Contemporary Feminist Politics Research Articles

Gandhi and the Gender of Nonviolent Resistance

The special issue of which this article forms a part looks at human violence and tries to investigate religious potentials to strengthen the case for nonviolence as the preferred method of social change. This article’s focus is on Gandhi’s version of a faith-based form of nonviolent resistance, called Satyagraha, and its relation to gender. In particular, the article asks whether this Gandhian tradition holds any value for women’s struggles and for contemporary feminist politics. The first section follows the historical development of Gandhi’s thinking on women’s participation in Satyagraha, from South Africa to India. The second section gives a brief overview of the recent empirical work conducted by Erica Chenoweth on the impact of women’s participation on the outcomes of mass movements over the past century. The final section places these two thinkers in conversation and draws out the value and limitations of Gandhi’s thinking for contemporary women’s struggles and feminist resistance. Although the direct focus is on the relation between women and nonviolent revolutionary campaigns and movements, indirectly the unstable gendered dichotomies, male–female, masculine–feminine, and violence–nonviolence, will be simultaneously drawn upon and problematised.

Special Issue: ‘Vulnerability’ within Contemporary Feminist Politics and Theory

Special Issue: ‘Vulnerability’ within Contemporary Feminist Politics and Theory

Drawing Dangerous Women: The Monstrous-Feminine, Taboo and Japanese Feminist Perspectives on the Female Form

During the twenty-first century, global developments with graphic texts have seen positive changes in the representation of characters and storylines representing female-led narratives and perspectives. Recent Japanese graphic texts offer an instructive window into concerns about feminist comics and graphic novels which not only represent a vital intervention in terms of contemporary Japanese feminist politics but also reinforce their relevance as feminist art activism within a global frame. Taking into account the popularity of manga worldwide this article argues that the growing range of Japanese texts with clear feminist messages marks an intervention on behalf of female creators in keeping with the theory and practice of contemporary feminist discourse. Additionally, this Japanese evolution illustrates the ways in which second wave feminism, particularly feminist art, has impacted women on a global scale. Consequently, the article explores the important role of intersectionality alongside themes relating to the body and sexuality, subversion of the monstrous feminine, feminist activism by considering the narrative of Rokudenashiko’s graphic memoir What is Obscenity?: The story of a good for nothing artist and her pussy (2016).

Politics of Shame in Turkey: Public Shaming and Mourning

The politics of shame makes part of the politics of affects. It is becoming a prominent form of politics in the age of social media. Social media, insofar as it presents a plurality of perspectives, can be a milieu for public deliberation. Acknowledging that politics of shame can be of different types, this essay considers two different experiences of politics of shame in social media. It compares public shaming as an activist strategy of moral reform in contemporary feminist politics with politics of shame under authoritarianism by concentrating on two cases from Turkey. At first the structure of shame will be articulated by recourse to the phenomenological and psychological theories of shame. In public shaming for feminist moral reform, the publically shamed agent, who is a feminist, is accused by a group for performing an injurious speech act or a deed with mediate pernicious, harmful consequences. It is my contention that a theory of gender or sexual difference can be false, but is not morally equivalent to an attack on somebody’s existence, racism, and acts of genocide denial. Practices of public shaming in feminism are not self-defense; they are repressive and unfair attacks that destroy public deliberation. It is also problematic to attack feminists, on the grounds of arguments that are based on analogies, which do not apply to non-Western geo-political contexts. All politics of shame is not wrong. For example, the practices of politics of shame that concern non-elaborate mourning have moral and political value insofar as they can play a role in challenging an authoritarian political rule. In this case, the public shame results from attesting to injustice done to the other(s) in the public sphere, a public sphere, which is already closed, and highly manipulated by the authoritarian state.

Introduction: gender experts and gender expertise

The rise of gender expertise and gender experts as a new profession is a significant and highly controversial phenomenon of contemporary feminist politics. This introductory article provides a contextualisation of this phenomenon, a short review of the literature and a theoretical specification of gender expertise, drawing on insights from the professionalisation and expertise literature. We highlight the importance of studying the politics of gender expertise and interrogate the type of knowledge that it constitutes and its relationship to policy and politics (including feminism). The special issue as a whole shows the varieties and complexities of gender expertise, what it makes possible and what it forecloses, and the disruptions it produces. The contributions adopt different approaches to show: how gender expertise is rent with tensions and divisions; how it is constrained within institutions, networks and policies; and how it produces multiple and sometimes unintended outcomes with powerful political effects.

