Feminist Debate Research Articles

Feminist aesthetics: then and now – reflections on thirty-five years of inquiry in the US tradition

Marking the thirty-fifth anniversary since its emergence in the United States, feminist aesthetics commemorates its significant contributions to feminist philosophical inquiry. This anniversary provides an opportunity to reflect on the field's current status and its potential to further enrich philosophical discourse. This article sets out to (a) synthesise the existing theoretical frameworks within feminist aesthetics, (b) delineate its subject matter and (c) chart the dominant trends and interventions marking feminist engagements with aesthetics. In contemporary feminist debates, aesthetics often occupies a peripheral position, a phenomenon attributed to its perceived detachment from the socio-political core of feminism (Plonowska-Ziarek) and its dismissal as a ‘feminine’ or ‘girly’ discipline (Brand Weiser). This marginalisation is further compounded by critiques of the field's allegedly slow response to the ideas, problems and methodologies present in related domains and broader philosophical inquiry (Eaton). So, despite acknowledging the vital role of aesthetics within feminist philosophy, the articulation of a systematic and coherent feminist aesthetic theory remains elusive. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the most significant and representative positions within feminist aesthetics in the US tradition. The first section introduces the topic of feminist aesthetics. The second section examines feminist interventions in aesthetics, including their evolution towards intersectional and transnational approaches. The challenges of establishing autonomy within and defining feminist aesthetics are discussed in the third, fourth and fifth sections. The sixth section explores the main currents of feminist aesthetics: (a) historical-critical, (b) essentialist (revisionism vs perspectivism), (c) gynocentric and (d) anti-theoretical.

Migrant services and the reconfiguration of social reproduction as capital accumulation

Much of past feminist theorization of social reproduction has concentrated on the domestic sphere. However, in multiple domains such as education, childcare, elder care, health care, the delivery of goods, and migrant settlement, first the state and non-profit organizations and increasingly corporate profit-making service industries emerged as significant providers. In this transformed world of social reproduction, the initial query of feminist theorists about the relationship between social reproduction and capital accumulation must again be addressed. This return to a theorization of social reproduction in what is often considered the humanitarian sector of capitalist economies must encompass the labor of precarious workers and unpaid volunteers. Building on but going beyond the feminist debate about social reproduction, this paper explores the relationship between the public–private domain of service delivery and capital accumulation in migrants’ services. In so many instances, humanitarian activities in sectors such as migrant services have become the local face of a multiscalar migration industry. Through an exploration of the delivery of migrant services in a disempowered city in eastern Germany, the paper explicates the dynamics through which social reproduction activities are commoditized and are increasingly linked to locations and mechanisms of capital accumulation through the extraction of surplus value.

Wallaert, S. (2023). Kwaad Spreken: Wie Gelooft de Boze Vrouw?. Borgerhout: Letterwerk. Review by Alexia Debbaut

Sigrid Wallaert’s Kwaad Spreken: Wie Gelooft de Boze Vrouw? (translation: Knowing Anger: Who Believes the Angry Woman?) is part of the Questa-series essays, a series launched by the Belgian publisher Letterwerk, which foregrounds critical feminist writing. All essays in this series focus on specific topics (such as ethics, love, age, music...) or specific philosophies (like feminist ethics, feminist philosophy, the philosophy of Proust, etc.). Knowing Anger is an important contribution to contemporary feminist debate because it sheds light on the (omni)presence of feminist anger and its epistemic value. As Wallaert puts it, anger is more than the wrapping paper in which you pack your message. It is an essential part of what you have to say (Wallaert, 2023, p. 29). She speaks of an ‘anger turn’, as she sees a new prominence of (the use of) feminist anger in the (non-fiction) publishing industry, the media, the academic world and politics, parallel to Sara Ahmed’s ‘happiness turn.’ Wallaert investigates where this anger comes from and how it is used as an enabling force in feminist activism by using Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007).

