US Feminist Research Articles

A Radical Demand Effect: Early US Feminists and the Married Women's Property Acts

Numerous scholars consider the economic origins of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century US married women's property acts. Researchers investigate how economic downturns and women's inroads into business spurred lawmakers to reform property laws to give married women the right to own separate property. Such economic explanations, however, are only a partial story. Our investigation reveals the important role of women's collective activism in winning these legal changes. Women mobilized for property rights often as they pressed for voting rights and, in one case, as they campaigned for an equal rights amendment. We examine circumstances leading to passage of married women's property acts in seven states to show that as women mobilized for property rights alongside voting rights or a broader equal rights law, a radical demand effect unfolded. Lawmakers often considered demands for woman suffrage or an equal rights amendment as more far-reaching and thus more radical and threatening. Such feminist demands, then, provided a foil for property-rights activism, and the contrast led lawmakers to view property demands as more moderate. In addition, as they pressed for these combined reforms, women often engaged in hybrid framing that allowed them to moderate their demand for property reforms by linking their property goals to beliefs already widely accepted. The confluence of these circumstances led political leaders to deem property changes as more moderate and acceptable in an effort to steer feminists away from their radical goals. In the end, the radical demand effect created a political opportunity for passage of the married women's property acts.

Garzona Nationalism: The Confluence of Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the Cuban Republic

Garzona NationalismThe Confluence of Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the Cuban Republic Kristie Soares (bio) Although policing the sexual (stigmatizing and outlawing several kinds of non-procreative sex, particularly lesbian and gay sex and prostitution) has something to do with sex, it is also more than sex. Embedded here are powerful signifiers about appropriate sexuality, about the kind of sexuality that presumably imperils the nation and about the kind of sexuality that promotes citizenship. Not just (any) body can be a citizen anymore. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas” [I see them] with their boyish haircuts, their aptitude for sports, and their masculine mannerisms, these biologically degenerate types that among women correspond to the perfect pepillito [gay man]: garzonas [lesbians]. Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, Feminismo: cuestiones sociales y crítica literaria The two epigraphs above are, to the dismay of many, both from feminist thinkers. The first, from well-known Trinidadian scholar M. Jacqui Alexander, outlines the ways that sexuality is not just central to but in fact constitutive of notions of citizenship in the postcolonial Caribbean. The second, from a feminist thinker little known outside her home nation of Cuba, Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, proves Alexander’s point in a haunting way. How two women with such differing views can both identify as feminists is the purview of another article, but central to this one is the question of how these two discourses—that citizenship often requires a policing of sexuality and that feminists themselves have often been the enforcers of such regulation—might help us understand both feminism and nationalism as always already in dialogue with one another. This article examines discourses of lesbian sexuality during the Republican period in Cuba (1920s–30s) to understand how many of our modern understandings [End Page 154] of gender and sexuality, both in the United States and in Latin America, can actually be traced back to this era. Many scholars have argued that the 1920s and 1930s were a fundamental period in the development of a postcolonial Cuban identity.1 It was during this period that Cuban nationals first attempted to articulate a vision of the Cuban character, while finding themselves plagued simultaneously by the memory of Spanish colonialism—having just gained sovereignty from Spain in 1898—and the threat of American imperialism—manifest in the Platt Amendment of 1901, which gave the United States partial jurisdiction over Cuban affairs. Cuban women, in particular, marked this period with an unprecedented amount of involvement in political and literary circles and saw themselves as an integral part of the development of a postcolonial Cuban identity. So successful was the activism that Cuban feminists engaged in during this time period that scholars have called the 1940 constitution “perhaps the most progressive charter in the Western Hemisphere” up to that time.2 It included, among other things, Article 23, which declared all Cubans equal to one another. Leading up to this momentous constitution were several landmark laws passed on behalf of gender equity, including a 1917 law that gave women control of property, the right to sue, and authority over their children; a 1918 law permitting divorces filed by both women and men and requiring that both be responsible for children after a divorce; the overturning of Article 437 of the Penal Code in 1930, which stated that a man could legally kill his adulterous wife; Decree 589 in 1934, promising equal pay for equal work; and a 1937 maternity law giving women time for breastfeeding during the workday and forbidding hiring discrimination in the case of pregnancy.3 Missing from this list is of course the right to vote, which women obtained in 1933 under the one-hundred-day government of Ramón Grau, which the United States did not recognize.4 So successful was Cuba’s feminist movement in these early years that its absence from most narratives of western feminism is both shocking and worrisome. One reason for the relative inattention to early Cuban feminism by US academia is the disconnect that existed between Cuban feminists and US feminists during this time period, with...

