Shulamith Firestone Research Articles

Undercommoning Anthrogenesis

Sophie Lewis coined anthrogenesis as “the production of human beings” and, using this unfamiliar term, calls for the radical reimagining of gestational politics, as an alternative to liberal feminism's focus on choice. Revivisng Shulamith Firestone, for feminists like Lewis and Helen Hester this reimagination takes shape within a techno‐utopic communist framework. While enticing, such a framework relies on a modernist understanding of institutions that has been critiqued by decolonial and abolitionist theory and risks undervaluing the fugitive underground work of radical care and mutual aid that already exists today. In this article, two strategies at play in the contemporary Marxist reimagination of anthrogenesis are differentiated: (1) a communist approach focusing primarily on fundamentally restructuring the commons of reproductive care on a grand societal scale and (2) an “undercommons” approach that aims to fugitively abolish public institutions through small‐scale mutual aid and radical care practices that are already constituting otherworlds of reproductive justice through transnational coalitions. Highlighting abortion and birth networks in the Netherlands (the Abortion Network Amsterdam and the Geboortebeweging, a loose collaborative network of midwives) who transnationally and fugitively care for anthrogenesis, the second strategy is proposed as the more promising one for the anthrogenesis of human beings otherwise. The author develops another possible outcome of Firestone's revolutionary thought: not a gestational communism but an anarcho‐abolitionist fugitive undercommoning of anthrogenesis, through the work Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Marquis Bey, and Chiara Bottici.

Gender, Sex and Freedom: Testing the Theoretical Limits of the Twenty-First-Century ‘Gender Wars’ with Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray

Many Global North contexts are experiencing conflict in feminist discourses between supporters of trans and gender diverse self-identification and self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists who consider this to undermine feminist goals. We argue that the channelling of contemporary feminist discourse into defensive and oppositional channels has foreclosed the space for more nuanced and future-oriented, utopian thought around freedom from sex/gender, limiting the prospect of developing a coalition of actors focused not on difference, but rather on commonality. Putting classic feminist works by Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray into dialogue, we consider an alternative approach to freedom premised on an ontology of potentiality combined with acceptance of the materiality of the binary gender hierarchy, that nonetheless remains utopian and open-ended, demonstrating the capacity to transcend these impasses and potentially overcome these divides.

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Motherhood and Feminism: Relationship Through the Lens of the Movie Suffragette

While there has been an increasing amount of discussion around feminism, the relationship and controversies between motherhood and feminism has been relatively overlooked. Taking on a new perspective of films, this paper explores the relationship between motherhood and feminism through the content analysis of empirical research and the movie Suffragette (2015). Examining theories from feminists such as Adrienne Rich, Shulamith Firestone, and Betty Friedan, this paper includes a supportive relationship, which is motherhood acting as a cause for feminism, a neutral relationship, which is the two being balanced and rather loosely connected, as well as a negative relationship, which is motherhood hindering and oppressing women. This paper concludes that while it is arguable that motherhood can be a hinder towards feminism, there is more evidence both in real-life and in the movie showing a supportive and neutral relationship. Thus, this encourages future researchers and feminists to more actively include motherhood in its activities considering their positive relationship.

