Liberal Project Research Articles

Can Religious Modest Dress be Included in the Feminist Project

In 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, claimed that the burqa was not a symbol of faith but rather a sign of enslavement, and was therefore unwelcome in French society (La Fornara, 2018). Feminism aims to free women from any such ‘enslavement’ that would act as a barrier to gender equality. Nevertheless, the intersectional injustices that impact religious women make this debate more complicated than what Sarkozy suggested. This essay will therefore explore the ethical significance of religious modest dress, and advocate for its compatibility with the feminist project. This will be achieved through focusing on Jewish and Muslim women, living as minoritised groups in Western countries. While religious patriarchal structures seem to contradict the strive for gender equality through dictating how women present themselves, this should not permit the Western world to act as ‘saviours’ and reduce these women to victims. Instead, they should be included in the feminist cause and an effort should be made to truly understand their perspectives in order to strive for a modern world that treats men and women from all backgrounds more equally than it does currently.

Duple Cacao-Chocolate and the Materiality of the Political Economy of Pleasure

AbstractThis article expands on Walter Rodney’s call to explore possibilities for redevelopment of the African diaspora due to its underdevelopment. Drawing on four experiences of rural everyday resistance in Colombia, Brazil, and Venezuela, it analyses fine-flavour cocoa (Theobroma cacao l.) ecologies, subjectivities, and economics in relation to craft chocolate production, commercialisation, and consumption. Our evidence suggests that farmers’ liberation projects occur beyond the ambivalence between oppression and emancipation. It is argued that emancipations are rather shaped by complex non-binary power dynamics with multiple tensions that resist the materiality of a racialised administration of pleasure and pain.

Palestine and the Dialectic of Racial Capitalism

This article situates racial capitalism as a historical-theoretical framework to generate new and alternative theory on the question of Palestine. It argues that the genocidal assault on Gaza must be understood as the clearest expression of the logic of racial capitalism and the terrain upon which we must generate theory and strategy able to dismantle Zionism, colonialism and Imperialism. Many of the critiques of Zionism deploy frameworks of apartheid, understood by radicals in South Africa as a social structure reproduced by racial capitalism. It was understood that such a system could only be effectively dismantled through a national liberation project which understood race, class, capital and Imperialism as a single contradiction which must be overthrown as a totality. Similarly, earlier theorists within the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, such as Fayez Sayegh, understood Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of Western Imperialism. By tracing the emergence of racial capitalism within the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the similarities between the white minority regime and Zionism, this article acts as a point of departure to drawing together histories of the Black radical tradition and the Palestinian struggle in crafting radical theory relevant for our present moment.

Not just one woman at a time: Re-radicalizing a feminist project at work in a postfeminist era

Not just one woman at a time: Re-radicalizing a feminist project at work in a postfeminist era

Urban geography in crisis times: insights from a feminist project

Urban geography in crisis times: insights from a feminist project

Engaging in Transnational Feminist Praxis

In this reflective article, I focus on the meanings and implications of conducting feminist ethnographic research during the COVID-19 pandemic with women participants of an educational project supported by the non-governmental sector in India. This research aimed to provide the space for women to organically present and provide insight into the multiplicity of factors that influence their decision-making authority and ability, illuminating the connections between education, agency, and empowerment during the COVID-19 pandemic. I discuss the nuances as well as on-the-ground limitations of developing collaborative and relational research in contexts with significant material and structural constraints. In this article, I seek to underscore the need to examine closely what collective belonging, duty, and responsibility looks like for researchers in the development and implementation of transnational feminist projects during crisis.

Liberal statecraft and the problems of world order

Abstract What is the future of the Western-led liberal international order? This paper makes four arguments. First, over the last two centuries, liberal democracies have pioneered a tradition of international order building, the essential impulse of which has been to create an environment—a sort of cooperative ecosystem—in which liberal states can manage interdependence, protect their values and interests, and aggregate capabilities to defend against threats and challenges to their global position and way of life. Second, liberal democracies have used institutions as tools and mechanisms to respond to dangers and opportunities in the global system, focused on the problems of anarchy, hierarchy, interdependence, liberal openness, and geopolitical vulnerability. Third, the most dramatic forms of liberal order building have occurred after major wars, when liberal democracies found themselves in war and geopolitical competition with rival and threatening illiberal great powers. Finally, liberal internationalism and the liberal project still have a future in that they offer cooperative solutions the core problems of twenty-first century world order.