Connecting Intersectionality and Nepantla to Resist Oppressions: A Feminist Fiction Approach

Abstract This essay argues that the black and Chicana feminist theories of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Gloria Anzaldúa, intersectionality and nepantla, respectively, attend to the complicated aspects of women’s identities, yet each also involves unique analyses that interrogate systemic understandings of oppression. I argue for a framework of intersectional nepantla, that is, the merger of these theories into a conjoining theoretical framework to be applied to issues related to the oppressions of US women, particularly women of color. Such merging involves the labor of women’s self-reflection and examination and the difficult task of struggling through the pain and discomfort of internal resistance and oppression to move to this work on collective levels. This individual grappling and interrogation are worthwhile because they entail examinations of white heterosexist patriarchy at the personal and societal levels. An intersectional nepantla analytical lens, connecting the works of two key US feminist theories, creates an internal/personal and external/societal system of examination that leads to the investigation of and resistance toward oppressions for women, particularly women of color. Though I apply this lens to literary productions by black feminist authors, intersectional nepantla is a method of analysis that may expand into various disciplines and areas in order to interrogate the identity-based oppressions of all, but primarily women of color due to their multifaceted identities and histories with race- and gender-based discriminations within white heteropatriarchal US society.

Colonizing intersectionality: replicating racial hierarchy in feminist academic arguments

In this article I use tools of critical and poststructural discourse analysis to examine a particular rhetorical frame adopted by some European social scientists and philosophers dealing with the feminist concept of intersectionality. These scholars must negotiate a complex discursive terrain framed by what David Theo Goldberg calls ‘racial Europeanization,’ a metadiscursive regime that denies the continuing existence of European race and racisms. The result is to suppress the availability of conceptual tools that will allow people to recognize, analyze, and debate what might count as structural racisms and how racial differences can be negotiated effectively. Acceding to this suppression restricts the tools available when critics must engage with racial arguments in criticizing US intersectionality. I examine here three cases in which critics fail to give due attention to the imbrication of race, nation, and power in their arguments, the women they target, and the forms of intersectionality they wish to critique. The critics utilize structures of argument that evoke histories of racial hierarchy and colonialism, treating the intersectionality of US women of color as a site to colonize and control. They deploy rhetorics that map closely to structures of thinking described by Albert Memmi in his description of colonial racism. I demonstrate how the critiques of intersectionality frame US feminist scholars of color and their constituencies by ‘depersonalizing’ and ‘collectivizing’ them through what Memmi calls ‘the mark of the plural,’ through binary and hierarchical rhetorics, and through ‘fixing’ the nature of the black feminists who introduced the concept of intersectionality as a theoretical tool. The unacknowledged expressions of racial privilege that characterize these critiques demonstrate that feminists need to transform the terms of reading and writing to take responsibility for the ways feminist discourses function as technologies of power.