Xenofeminist Hope and Dread, or How to Move Beyond Patriarchal Technocapitalism

Who said manifestos are dead? Some thirty years after the publication of Donna Haraway's illustrious A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1991), fifty years after Valerie Solanas's angry and delightful SCUM Manifesto (Solanas 1967), and 170 years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's influential Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1848), a new manifesto in town in fact bears traces of all these and then some: The Xenofeminist Manifesto. This manifesto, which comes in a gorgeously designed booklet version as well as in a colorful and nostalgic 80s computer-culture website with nerdy hexadecimal page numbers and related Twitter account, is a work from the “xenofeminist” collective Laboria Cuboniks. The name of this collective, whose members are from various parts of the globe, is actually an anagram of “Nicolas Bourbaki,” a largely French collective of mathematicians in the early 1900s who sought to affirm abstraction, rigor, and generalization (Laboria Cuboniks 2014). Together with a firm foot in cyberfeminism and a strong penchant for the abstract and universal by way of the logic of computing against the arguably flawed universal of “nature,” the manifesto also clearly bears the marks of feminist ecocriticism, new materialism, queer theory, and technological accelerationism. The two books under review bring various activisms and insights together in an original way, and do so clearly with an eye toward reviving the cyberfeminist spirit through, among others, ideas from Shulamith Firestone's Dialectics of Sex (Firestone 1970). This pairing certainly had me excited, since, as I argue elsewhere, I am, together with Haraway's original cyborg manifesto, firmly of the opinion that feminisms of all kinds should intervene in and contribute even more radically to contemporary techno-culture and philosophy of technology. This is because clearly, new media and genetic technologies are at present some of the most powerful techniques by which we live and probably will live in the near future, and because these technologies are intimately interwoven with Eurocentric masculinism, heterosexism, militarism, and capitalism (Hoofd 2016, 225, 229).

Radical freedom: Periyar and women.

This paper looks at South Indian social reformer and anti-caste radical Periyar E.V. Ramasamy's approach to the women's question. Periyar was not just an advocate of social and economic equality between the sexes but espoused a radical concept of sexual freedom for women, which is central to his concept of liberty as such. While the anti-colonialists of his period defended native traditions and customs, Periyar welcomed modernity and saw it laden with possibilities for the emancipation of women. Likewise, where other social reformers addressed the women's question within the ambit of the nation and/or the family, Periyar saw both nation and family as institutions that limited the liberties of women. This paper compares his thoughts with The Dialectic of Sex, the key work of the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, and highlights the similarities in their approach to women's liberation and sexual freedom, especially their critique of child-rearing and child-bearing. It explores Periyar's booklet Women Enslavedin detail and engages with lesser known, new primary material of Periyar on the women's question, concluding with a discussion of his perspective of the West.

Marianne Schnitger y el feminismo radical de los setenta: aportes a la Sociología para pensar las relaciones sociales en lo público y lo privado

En la Sociología clásica permean sesgos liberales por los que la atención analítica se centra exclusivamente en el espacio público y se deja al de lo privado como una <em>caja negra </em>llena de misterios que no competen al análisis de la Sociología. Esto implica la ausencia de diagnóstico sobre el ámbito privado y, en consecuencia, carencias explicativas sobre las relaciones en las sociedades modernas. Es por eso que proponemos el acercamiento al pensamiento feminista en el que siempre ha estado presente un cuestionamiento a la separación liberal público/privado y que ha puesto, en el centro de su atención, temáticas enmarcadas en la esfera de lo privado. Específicamente, proponemos por un lado la recuperación de la sociología feminista de Marianne Schnitger, contemporánea de Weber y de Simmel, y por el otro de las feministas radicales de la década de los setenta, Kate Millet y Shulamith Firestone, entre quienes es posible establecer fecundos diálogos

Imagining the Feminist Revolution


 Review of Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood. A case for the enduring relevance of Shulamith Firestone.

