'Feminism' tag archive

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 […]

Feminism and Images of Autonomy Pauline Johnson It is by now widely accepted that feminist politics has meant the expansion of our understanding of the nature of the political. Feminism’s powerful critique of the oppressive character of traditionall y structured relations between the sexes is seen to have added new depth and meaning to the […]

‘Pure Lust’ The Elemental Feminist Philosophy of Mary Daly Jean Grimshaw … Pure Lust names the high humor, hope and cosmic accord/harmony of those women who choose to escape, to follow our heart’s deepest desire and bound out of the State of Bondage, Wanderlusting and Wonderlusting with the elements, connecting with auras of animals and […]

The Eupsychian Impulse Psychoanalysis and Left politics since ’68 Barry Richards My purpose here is to offer some reflections on the part flayed by psychoanalysis in Left politics in Britain since 1968. I will attempt a broad and critical characterisation of the major uses to which psychoanalytic theory has been put in political discourse during […]

Women, Humanity and Nature Val Plum wood There is now a growing awareness that the Western philosophical tradition which has identified, on the one hand, maleness with the sphere of rationality, and on the other hand, femaleness with the sphere of nature, has provided one of the main intellectual bases for the domination of women […]

Nietzsche’s Woman The Poststructuralist Attempt To Do Away with Women Kelly Oliver Since Derrida’s Spurs, Nietzsche has been posed as woman. With his recent Postponements, David Farrell Krell pushes Nietzsche further into Derrida’s ‘feminine operation’. Krell claims that Derrida and Nietzsche save real women from dogmatic philosophy by writing with ‘the hand of woman’: It […]

Feminism and the Logic of Morality A Consideration of Alternatives Susan F. Parsons As a feminist and a moral philosopher, I have for some time been interested in the understanding of morality which emerges from the great variety of feminist writing. It has, fIrst of all, been intriguing that the shift from liberal to radical […]

From Virginia Woolf to the Post-Moderns: Developments in a Feminist Aesthetic Pauline Johnson Contemporary feminist art theory and practIce has, by and large, turned away from a modernist affirmation of the autonomy of art from IHe towards a post-modern problematisation of the specIfIc category of the aesthetIc. The modernist assertion of the freedom of the […]