Ambivalence as a Feminist Project

Ambivalence as a Feminist Project

The political implications of state neutrality as a range concept

ABSTRACT The idea that the state ought to be neutral towards different conceptions of the good life has been an influential principle in liberal theory since the 1970s. It has, however, been subject to criticism by communitarians, multiculturalists and liberal perfectionists. Recently, Peter Balint has attempted to defend state neutrality against its liberal critics as the adequate interpretation of the liberal project by redefining it as a range concept. By arguing that neutrality always occurs within a specific range of permissible conceptions of the good life, Balint provides a convincing rebuttal of neutrality’s critics. In this paper I argue that while neutrality as a range concept provides an adequate account of state neutrality, it also makes it vulnerable to a new line of critique. Since the range of neutrality cannot be deduced from the principle of neutrality itself, neutrality is subject to political developments beyond its own control. I will start by clarifying the notion of neutrality as a range concept. Secondly, I will demonstrate that Balint’s notion of the range concept finds ample support in the wider literature on neutrality. Thirdly, I will argue that, as a range concept, neutrality ultimately depends on politically constituted value judgments.

How Progressive are Multidimensional Accounts of Autonomy? Transnational Feminist-Friendly Amendments and a Critical Intersectional Relational Autonomy

Abstract “Multidimensional” accounts of autonomy offer multiple, rather than unitary, dimensions along which to measure autonomy. Such accounts are significant developments in the literature and help generate nuanced, degree-based frameworks. However, transnational feminists—those theorizing feminism in light of (post)colonialism and global neoliberalism—may raise concerns about multidimensional accounts for women in the Global South. For instance, there may be worries about the generalized focus and implicit individualism that still lurks. Sympathetic to both non-unitary autonomy and transnational feminist projects, I argue that multidimensional accounts can be salvaged from such critiques with two amendments. First, they can adopt what I label a “critical” relational framing, and second, they can include intersectional identities. Using commercial surrogates in India as an example, I show how these amendments to multidimensional theories might better serve these women of color, and indeed all persons.

'Then We Build a System to Deal with It': Waste and the Technological Sublime in Don DeLillo’s "Underworld"

Over twenty-five years after the publication of Don DeLillo’s magnum opus Underworld (1997), which depicts the shift from a naïve belief in technological progress at the beginning of the Cold War to disillusionment as it ended, the novel is more topical than ever, faced as we are with the growing recognition of the failure of both technorationality and capitalism to address humanity’s depredation and despoilment of the biosphere. This article argues that Underworld deploys David Nye’s notion of the technological sublime to depict the attempt to master recalcitrant nature, only to ironically reveal the impossibility of the endeavor. Underworld’s use of waste as a catalyst for the sublime is interesting precisely because waste connotes something valueless, whereas the sublime is occasioned by ‘great’, ostensibly valuable, things. Seen within its own logic, the technological sublime is a project of liberation, a vision of impending omniscience, a permanent deferral of human limitation. Yet when waste becomes sublime, the progression toward mastery does not proceed smoothly. Although the technological sublime “undermines all notions of limitation, instead presupposing the ability to continually innovate and to transform the world” (Nye 60), Underworld’s aestheticization represents it at its limit, when it can no longer regulate the abject threat of waste. Ultimately, I argue that DeLillo asks readers to grapple with abjection by dramatizing the failure of the technological sublime as an aesthetic strategy, which inadvertently reinscribes the boundaries that it seeks to override: the finitude of the embodied human, our relative powerlessness amongst the world within which we are enmeshed.

