'Feminism' tag archive

Radical feminist analyses have always placed considerable emphasis on the crucial role played by social reproduction for the development of capitalism. Early social reproduction analyses – primarily premised on housework but also more broadly concerned with wagelessness – developed a robust critique of Marxian views that identified processes of value-generation only with the productive sphere, […]

Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 280pp., £74.95 hb., £24.95 pb., £24.95 eb., 978 0 23117 640 8 hb., 978 0 23117 641 5 pb., 978 0 23154 455 9 eb. A recurring theme within feminist philosophy has been the association of a feminine maternal principle […]

Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, trans. Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 208pp., £58.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 978 0 80479 218 9 hb., 978 1 50360 040 9 pb. At first glance one has the impression that Adriana Cavarero’s fascinating critique of verticality in Inclinations is a genealogical investigation […]

Victoria Browne and Daniel Whistler, eds., On the Feminist Philosophy of Gillian Howie: Materialism and Mortality (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 304pp.,, £85.00 hb., 978 1 47425 412 0 In conversations with students feeling overwhelmed by their studies, I sometimes use the phrase, ‘remember that studying is part of life, not the other way around.’ While this […]

In order to qualify as truly ‘feminist’, a movement has to be politically radical. That is a core insight of some important second wave feminist writings. There is a powerful articulation of this theme, to mention one noteworthy site, in the work of bell hooks. A guiding preoccupation of hooks’ thought, as far back as […]

Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Alresford: Zero Books, 2017). 136pp., £9.99 pb., 978 1 78535 543 1 Kill All Normies sets out to provide an anatomy of the internet spaces in which contemporary ‘culture wars’ are being fought out, and an account of […]

In her 1984 article ‘Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation’, Iris Marion Young contended that ‘pregnancy does not belong to the woman herself’ within patriarchal Western institutions of modern medicine. ‘It is a state of the developing fetus, for which the woman is a container; or it is an objective, observable process coming under scientific scrutiny; […]

COMMENTARY Anti-Genderismus and right‑wing hegemony Eva von Redecker After incidents of pickpocketing and sexual harassment were reported to have taken place at the New Year’s Eve festivities in Cologne and Hamburg, and been associated with perpetrators of North African descent, public discourse in Germany turned blatantly racist. [1] This seemed to stand in stark contrast […]

Helen macfarlane Independent object David black and ben watson Talking of the destructive nature of egoistic desire, its satisfaction that the other is nothing, Hegel made room for further development, an empirical moment which might surprise those who think German Idealism only ever allowed for abstraction: ‘In this satisfaction, however, experience makes it [the simple […]

'The Personal is the Philosophical'

Obituary A founder of Feminist Review Mary McIntosh, 1936–2013 Mary McIntosh was an intellectual, a socialist and a feminist activist. She was a woman of strong principles, combined with an abundance of personal kindness. She occupied a pioneering role in many social movements of the late twentieth century, in particular the Gay Liberation Front and […]

Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines, Semiotext(e), Intervention series 12, Los Angeles, 2012. 144 pp., £9.95 pb., 978 1 58435 108 5. How best to describe the colonization of the body at this particular juncture of capitalist life? Much recent theorizing has focused on a kind of war of […]

Shulamith Firestone was perhaps the most infamous radical feminist theorist of the twentieth century. As a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, she became an early activist in the women’s movement, founding (with Jo Freeman) the Westside Group in 1967, in large part in response to the patronizing sexism of left politics at the […]

‘It is difficult to convey the desert which faced women philosophers in Britain in the early 1980s’, Margaret Whitford once remarked. It was a desert that Margaret’s own work was pivotal in modifying. At a time when feminism was flourishing outside the academy, philosophy seemed especially immune from its influence; both in terms of content […]

NEWS Women in philosophy in Britain The good news and the bad T he Society for Women in Philosophy has now been in existence in Britain for over a decade. During this time a great deal has been achieved in terms both of the increased publication of feminist philosophy and the encouragement and support of […]

Philosophy, feminism and universal ism Jean Grimshaw During the last ten years or so, when I have been asked what my particular ‘interests’ are, I have usually said that I have been working on ‘feminism and philosophy’, or ‘philosophy and feminism’ – or perhaps, though less often, ‘feminist philosophy’. I have become increasingly interested in […]

COMMENTARY ‘Woman’ as theatre United Nations Conference on Women, Beijing 1995 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak T he United Nations is based on the unacknowledged assumption that ‘the rest of the world’ is unable to govern itself. In fact, of course, no state is able to govern itself, in different ways. And, in the current conjuncture, the […]

NEWS Chinese women and feminist thought: an international symposium An international symposium on Chinese Women and Feminist Thought was held in Beijing on 22-24 June 1995, hosted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, funded by the Ford Foundation, and originating in the annual Philosophy Summer School organized jointly by academics from China, Britain and […]

INTERVIEW Drucilla Cornell Feminism, deconstruction and the law RP: Perhaps you could begin by saying something about the Critical Legal Studies movement in the USA. What is its relationship to feminism? And where do you see your own work as fitting in? Cornell: Regrettably there’s very little organized presence of either Critical Legal Studies or […]

‘When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say?’ Sue Bridehead’s question – or rather exclamation – in Jude the Obscure – is, of course, rhetorical; and Hardy has surely been vindicated in this appeal to […]

Hiding Out or Moving On? Feminism in Psychoanalysis ‘Why are we all here?’, Juliet Mitchell asks her audience, rhetorically. She is opening a conference in London held in May to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism. ‘Why are we all here, and not there – as feminists, that […]