Contemporary Feminist Research Articles

Dear Sister Artist

The 1970s Feminist Art movement continues to serve as fertile ground for contemporary feminist inquiry, knowledge sharing, and art practice. The CalArts Feminist Art Program (1971–1975) played an influential role in this movement and today, traces of the Feminist Art Program reside in the CalArts Institute Archives’ Feminist Art Materials Collection. Through a series of short interrelated archives stories, this paper explores some of the ways in which women responded to and engaged the Collection, especially a series of letters, for feminist projects at CalArts and the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, University of London over the period of one year (2017–2018). The paper contemplates the archive as a conduit and locus for current day feminist identifications, meaning-making, exchange, and resistance and argues that activating and sharing—caring for—the archive’s feminist art histories is a crucial thing to be done: it is feminism-in-action that not only keeps this work on the table but it can also give strength and definition to being a feminist and an artist.
 Pre-print first published online 12/05/2020

Virile Resistance and Servile Collaboration

The article aims to expose and contest the gendered representation of betrayal in resistance movements. For a theoretical framework, I draw on Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of masculinist myths of femininity inThe Second Sex, combined with contemporary feminist scholarship on the oppressive constructions of female subjectivity in debates on war and violence. I trace how the hegemonic visions of virile resistance tend to subsume the grey zones of women’s resistance activity under two reductive myths of femininity – the self-sacrificial mother and the seductivefemme fatale– while obscuring the complexities of betrayal arising from women’s embodied vulnerabilities. I demonstrate the political relevance of this theoretical exploration on the example of two representative French Resistance novels, Joseph Kessel’sArmy of Shadowsand Roger Vailland’sPlaying with Fire.

Woke? Affect, Neoliberalism, Marginalised Identities and Consumer Culture

Reading the current conjuncture is challenging. Alongside the exigencies of the current global pandemic, we live in a moment of resurgence of right-wing nationalism, populism, and a crisis of the left across the West. At the same time, we observe a different kind of political commonsense emerging in consumer culture. From burger chains and oil companies to fast fashion, there is an increasing saturation of 'feel good' and 'positive' messages of female empowerment, LGBTIQ pride, racial and religious diversity and inclusion, and environmental awareness. In this article, we question how radical politics – especially around gender, race and sexuality – is put to work in current moment as a response to crisis/ crises in this context of corporate 'wokeness'. We analyse the texture of woke capitalism – what it re-articulates and disarticulates – using Stuart Hall's ideas of conjuncture but contribute an explicitly feminist perspective that notes the extent to which these ideological formations operate affectively. We draw on contemporary feminist work illustrating the affective operation of neoliberalism in the production of everyday life and subjectivity. Going beyond a simple diagnosis of incorporation and recuperation of radical movements, we use the case study of woke capitalism to suggest the production of new affective movements structuring the ongoing obduracy of neoliberalism.

Steal My Girl

ABSTRACT This article explores the way that a scholar of girls’ studies and popular music deals with the emergence of her own daughter’s identity as a popular music fan, with particular emphasis on the discourses of sexuality, empowerment, and safety that dominate contemporary feminist discourse. The author contrasts her own experience as a young fan and daughter of a feminist in 1976.

Shrugging off the tiger: Examining the state of contemporary feminism in the Trumpian era through Maria Berrio’s El Cielo Tiene Jardines

Through the examination of the artwork of Maria Berrio, parallels are drawn between her work, entitled El Cielo Tiene Jardines, and the 2019 political climate under Donald Trump. With the intention of linking the rise of feminism to Trump’s presence in office as president of the United States, specifically through examples of his sexism, narcissism and preference for patriarchy, this is approached through the metaphors of Berrio’s painting. In retaliation to the upswing of sexism, narcissism and patriarchy coming from the White House, each element examined in the artwork is meant to describe the relationship to Donald Trump’s personality cult as well as the corresponding reaction of anti-Trumpian groups, particularly feminists, as well as prescribers to psychoanalytic theory. Examples are cited from Trump’s presence in the media, including tweets, personal statements and historical evidence supporting the arguments made. Topics of neo-colonialism, the American Dream and the generalization of the female desire to remove herself from the submissive role of patriarchal assignment are also discussed. With what was being hailed as Third Wave Feminism, beginning with the Woman’s March of 2017, these aspects of Trumpian character and behaviour are described through the model of Berrio’s stunning mix-media painting and are meant to appeal to readers through both feminist and psychoanalytical analyses.

