What should feminist theory be?

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, University of Oxford, and a contributing editor of the London Review of Books. Her collection of essays, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2021. In this interview with Radical Philosophy she is in conversation […]
Yellow chair under a spotlight

The politics of miscarriage

In 2015, Purvi Patel became the first person in the US to be charged, convicted and sentenced for ‘feticide’ in relation to her own pregnancy. In 2013, she had been admitted to an emergency room in Indiana after turning up with heavy bleeding and a severed umbilical cord. She claimed to have suffered a miscarriage […]

Chinese Women and Feminist Thought, Beijing,22-24 June 1995

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 […]

Heterosexual Utopianism

‘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 […]

Judith Butler: Gender as Performance

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 […]

Studying Child Sexual Abuse: Morality or Science?

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 […]

Feminism and the Enlightenment

• 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, […]

62 Editorial

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’: 1. How Did the Dinosaurs Die Out? How Did the Poets Survive? 2. Richard Rorty: Knight Errant

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 […]

Reason Without Emotion

Reason Without Emoti·on Carol Jones J In ‘Reason and Emotion’ (RP 57), Miranda Fricker objects to the polarisation of reason and emotion, the separation of which she sees as a factor in the conflict between rational, patriarchal modes of reasoning and the ‘expressive power of emotions’ which feminists have tended to prefer. Seeking to refute […]

Nietzsche, Ethics & Sexual Difference

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 […]

Women and philosophy

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 […]

Dictating research: Feminist philosophy and the RAE; The case of economics

News Dictating researchFeminist philosophy and the RAEIn an essentially contested subject such as philosophy, it makes little sense for a small Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Panel to make judgements across the whole breadth of the discipline, however well-intentioned that panel might be. As I work between the ʻcontinentalʼ and ʻanalyticalʼ traditions – in the field […]