Feminist Debate Research Articles

Tocqueville, Democratic Poetry, and the Religion of Humanity

AbstractThe Religion of Humanity has typically been associated with Auguste Comte's positivism. Within liberal philosophical debate, John Stuart Mill's measured advocacy for it has received some attention, especially given his otherwise well-known emphasis on the tension between religion and liberty. Yet Alexis de Tocqueville's perceptive awareness of the Religion of Humanity as an evolving phenomenon, expressed through his discussion of democratic poetry, remained largely unnoticed. Of course, Tocqueville's essential religio-political task was to promote a modified version of Christianity and buttress the standing of religious morality as an outside barrier against human action motivated by democratic materialism, notwithstanding the secular doctrine of self-interest well understood. Indeed, despite the neutral tone of Tocqueville's discussion of democratic poetry, elsewhere his critique of democratic pantheism, writers and orators, theatre, and historians warned against excessive veneration of humanity, which amounted to a sublimation of the dogma of the sovereignty of the people.

Making fun of feminism: British television comedy and the second wave

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the representation of second wave feminism in two mainstream comedy shows starring male comedians. Scott On … (BBC 1964–74) and a sketch narrative which featured in the 1980 season of The Two Ronnies (BBC 1971–1986) brought feminism into family living rooms. While these shows make fun of feminism they also represent key aspects of the second wave, often echoing debates taking place in the women’s liberation movement. Despite their conservative politics Scott On … and The Two Ronnies put feminist ideas on screen in the 1970s and early 1980s; they represent a mainstream resistance and response to the second wave activism which was changing the British social and political landscape. Such shows make fun of feminist politics, yet in doing so they register and refract feminist debates.

Feminism in Radical Democracy and Japanese Political Theory: Mouffe, Pateman, Young, and “Essentialism”

Abstract This paper examines feminist arguments in radical democracy and Japanese responses to them. Although feminist insights are significant intellectual sources of radical democracy, recent political theorists have tended to exclusively consider radical democracy as agonistic pluralism. The radical democratic thinker Chantal Mouffe, who is very popular among Japanese political theorists and philosophers, criticizes the “essentialist” tendency of two feminist political theorists, namely Carole Pateman and Iris Marion Young. First this paper examines Mouffe’s critique of the two theorists. Second, it evaluates the relevance of Mouffe’s criticism of Pateman and Young by reconsidering their ideas on democracy and citizenship. Third, it engages the works of a few Japanese political theorists who respond to the issue of essentialism and points out the problems involved in the introduction of radical democracy in Japan and in Japanese feminist political theory. Finally, this paper concludes that we are still in the early stages of introducing and absorbing foreign feminist political theories into Japan as opposed to developing original Japanese feminist political theory to share with the world.

Glokalisierung und Feminisierung: Zur strukturellen Krise von Lohnarbeit im europäischen Raum

Abstract. The article discusses the glocalized socio-spatial form of European production as socially crisis-ridden. Combining literature from transnational production network theory, critical political economy, labour process theory and feminist geography the article shows that a European production regime has developed which is based on the transnationalization of economic and competitive parameters on the one hand and multiscalar social fragmentation of labour processes on the other. Its very logic is, hence, functional economic integration based on labour's socio-spatial disintegration. The regime pushes for what we can call the feminization of work because it systematically cuts the former, patriarchal and uneven connection between waged work and socio-political integration. As feminist debates show, progressive perspectives have to be transnational and multiscalar and they have to include fundamental questions about the concept and status of work in society.

Portraying slavery: Visual art and cultural trauma

This article, aimed at presenting the effectiveness of the arts in the transformation of cultural trauma, presents how Ellen Gallagher’s visual art intervenes in the transformation of the cultural trauma of slavery. Hence, first of all, we investigate the implications of cultural trauma, and how these can be enhanced by memory studies, to recognise the substantial value given by the analysis of the shape-shifting nature of the events. Secondly, we propose how the theory of cultural trauma can benefit from the feminist debate on bodies and cultural boundaries, which insists on the interruption of hegemonic and dominant narrations. To achieve this goal, we stress the role of visuality and present an artist who mobilizes the public meanings of slavery and intervenes on the still open wounds of a controversial past.