Mulheres negras e antirracismo no Brasil

O objetivo do presente texto é destacar as contribuições de ativistas e intelectuais negras para o movimento antirracista brasileiro. São apresentados três elementos para pensar esse processo: primeiro, a forma como algumas pensadoras negras compreenderam a dinâmica racial brasileira; segundo, como elas problematizaram o lugar da mulher negra na sociedade brasileira; e em terceiro lugar, discute-se como elas atuaram na construção de ações específicas de enfrentamento do racismo. Para se alcançar a questão proposta, faz-se referência à algumas produções de ativistas e intelectuais identificadas à primeira geração do feminismo negro contemporâneo brasileiro.

Transformative justice and restorative justice: Gender-based violence and alternative visions of justice in the United States

In the United States, the contemporary feminist movement against gender-based violence started in the early 1970s, just as ideologies and policies supporting mass criminalization launched what became a five-fold rise in U.S. rates of incarceration. Since the new millennium, people of color have taken the lead in re-envisioning fundamental notions of justice given the dramatic backdrop of mass incarceration and the recent upsurge in prison abolitionist possibilities. Central to this reformulation has been a social justice critique that recognizes the intersection of gender-based violence and other forms of interpersonal violence with the violence of the state, most concentrated within U.S. carceral institutions. While the U.S. roots of violence as well as resistance to this violence extend back to the earliest days of colonial occupation, the contemporary manifestation of the anti-violence struggle has taken on the labels of restorative justice and, more recently, transformative justice. This conceptual paper relies upon historical analysis of the contemporary anti-violence movement, secondary legal literature, and insider social movement knowledge to trace recent trends in the movement to redefine notions of justice in its application to gender-based violence, the contrasting trajectories of restorative justice and transformative justice, and the liberatory vision and practices of transformative justice.

Feminismo especulativo nas veredas pós-correlacionistas

RESUMO:Este trabalho discute novas possibilidades do feminismo no movimento filosófico denominado realismo especulativo, na vertente de Quentin Meillassoux, de forma a oxigenar a epistemologia feminista contemporânea, que se encontra em clausura metafísica. Se, pré-Kant, o feminismo se encontrava enclausurado na postura objetivista, com a essencialização da mulher como imperfeita, por outro lado, pós-Kant, a mulher se encontra reduzida à verdade subjetivista da ordem epistêmica, gerando outras essencializações. O artigo propõe nova visão para se pensar o feminismo póscorrelacionista, com a ascensão de outra forma de reflexão ontológica: através da cosmontologia, uma compreensão do sexo, do gênero e da sexualidade nem melhor e nem pior, mas apenas diferente, que provoca a reontologização das ciências humanas pelo reconhecimento de outras grafias e modos de existência.

Feminist Facing up to the Logical Foundation of Dualist Philosophy: A Sequentialist Approach

There is a robust tendency within the contemporary feminist mainstream to argue against and ultimately reject the so-called ‘dualising or dualist philosophy’ (associated historically with the thoughts of Plato and Descartes, though from different perspectives) since it is the supportive paradigm background for any gender discrimination originated from (and it also admits of) the hegemonic sovereignty of masculinity over femininity. In this paper, having dived deeper into the feminist critical depiction of the logical binarist foundation on which the dualising philosophy is said to be well-grounded, I will proceed to portray and examine a sequence of doctrines that feminist philosophers have developed to shed light on the fact that the hegemonic sovereignty of masculinity over femininity has been theoretically initiated from the logical disjunction 'p or not p' (p v ~ p) to masculinity essentialism. Finally, I will end by pointing to a tension between underlying assumptions of the feminist sequentialist approach and what feminists themselves claim to adhere to as the highest ideal: non-naturalising gender differences.

Mulher, o outro: seu corpo e seus constituintes biológicos, segundo Simone de Beauvoir

This article explores, based on the problem of the body and its biological constituents, the question of the movement of “wanting to be”, based on the work_O Segundo Sexo, by Simone de Beauvoir. We investigated how the philosopher reaches the genesis of the submission of women, according to the perspective of biology and which are the biological references that allowed men to recognize women as the Other. This also affirms and shows that the biological body is the starting point of all the analysis of the philosopher who produced a conceptual set, rigorously philosophical, of the body submitted to society. Finally, we argue that the analysis of biological data, carried out by Beauvoir in the light of existentialist philosophy, was essential for the unfolding of the various conceptions that guide contemporary feminism.

From actions to words: FEMEN’s fourth-wave manifestos

Since its creation in 2008 in Ukraine, FEMEN has fascinated mainstream audiences and scholars alike. Yet few studies have dealt with FEMEN’s writings in French. While the lack of translations may partially explain this critical gap, the overall dismissal of FEMEN and its impact on contemporary feminisms participates in the historic marginalisation of women’s contributions to the arts, the sciences, or society at large. Recognising the organisation’s problematic standpoints, this article demonstrates how, going from action to words, FEMEN’s collective book publications, Manifeste FEMEN and Rébellion, contribute to, and complicate, contemporary feminist thought and debates. Inscribing themselves in the feminist manifesto tradition, both books articulate a fourth-wave feminist standpoint, and through FEMEN’s assessment of their actions, the organisation unveils Western democracies’ tartufferies regarding secularism and equal rights. FEMEN’s manifestos also generate a reflection on the (im)possibility of a universal, global approach to feminism, namely, due to their Islamophobic stances.