The return of the king’s two bodies: liberal arguments for the moderating powers of monarchy in post-revolutionary France and Portugal*

ABSTRACT Arguments analogous to those found in the late medieval theory of the king’s two bodies, popularized by Ernst Kantorowicz, were resurrected in early nineteenth-century constitutional theories of the moderating powers of monarchy. Post-revolutionary French liberal thought, echoed by its Portuguese counterpart, rediscovered the virtues of the institution of royalty, notably the immaterial and immortal body of the king. This rediscovery was prompted by the uncertainties of different national political contexts which made many contemporaries believe it desirable to integrate restored monarchies within modern constitutional models for state stability. This first occurred with the Bourbons’ return to post-Napoleonic France and the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, and then with the Braganza royal family’s return to Portugal in 1821 after thirteen years of rule from Brazil. Using arguments similar to those previously made in late medieval European political and legal thought, French and Portuguese liberals developed a theory of the king’s two powers, according to which the monarch at once exercised a moderating power, defined by the abstract institutional nature of the king’s person, and an executive power, embodied within his physical person. This conceptualization of royal duality was intended to make it possible to delegate executive power to ministers, leaving the king only the attributes of a largely symbolic power. Liberals thereby hoped to confine the monarch to his purely institutional body in a de-politicized constitutional role.

Women’s search for public space and leisure in Agra: cots, courtyards, and riverbank

ABSTRACT Historians have often highlighted the centrality of bazaars and the streets in urban public life in India as a space for politics and mobilisation. Historically, these bazaars and streets have been the domain of men, while spaces created by dominant urban planning logics like sequestered parks and enclosed marketplaces are marked by exclusion across various axes. Where do women then find opportunities for leisure, solidarity, chance encounter, or discursive politics? The paper explores this question through a case study of a low-income riverside settlement in Agra using ethnographic field work conducted in 2019. This included observations, interviews, and group discussions with residents, community leaders, and police officials, and a systematic review of local and national news reports. The paper finds that for women, public spaces like riverbanks, streets, and large parks are characterised by a ‘mahaul’ (translated here as affective environment) that is risky and ‘kharab’ (immoral or corrupt) due to their sticky affective association with harassment, transgression, romance, and the risk of elopements. Instead, women find opportunities for leisure and sociality by coming together on cots in shared courtyards or rooftops within their neighbourhood – these form their ‘enclosed outside’ where they find opportunities for sociality, leisure (which exists simultaneously with work), and discussion. By centring women’s experiences, vocabularies, and everyday relationship with public spaces, and underscoring the register of ‘affect’ in these experiences, this paper makes an important contribution to the growing literature on gendering right to the city and the feminist argument for women’s right to leisure spaces. The paper also centres the importance of local built elements like shared courtyards within a neighbourhood especially for women, with implications for urban planning and design.

Young Men and Feminism: Gendered Struggle and Sense-Making for Australian University Students

This paper explores feminism as a site of explicit struggle and implicit sense-making for young men. Through an analysis of interviews with twenty young people at two Australian universities, it considers how popularised feminist (and anti-feminist) discourses shape discussions of men, boys and masculinity. Actively grappling with the place of boys and men in certain high-profile feminist debates, participants’ responses revealed core sites of tension around their collective and individual responsibility for gendered harms, tensions reflective of those present within feminist debates themselves. The impact of feminism could also be seen in the gendered analysis so many participants produced to make sense of limiting emotional norms, even though they did not recognise this analysis as a feminist inheritance. Moving beyond an approach seeking to categorise young men’s responses as either pro- or anti-feminist, this paper highlights the entanglement of feminism in young men’s sensemaking around gendered issues.

‘blotted into the unreadable darkness’: Feminist Solidarity as Feminist Utopia in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White (2002)

This article investigates the representation of feminist solidarity as feminist utopia through the relationship between Sugar and Agnes, the female protagonists of Michel Faber's neo-Victorian novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). The article argues that the two women's relationship serves as a metaphor for the feminist debate on difference, negotiated in neo-Victorian fiction, and dramatises the process whereby support is consciously and actively offered in order to defy oppression and alleviate suffering, despite their different positionalities. A key aspect of this process is the (literal and metaphorical) journey which Sugar undertakes to the sites of Agnes's lived experience, which provides her with an insight into the kind of oppression Agnes experiences and enables her to offer the latter woman the assistance she needs. Feminist solidarity, the article asserts, is ultimately conceptualised as a feminist utopia, as Agnes's desired mode of aid entails that she chase her own utopia once Sugar liberates her. In this way, the text asserts the necessity of thinking about feminist solidarity as feasible within the context of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century feminist controversies on that issue.