White Suffragist Dis/Entitlement: The <em>Revolution</em> and the Rhetoric of Racism

The canonization of the US woman suffrage movement and its most famous figures reveals a paradox. While Elizabeth Cady Stanton is arguably the movement's most recognizable symbol, historians Ellen DuBois and Richard Candida Smith have recently pointed out that of her writing has been easily available and that she is known today for only a handful of pieces (Introduction 1). Even as Stanton is the focus of numerous biographies, documentaries, and scholarly studies, scholars simultaneously overlook her large body of work. One reason for this contradiction, as DuBois and Smith note, is that Stanton never wrote one major book that would allow future historians and critics to synthesize her contributions (1-2). Instead, much of her work ranges across speeches, pamphlets, and newspapers, and while anthologies reprint many of these pieces, these collections simply cannot represent the sheer volume and sweep of her oeuvre, which runs to thousands of pages. (1) As a result, our acquaintance with Stanton's writing is rather shallow even as her identification as a symbol of US woman suffrage remains ubiquitous. One of the most canonical figures of the movement is, strangely enough, also relatively unknown. The critical focus on racism within white suffragism mirrors this paradox. The historiography of US suffrage of the past twenty-five years documents the many forms of bigotry embedded within the movement and espoused by its central figures. Stanton in particular has been fully and frequently as a looming figure of racism in US feminism's past. (2) In a recent collection of essays on her work, historian Ann D. Gordon points out that the luster of the infamous cofounder of the nineteenth-century women's rights movement has been dimming in recent years because of the close scrutiny now given to the racialized rhetoric in her speeches and writing (Stanton iii). Study after study documents Stanton's of racial slurs, the racial constructions her thought relied on, and the bigotry behind her blind spots. As Gordon notes, her are now well established (124). Well established, but not well understood. Works rarely explore or explicate white suffragist racism--they only confirm it. As with our acquaintance with Stanton herself, this racism is now notorious even as it remains obscure. Scholars persistently produce this racism as the reason for the so-called split within the suffrage movement over whether to support or oppose the Fifteenth Amendment and the enfranchisement of black men before women, but in doing so they make that racism into an explanation for an event, a way to understand the fissures and failures of the movement. This critical desire represents an important intervention in feminist historiography, but one of its effects is to convert white suffragist racism into a shorthand way to understand how the suffrage movement split in two in 1869. I'm suggesting that the critical tendency to always already understand this historical moment as an originary site of white feminist racism paradoxically results in the obfuscation of how that racism functioned. White suffragist writing is thus in the peculiar position of being canonized and overexposed and at the same time under-considered. (3) Gordon points to this problem when she suggests that documenting Stanton's bigotry and elitism is an important task, but [n]onetheless, the exploration of what [these things] signify needs better tools and maps than are currently in use (Stanton 124). This essay seeks to contribute to this exploration through a tracing of white suffragist writing in the short-lived periodical the Revolution. The critical paradox of Stanton's work and white suffragist racism are, I argue, bound up with the pervasive critical bypassing of this important text. Published from 1868 to 1870 in New York under the editorial leadership of Stanton and Anthony, the newspaper is the source of some of the most frequently cited and denounced writings within suffrage historiography, yet scholars have generated very little work on the journal as a text. …

WEAPONS OF SEX, WEAPONS OF WAR

Recent international attention has focused on designations of rape and sexual violence in conflict zones. The most formative debates on this issue centre on the 1990s-era conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which also involved heated debates amongst feminists over designations of rape as genocide. While the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda case, the Prosecutor v. Akayesu, resulted in the first formal charge of wartime rape as genocide within international criminal law, the first case to charge wartime rape as genocidal occurred in US federal court. This project looks for the overarching social and political meaning of the contemporary international legal focus on rape and sexual violence. It examines why, how, and to what extent US and transnational feminist legal academics and activists transmitted and secured their understandings of the relationships between sex, violence and ethno-religious difference within the international legal arena. In doing so, I argue that their participation in the contemporary recognition and narration of sexual injury in a global context both retreads and reconfigures the heated 1980s-era US Sex Wars debates on the workings of gender, sex, race and power.