Upheavals in Black Thought

Upheavals in Black Thought

Radical feminism and punk: visual cultures of affect and disruption

Radical feminism and punk subculture were two communities in Britain in the 1970s which produced politically diverse cultural, visual, and photography practices. This paper explores, for the first time, the overlap between these two communities and how their political perspectives and enthralling disruptive visual strategies informed each other. I argue that punk, although resembling the dominant culture and other subcultures in their patriarchal aspects, provided a space for communicating feminist arguments and shared radical feminism’s disruptive strategies. My discussion examines punk artist Linder Sterling’s exploration of gender boundaries and sexuality in her feminist photomontages and her controversial punk performance. This argument is posited in relation to radical feminist street events, feminist photography, and punk aesthetics. Finally, I suggest that feminist and punk uses of photography, visual production, and performance were affective practices that engendered a political sense of community, identification, and mobilization.

Review of Medical Entanglements; Rethinking Feminist Debates about Healthcare by Kristina Gupta

No abstract available.

#MeToo, consent and prostitution – The Irish law reform experience

The recent reform of Irish prostitution law introduced in Part 4 of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017, which criminalised the purchase of sexual services, is based upon 1999 Swedish legislation in accordance with an approach termed ‘the Nordic model’. The Nordic approach has been subject to criticism from those who argue that laws criminalising sex purchase offend against personal autonomy. This article challenges that criticism, and offers feminist arguments for the reform, which represented a significant turn in the focus of Irish law from a framework based upon prohibition of public nuisance, towards an approach which views prostitution as an inherently exploitative transaction within a gendered context. The author argues that feminist arguments in support of the new Irish law are based upon reconsideration of consent as a legal concept, informed by insights gained through the work of the #MeToo movement on the need to take account of social and economic contexts within which consent is given and choices made.

Searching for Ethical Hope: Ideas on what Feminist Debates on the Anthropocene can offer Theorisations of Gender and Violence

This article reviews some contemporary responses by feminists such as Haraway and Braidotti to the invitations offered by the concept of the Anthropocene to reimagine the human and the violent. Finding the need to think more closely about questions of race and rape, in these responses, the article turns to the theory of Sylvia Wynter and the poetry of Yvette Christiansë for a rich enough language. The article then moves to the consideration of how to use such a language in the understanding of a particular ampersand - the & of gender and violence. The article is shaped as an exercise to trying to think, across contradictions and myriad accountabilities.

Medical Entanglements: Rethinking Feminist Debates About Healthcare

<i>Medical Entanglements: Rethinking Feminist Debates About Healthcare</i>

The Face of Food Insecurity is Female: A Post- Colonial Feminist Argument for Rural Women

The achievement of food security is a global priority, but remains a particular challenge for rural women. International frameworks, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to ensure zero hunger, improved nutrition and the promotion of sustainable agriculture. Yet, while the SDGs have significantly broadened the scope of targets focused on achieving gender equity and women's empowerment, as well as recognising that gender equality has a social, economic and political dimension, they remain silent on how substantive gender justice would be achieved. Using a post-colonial feminist perspective, the paper argues that the political, economic and social dimensions, specifically regarding food security, are interconnected and rooted in power inequality and patriarchy. The paper uses a qualitative content analysis to determine the extent to which policy frameworks developed in support of rural women in South Africa are gendered to reflect the experienced realities of women in rural, culturally traditional communities.

The Rebuilding of the Liberal: Reading Rawls’s Debate in Ian McEwan’s Saturday

ABSTRACT Between the end of the Cold War and the financial crash of 2008, liberalism dominated the geopolitical stage, although it faced challenges. In his 2005 novel Saturday, Ian McEwan constructs a self-confident liberal protagonist facing the heterogeneity of the world. This novel’s engagement with the processes of identity formation can be discerned in some detail when read in light of John Rawls’s idea of public reason. By concentrating on formal debating spaces particularly, this reading discovers an iterative process of identity formation and social construction in the novel, in which the success or failure of directed dialogic exchanges shapes both personal identity and the chance for social change. The reader is presented with the potential for reimagined forms of and arenas for liberal debate to respond to the complexity of the world.