The gendered politics of Iran-U.S. relations: sanctions, the JCPOA and women’s security

I examine the decades of fraught Iran–U.S. relations through a conceptual feminist IR lens, and I situate the relationship within the broader MENA region beset with rivalries, conflicts and crises. The spotlight is on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the unilateral U.S. withdrawal in 2018, the long sanctions regime imposed on Iran, and the gendered effects on women’s welfare and security. I argue that Iran–U.S. mutual hostility has enhanced tensions in the Middle East, reinforced militarised masculinities and bolstered the patriarchal political forces in Iran – which became the target of the 2022 female-led protests. Building on feminist arguments about the connection between domestic and international affairs, the article elucidates the relationship of sanctions to ‘the continuum of violence’.

From Gender-Blind to Gender Bind: Foregrounding Gender in the History of the UNFCCC

Abstract In this article, I argue that the Women and Gender Constituency (WGC) in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been remarkable in its efforts to mainstream gender in the Convention. The WGC has been at the forefront of the fight to embed a gender perspective into global climate change politics and has been the driving force for the UNFCCC’s progression from gender-blind in 1992 to a Gender Action Plan in 2017. Through an intersectional framework, I demonstrate that foregrounding gender as a political issue and feminist activism in the history of the UNFCCC makes visible a tricky strategic bind whereby an “insider” approach to influencing the negotiations has meant that while women–environment links are firmly embedded in UNFCCC discourse, gender–environment links are less well received. Understanding this strategic bind faced by feminist climate activists is important politically, to advance feminist arguments in global climate governance.

(What) Is Feminist Logic? (What) Do We Want It to Be?

‘Feminist logic’ may sound like an impossible, incoherent, or irrelevant project, but it is none of these. We begin by delineating three categories into which projects in feminist logic might fall: philosophical logic, philosophy of logic, and pedagogy. We then defuse two distinct objections to the very idea of feminist logic: the irrelevance argument and the independence argument. Having done so, we turn to a particular kind of project in feminist philosophy of logic: Valerie Plumwood's feminist argument for a relevance logic ( L Plum ) . Plumwood's work serves as our primary case study as we turn to the project of considering three different ways we might understand her argument and revisionist arguments like it: as a priori theorizing, as ameliorative conceptual engineering, or as instances of anti-exceptionalist approaches to logic. After arguing that the anti-exceptionalist approach seems to provide the most promising means of understanding the kind of project undertaken in a feminist challenge to classical logic, we briefly address the consequences that this might have for logic instruction. Here, we argue for the perhaps unexpected conclusion that feminist programs ought to offer more, not less, instruction in logic for those who take interest.

Leave Her Alone, She Speaks the Truth

Most feminist debates, including Western Feminism and postcolonial strands of feminism such as African Feminisms, place emphasis on religion – specifically Christianity – as an oppressive structure dominating women, and justifiably so. Within feminist and colonial discourses, however, Christianity occupies complex, ambiguous spaces. In considering Christianity’s positioning within colonialism and feminism, an African feminist position should seek to recognize the contradictions inherent in Christianity and, by extension, facilitate the nuanced experiences women in postcolonial, global South contexts have with Christianity. While some women might find Christianity oppressive, others may find it deeply fulfilling and others still may experience these dichotomies simultaneously. This article presents an African feminist reading of Katori Hall’s play, Our Lady of Kibeho (2018). Inspired by real-life events and centering Christianity (specifically Catholicism), Hall’s play tells the story of three Rwandan convent high-school girls – Alphonsine, Anathalie, and Marie-Claire – whose Marian apparitions garnered widespread attention. Through a textual analysis of, primarily, Alphonsine, who reportedly had the first and most frequent visitations, Christianity is proffered as a site of concurrent oppression and liberation. This article does not engage in the specificities of Catholic doctrine, but rather offers a discussion of varied encounters with Christianity.

(En)Countering epistemic imperialism: A critique of “Westsplaining” and coloniality in dominant debates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

ABSTRACT On February 24, 2022, the world was surprised by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and, perhaps even more so, by Ukraine’s fierce resistance to it. In this article, we examine mainstream and feminist International Relations (IR) debates that have emerged in response to Russia’s invasion, as well as the older debates revived through them. Building on decolonial and feminist scholarship, prominently centering feminist debates from Europe’s East and Central Asia, we argue that dominant Western IR debates on Russia and Ukraine are shaped by inter-imperiality. We trace issues of epistemic injustice, epistemic imperialism and coloniality of knowledge production in mainstream IR and see them replicated in feminist debates, including from global South perspectives. We conclude with a contemplation on the structural changes warranted across academia to eliminate the coloniality of knowledge production about Ukraine and fellow societies as well as Indigenous nations affected by Russian colonial and imperial violence.