Troubling the realm of estrangement: A comparative analysis of the Docile and the Resistant body in Giuseppe Pitré’s Catarina the Wise and Jeanne Marie Le Prince De Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast

For centuries, the body has stood at the very center of the body/mind dualism which associates men with the mind and women with the body. As a realm of estrangement, the body has been used to redefine the borders of womanhood by the patriarchy that is the reason why theorizing the body from a feminist philosophical approach has become one of the maverick proponents of contemporary feminist theory. As it is a fruitful source for the feminist scholars to reach knowledge about the subjectivity of the feminine body, in contemporary feminist theory, the body plays an important role. This study aims to propose a new reading of Giuseppe Pitré’s Catarina the Wise (1875), focusing on the comparative analysis of the tale with Jeanne Marie Le Prince De Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast (1756) within the light of feminist perspectives of Foucault’s notion of “docile bodies.” The comparative reading of the tales intends to illuminate how the dominant ideology of traditional fairy tale culture, exemplified by Beauty and the Beast, shapes and transforms the female body therefore, identity into a docile body and how Catarina subverts the power relations and certain disciplinary practices of fairy tale culture through her resistant body. Catarina as an independent, bold, self-reliant, economically strong woman subverts the construction of the female body as a cultural archive in fairy tales which are coded plastic mannequins.

Marriage as Ruse or Migration Route: Jewish Women’s Mobility and Sex Trafficking to Argentina, 1890s-1930s

The victim narrative of the international anti-white slavery movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century highlighted the suffering of prostituted women entrapped by violent men. Due to both antisemitic exaggeration and the reality of Ashkenazi Jewish networks of international sex work management in this period, Jews faced particular scrutiny as traffickers, and organized internationally with non-Jewish reformers against the phenomenon. Reformers often decried the shtile khupe, a Jewish religious marriage ceremony without a civil component, as a key trafficking technique. Drawing on League of Nations archives, court records, and the Yiddish, Spanish, and English press, this essay provides a granular social history of marriage and associated relational strategies for cross-border migration and structuring Jewish sex work on the ground in early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires. Evidence from sex workers and their managers pushes against these victimization narratives, reframing marriage as a method to achieve transnational mobility and improve labor and living conditions. Historical and contemporary feminist responses to trafficking share rhetorical strategies and critiques – in both past and present, transnational sex work can be analyzed in a migratory rather than coercive context, centering individuals making difficult choices from among limited options.

Telling Transnational Histories of Women in Architecture, 1960–2015

This essay uses an emergent transnational research project — a global encyclopaedia of women in architecture — as a site for unsettling the terms, chronology, and geography of feminist histories of architecture. By locating feminist architectural history in multiple geographies and histories, feminist practice can attend to the specific geopolitics of architecture and knowledge. This project uses a crowdsourced approach, rooted in local regional reference groups and writers, to facilitate a greater range of entries, voices, and expertise. Transnational histories are generated from difference and disseminate diverse models of architectural practice and lives. Biography is a central tool for providing these counter-narratives of architecture. In this essay feminist scholarship of the 1980s on women’s lives provides a critical foundation for the current biographical turn in journalism and academia. Life writing has long been foundational to women’s history writing, but contemporary biography, with its strategies of visibility, de-canonisation, and mobilisation around gender identity, also provides an affective politics for contemporary architectural feminism. The global turn in architectural history is enriched by an intersectional lens, capable of mapping the myriad geographies and differences of women’s lives, and the precise contours of agency and oppression.

Contemporary feminist imaginings of the refuge-space: implications for Black and ‘minority ethnic’, migrant survivors in the UK

Since 2010, cuts to social expenditure as part of the UK government’s programme of austerity, along with a localism agenda, have resulted in the closure of many refuges for those fleeing domestic abuse, particularly those dedicated to serving Black and ‘minority ethnic’ (BME), migrant survivors. Understanding the refuge as not only a means of practical intervention but as a ‘spatial imaginary’ – a conceptual space in which transformative feminist work is understood to take place – this article examines the discursive construction of the refuge-space by feminist organisations which have mobilised to resist the state-sanctioned erosion of its real-world referent. Engaging with the refuge-space as a bordered site which regulates the material inclusion and exclusion of survivors, as well as the production of feminist knowledge, I assess its ability to produce feminist responses to domestic abuse which can ensure the safety of BME, migrant survivors in an increasingly hostile socio-political climate. Identifying the refuge-space as a site which variously delegates, facilitates and enacts social transformation, I argue that only a refuge-space committed to transforming the site on which it builds can begin to make safety possible for those living at the dangerous intersections of gender, race and immigration status.