Competitiveness, Civilizationism, and the Anglosphere: Kenneth Minogue's Place in Conservative Thought

This article contributes to an understanding of postimperial civilizational thinking within British conservatism by engaging with the work of Kenneth Minogue, an understudied but important thinker. Minogue played a key role in reframing an older discourse, centred on empire, in the register of free-market economics and global “competitiveness.” During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a significant figure on the New Right, critiquing university radicalism, feminism, and multiculturalism. During the 1990s his thought took a civilizational turn, and he condemned the liberal projects of political elites for undermining the West's traditional competitive ethos. The bureaucracy of the European Union and the economic rise of East Asian “state societies” were particular concerns for Minogue and led him to champion the concept of the Anglosphere as a distinct civilization.

“I hardly see the husband”: Noticing the absence of men in paid domestic labour research

Feminist scholars have focused on paid domestic labour as a site of gendered inequalities structured by race, gender, class, and citizenship. However, men are largely absent from feminist intersectional understandings of everyday interactions within paid domestic labour. This paper draws on an interview study of South African domestic workers focusing on their talk about interactions with male employers. The analysis demonstrates that talk about routines of the physical and symbolic absence of men can become normalised within domestic labour discourse. This is a narrative that is only brought to light once men's (lack of) presence is made a topic. The conspicuous absence of analyses of this kind within paid domestic labour studies points to unfinished and troubling feminist projects.

An eastern feminist perspective on the ‘woman question’: the activity, thought and writing of ‘A‘isha Taymur & Malak Hifni Nasif

ABSTRACT In nineteenth-century Egypt, the ‘Women Question’ reflected a battle over the cultural content of the nation in the production of a ‘New Woman’. Eastern feminists were entangled in the complexities of colonial and local discourses on women. ‘A‘isha Taymur & Malak Nasif engaged in discussions and debates with male-counterparts on these. Their thought centered on ushering new ways of thinking through the formation of an alternative Eastern feminist project that retained indigeneity and benefited from universal tendencies. They offered their own interpretations, and expressed the viability of multiple notions/discourses and complex realities in the formation of a new woman.

Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and Nationalism: On Motivations and Violence

In discourse that normalizes and propagates Israeli settler colonial conquest and domination, analytical attention is given to the supposed nationalist nature of the Zionist project painting Zionism as a liberatory project for persecuted Jewish peoples in Europe and beyond. To counter this discourse and its erasure of the colonized, many critical scholars have emphasized that Zionism is both nationalist and settler colonial. However, to present a decolonial alternative to the exclusive focus on Zionism as a nationalist project, critical analysis must insist that state nationalism is but one of the elements that scholars can analyze within, not alongside, the larger framework of settler colonial sovereignty. This article argues that we must examine the effects of the Zionist project and give the Palestinian experience its proper analytical weight at the forefront of the analysis, not as that which can illuminate the ‘unintended consequences’ of Zionism, but as that which reveals the very logic and nature of Zionism and the Zionist project.

Divine Power and Fluid Bodies: Tirunaṅkais in Tamil Nadu

This article analyzes the complex ways in which religious practices influence the formation of identity and community among tirunaṅkais, male-to-female transgender people in Tamil Nadu. I argue that tirunaṅkais draw on longstanding religious resources to enact nonnormative identities that operate outside of the secular constructions of the modern subject that undergird governmental “uplift” efforts as well as the liberatory projects of Western feminist scholars such as Judith Butler. I focus in particular on three arenas in which tirunaṅkais negotiate their identities in specific religious and social contexts: the kinship network, the annual Kūttāṇṭavar festival, and public rituals associated with Hindu goddesses in Tamil Nadu. The tirunaṅkai kinship network deploys multiple religious rituals while at the same time transcending boundaries of religion, caste, and class in its inclusivity. The enactment of marriage and widowhood at the annual festival to Kūttāṇṭavar foregrounds the divinity of the male-female form that tirunaṅkais emulate. Serving as vehicles of the divine who embody particular goddesses through ritual possession in public temple spaces provides affirmation of their ritual efficacy and power to mediate between the human and divine worlds.