From Triple Jeopardy to Intersectionality: The Feminist Perplex

This essay focuses on the contradictory state of feminism today, showing how the transformations feminism has undergone since the inception of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s have manifested accommodations to changes in the broader political arena. To illustrate this, Aguilar’s article traces the evolution of “intersectionality,” a central concept in feminism, from the “triple jeopardy” slogan of the second wave. It makes evident that while intersectionality recounts and mimics the triple jeopardy motif propounded by US third world women it has, in fact, successfully been emptied of its revolutionary content. This essay argues that such evisceration characterizes contemporary US feminism. To resolve this quandary, Aguilar proposes that sharper analytical tools be deployed to comprehend a larger social totality than what prevailing discourse offers and that creative energies be channeled into the building of a revolutionary social movement.

“The Way We Read Now”

Research Article| April 01 2012 “The Way We Read Now” Elizabeth Weed Elizabeth Weed Elizabeth Weed teaches in Brown University’s Modern Culture and Media Department, and is editor, with Ellen Rooney, of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. She recently edited, with Judith Butler, The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism (2011), and is editor of Essential Readings in US Feminist Theory, forthcoming in Chinese with Nanjing University Press. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of the Present (2012) 2 (1): 95–106. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.2.1.0095 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Elizabeth Weed; “The Way We Read Now”. History of the Present 1 April 2012; 2 (1): 95–106. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.2.1.0095 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of the Present Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2012 University of Illinois Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

From Drug Mule to Miss America: American Exceptionalism and the Commodification of the “Other” Woman in María Full of Grace

Commenting on his motivations for his movie Maria Full of Grace (2004), director and writer Joshua Marston explains that he intended to make an educational movie about people who are engaged in international drug trafficking and about dangers that such work entails.1 His choice to depict Colombia's drug industry echoes his deep interest in world politics, Colombia's forty-year civil war and guerilla wars, and country's stagnant economy. With Marston's advocacy of issues in world politics and human rights, HBO, movie's US distributor, continues to add diversity to its playbill.2 Still, despite these noble intentions of promoting issues of Third World countries, movie only partly succeeds in its attempt to humanize drug mule.3 This becomes evident from general response movie received from American viewers: while many are positively captivated by movie, attention of their enamored attachment to movie almost exclusively focuses on Catalina Sandino Moreno, young Colombian actress who plays role of Maria. While her convincing performance certainly aided in successful transference of movie's intended message about complicated entanglements that affect lives of transnational drug mules, ways in which many movie critics (professional and amateur) see in Moreno a representative of Colombia she depicts is rather troublesome.However, as this article argues, such resonance with audience is not entirely beyond Marston's control. On contrary, there are several instances in movie that invite audience to see in Moreno a spokesperson for Colombian social realities, and in Maria a 'windowsQ' into presumed alterity of other (Amireh and Majaj 2). One movie review makes a particularly problematic assumption about movie when it characterizes Maria Full of Grace as a portrayal of the enormous complexity of Hispanic life in America, especially of illegal variety (Brunette). Such is general tenor in responses Marston's movie has received from journalists and online bloggers alike.While this essay does not endorse such reviews, it addresses a selection of such responses for its investigation of degree to which Marston's movie itself suggests an objectified representation of Colombian female drug mules. Such representation, it seems, appears to resonate with American audience more than careful crafting and sensitive gaze with which Marston approaches subject of his film. It is therefore particularly interesting to examine in what way movie objectifies Colombian women by appropriating Colombia as stereotypical global South. Taking its cue from recent discussions in transnational feminism, this essay analyzes a recurrent dilemma in Western representations of Third World through images of woman to emphasize difference between First and Third World for an ultimate projection of American supremacy.Third World Women on American TV-ScreensRecent US feminist culture criticism has increasingly shown interest in transnational feminist issues,4 most particularly in orientalist and essentialist over-generalizations of Third World cultures that US academia, popular culture, and mass media have produced when attempting representations of Third World women.5 Recognizing danger of such generalizations, Rey Chow offers two useful concepts for a critical evaluation of Western mass media's depiction of the other country. In her critique of American coverage of crisis of late 1980s, Chow refers to a sensationalist interest of Western audiences that manifests itself in what she calls watching. Symptomatic of China watching, specifies Chow, are detailed accounts in which US mass media depicts Chinese government as controlling and ruthless, and portrays protesters without respecting their right to anonymity (Third World 83). The second concept, King Kong syndrome, which Chow defines as intricately connected to sensationalism that is at center of China watching (Third World 84), echoes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's contention that Third World is often depicted as a site of raw materials that invoke monstrosity, which appears in contrast to First World both as entertainment and as evidence for persisting, Western notion of cultural elevation (In Other Worlds 90). …