Radikal Feminist İzler: Judith Thompson'nın The Crackwalker ve Lion in the Stree

Bu araştırmanın amacı çağdaş Kanadalı oyun yazarlarından biri olan Judith Thompson’nın The Crackwalker (1981) ve Lion in the Streets (1992) isimli oyunlarında ki kadın bedenlerini, başta Kate Millett ve Shulamith Firestone olmak üzere radikal feminist bakış açısıyla incelemektir. Radikal feminizm, toplumda ki kadın ve erkeğin üstlendiği adil olmayan rollerin sebebi olarak kadın ve erkek biyolojik farklılıklarını ve ataerkil sistemin baskısını görür. Oldukça etkileyici ve yenilikçi tarzıyla günümüz Kanada tiyatrosuna damgasını vuran Thompson, her iki oyununda da ataerkil sistem içerisinde yaşayan kadın ve erkek ilişkilerini ele alır. Thompson, The Crackwalker da Theresa- Alan ve Sandy-Joe karakterlerinin kendi aralarında ve hatta birbirleri arasında geçen aşk, evlilik,sexuality ve arkadaşlık gibi temaları ele alır. Theresa, Alan ile evlenerek, Alan’ın çocuk arzusu isteğini yerine getirmek zorunda kalır. Joe ile evli olan Sandy ise defalarca Joe’nun kaba sözlerine ve fiziksel şiddete boyun eğer. Lion in the Streets oyununda ise Thompson, tacize uğradıktan sonra öldürülen Isobel’in hayaletinin tanık olduğu kadın-erkek ve aile ilişkilerinden ve cinayetlerden bahseder. Oyunun ilk bölümünde eşi tarafından aldatıldığını öğrenen Sue, Bill’i terketmek yerine onun hakaretlerine katlanıp affetmeyi tercih eder. İkinci bölümde yer alan Edward ve Sherry, nişanlı bir çift, ilişkisinde ise Thompson, erkeğin kendi tatmini için kadını nasıl aşağıladığını gözler önüne serer. Her iki oyundada Thompson evli çiftleri mutluluk tablosu içerisinde yer almaz. Hatta Thompson, patriarchal yapı içerisinde varolan kadın vücutlarının evlilik teması altında nasıl ezildiğini ve yavas yavas tüketildiğini anlatır.

The Dialectic of Sex, after the Post-1960s

A key artifact of the political contradictions and utopian problematics of women’s liberation and the tradition of radical feminism at the end of the 1960s, Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex remains a site of controversies, misinterpretations, and unmet challenges. This essay considers the critical capacity of this text at the present juncture, strongly characterized by the reactionary resurgence of second-wave feminism and a trans-exclusionary brand of radical feminism. While both illuminating and symptomatizing many of the contradictions and failures of radical feminism, Firestone’s text also strongly resonates with the critical utopian interventions of queer-feminist science fiction writing in the early 1970s. This critique of The Dialectic of Sex seeks to rearticulate some of Firestone’s key concepts within a critical utopian framework and to reconceptualize the text’s contributions to radical feminism in relation to a contemporary project of revolutionary feminism. To do this, the author suggests, requires a more nuanced approach to historicizing and engaging with political confusion—marking a matter of great urgency for the current cultural landscape.

Feminisms

Abstract This chapter reviews a selection of books published in 2018 relevant to feminist critical and cultural theory. The chapter is divided into three sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Feminist Pasts, which reviews Victoria Margree’s Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone, Celia Marshik and Allison Pease’s Modernism, Sex, and Gender, and Ania Loomba’s Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India; 3. Feminist Presents, which reviews Orienting Feminism: Media, Activism and Cultural Representation, edited by Catherine Dale and Rosemary Overell, and Emma Young’s Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Short Stories.

Mulher, natureza e loucura em ‘Uma carta” de Sérgio Sant’Anna

Partindo da obra de Simone de Beauvoir e do conceito de ‘dialética sexual”, desenvolvido por Shulamith Firestone, analisa-se neste artigo a associação entre mulher, natureza e loucura como parte da estruturação literária do conto ‘Uma carta”, do escritor brasileiro Sérgio Sant’Anna.

