'Feminism' tag archive

The Ethics of Ambiguity is well known as de Beauvoirʼs attempt to formulate an existentialist ethics; that is to say, an ethics premissed on the account of the lack at the heart of any human existence (ʻthe being whose being is not to beʼ) given by Sartre in Being and Nothingness. [1] The ʻambiguityʼ of […]

Micropolitics Leo Bersani and conflicts in contemporary feminism Rafeeq hasan …as if the molecular were in the realm of the imagination and applied only to the individual. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ʻMicropolitics and Segmentarityʼ [1] There is something taking shape in Western feminist theory, something so drastic – and, to speak from an intellectualist […]

Obituaries Radical inventions Monique Wittig, 1935–2003ʻBut remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.ʼ Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères Monique Wittig, who has died aged 67, was one of the most provocative and innovative of lesbian feminist thinkers of the twentieth century. Wittig was born in Dannemarie, on the Upper Rhine in France on […]

Obituary symposium Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004 David Cunningham In an interview with Le Monde published a couple of months before his death at the age of 74 from pancreatic cancer on Friday 9 October 2004, Jacques Derrida confirmed what many already knew, that he was ʻdangerously illʼ, ʻat war against myselfʼ. If questions of ʻsurvivalʼ had […]

News Women’s Philosophy Review, 1997–2005 In August 2005 the editors and editorial board of the Womenʼs Philosophy Review (WPR), the journal of the UK Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), decided to cease publication, at least for the foreseeable future. WPR grew out of the Women in Philosophy Newsletter that had been circulated to members […]

The incomplete materialism of French materialist feminism Alison stone According to one important and influential line of feminist interrogation of the category of sex, we only believe that there are two biological sexes because our thought and perception are constrained by the two-gender social system under which we currently live. [1] The French materialist feminists […]

‘All human beings are pregnant’ The bisexual imaginary in Plato’s Symposium Stella sandford ‘All human beings, Socrates, are pregnant both in body and in soul, and when we come to be of the right age, we naturally desire to give birth.’ Symposium, 206c1–2In recent years the question of the status of sex – that is, […]

This is not my body Elisabeth lebovici Indeed there are not two genders, there is only one, the feminine, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general. [1] These two sentences, written by Monique Wittig in 1983, pronounce a regime of visibility and invisibility for the feminine […]

Obituary A mother’s thought Sara Ruddick, 1935–2011 ‘i speak about a mother’s thought’ wrote the feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick, who has died in New York at the age of 76. ^ Along with Adrienne Rich, Ruddick was probably the most important philosophical thinker to address the issue of mothering and motherhood since second-wave feminism, and, […]

The absent philosopherprince Thinking political philosophy with Olympe de Gouges Ariella azoulay Since the publication of Olivier Blanc’s biography of Olympe de Gouges and the first collection of her texts, compiled and edited by Benoîte Groult, [1] dozens of articles on various aspects of de Gouges’s work have been published. All of them share the […]

‘You nearly gave me a heart attack’, a friend told me, after my talk at the opening session of the event in London celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first national Women’s Liberation Conference in the UK, at Ruskin College, in February 1970. Appropriately enough, the feminist publisher and cultural entrepreneur Ursula Owen had organized […]

What is sex? Some feminists have harboured suspicions about this form of question, given its philosophical (or ‘metaphysical’ [1] ) pedigree. But philosophy no longer has the disciplinary monopoly on it. Indeed, with regard to sex, the more interesting task today is to pose and to attempt to answer the question from within a transdisciplinary […]