Judy Chicago and the Practice of 1970s Feminism

JudyChicago and the Practice of 1970s Feminism Jane Gerhard Eve Ensler's 1998 play The Vagina Monologues opens with a deceptively simple statement about her longing for a woman-centered community: "I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas—a community, a culture of vaginas."1 Surely the most successful of feminist themed cultural products in recent memory, The Vagina Monologues has become a popular feminist ritual where women with little else in common beyond their vaginas come together and affirm their differences. The play and the nonprofit V-Day organization founded to channel audiences' enthusi astic support of it represent the power of a popular form of US feminism or a form of feminism that has found a niche in the cultural marketplace since the 1970s. Other examples of commercially popular feminist-themed cultural products abound: Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Contem plated Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975), and the one-woman stage show by Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1986); Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple (1982), made into a film in 1985, along with 9 to 5 (1980), Tootsie (1982), and Thelma and Louise (1991), as well as the chic literature-to-film/cable hybrids, Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones'Diary (1996, 2001) and Candice Bushnell's Sex and the City (1997, HBO 1998—2004, 2008). This popularized form of feminism has a history worth exploring, one Feminist Studies37, no. 3 (Fall 2011). 591© 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 592 Jane Gerhard that sheds light on contemporary debates over the proper modifier—post, Third Wave, or simply "new"—for today's feminism.2 To start assembling that history, it is necessary to challenge Ensler's view that her longing for "a community, a culture of vaginas" is without histor ical precedent. In fact, the play's special V-Day 2001 foreword by Gloria Steinem notes that she herself had a vagina awakening when "walking through Judy Chicago's Woman House [sic] in Los Angeles, where each room was created by a different woman artist, and where I discovered female symbol ism in my own culture for the first time."3 Like Ensler's play in the 1990s, Chicago's work in the 1970s introduced thousands of nonactivist women to elements of feminism. And again anticipating Enlser, Chicago created literal and metaphorical communities around women's commonalities through which people had an experience of feminism. In her classroom in 1970 to 1972, which resulted in the installation Womanhouse (1972), and in her studio between 1976 and 1979, which resulted in the monumental artwork The Dinner Party (1979), Chicago practiced feminist ideals of egalitarianism and personal empowerment. These literal communities generated tempo rary and discursive communities through a feminist art that articulated a belief in the commonality of all women. The feminist meanings of Woman house and The Dinner Party, clearly on display for audiences to see, were born as much from the practice of feminism in these literal communities as from the representation of women's power in the art. Examining Chicago's classroom and studio illuminates the evolution of 1970s feminism as it moved from a period of intense, multifaceted, and often confrontational activism toward a more mainstream, diffuse, and individualist expression of women's rights as the century ended. This shift away from activism, which took place in tandem with a growing conserv ative backlash in the 1980s and 1990s, set the stage for the popularity of cultural products such as The Vagina Monologues. A lens focused on the force of popular feminism allows us to explore the diversity of feminist expres sion as it reached ordinary women for whom it was often consumed as a cultural product rather than defended as an identity. The contours of that transformation, not simply a shift from politics to culture but to the poli tics of cultural production and consumption, can be seen in the commu nity spaces and art produced by Chicago. Jane Gerhard 593 Toward a "Female Art History" Chicago's fascination with women's history is one of the defining aspects of her feminism and...

