Abstract The purpose of this paper is to problematize how the wave narrative maintains and reinforces the hegemony of Western-dominant feminisms while silencing, excluding, appropriating, and/or diluting Othered feminisms and gender-related perspectives. As Western-dominant feminist historicizations travel to the wave narrative, they become the points of reference to all, while Othered historicizations are either erased or Westernized and whitewashed as they travel to the wave narrative. First, to present these problematizations, I will articulate with Edward Said’s travelling theories, Santiago Castro-Gómez’s zero-point hubris, and Linda Alcoff’s speaking for the other. Secondly, I will argue the wave narrative is embedded in Western myths that reinforce its supremacy, including the myths of: (i) true-universal feminisms; (ii) neutral locus of enunciation; (iii) linear-progressive feminist historicization; and (iv) white feminist savior. Finally, I seek to contribute with the theoretical perspectives presented in this paper by focusing on: (1) the importance of understanding from-to/how-by theories and historicizations travel; (2) how Othered epistemologies are located, according to zero-point hubris logics, within hyper-surveilled points of no-observation; and (3) how the dilution and appropriation of Othered stories and epistemologies by Western-dominant feminisms is not simply speaking for Others, but speaking above Others.

Abstract This article examines the United Nations Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security (WPS) and argues for an expansion of existing agendas to incorporate security away from the repetition of militarized security, extractive capital, and Western humanism through attention to maritime security. Drawing on posthuman feminisms, critical ocean studies, and decolonial and queer feminist engagements with the ocean, I propose the identification of the ocean as a legal subject to enact an unmooring of the ways in which gendered security is currently thought about, realized, and deployed in legal spaces. The liberal feminist preoccupation with including women and creating gender parity, the radical feminist legal agenda for addressing sexual violence, and the cultural feminist legal reforms that center women’s differences are challenged as reasserting and reifying the status quo of law and legal arrangements. Feminist maritime security, posthuman, with the ocean as subject, contributes ways to think and know law in new registers and addresses the legacy of humanist exclusions of both human and nonhuman subjects. Furthermore, oceanic subjectivity invites reflection on the necessity of terraqueous thinking for planetary survival.

Abstract The realities of the Anthropocene, from climate change to pandemics to plastics, necessitate substantially different ways of understanding what it means to act in the world today. In response, feminist scholars within the field of new materialism have attempted to rethink the nature of agency and action. This article focuses on two unresolved challenges with their framework: first, it lacks a way to make distinctions or draw boundaries between different entities and actors and, second, it simplifies the relationship between ontology and ethics, implying that an ontological transformation will lead to more ethical and just relationships with the more-than-human world. I argue that to address these challenges new materialism should look to ecofeminism, particularly the philosophy of Val Plumwood; this pairing is especially pertinent considering the often overlooked or downplayed genealogical connections between them. I also argue, however, that new materialism has something to offer Plumwood: its reconceptualization of agency better responds to contemporary circumstances in ways foreclosed by Plumwood’s more limited account. I conclude that a coalition between new materialism and ecofeminism—a new materialism supplemented and modified by aspects of Plumwood’s account—provides valuable conceptual tools with which to respond to the Anthropocene condition.

Abstract Sex work is highly gendered, with 80 percent of sex workers being female, and the vast majority of buyers of sex being male. It is often taken for granted that this is how it is, and implicit in much of the debate around sex work is the assumption that it is inherently gendered. In this paper, I question this assumption, drawing on sociological research to challenge arguments which purport that it is inconceivable that women would ever want to pay for sex, or that sex work would exist under conditions of gender equality. I argue that gendered sexual norms likely are a significant reason for why sex work is so gendered, but sex work would probably continue to exist under conditions of gender equality, due to the diversity in motivations people have for buying and selling sex. Acknowledging that sex work is not inherently gendered is important for (at least) two reasons. First, it is probable that the gendered nature of sex work contributes to the stigma and bad treatment that sex workers, particularly female ones, face. Secondly, if sex work is not inherently gendered, this will have implications for how we should think about it, morally, practically, and legally.