Feminizm amerykański trzeciej fali – zmiana i kontynuacja

The history of American women fighting for equal rights dates back to the 18th century, when in Boston, in 1770, they voiced the demand that the status of women be changed. Abigail Adams, Sarah Grimke, Angelina Grimke and Frances Wright are considered to have pioneered American feminism. An organized suffrage movement is assumed to have originated at the convention Elizabeth Stanton organized in Seneca Falls in 1848. This convention passed a Declaration of Sentiments, which criticized the American Declaration of Independence as it excluded women. The most prominent success achieved in this period was the US Congress passing the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote. The 1960s saw the second wave of feminism, resulting from disappointment with the hitherto promotion of equality. The second-wave feminists claimed that the legal reforms did not provide women with the changes they expected. As feminists voiced the need to feminize the world, they struggled for social customs to change and gender stereotypes to be abandoned. They criticized the patriarchal model of American society, blaming this model for reducing the social role of women to that of a mother, wife and housewife. They pointed to patriarchal ideology, rather than nature, as the source of the inequality of sexes. The leading representatives of the second wave of feminism were Betty Friedan (who founded the National Organization for Women), Kate Millet (who wrote Sexual Politics), and Shulamith Firestone (the author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution). The 1990s came to be called the third wave of feminism, characterized by multiple cultures, ethnic identities, races and religions, thereby becoming a heterogenic movement. The third-wave feminists, Rebecca Walker and Bell Hooks, represented groups of women who had formerly been denied the right to join the movement, for example due to racial discrimination. They believed that there was not one ‘common interest of all women’ but called for leaving no group out in the fight for the equality of women’s rights. They asked that the process of women’s emancipation that began with the first wave embrace and approve of the diversity of the multiethnic American society.

Antisocial Feminism? Shulamith Firestone, Monique Wittig and Proto-Queer Theory

Recent iterations of feminist theory and activism, especially intersectional, ‘third-wave’ feminism, have cast much second-wave feminism as politically unacceptable in failing to centre the experiences of less privileged subjects than the often white, often middle-class names with which the second wave is usually associated. While bearing those critiques in mind, this article argues that some second-wave writers, exemplified by Shulamith Firestone and Monique Wittig, may still offer valuable feminist perspectives if viewed through the anti-normative lens of queer theory. Queer resists the reification of identity categories. It focuses on resistance to hegemonic norms, rather than on group identity. By viewing Wittig's and Firestone's critique of the institutions of the family, reproduction, maternity, and work as proto-queer — and specifically proto-antisocial queer — it argues for a feminism that refuses to shore up identity, that rejects groupthink, and that articulates meaningfully the crucial place of the individual in the collective project of feminism.

Cyberculture in the Large World House

This essay describes a gesture of thought and politics—almost ahistorically called "cyberculture"—that appeared in the early 1960s and extended its reach into the politics and poetry that followed. To reread this gesture, I explain, brings new terms of legibility to this later work, from Marshall McLuhan to W.S. Merwin and Philip José Farmer to Shulamith Firestone and Martin Luther King Jr. It may also enable a point of resistance to advancing technological orders of global capitalism.

Dialectiser le sexe. Réélaborations matérialistes et psychanalytiques dans les approches de genre

Starting from a reading of Shulamith Firestone’s ground-breaking book, The Dialectic of Sex, the article questions the dialectical approach used in certain gender theories which reevaluate both psychoanalysis and Engels and Marx’s materialism. The very notion of the dialectical – which can have different meanings – enables us to address the sexual question by way of the socio-historical production of gender-oriented discourses and practices, in articulation with the psychosexual basis of this production. The dialectical approach, the thrust of which is critical and revolutionary, must however undergo a conceptual rephrasing of their psychoanalytical and Marxist formulation, in particular regarding the relations between biology, class and sex, with a view to deciphering the gendered bias latent in their unconscious and ideological conceptualization. The inherited theoretical framework, proper to Marxism and to psychoanalysis, is thus tested in the confrontation with the historical specificity of the articulation between the social relations of sex, class, and race, thus leading to the elaboration of a materialistic approach to psychoanalysis.