Gendered racism

This article examines the intersecting oppressions of Danish welfare politics and its emerging interest in emancipating ‘immigrant’ women and girls. It draws on Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images and, based on a documentary text corpus, it identifies how the images of the unfree immigrant housewife and the inhibited immigrant girl are formed through oxymoronic liberal arguments of care and control. The article demonstrates how this plays out in an assemblage of policy documents and suggests why welfare professionalism is called upon to ‘rescue’ ‘immigrant’ women and girls, situating welfare politics and professionalism within the racial welfare state and its racial capitalist and Orientalist logics. The analyses demonstrate how gendered and racialized signifiers help to structure welfare politics and professionalism, and how a space of emancipation is intertwined with a global economic division of labor. The article suggests that racialized welfare politics and professionalism are permeated by the desire to emancipate women, which remains a powerful impulse within Danish welfare state capitalism, liberalism and social-democratic reasoning.

Contributions of a “Brazilianized” Radical Behaviorist Theory of Subjectivity to the Feminist Debate on Women

An essentialist view of gender and an individualistic concept of subjectivity have distanced psychological theories from emancipatory feminist projects. In Brazil, similar to some other psychological orientations, the behavior-analytic field has sought an interface with feminism. The anti-essentialist vein of radical behaviorism underpins the early movement toward feminism. This essay aims to expand the area of contact with feminism through a theoretical proposal for understanding women’s subjectivity inspired by Brazilian behavior-analytic literature. From a contextualized, multidimensional, pluralized, and politicized view of subjectivity, women’s subjectivation is forged in a tripartite complex of body, person, and “self”, whose relative unity is susceptible to changes and conflicts. In a patriarchal, racist, and cis-heteronormative society, such as the Brazilian one, subjectivation is also an oppressive process. Nevertheless, the essay demonstrates that women’s subjectivation can be a process of emancipatory liberation. This possibility is glimpsed within a virtuous dialectical circuit between disruptive verbal communities (uncommitted to institutional, hierarchical, and oppressive social control) and subversive subjectivities. Thus, behavior-analytic psychology has theoretical tools to situate the process of women’s subjectivation not as a locus of depoliticization but as a crucial ally in constructing a more equitable and just society, as envisioned by feminism.

For All (Wo)mankind: Advancing a Feminist Critique of US Space Policy

Though significant attention has been paid to the early absence of women astronauts and the difficulty in reducing gender gaps there and in the broader fields of science, technology, engineering, and math fields, little analysis has been done of the ways in which gender influences space policy in the United States. This article argues that a feminist critique is not only necessary but also needs to be advanced in a more sustained manner. To do so, it outlines feminist arguments including those of feminist international relations theory and hegemonic masculinity theory. It then notes the few studies undertaken in this area highlighting the lack of recency and frequency in them. Then, it presents two cases of a feminist critique: the masculine nature of space power theory and the influence of hegemonic masculinity theory in the commercial space industry. It concludes with noting several different areas ripe for such feminist analysis as well as analyses focusing on the intersectional nature of the space domain.As the pace and speed of events in space continues to increase, this article highlights the importance of addressing these imbalances now before societal and power imbalances have the opportunity to reach beyond Earth orbit.

Worrying about China: storytelling, humanitarian intervention and the global circulation of independent Chinese documentary

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of cross-border collaboration on independent Chinese documentary. Through a study of Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China, I argue that the film, which passed through training events run by CNEX and the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Programme in China, bears the formal impact of the industrial-humanitarian logic central to these workshops: character-driven storytelling as the key to generating a global Anglophone public for independent Chinese documentary. Tracing this logic through the workshop mechanism, the film’s form, and audience reactions to its screening in the UK, I suggest the result is a viewer response privileging personal action over structural critique—what in this context I term “worrying about China.” This allows me to locate the documentary in relation to broader liberal arguments over China’s place in the world system and assess the limitations of this approach to “going global” for independent Chinese documentary.