Abstract During the early 1970s, the Italian feminist movement opened up to foreign militant contexts. The two crucial interplays were with the American and French Women’s Liberation Movements. The aim of this article is to analyze from a transnational historical perspective the connection between Milanese activists and the French group Psychanalyse et politique led by Antoinette Fouque, which developed through several encounters during a period of a few days. From the French militants, the Milanese women learnt the political practice of unconscious which differed from the more diffuse consciousness-raising technique. From those meetings I reflect on general issues linked to the Italian and French feminist movements of that time: for instance, viewing the women’s separatist communal life both as a response to the New Left’s refusal to take on the peculiarity of women’s oppression and as the positive exemplification of the deconstructive claim that the personal is political. I also consider the contrast between the use of psychoanalysis and consciousness-raising practices, the significance of orality as a feminist means of communication, and the relationship between orality and the later trend of feminist bookshops. The ultimate goal is to understand the political effectiveness and limitations of the transnational feature of those encounters.

Abstract In this article, I revisit radical, cultural, and lesbian feminist manifestos from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Shulamith Firestone’s The dialectic of sex, the Radicalesbians’ “The woman-identified woman,” and “The fourth world manifesto” by Barbara Burris et al. I highlight a historical and political shift from the nonlinear temporality of the feminist revolution to the spatiality of women’s culture. This shift, overlapping with what feminist historian Alice Echols describes as “an eclipse of radical feminism” by cultural feminism, is symptomatic and indicative of an agential crisis emerging from the utopian drive of radical feminism. The failure or indefinite postponement of the feminist revolution pushed radical feminism toward the spatial politics of separatism, in which cultural and lesbian feminists found temporary yet sustainable refuge from a patriarchal society. The cultural feminist politics of the women’s space offered a utopian refuge for radical feminists whose desire for feminist revolution did not materialize. However, it initiated feminist hostility against transwomen, establishing a historical presage of the contemporary anti-trans feminist movement. In revisiting textual remnants of feminist history, this article critically intervenes with contemporary anti-trans feminist discourse that politically appropriates the cultural legacies of radical feminism in its essentialist tropes of “real women.”

Abstract This paper engages with a series of recent literatures that examine how feminist and queer movements have become agents of nationalism, neoliberalism, and global wars. I argue that, while the critique of intersectionality has attempted to curtail the reproductions of such violence within feminism, it too has not been able to resist cooptations into nationalist and capitalist forms of power. Developing an epistemological critique of intersectionality, I arrive at an analysis of identity politics as an elemental identification with phallic power that erases the feminine. Building on the works of Elizabeth Grosz, Wendy Brown, and Luce Irigaray, I suggest that at the core of such feminist alliances with domination lies an unresolved relation to feminine desire as the desire for a non-identitarian politics.

Abstract I bring together the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Elena Ferrante to philosophically analyze envy in girlhood friendships. I compare two kinds of envy: the destructive envy between girls in their mode as object-beings as described by Beauvoir in The second sex (2011); and the more ambivalent form of envy that I identify in Lenu’s friendship with Lila in Ferrante’s The Neapolitan quartet (2012–15) and Beauvoir’s with Zaza in both Memoirs of a dutiful daughter (1963) and The inseparables (2021). Using Beauvoir’s existentialist understanding of subjectivity and freedom in The ethics of ambiguity (1976) and The second sex, I argue that envy for a girl friend’s intellectual abilities can act as an impetus for the girl to pursue new ends in her mode as subject-being, while simultaneously causing her negative feelings. In doing so, I demonstrate that intellectual friendships between girls that feature envy can open up the girl’s situation such that new possibilities of freedom are available to her that may not have been otherwise.

Abstract In this paper, I examine some of the emotional dimensions of oppression under the heading of “emotional alienation.” If the experience of oppression is affectively attuned, then resisting oppression will likely involve dealing with these difficult, often painful, feelings. Resistance may require finding ways of pushing back against their potentially disempowering effects and developing other, more empowering, ways of feeling. Long-lasting forms of social oppression have a strong hold in people’s sense of self. Resistance, then, requires self-transformation. If emancipation requires undoing disempowering emotional patterns, then self-transformation will require “undoing” ourselves. How is this undoing tied to developing a new consciousness? How does developing a “radically altered consciousness” (Bartky 1990) involve radically changing our ways of feeling? In this paper, I will argue that emotional disalienation need not be thought of in terms of suppressing or excising disempowering emotional patterns. I will contend that narrative thinking, as a relational process, can play an effective role in the struggle towards emancipation.