Firestonian Futures and Trans‐Affirming Presents

Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution was, upon its original publication, both radicacmen would be freed from the burden of childbirth, in which the nuclear family, gender roles, typical constructions of marriage and parenting are all a thing of the past, still for many seems radical, even forty‐five years after its debut in 1970. With Firestone's recent passing, it is a particularly suitable time to reconsider her work in light of the medical, technological, and social changes of the past few decades. Specifically, I wish to argue that the kind of future society that Firestone envisioned, which would be possible only through the use of certain medical technologies, has begun to be actualized within many trans‐affirming communities. The greater the recognition of trans identities, trans lives, and trans relationships, the more we will approach the realization of the post‐revolutionary society that she describes. In this essay, I consider Firestone's ideas on the issues of biological sex, gender, relationships, and parenthood, after which I will identify how present trans‐affirming practices serve to support these Firestonian ideals.

RADİKAL FEMİNİZM: “KİŞİSEL OLAN POLİTİKTİR” SÖYLEMİNDE AİLE

OZET: 19. Yuzyilin yarisi ve 20.Yuzyila damgasini vuran bir siyasi ideoloji olan feminizm kadinlarin haklarini savunmak amaciyla ortaya cikmistir. Bu calismanin amaci feminist teorisyenlerinden radikal feminizm savunucularinin aile kurumuna bakis acilarinin nasil oldugunu irdelemektir. Radikal feministlerden Kate Millett ve Shulamith Firestone’nun feminizmin tarihi acisindan oldukca oneme sahip olan “Cinsel Politika” ve “Cinselligin Diyalektigi” adli eserlerinden yola cikilarak aile konusu ele alinmistir. Firestone ailenin kadinin ozgurlugunu kisitlamasi noktasinda daha cok kadinin biyolojik anneligi uzerinde durmustur. Kate Millett ise ailenin kadinin ozgurlugunu daha cok cinsellik acisindan kisitladigini vurgulamistir. ABSTRACT: Feminism which was a remarkable political ideology in the half of 19th and in the 20th century brought into existence to defend women’s rights. The aim of this study is to scrutinize how the defenders’ perspectives of the radical feminism are on the institution of family. In this study, the topic on family was came up on the basis of Kate Millett’s and Shulamith Firestone’s books “Sexual Politics” and “the Dialectic of the Sex” which are very crucial works in terms of the history of radical feminism. In relation to family’s restriction of the woman’s freedom, Firestone dwells on the woman’s biological motherhood. But Kate Millett emphasizes that the woman’s freedom is resticted by family with regards to sexuality.

The VanishingDialectic: Shulamith Firestone and the Future of the Feminist 1970s

This essay explores the relation between the feminist present, its recent past, and its possible futures using Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970) as a point of reference. Rather than conceive 1970s feminism as either a dead relic of a superseded past or a living legacy, the analysis experiments with temporalities of feminist theory that might better account for both continuity and rupture, for our attractions and repulsions to different moments. This discussion of feminist time focuses on four concepts designed to animate different possibilities for thinking about the present and future of feminist theory. The first of these frames the Dialectic as a utopian manifesto; the second poses it as a vanishing mediator; the third casts the contrast between Firestone's Dialectic and her second book, Airless Spaces (1998), as an allegory of the present; and the fourth presents the Dialectic as an archive of the future.

Feminism and Emotion: Love and the Couple in the Magazine Effe (1973–1982)

Drawing on recent scholarship on the history of emotions and on feminism in Italy, the article analyses the Italian feminist magazine Effe (1973–1982) and its attempt to rethink notions of love and affective relationships between couples. Whilst a reclaiming of emotions and a re-envisioning of female sexuality were central to 1970s feminism in Italy, Effe was unusual in identifying love — as abstract notion, but also as fact of daily life, both heterosexual and homosexual — as an issue to be addressed in its pages. The article argues that the magazine, influenced in particular by the ideas of American feminist Shulamith Firestone, presents a clear rejection of traditional romantic love, as intimately bound up with the subjugation of women, but that, perplexed by the continuing hold love apparently had over women, and also drawn to an ideal, indeed utopian, vision of love, largely exclusive to women, it is highly ambiguous in proposing an alternative.