'Feminism' tag archive

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 […]

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) In place of our usual editorial, in this issue we publish differing responses to Simone de Beauvoir’s death from two French newspapers. Rob,ert Maggiori (from Liberation, 15 April 1986) In 1929 two young people, like many others before and after them, must have rushed across to the rue de Grenelle to […]

Luce Irigaray and the Female Imaginary: Speaking as a Woman Margaret Whitford Although Luce Irigaray’s name is beginning to become more familiar in England, her work has not, for the most part, been translated, so that non-French-speaking readers have had to confine themselves to the odd bits and pieces – the translation of an interview […]

‘Political philosophy’, according to Moller Okin in Women in Western Political Thought, consists of ‘writings by men, for men, and about men’. 1 Although the frequent references to the generic term ‘mankind’ by political philosophers might suggest a concern with ‘the human race as a whole’, she argues that ‘we do not need to look […]

Masters, Slaves and Others Genevieve Lloyd In The Second Sex; Simone de Beauvoir utilised some of the basic concepts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – concepts such as ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, ‘being-for-self’ and ‘being-for-others’, ‘bad faith’ and ‘authenticity’ – in a profound diagnosis of the con4ition of women. That she could thus use the framework […]

Women and the High Priests of Reason Janna Thompson Introduction Women are not supposed to be truly rational. The conviction that women can at best worship in the outer precincts of the temple of reason has a long tradition. It has survived philosophical and social revolutions. The idea is not that women are incapable of […]

CORRESPONDENCE ‘The Sceptical Feminist’ Dear Radical Philosophy, r r I should like to comment on Janet Radcliffe Richards’ reply to my review of her book, The Sceptical Feminist, which appeared in RP30. Richards says that I have seriously misrepresented her position, and that most of the quotations I use to support my view of her […]

CORRESPON DENCE Philosophy and Feminism Dear Radical Philosophy, In her article on The Sceptical Feminist, Jean Grimshaw describes my position as an enfeebled and unviable thing, scarcely worth the name of feminism. In one sense I hardly blame her. The position she describes seems to me all that and more: I should even call it […]

the worker tries to gain mastery over the labour process). The contradictions arising directly from this type of work are arguably near-maximal for free labour: labour allows negligible mastery of skills; the efficacy of labour is felt to be external to the labour process and is located in the spheres of circulation and exchange. It […]

Feminism: History and Morality Jean Grimshaw Janet Radcliffe Richards’ book The Sceptical Feminist (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980, £12 hb) is an attempt to extricate feminism from what she sees as ideological commitments that are not essential to it, and serve merely to confuse feminists themselves, and alienate potential supporters. The image of the feminist […]

Women and philosophy Michele Le Doeuf £ Let us avoid getting caught up in a mere lament about the fact that ‘woman’, in addition to being, from time immemorial, alienated, beaten and deprived of political, sexual and social rights and legal identity, last and least of all saw herself forbidden any access to philosophy: as […]

Sexism, Gapitalism ” the ramil, I~_ __ Bosalind Delmar (This paper was written for the Womens Liberation Conference, London, November 1972) The relation between sexism and capitalism is often expressed as an opposition: is it a sexist society or a capitalist society? Are we interested in feminism-or socialism? We see socialist women denouncing feminism as […]