Agency, the Family and the Patriarchal State in Archival Documentation of Australian Second World War Brides

AbstractThis article examines the intersecting social circumstances of Australian women's intimate, international relationships with American and other foreign allied servicemen during the Second World War, including their experiences of romance, marriage, divorce and subsequent child‐maintenance USA. We explore how the widely varying, often highly personalised, perceptions of the women's raced, classed and ethnic status, across differing legal systems, could impact not only immigration eligibility, but, especially in the case of Indigenous women, the fundamental right to marry. Immigration laws and local authorities worked in discretionary ways, shaped by a range of considerations and interactions, including class, race and gender to limit non‐white people's mobility and freedom. We demonstrate how this unprecedented larger‐scale experience of international and interracial marriage unsettles feminist arguments that underplay the intersection of issues of race, ethnicity and class with gender in the impact of the Second World War and set the scene for subsequent social changes driven by the logics of race inequality. Enlarging on earlier scholarship, we see the Second World War as a site for the ignition of changes in women's economic, cultural and political status, related here not so much to their work experiences, but to their personal and romantic lives, and also transnational raced experiences of exclusion, agency and shared knowledges.

How to dress like a feminist: a relational ethics of non-complicity

ABSTRACT Feminists have always been concerned with how the clothes women wear can reinforce and reproduce gender hierarchy. However, they have strongly disagreed about what to do in response: some have suggested that the key to feminist liberation is to stop caring about how one dresses; others have replied that the solution is to give women increased choices. In this paper, we argue that neither of these dominant approaches is satisfactory and that, ultimately, they have led to an impasse that pervades the contemporary feminist debate. The problem is that both sides of the debate understand women’s complicity in patriarchal subordination as a matter of what women wear and do. Instead, we propose a phenomenological analysis that understands complicity as based in our relations to our clothes. Starting from this phenomenological perspective, we sketch a new relational feminist ethics of dressing. This alternative ethical paradigm cannot yield a simple recipe for how to dress or tell us what garments are off-limits. But it can offer a way to make critical feminist judgements about clothes without veering into a stifling new prescriptivism.

Protecting civil Liberties in a cognitively enhanced future: the role of classical liberalism.

A prominent concern in the literature on the ethics of human enhancement is that unequal access to future technology will exacerbate existing societal inequalities. The philosopher Daniel Wikler has argued that a futuristic cognitively enhanced majority would be justified in restricting the civil liberties of the unenhanced minority population for their own good in the same way that, mutatis mutandis, the cognitively normal majority are now justified in restricting the civil liberties of those deemed to be cognitively incompetent. Contrary to this argument, the author of this manuscript presents and defends The Liberal Argument to Protect Cognitive 'Normals'. According to this argument, while classical liberalism authorizes the cognitively competent to paternalistically restrict the civil liberties of the cognitively incompetent, classical liberalism does not authorize the cognitively enhanced to paternalistically restrict the civil liberties of the cognitively normal. Two additional arguments are developed in support of The Liberal Argument to Protect Cognitive 'Normals'. The author of this manuscript concludes by suggesting that classical liberalism could be valuable for protecting the civil liberties of disenfranchised groups in a future in which enhancement technology could exacerbate existing societal inequalities.

Feminism Is forBeginners: Learning from Straight Men Doing Queer Feminism

This essay argues for the importance of cisgender straight male perspectives to contemporary feminist theory and practice. I identify four lessons to be learned from what I call male affirmative feminist theory written by people of all genders, defined as any feminist thought that considers cis men critical interlocutors to feminism and legitimate subjects of gender and sexual freedom projects. These lessons include the value of androgynous thinking; the necessity of anti-essentialist approaches to male gender; the importance of understanding nonviolent and anti-sexist male perspectives on gender dynamics; and the potential queer investment that cis straight men might have in feminist politics, namely the freedom from heteronormative policing. I offer an intellectual genealogy of cis male contributions to feminist thought, followed by a close reading of Mike Mills's Academy Award–winning film Beginners (2010). The movie presents a visual account of straight male masculinity as it is positively impacted and influenced by feminist and queer perspectives, without necessarily becoming them. The film makes a powerful male feminist argument for the value of “beginning,” asking what feminist and left social justice projects might gain by splitting their gaze between a focus on failed relations across gendered difference—grounded in the seemingly endless betrayal of women and queers by straight cis men—and a productive openness to the inauguration of unexpected relationships between all gendered subjects.