Sisterly Solidarity: Politics and Rhetoric of the Direct Address in US Feminism in the 1970s

The wide circulation of the terms ‘sister’ and ‘sisterhood’ in the 1970s suggests the extent to which the idea and practice of sisterhood shaped US feminism at that time. Four decades later sisterhood is often referred to within the context of critique, namely that primarily white, middle-class women imagined sisterhood in a way that reproduced racism, homophobia, classism and US-centrism, and that erased differences among women. Without dismissing these critiques, I contend that a close reading of the different deployments of the term ‘sister’ reveals some of sisterhood's complexity and power, as well as additional limitations of the term that are rarely discussed. In particular this article analyses instances in which ‘sister’ occurs within a direct address in feminist periodicals. The direct address is an interpellation, a speech act that both hails the reader, naming her as a sister, and produces a community of women who are sisters. Looking at various examples in which readers are addressed as sisters, I consider facets of interpellation, such as the interdependence of the addressor and addressee, the simultaneity of subject and community formation, the affective quality of an address, and the different effects of a name when it is written rather than oral. An investigation the rhetorical force of interpellation points to the importance of the direct address in social movement communities, the challenge of negotiating and producing one's audience, and that which obstructs the formation of a community identity that produces subjects who are also activists.

“Nothing Hurts the Cause More Than That”

The final season of the television series Veronica Mars was marked by a narrative shift from an apparent investment in supporting feminist values to a virulent attack on US feminism. This shift reproduces several of the tenets central to the discourses of the backlash, including the views that feminism promotes hostility towards men, that it has betrayed women rather than advocating on their behalf, and that feminist liberation comes at a tremendous personal cost, which leaves women miserable and unfulfilled. This essay examines the show's transformation into a backlash text within the context of the pressure reportedly placed on writers and producers to increase ratings in order to avoid cancellation. It argues that because the series's reproduction of backlash rhetoric can be read as reflective of the popular view that feminism is antithetical to the values of the US cultural mainstream, it illustrates the influence of the backlash on US market forces, as well as on US popular culture. It also suggests that, in the process, the series reveals a great deal about the ways in which profit motives intersect with, and possibly override, ideological considerations in the production of popular culture texts.

“Join the Knitting Revolution”: Third-Wave Feminist Magazines and the Politics of Domesticity

Abstract: The mid-1990s saw the rise of a new sub-genre of political magazine in the United States: the “third-wave” feminist periodical. A key feature of these publications is that they promote reclaiming and repoliticizing activities traditionally associated with the domestic sphere, particularly knitting. This paper critically examines and historically contextualizes the discourses on the “new” knitting in the letters to the editor, editorials, articles, and advertisements of third-wave feminist periodicals and argues that contemporary feminist craft cultures sit at a politically ambiguous nexus of privilege, complicity, and resistance. By historicizing third-wave periodicals' promotion of knitting, this paper sheds light on changing ways in which the domestic sphere has figured within the broader history of US feminism and suggests that, despite their appeals to the “new,” these periodicals are very much in conversation with what is, to some extent, an imagined feminist “past.”