Kommunikation und Feminist New Materialism: Methodologien zum Verständnis des Kontinuums zwischen Materie und Diskurs

The relationship between literature and social networking sites (SNS) is a material context in which authors and readers merge into each other to create a literary communicative process that transforms contemporary politics. The aim of this paper is to analyse the communicative process by investigating the continuum between matter and discourse from a new materialist approach. From social sites, we can understand how elements, such as readers, authors, context, novels, culture and digital platforms, “intra-act” (Barad 2007) to create an affecting/ed communicative process. We propose feminist new materialism as a theoretical terrain that helps to reconfigure politics and communication in order to build a methodological framework for contemporary feminist politics and theory related to Literature. Using a digital genealogy and the theory of new materialism, we identify communication in literature as a trapping force in which different elements intra-act with each other and become indivisible. Affecting/ed communication is a dynamic conceptualization, a literary activity in which active agents participate in creative spaces for future social changes.

Living dolls? The role of clothing and fashion in ‘sexualisation’

This article considers the role that clothing and fashion have played, or continue to play, in ‘sexualisation’. It is pointed out that fashion, as in clothing, has often played a very small part in much wider discussions about ‘sexualisation’ much of which fails to problematise the meaning of the clothing concerned. The article thus considers what might constitute ‘sexualised’ clothing or fashion – whether this is simply baring of flesh, too ‘adult’, or somehow ‘pornographic’ in its derivations or connotations. In addition, fashion and dress have a long history of forming heated concern for feminists who have often found themselves caught between seeing it as oppressive and male defined or expressive and somehow empowering. What is often at stake here is the very significance of fashion or dress itself when seen as a wider communicator of status or just personality. Drawing on established feminist and fashion theory, this article unpacks this connection. In addition, the ‘function’ of fashion as display has an equally long history of often unacknowledged gender difference that precedes later feminist resistance yet still informs it. The article also considers the extent to which understandings of fashion may inform or disrupt more contemporary feminist politics on dress, and recent attempts to reclaim ‘sexualised’ clothing and dressing as empowering for young women are questioned. In sum, it is argued that an analysis of fashion and dress per se is needed to develop a more informed understanding of the processes of ‘sexualisation’ and resistance to them.

Constructing a feminist icon through erotic friend fiction: millennial feminism on Bob’s Burgers

ABSTRACTThis study engages in current scholarly debates regarding third-wave versus postfeminist media icons through an analysis of Tina Belcher, the eldest daughter in the animated series Bob’s Burgers and a paragon of what I coin “millennial feminism.” In it, I argue that Tina rejects popular postfeminist discourses and experiences a politicized feminist awakening. While Tina is significant in her own right, most remarkable is the way millennial audiences have utilized the internet to position Tina as a feminist folk hero. Ultimately, I trace how popular critics use Tina to theorize a millennial feminism that reflects the values and characteristics of the millennial generation. Revisiting Sarah Banet-Weiser’s (2004. “Girls rule! Gender, feminism, and Nickelodeon.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21, pp. 119–139) argument that Nickelodeon’s girl power programming demonstrated third-wave feminist politics for its audiences, I argue that adult-oriented animated sitcoms lend themselves to an absurdity and disregard for hegemonic gender ideologies which have the potential to unsettle dominant ideologies of gender and sexuality and can define contemporary feminist politics for viewers.

A Psychopathology of Everyday Women: Psychoanalytic Aesthetics and Gender Politics in <em>Letting Go</em> and “The Psychoanalytic Special”

FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSISThe fact is that to [him] [. . .] women [are] a strange, inferior, less-than- species. He [sees] as childlike dolls, who existed in terms only of man's love, to love man and serve his needs (Friedan 108). This is not another rebuke of Philip Roth's alleged misogyny, although it may remind us of Hermione Lee's provocative statement that, in Roth's novels, nearly all the women [. . .] are there to obstruct, or to help, or to console the male (Reading 132), or David Gooblar's assessment that feminist critics have usually deemed Roth's female characters as inferior to his male characters, mere types, never rising to the complexity or depth of the fully human (8). The opening allegation is not, in fact, taken from Roth criticism at all, but rather encapsulates Betty Friedan's estimation of Sigmund in her 1963 feminist classic The Feminine Mystique. Decades later, Nancy Chodorow still admits, Freud was indeed sexist. He wrote basically from a male norm and ignored women. [. . .] He talks, for instance, about women's lesser sense of justice, of their jealousy, shame, vanity, and lack of contribution to civilization as if were clinical findings (172). Evidently, charges of sexism and misogyny abound both in and in Roth criticism (Young-Bruehl and Wexler 455; Shostak 112; Gooblar 7). Both have been accused either of neglecting and distorting the female point of view or even of disseminating images of femininity that have proved damaging to the cause of feminism. Roth's allegiance to could thus easily be seen as the bedrock of his own sexist inclinations.However, such an assessment would jump too quickly from superficial readings of and Roth to a questionable conclusion. Instead, I will argue here that Roth's feminism-his critique of rigid gender roles and sexual politics-is particularly acute where he openly engages with Freud. This argument is far less surprising than the statement by Friedan or the opinions summarized by Lee and Gooblar suggest. First of all, Roth's works have already been associated with feminism. Julie Husband, for instance, notes that Roth's early novels offer an intriguing view of Roth's struggle with second-wave feminism, in developing forceful, albeit ambivalent, critiques of patriarchy (25-26). Defending When She Was Good (1967), Sam Girgus claims that the novel suggests that for Roth becoming a man and achieving true sexual and personal liberation require a culture of freedom for women as well (153), thus also aligning Roth with contemporary feminist politics. Furthermore, several critics have demonstrated how Roth uses subtle narrative techniques to deconstruct the sexism flaunted by his characters. A close reading shows that one-dimensional or stereotypical portrayals of women, which appear frequently in Roth's work, can be traced back to a male character's limited or flawed perspective. Debra Shostak has pointed out that, for these very reasons, [. . .] Roth's work can appear as much a prescient critique of misogynist attitudes as a purveyor of them (112). In a mock trial staged between Philip and his mistress in Deception (1990), the writer responds to the charge of sexism and the claim that all his women are vicious stereotypes (110) in the following way: [Y]ou may do your own sex a disservice when you postulate intelligent young women as lacking the courage to be desirable-as having no aggression, no imagination, no daring, no adventurousness, and no perversity (111). In addition, then, Roth's portrayals of desirous and aggressive women, which have often been counted among vicious stereotypes, may add a crucial dimension to a more complex vision of womanhood often occluded by images of female virtue and demureness.Secondly, even the most vehement feminist opponents of Freud, among Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, have appropriated psychoanalysis for analyzing sexism (Young-Bruehl and Wexler 456). …

Contested Feminisms: Women’s Religious Leadership and the Politics of Contemporary Western Feminism

Feminism is a relatively recent social movement of radical reform, emerging from the mass political movements of democratisation, secularisation and liberalism that swept across the western world from the 17th century onwards. The first wave of organised feminist political action was articulated in the abolitionist, temperance and suffrage movements in America and Europe in the mid 19th century and culminated in the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 in New York State where the women’s rights movement was born. Religion was a crucial influence in the work of first wave feminists enjoying close ties to the liberal movements of Protestantism, particularly the Quaker movement. However, as modernity progressed into the twentieth century and secularism became incorporated into statecraft, the influence of religion in the public sphere waned and humanist ethics came to the fore in political life. So, although Christianity had been a primary part of first wave feminism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the 1960s second wave feminism embraced secularism and situated religion as an inherently patriarchal institution, incapable of social change and has yet to acknowledge the pivotal part that women’s religious leadership played in establishing the grounds for contemporary feminist politics. Recently, a third phase of religious feminism, defined as post-secular feminism, shifts the ground yet again to open up new possibilities of engagement between religious and non-religious feminisms. Following on from the first two waves of religious feminism, this third phase holds potential for counter hegemonic action in transforming gender conservative religious institutions, theologies and social practices towards more inclusive, potentially transformative, religious cultures. It also provides space for a new articulation of religious and secular feminist politics.

Whose personal is more political? Experience in contemporary feminist politics

Whose personal is more political? This article explores the role of experience in contemporary feminist politics, arguing that it operates as a form of capital within abstracted and decontextualised debates which entrench existing power relations. In a neoliberal context in which the personal and emotional is commodified, powerful groups mobilise traumatic narratives to gain political advantage. Through case study analysis this article shows how privileged feminists, speaking for others and sometimes for themselves, use experience to generate emotion and justify particular agendas, silencing critics who are often from more marginalised social positions. The use of the experiential as capital both reflects and perpetuates the neoliberal invisibilisation of structural dynamics: it situates all experiences as equal, and in the process fortifies existing inequalities. This competitive discursive field is polarising, and creates selective empathies through which we tend to discredit others’ realities instead of engaging with their politics. However, I am not arguing for a renunciation of the politics of experience: instead, I ask that we resist its commodification and respect varied narratives while situating them in a structural frame.

Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences

Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences

Teaching Chaucer and Popular Culture:

This essay is inspired both by an increasing disciplinary contention that Chaucerians engage with popular culture and by a refreshed critical interest (reflected in the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in sharing pedagogical innovations and interests with peers within a public forum.2 Notwithstanding lingering professional suspicions about the value of the popular, engagement with popular culture involves the need both to better communicate Chaucer’s aesthetic distinction to the culture at large and to embrace the popular in our teaching. This essay offers a brief meditation on the value of the popular and offers two theoretical approaches that one might use to introduce the study of Chaucer’s popular constructions into the classroom. I suggest, in short, that Chaucer’s reproduction in popular culture has both pedagogical and critical value—both as interpretations of his poetry as it is adapted to

Considering Emma

This article considers the importance of the anarchist thinker and activist Emma Goldman (1869–1940) for contemporary feminist theory and politics. Initially concerned with how Goldman’s views on power and change help us reconsider our own history and present, the author shifts gears in the course of the article to think aspects of her thought that are less easily reclaimed. Exploring her own and others’ desire for Goldman to resolve current difficulties within and beyond feminism, the author highlights the problems this desire presents for both our understanding of the past, and our ability adequately to engage the present. Focusing instead on the importance of fantasy in our accounting for the relationship between past and present, the author explores our desires to consign judgement and essence to another era.

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics

GENDER AND INSTITUTIONS

Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics: Gender and Politics. Jonathan Dean, 2010. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gender, Politics and Institutions: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism. Mona Le...

Manic Impositions: The Parasitical Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle

[There] is moment when Echo traps Narcissus in a certain way. . . . Echo, in her loving and infinite cleverness, arranges it so that in repeating last syllables of words of Narcissus, she speaks in such a way that words become her own - In repeating language of another, she signs her own love. Jacques Derrida, in documentary Derrida, 2004 The letters are a rhizome, a network, a spider's web. There is a vampirism in letters, a vampirism that is specifically epistolary. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Feminist Parasites This essay asks how parasitism might articulate itself as an experimental practice as well as a performance model for contemporary feminist politics. My thinking here is drawn from a larger critical project, which argues that by dragging impositions, parodies, and caricatures said to represent feminism, by performing back to itself, a younger generation of feminist artists have already begun to reimage feminism as a critically viable project capable of assimilating irony and equivocality for its tactical gain. By performing parasites, artists Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle model feminist tactics that feed on and destabilize patriarchal forms by seizing upon gendered analogy of correspondence between feminized parasite and her masculinized host. Precisely what is a para- site? asks David Bell of Michel Serres's study The Parasite. It is an opera- tor that interrupts a system of exchange. The abusive guest partakes of host's meal . . . and gives only words ... in return (1981, 886). Chris Kraus and Sophie Calles art book projects explore motif of heterosexual epistolary exchange, read here as literary performance. The role of epistolary in production of sexual abjection, a medium historically associated with courtship, is made explicit; in both projects, love letter represents a state of play by which gendered opponents feed on each other in a dynamically unstable game (recalling a question Judith Butler has posed: Can exchange of speech or writing be occasion for a disruption of social ontology of positionality? [1995, 441-42]). Kraus and Calle are not first artists to mobilize epistolary and diaristic practices, traditionally seen as benign feminine literary forms, to challenge heterosexual romance's complicity in women's abjection. Their works tug on a thread within feminist practices established by works such as Carolee Schneemanns Interior Scroll (1975) or Adrian Piper's Calling Cards (1986), which mobilized questions of racial as well as sexual abjection. The artists step into role of parasite to avenge women's (real and performed) hostility toward men, designated guilty agents of their (real and performed) suffering. In both projects, women's desire to literalize, to put into letters, their social revenge on patriarchy by making surrogate victims out of actual male subjectivities takes on a decidedly literary character, as reading and writing become conditions of possibility for turning the law of father against itself, letter by letter. What is intriguing about parasite for feminism is how it has been overwhelmingly deployed as a pejorative term rooted in misogyny of supposed alien threat of femininity, a destructive and out- of- control dependence on a presumably healthy patriarch. J. Hillis Miller noted this gendering, writing that parasite suggests image of 'the obvious or univocal reading' as mighty, masculine oak or ash rooted in solid ground, endangered by insidious twining around it of ivy. English or maybe poison, somehow feminine, secondary, defective, or dependent, a clinging vine, able to live in no other way but by drawing life sap of its host (1977, 440). More compelling is extent to which Western feminist discourses have internalized these anxieties, warnings of parasitism cropping up in canonical texts of often white, U. …