From optimist to sceptical liberalism: reforging European Union foreign policy amid crises

Abstract Russia's invasion of Ukraine brought both condemnation and vindication to the European Union. EU policies were condemned for being complacent, naive and greedy. However, when European leaders conducted a coordinated response backing Ukraine, the war also vindicated the EU as a liberal project. The crisis has led to a surge in support for the EU, unprecedented cooperation across policy areas and new accession negotiations with the EU's eastern neighbours. To understand this shift, the article argues that crisis has catalysed the EU becoming a sceptical liberal actor. Sceptical liberalism is characterized by a bleak view on the trajectory of the international order, a self-critical understanding of Europe's role in it, and a willingness to intervene, including with military means, to tackle political predicaments. The transition changes EU leaders' previous optimistic liberal approach of pursuing peace and prosperity though mediation and interdependence. Distinguishing between ideals and actions, the article argues that liberal ideals remain intact, but a sceptical outlook implies different actions to pursue those ideals. The article's argument challenges longstanding scholarly debates on ‘normal versus normative power Europe’, which build on an excessively bifurcated assessment of EU foreign policy that fails to capture contemporary dynamics and the dilemmas they cause.

Gender and the Disruption of Patriarchy in the Crime Stories of Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire

While Mariana Enríquez is most recognised as a writer of Gothic horror, this article explores issues of gender and power in crime stories from her collection Things We Lost in the Fire: ‘The Dirty Boy’, ‘Under the Black Water’ and ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’. Enríquez aligns herself with feminist variants of the crime genre by centring women's concerns and voices, breaking down binary and hierarchical representations of gender and sexuality and illustrating the struggles women and marginalised groups face in Argentina under patriarchy. Discussed as well are the implications of Enríquez's feminist project in contemporary crime fiction.

Troubling transracialism: a transnational perspective

What kinds of feminist projects are made possible by (dis)analogising race and gender and/or transing them? The article asserts that an arbitrary separation is enacted when the transgender-transracial question is pulled apart such that an examination of the conceptual prefix that connects the two, i.e. trans, is discarded for an examination of the elements that allow for their separation – race and gender. Rather than affirm a (dis)analogy between race and gender, the article offers two correctives to the feminist discourse around transracialism / the possibility of reading race as malleable. First, I contest the shock value of transracialism by suggesting that a modality of transracial crossing has existed in the feminist imagination in the form of transnational, diasporic crossings that are separate, though not disparate, from transgender crossings. Second, through a glimpse into the history of racial prerequisite cases in early twentieth-century USA, I suggest the necessity of deploying trans analytics to understand the ways in which race has been made unevenly malleable in highly regulated and contested ways for different populations in different historical contexts. Race operated as fluid, flexible terrain accessed and claimed through discourses of citizenship and diaspora with mixed success. Hence, the article offers diaspora and citizenship, rather than the cultural and biological, as key analytics that enable the mapping of trans formations through patterns of migration and movement.

Women under the Panchayat Regime: Parijat’s Under the Sleepless Mountain as a Feminist Project

The representation of the female in Nepali fiction has been a fascinating subject for critics. This paper examines the representational position of the women as projected in Parijat’s Under the Sleepless Mountain. In this novel, the novelist critiques the patriarchal society’s treatment to women in a different social structure. Parijat’s female characters are projected as suffering and marginalized people of the Nepali society around the student’s revolution of the early 1980s. Other issues raised in this paper focus on students and subaltern characters who are treated badly as they raise voice against the oppressive Panchayat system and other kinds of dominance. She writes against social wrongs and ill intended human activities. She exposes the character’s desire for freedom, individuality and equal rights. Thus, the objective of this study is to find out the answers to whether the suffering of women, laborers and students are concretely represented in her novel or not. In this paper, this researcher explores the issues around the plight of the female, which are interpreted from the feminist perspective. The relevant feminist notions developed by the feminist critics such as Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, Catherine Belsey and Susan Bassnett have been adopted for textual analysis as a methodological tool. This paper concludes that the gender discrimination and political disharmony are the major obstacles to women upliftment.