“Join the Knitting Revolution”: Third-Wave Feminist Magazines and the Politics of Domesticity

Abstract:

Transnational alliances, US third world feminism, and Chicana Mestizaje in Ester Hernández's visual art

This article examines connections between US third world feminism (Chela Sandoval) and recent developments in transnational feminisms. A focal emphasis of the article is the notion of oppositional consciousness, which, as postulated by Chicana critic Chela Sandoval, constitutes a mobile strategy whereby the trans-cultural, trans-gendered, transsexual and transnational are activated in order to defy ideology and equalize power on behalf of the colonized. Ester Hernandez’ visual art is used to illustrate the goals of the movement and the method of oppositional consciousness. The analysis demonstrates that, through the tactics implemented by Chicana mestizaje, Hernandez is able to grasp the local in a dialectical relation with the global, destabilizing universal discourses of class, race, gender and nation. Furthermore, by turning the mestiza body into the site where the material conditions of neocolonial histories are played out, the artist is able to rupture ideology, propelling new strategies for Chicana liberation. In synthesis, through the transnational lens, US third world feminism is viewed as a deviation from the normalized category we call “US feminism,” a movement of its own that provided – as Hernandez’ work illustrates – a profound understanding of difference within the United States, and a new and provocative way of articulating marginality.

Gender, Race, and Imperial Wars

Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War. Edited by Robin L. Riley, Naeem Inayatullah. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 254 pp., $74.95 hardcover (ISBN-10: 1-4039-7462-4). Interrogating Imperialism, edited by Robin Riley and Naeem Inayatullah, interrogates the “worldwide capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal form of imperialism” (p. 3) visible in global politics today both on its own and as a product of hundreds of years of imperialisms that remain a key scaffolding to this new imperialism. The dual purpose of this collection is (in the words of Cynthia Enloe in the foreward) to revive “persistent curiosity and nuanced understanding” (p. ix) and (in the editors' words) “reveal the many machinations of the new imperialism and the complexity of racial and gender formations within it” (p. 5). In service of these missions, the collection includes eight substantive chapters with a variety of empirical foci. While the authors share a theoretical commitment to interrogating imperialism, each treats the subject matter in importantly unique ways. In Chapter Two, Elisabeth Armstrong and Vijay Prashad show the conceptual and practical difficulties of establishing solidarity among feminist movements. They note that efforts at solidarity are often hampered by the fact that “U.S. feminists and other progressives often presume that the darker nations do not have an indigenous feminist tradition on par with their own” (p. 16). Using examples of US feminist attempts at solidarity with women in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan during the United States' conflicts with those states, the authors of this chapter demonstrate that presumed superiority often prevents American feminists from seeing the legitimacy of elements of national …

Cross-border feminism: shifting the terms of debate for US and European feminists

Recent decades of women's rights advocacy have produced numerous regional and international agreements for protecting women's security, including a UN convention that affirms the state's responsibility to protect key gender-specific rights, with no exceptions on the basis of culture or religion. At the same time, however, the focus on universal women's rights has enabled influential feminists in the United States to view women's rights in opposition to culture, and most often in opposition to other people's cultures. Not surprisingly, then, feminists across the global South have criticized the universal-women's-rights agenda. This article reviews representative critical responses to universal-women's-rights advocacy. The author argues that, taken collectively, these critical responses do not reject the possibility of cross-cultural feminist advocacy but they do suggest the need for feminists in the United States and Europe to focus less on transferring rights across the obstacles of culture and more on how they can revise and expand their own understanding of women's rights in response to the struggles of other women, many of whom view women's rights as organic to their own cultures and as connected to broader social struggles.