Protection or Patriarchy? Gender Ideology and Support for Anti-pornography Legislation, 1988–2018

Though religious conservatives espousing patriarchal views have historically been on the forefront of anti-pornography efforts in the USA, the past few decades have witnessed an increasing secularization of the anti-pornography movement. This shift is characterized by greater rhetorical dependence on scientific studies, secular anti-pornography activist groups, and arguments surrounding the protection of women from exploitation or abuse. Using both aggregated and disaggregated data from the 1988–2018 General Social Surveys, we estimate a series of binary logistic regression models in order to examine the potentially changing connection between espousing a more patriarchal ideology and support for anti-pornography legislation, net of relevant correlates. Among Americans in general, embracing a more patriarchal ideology is positively associated with support for anti-pornography legislation across all survey years. Moreover, interactions indicate that Americans who adhere to a more egalitarian ideology, and particularly women, show a decline in their support for anti-pornography legislation over time. Despite the prominence of feminist anti-porn groups and arguments in past decades, findings contradict the idea that support for strict anti-pornography legislation among the general public has ever been discernibly driven by egalitarianism. Rather, it has been and remains robustly connected to patriarchal beliefs and values prescribing traditionalist gender roles. Findings elucidate the dominant underlying gender ideology present in both historic and contemporary attitudes toward sweeping anti-pornography legislation and demand scholars and policy-makers disentangle rhetoric (of protection) from reality (patriarchy).

Swimming pools, Islamic dress and colonial differentiation: the cleansing role of law in ‘the republic [that] lives through an uncovered face’

ABSTRACT On 23 June 2019, seven Muslim women staged a protest at a swimming pool in Grenoble, France in defiance of rules prohibiting burkinis in swimming pools. French law 2010–1192 criminalizes the bodies of visibly Muslim women by prohibiting full-face coverings in French public space. This creates precarious bodies through law and facilitates an institutional Islamophobia, which I argue circulates in French society through a logic of hygiene. This logic of hygiene refers not merely to cleanliness but to the racial purity of the French republic. Law performs a dual cleansing role: it cleanses public space(s) of the presence of colonial markers and acts to displace colonial memory in France. This article traces the emergence of pro-ban feminist arguments supporting the criminalization of Islamic dress in France to a historical foundation of humiliation and cleanliness in post-WWII shavings of the hair of dissident French women. The article draws parallels with the forced uncovering of the hair of Muslim women in historical colonialism and in contemporary France to conceptualize hair as the patriarchal symbol of the French republic. Muslim women are made precarious through law's complicity with the hygiene and sterilization agendas of French coloniality and post-war capitalist modernization. The conclusion is that Muslim women are the site of the racial and gender differentiation necessary for the maintenance of the French republic.

Nostalgia and the Dialectics of Contemporary Feminisms in The Handmaid's Tale

In this article, we turn our gaze to the television series The Handmaid's Tale to examine different critical aspects of nostalgia in relation to contemporary and previous feminist debates. Our purpose is to analyze not only the series' different approaches to nostalgia but also to question the type of feminism the female dystopia attempts to recuperate. We enquire into the political capacity of the show's nostalgia to advance the complex debate on the subject of feminism. In our opinion, the series articulates a conservative recuperation of old feminist debates centered on the female subject (motherhood, rape, pornography, prostitution, etc.) not only due to the threat of the recent misogynistic backlash but also in response to the growth of political power from the LGBTQI movement and the subsequent displacement of traditional feminist issues. Nevertheless, despite falling short of contributing to an intersectional and structural critique of gender injustices, the show constitutes a stimulating catalyst in the fight and debate regarding the improvement of women's lives against the advances of retrograde attitudes and policies in current times. Ultimately, the series defies any monolithic understanding of nostalgia as either amnesiac and regressive or as reflective, inspiring, and recuperative regarding gender.

