of the concerns of ‘second wave’ feminism. According to The Second Sex, feminism is an expression of humanism in a quite straightforward sense.! Indeed, […]

NEWS God Bless You, Mr Rosewater Feminist Fortunes in the New Latvia Booking my ticket for Riga, I had not expected a discussion on the shifting geographical boundaries of Europe. Where were the Baltic States, I was asked, and, for insurance purposes, could they be said to be safely European? Qualification for membership was a […]

EDITORIAL ~ /’~~ Socialism has typically presented itself as a project of human emancipation, based on a moral vision of the future, and on a critical diagnosis of the present – informed both by that vision of human possibilities, and by a theoretical grasp of what stands in the way of their realisation. It has […]

REPLIES TO RICHARD RORTY’S ‘FEMINISM AND PRAGMATISM’ I How Did the Dinosaurs Die Out? How Did the Poets Survive? Catherine Wilson In ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’ (Radical Philosophy 59, pp. 3-14), Richard Rorty offers feminists an arrangement of convenience. In exchange for their support of his philosophical programme, which involves the rejection of a representationalist account […]

Framing and Freeing: Utopias of the Female Body Lynda Nead The standard definition of utopia is in two parts: it is at once ‘no place’ and also the imagined location of the good society. * Utopian fiction and non-fiction frequently tell the story of the traveller who moves from the flawed world of the present […]

Feminism and Pragmatism Richard Rorty When two women ascended to the Supreme Court of Minnesota, Catherine MacKinnon asked: ‘Will they use the tools of law as women, for all women?’ She continued as follows: I think that the real feminist issue is not whether biological males or biological females hold positions of power, although it […]

Reason and Emotion Miranda Fricker The question of how emotion relates to reason acquires its importance from an apparent conflict between the implicit teachings of Western philosophy and and feminism. If philosophy advises that we should place our trust, if anywhere, in reason; and if feminism has learned that it is a political imperative to […]

The Artificial Womb Patriarchal Bone or Technological Blessing? Carl Hedman Every area of technological innovation has an idea that can serve as a kind of ‘Rorschach Test’ for revealing some of our deepest intuitions.l Consider, e.g., the idea of a fully automated factory. This idea can be used to bring out a person’s intuitions as […]

Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism Kate Soper I shall not begin, as I probably should, by offering to define my terms. Instead, I shall acknowledge that I have brought together three concepts admitted on all sides to be well-nigh indefinable. Or, if they are definable, they are so only by reference to a particular thinker’s usage […]

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak An Interview Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born in Calcutta. She now teaches English and Culture Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her translation of Derrida’ s Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), with a long and authoritative introduction, remains a controversial event in the recent history of philosophy and cultural theory, […]

Feminist Epistemology: An Impossible Project? Margareta Halberg This paper takes up the recent epistemological turn in feminist theory and some of the problems thereby raised. The fundamental aim of feminist theories in general is to analyze (and change) gender relations. It may be argued that the term ‘epistemology’ in feminist discourse should not be defined […]

Socialism, Feminism and Men Peter Middleton Feminism has been both welcomed and resisted by socialist men in the past twenty years. As a critique of exploitation and inequality, feminism has been easily recognisable to socialism. Women can be added on to its emancipatory project as another oppressed class to be liberated. In practice this has […]

LETTERS SEX/GENDER DISTINCTION: A REPLY TO PLUMWOOD Dear RP, In Radical Philosophy 51, Spring 1989, you published a paper by Val Plum wood titled ‘Do we Need a Sex/Gender Distinction?’. In that paper Plumwood makes extensive use of, and reference to, a paper titled ‘A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction’ which appeared in Beyond Marxism? […]

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Tensions in Feminist Philosophy Jean Grimshaw The history of the reception and interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a complex and fascinating one. 1 It was praised by many of her radical contemporaries, including Tom Paine and Mary’s husband, the radical anarchist philosopher and social theorist, […]

Nietzsche, Ethics & Sexual Difference Rosa/yn Diprose There are many women in Nietzsche’s texts. There is the old woman, the sceptic and the enigmatic love object, or woman as masquerade. There is The Woman, thejouissance of which is Lacan’ s God – the Truth behind the veil. There is the other as object of evaluation […]

Do We Need a Sex/Gender Distinction? Val Plumwood We live an embodied life; we live with those genital and reproductive organs and capacities, those hormones and chromosomes, that locate us physiologically as male or female …. We cannot know what children would make of their bodies in a nongender or non sexually organized world, what […]

Hegel as Lord and Master Chris Arthur INTRODUCTION The feminist interrogation of philosophy can take two forms. It can examine what philosophers have had to say about the nature and destiny of woman: here the record is one of almost universal sexism (Kennedy & Mendus 1987). In addition, it may ask if this is merely […]