“Poor Visitor”: Mobility as/of Voice in Jamaica Kincaid’s <i>Lucy</i>

Jamaica Kincaid crosses disciplinary borders by writing fiction that is simultaneously diasporic and national, but only half of this equation has received serious inquiry. Since its publication, myriad critical essays have appeared about Kincaid's Lucy: A Novel (1990), a fictionalized autobiographical account of Antiguan author's migration to New York in late 1960s to work as an au pair for a wealthy white family; most essays focus on character interactions in novel that metaphorically explore relationship of Antigua to its British colonial past and to contemporary imperialism and forced diaspora of global capital. For example, Jana Evans Braziel explores Kincaid's use of daffodils in Lucy as a metaphor for diaspora and a way to reverse colonial 'order' and denaturalize 'natural' (113-14). Gary E. Holcomb reads novel through lens of black transnationalism, characterizing Lucy as a migrant whose travel and sexual liberation work together to resist dominant notions of national identity [that] endeavor to enforce homogeneity through colonial, racist, and nationalist values (296). Rosanne Kanhai stresses important role novels such as Lucy can play in undergraduate classroom as global feminist interrogations of (white) US feminism's limited focus on race-class-gender trifecta of identity categories, and Kristen Mahlis analyzes Lucy as a model of paradoxical space of female exile (182) through an analysis of body in exile, drawing particularly on Kincaid's metaphorical use of the tongue. While these articles contain excellent scholarship, they represent tendency to overlook Lucy as a work of American feminist fiction, one that resounds with commentary on US domestic politics and culture, even, or perhaps especially, as it considers these phenomena in a transnational context. Braziel, for instance, notes femininity implicit in Kincaid's description of daffodils and Lucy's scornful rejection of it, but focuses her analysis on issues of colonial displacement instead of on feminist politics that pervade text. Similarly, Kanhai's essay generalizes its critique of US feminism without a close analysis of Kincaid's writing. contend that Lucy's position outside of US literary canon is a notable oversight in American letters, both because Kincaid is a US immigrant and because story line openly critiques cosmopolitan American Left of 1960s, setting for book. One exception to this oversight is David Cowart's chapter on Lucy in Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America (2006), but even this analysis, which emphasizes questions of assimilation in US immigrant narratives, overlooks novel's strident commentary on particularly American political movements. Lucy's general critical placement outside purview of American literary studies upholds novel's own argument about limited potential for radical change in US culture. In Lucy, Kincaid uses mobility as a literary trope to examine assimilative impulses that pervade US feminist agendas; by dismantling mythologies that surround concepts such as family, sisterhood, conservation, and avant-gardism, she argues that such terms metaphorically imply always contains vestiges of imperialism and racism. In Modest_Witness (1997), Donna J. Haraway argues that American Left's opposition to genetic modification and other forms of biotechnology needs to be considered in context of Western theme of purity of type, in which can be heard the unintended tones of fear of alien and suspicion of mixed (61). Like it or not, Haraway writes, I was born kin to ... transgenic, transspecific, and transported creatures of all kinds; that is family ... to whom [we] are accountable. It will not help ... to to natural and pure (62). Haraway's critique of leftist politics in realm of biotechnology aids my reading of Lucy as a systematic deconstruction of appeal to natural and pure with which other leftist platforms--feminism, environmentalism, and bohemian counterculture--are infused. …

Mapeando a imaginação feminista: da redistribuição ao reconhecimento e à representação

Este artigo realiza uma reflexão sobre como reinventar o projeto feminista em um mundo que se globaliza, a partir de um balanço sobre as mudanças no feminismo no contexto das transformações no capitalismo pós-guerra e na geopolítica pós-comunista. O pós-11 de Setembro significou uma mudança drástica nas energias feministas, deslocando a ponta-de-lança da luta de gênero dos Estados Unidos para espaços transnacionais, como a "Europa". O que está por trás dessa mudança geográfica e quais são as suas implicações políticas para o futuro do projeto feminista são questões que a autora busca responder.

‘The Fire Will Not Consume Us’: Exploring the Link between Homophobia and Sexism in US Feminism

Feminist scholars in recent years have argued that both sexism and homophobia are forces that maintain traditional gender roles and inequality in society. Further, these scholars suggest that sexism cannot be eradicated without addressing homophobia simultaneously. Building on such arguments, I examine how the National Organization for Women (NOW), as a case study of feminism in the US, understood the relationship between sexism and homophobia by conducting a qualitative content analysis of the organization's national newsletters from 1968 to 2000. I find that NOW did not address this relationship sufficiently; rather, NOW justified its work against homophobia in ways that are distinct from a relationship to gender.