Apocalyptic Scenarios and Inner Worlds: A Conversation with Gloria Susana Esquivel

Apocalyptic Scenarios and Inner Worlds A Conversation with Gloria Susana Esquivel by Camilo Jaramillo Q&A P oet and fiction writer Gloria Susana Esquivel has been quickly positioned in the spotlight of recent Latin American literature. The University of Texas Press recently published Animals at the End of the World, the English translation of her first novel. The novel follows Ines, a seven-year-old girl, in the weeks that precede the apocalyptic end of the world. Together with María, the housemaid’s daughter, she ventures through the labyrinthine space of her grandparents’ house and, in the process, witnesses the aggressive, sorrowful, and desolate world of the adults who surround her. Outside, the political violence of Colombia in the 1990s threatens to intrude into her world, and slowly but surely, Ines’s innocent world starts to crumble. What emerges from the destruction is a scathed and wounded animal that is both elusive and fierce. The novel is a tour de force that stands out as the voice of a generation, offering shrewd insights into a country, an era, and a cohort marked forever. Esquivel is also the host of Colombia’s most renowned feminist podcast, Womansplaining, and a leading voice in cultural and feminist debates. À propos of the recent translation of her novel into English (translated by Robin Myers), we sat down to chat about her book, her podcast, and being a woman writer in Colombia. 32 WLT WINTER 2021 Camilo Jaramillo: You chose an interesting narrator for Animals at the End of the World: the voice of a child through the memory of the protagonist, an adult. Can you speak of the difficulties of working with this voice? Gloria Susana Esquivel: The book is narrated from the voice of a woman remembering her childhood. When I was doing research for the novel, I read many books written from the voices of children, and I thought it was very hard to achieve that kind of voice in a credible way. The girl is about to be seven years old and learning how to read and write, and it is very hard to translate that process into writing. The way children form sentences is very different from the ways an adult would. That would have exceeded my talent, and it was not what I was after. That’s why I decided that it was going to be narrated by the voice of a woman who remembered her childhood. What happens, though, is that this voice gets so immersed in these memories that she is able to bring a very genuine child’s perspective of the world, and that adult voice seems to merge with the voice of a child. Jaramillo: When you were writing the memories and experiences of a child, did you rely on your own experiences as a kid, or was it, rather, a blank canvas for you to explore with freedom and creativity? Esquivel: Memory and imagination can’t really be separated; they are linked. I did need to go into my memories, but not to bring out facts and events, or how things happened, but more to re-create the ambiences , smells, and the general feel of my childhood house. For example, I wanted to unearth how I perceived its light or its dimensions. I wanted to go back to that place and try to perceive the world like a child. Once I was there, in a set of sensations, then the story unfolded. And the story is all fictional and invented. Jaramillo: The novel goes back to childhood as an attempt to go back to the origins of something. What is the character Ines trying to find in her past? Esquivel: When I was creating Ines’s voice, I tried to imagine a woman who was going to psychoanalytic therapy. Although this does not appear in the story, this structure became a key feature for me. What Ines is doing, by telling those memories to herself again, is trying to understand why the adults that surrounded her acted like they did and, in the process, trying to understand how these adults affected her. More than trying to find something, she’s trying to make sense of her past...

Analiza fragmenta: književnost, histerija, biseksualnost

A b s t r a c t AN ANALYSIS OF FRAGMENT: LITERATURE, HYSTERIA, BISEXUALITY The essay starts with Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, relating its discordant lines of argumentation with the psychoanalytic concept of (bi)sexuality, as it was developed from Studies on Hysteria to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the latter of which was published in same year as the “Dora case”. We consider the aspects in which Freud’s contradictory analysis of the case becomes central to the feminist debate on hysteria in Hélène Cixous’s and Catherine Clément’s classic The Newly Born Woman. The analysis points to the constitutive relation of the authors’ disagreement on hysteria and different conceptions of literature and politics presented in their study and the subsequent polemical discussions. We further approach the dissent about the political and methodological framework of feminist criticism in the Anglo-American reception of the French authors, wherein gynocritics Elaine Showalter and Sandra M. Gilbert renounce the question of hysteria. Alternatively, deconstructive critical reading by Peggy Kamuf is grounded in Derrida’s approach to literature. Kamuf traces the main misunderstandings in Cixous’s reception, by interpreting her oeuvre as emblematic of so-called semi-theory and semi-politics, trying to deconstruct oppositions between a theoretical, political, and poetical text. Through the lens of semi-theory, the relation between Cixous’s semi-concept of a woman, as a reference without a referent, and the psychoanalytic understanding of bisexuality and hysteria, has far-reaching consequences on the reading of psychoanalytic text as literary and hysterical, as it compulsively repeats the very fragmentary pattern it tries to interpret. Keywords: hysteria, literature, feminist criticism, bisexuality, politics

Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice by Marijn S. Kaplan

Reviewed by: Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice by Marijn S. Kaplan Tessa Ashlin Nunn Kaplan, Marijn S. Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice. Routledge, 2020. Pp. 184, ISBN 9781003047803. $44.05 (ebook). ISBN 978-0-367-85852-0. $160 (cloth). Few book-length studies examine the life and work of novelist, journalist, actress, and translator Marie Jeanne Riccoboni (1713-1792). Marijn S. Kaplan underscores Riccoboni's role in the European feminist Enlightenment and points to the factors leading to her erasure from the eighteenth-century canon. Using the epistolary form as a vehicle for proto-feminist thought, Riccoboni promoted authority and autonomy for female voices. The first half of the book analyzes how Riccoboni's epistolary novels make feminist statements by silencing male voices, creating female spaces, and narrating the self. Her first novel, Lettres de Fanni Butlerd, blends fiction and facts from the novelist's life to make the personal public and to hold her former lover accountable for his acts. Whereas feminist scholars often protest against [End Page 181] reading women's novels as confessions, Kaplan interprets the use of autobiographical elements as a feminist praxis. Drawing on Janet G. Altman's argument that the letter is a metonym of the letter writer, Kaplan shows how the plurality of female voices in Riccoboni's novels creates self-sufficient female spaces where letter writing and friendship replace marriage. As Kaplan argues, female friendships and widowhood appear as methods for surviving eighteenthcentury patriarchy. Throughout her novels and short stories, Riccoboni grapples with the possibilities of feminine existence in marriage which, in her view, must be based on friendship. Though scholars tend to consider Riccoboni's last novel, Lettres de Mylord Rivers, to be her least feminist novel, Kaplan reads it as her most poignantly feminist work. This polyphonic novel suggests that men and women can coexist in harmony only when women possess authoritative voices, men respect women's speech, and no one is silenced. Studying Percival Stockdale's 1778 translation Letters from Lord Rivers, Kaplan examines how translations exaggerate, change, or eliminate feminist arguments. With new paragraphs and numerous footnotes, Stockdale's translation presents men as victims of women's attempts to gain rights and compares coquettish women to slave owners. English translations of Riccoboni's novels and letters greatly influenced the international reception and perceptions of this author. Riccoboni's indignation against sexism stands out in her novels as well as her letters, several of which she published. In the second half of the book, Kaplan examines Riccoboni's correspondence with men such as Denis Diderot, David Hume, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, David Garrick, and Philip Thicknesse. These letters, nineteen of which are included in the appendix with meticulous English translations, attest to how Riccoboni used publication to gain authority. One of her letters to Diderot delineates her concept of theatricality that must remain distinct from nature. Finally, her letters reveal her thoughts on the pirated editions of her works as well as the denigrated status of women writers. This book is essential for scholars of eighteenth-century women writers. Additionally, researchers interested in epistolary novels, theater studies, translation, and early feminism will find it relevant to their respective fields. Kaplan summarizes the novels in such a way that her analyses are understandable for readers unfamiliar with Riccoboni's work. Though Kaplan avoids comparisons between eighteenth-century epistolary feminism and twenty-firstcentury feminist practices, she gestures toward numerous connections that instructors can develop in the classroom. Accessible and engaging, this monograph offers new perspectives on eighteenth-century proto-feminism and the possibilities of letter writing. Tessa Ashlin Nunn Duke University Copyright © 2021 Women in French Studies

Death, Dying and Domination

This Article critiques conventional liberal arguments for the right to die on liberal grounds. It contends that these arguments do not go far enough to recognize and address private, and in particular structural, forms of domination. It presents an alternative that does, which is thus more respectful of true freedom in the context of death and dying, and also more consistent with liberalism. After discussing obstacles to the achievement of a right to die that encompasses freedom from both public and private domination, the Article closes with a significant reform project within bioethics that might help bring it about.