Teaching in higher education: organic methodologies

ABSTRACT In this paper, we use process philosophy to address the increased feeling of alienation and resignation among students and teachers in Norwegian academia. By trusting the generative forces of childhood, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we explore changemaking potentialities in what we label ‘organic methodologies’ in higher education. Our question is as follows: What educational potentialities might evolve if we educationalised ‘Babette’s Feast’ as a collective explorative act of feminist resistance in the academic system? As a starting point, we briefly present the short story Babette’s Feast, written by the Danish author Karen Blixen. We experimentally educationalise the imaginary of Babette’s feast and transform it into a contemporary feminist feast, facilitated through our master’s program Toddler Science (0–3 years). After a brief presentation of some elements in the feminist feast, we point to processual tendencies within the feast, using Manning’s logics of major/minor gestures and Massumi’s concept of the trans-individual.

16Feminisms

Abstract This chapter reviews a selection of books published in 2019 relevant to feminist critical and cultural theory. The chapter is divided into four sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Feminist Handbooks, which reviews The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism, edited by Tasha Oren and Andrea L. Press, and The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory, edited by Robin Truth Goodman; 3. Revolutionary Feminism, which reviews Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser’s Feminism for the 99 Percent: A Manifesto; 4. Feminism and Pornography, which reviews Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, and Andrew Altman and Lori Watson’s co-authored Debating Pornography.

Embodiment and Its Violence in Kawakami Mieko’s Chichi to ran: Menstruation, Beauty Ideals, and Mothering

This article offers a close reading of Kawakami Mieko’s Chichi to ran (Breasts and eggs, 2007/2008) and explores how the author problematizes agency vis-à-vis cultural and economical mechanisms that control the female body and fix gender roles in a male-dominated, neo-liberal society through an analysis of the portrayal of menstruation, reproduction and beauty ideals from a feminist perspective. Menstruation, beauty practices, reproduction and mothering, are collective experiences that have too often remained invisible. Kawakami puts them in the spotlight, invests body experiences with a voice, and tells a relevant story not only to Japan, but also to the world, making this novella one of the strongest contemporary feminist portrayals of embodiment, reproduction and agency.

Ethics and political imagination in feminist theory

This article discusses three different conceptions of ethics within contemporary feminist theory and how they depict the connection between ethics and politics. The first position, represented by Wendy Brown, mainly describes ethics as a sort of anti-political moralism and apolitical individualism, and hence as a turn away from politics. The second position, represented by Saba Mahmood, discusses ethics as a precondition for politics, while the third position, represented by Vikki Bell, depicts it as the ‘external consciousness’ of the political, and as destabilising political discourse by confronting it with singularity and ‘radical’ difference. Though they represent distinct positions, the article argues, all three suffer from a tendency to reify ethics by failing to give a contextualised account of it. The article then introduces the ethical perspective of Judith Butler, arguing that she – while offering both a transhistorical and a contextualised dimension – tends to psychologise and individualise ethics and politics. The last part of the article introduces Terry Eagleton and what, in a Marxist vein, could be called a ‘materialist ethics’ or an ‘ethics of socialism’, and argues that this way of framing the relationship between ethics and politics provides a solution to the trap of reification identified in the three described positions. This part also discusses how Eagleton’s theory relates to – but also differs from – arguments made by Butler. One advantage of Eagleton’s work, the article argues, is that it does not psychologise and individualise ethics and politics as Butler’s work does.

Eclecticism or exclusivity? The (critical) pragmatist ethos of (intersectional) analytic eclecticism

Eclecticism in International Relations (IR) claims to reject the rigid boundaries set by various theoretical traditions, yet, in practice, it falls short of moving the field “beyond paradigms” and tends to produce analytical exclusivity rather than eclecticism. This exclusivity is the result of Sil and Katzenstein’s investment in tenets of American pragmatism. These tenets favor consensus and universalism, leading to the reproduction and exclusivity of the theoretical status quo. Dissolving paradigmatic boundaries requires a more critical form of pragmatism. Drawing on the common origins of feminism and pragmatism paired with the contemporary feminist concept of intersectionality, this essay proposes a critical pragmatist ethos and an intersectional analytic eclecticism. This can produce a more inclusive form of analytic eclecticism and render visible the power dynamics that shape experiences as well as academic scholarship. Only when analytic eclecticism is informed by intersectionality and a critical pragmatism might it actually move IR “beyond paradigms.”