Book Review: Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics

Book Review: Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics

From Monkey Facts to Human Ideologies: Theorizing Female Orgasm in Human and Nonhuman Primates, 1967–1983

Abstract This article seeks to elucidate the content and implications of two debates that grew up around female orgasm in the 1970s, under the aegis of feminist science and of feminist politics, respectively. The scientific controversy began when a cadre of self‐proclaimed feminist primatologists led by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy insisted, against an overwhelmingly male anthropological consensus, that female orgasm was both present and evolutionarily efficacious in nonhuman primates. This dispute has received two able and very different scholarly treatments, one from historian Donna Haraway and one from philosopher Elisabeth Lloyd. Neither scholar, however, has attended adequately to the background of contemporary feminist politics against which support for the existence of female orgasm in nonhuman primates was construed as the feminist position and against which defending its human uniqueness appeared as a gender‐conservative view. I reject the facile conclusion that the debate was simply a recapitulation of th...

Sisterhood Revisited During the Second Wave of Feminism

Sisterhood Revisited During the Second Wave of Feminism Karen C. Krahulik (bio) Stephanie Gilmore, ed. Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 320 pp. Notes and index. $80.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). On August 27, 2008, a month after Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic presidential primary contest to Barack Obama, Neal Conan’s NPR series, “Talk of the Nation,” asked: “Where Does Feminism Go from Here?”1 Farai Chideya, Susan Faludi, Lizz Winstead, and Amy Richards all weighed in on the merits of Clinton’s campaign, on the politics of gender and race, and on the significance of her defeat for white women, for African Americans, and for feminism. Not one of them imagined, however, that feminism would go from “here” to Sarah Palin or, put differently, that a nascent heroine of the far right would so quickly usurp the feminist center stage. Two weeks later, on “All Things Considered,” Jacki Lyden asked historian Estelle Freedman if Palin, the apparent “new face of feminism,” was, indeed, a “feminist.”2 “That really gets to the heart of what is a feminist,” Freedman argued, “and it’s a very malleable term.” Stephanie Gilmore does not speak to contemporary feminist politics in her new edited collection, but she does address the implications of deploying a restricted understanding of what it means to be a feminist. “We must embrace a more capacious definition of feminism,” Gilmore argues, if we are to appreciate fully the “complexities and nuances” of women’s activism in the past (p. 5). The solid team of authors assembled by Gilmore in Feminist Coalitions, a volume addressing the second wave of feminism, exposes the tangled roots of women’s alliances that took place during the 1960s and 1970s, including those entrenched in conservative traditions. Gilmore hints at her “capacious definition of feminism” with sentences such as the following: “feminists have historically sought to eradicate all forms of oppression, even if assigning priority to particular forms of discrimination” (p. 7). In another passage she quotes Dorothy Sue Cobble to make clear that she and the authors in her collection “explicitly or implicitly agree that feminism ‘need not require an unwavering single focus on gender, nor does gender-conscious reform reside only in all-female organizations’” (p. 5).3 Yet [End Page 140] I longed for Gilmore to say explicitly what she means by the term feminist. Would Sarah Palin’s libertarian ancestors qualify? I am not advocating for one strict definition, nor for an ahistorical umbrella that embraces all activists agitating for women’s rights. But I am advocating for more precise definitions by scholars engaged in histories of feminism or feminists. Like the term queer, the “f word” has an activist and scholarly life of its own, with varying meanings in the past and present. Despite the amount of critical theory produced about feminism, or perhaps because of it, academics of all stripes still benefit from careful ruminations and explanations of how they are deploying such loaded terminology. Perhaps Gilmore intentionally refuses a stable definition of feminism so that historians will expand their inquiries into women’s lives and movements in the past. This logic is consistent with one of her central arguments, that by focusing only on self-identified feminists and the divisiveness within their organizations, historians have overlooked both the number and the diversity of activists who fought, often in coalitions, to improve women’s lives at home and in the workplace. Gilmore believes that by unhinging the historical imagination from a strict definition of what a feminist might be and by focusing on alliances rather than separations, historians will gain a better understanding of what some scholars believe is the most significant social movement of the twentieth century: the second wave of feminism. Gilmore’s concern for historians’ lack of knowledge regarding this momentous time in American history is well founded. We need to know more about the diverse array of women and men involved in the fight to improve women’s lives before, during and after the 1960s and 1970s in order to analyze the significance of the second wave judiciously. Scholars such as...