scholarly journals Returning to the root: Radical feminist thought and feminist theories of International Relations

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-375
Author(s):  
David Duriesmith ◽  
Sara Meger
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Radical Feminism ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Second Wave

AbstractFeminist International Relations (IR) theory is haunted by a radical feminist ghost. From Enloe's suggestion that the personal is both political and international, often seen as the foundation of feminist IR, feminist IR scholarship has been built on the intellectual contributions of a body of theory it has long left for dead. Though Enloe's sentiment directly references the Hanisch's radical feminist rallying call, there is little direct engagement with the radical feminist thinkers who popularised the sentiment in IR. Rather, since its inception, the field has been built on radical feminist thought it has left for dead. This has left feminist IR troubled by its radical feminist roots and the conceptual baggage that feminist IR has unreflectively carried from second-wave feminism into its contemporary scholarship. By returning to the roots of radical feminism we believe IR can gain valuable insights regarding the system of sex-class oppression, the central role of heterosexuality in maintaining this system, and the feminist case for revolutionary political action in order to dismantle it.

The Logic of the Development of Feminism; or, Is MacKinnon to Feminism as Parmenides Is to Greek Philosophy?

Hypatia ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bernick
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Radical Feminism ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Ancient Greek Philosophy

Catharine MacKinnon's investigation of the role of sexuality in the subordination of women is a logical culmination of radical feminist thought. If this is correct, the position of her work relative to radical feminism is analogous to the place Parmenides's work occupied in ancient Greek philosophy. Critics of MacKinnon's work have missed their target completely and must engage her work in a different way if feminist theory is to progress past its current stalemated malaise.

Leaders and Foreign Policy: Surveying the Evidence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Benedict Dyson ◽  
Thomas Briggs
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Political Action ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Leadership Influence ◽  
Causal Variable

Political Science accounts of international politics downplay the role of political leaders, and a survey of major journals reveals that fewer than 3% of all articles focus on leaders. This is in stark contrast to public discourse about politics, where leadership influence over events is regarded as a given. This article suggests that, at a minimum, leaders occupy a space in fully specified chains of causality as the aggregators of material and ideational forces, and the transmitters of those forces into authoritative political action. Further, on occasion a more important role is played by the leader: as a crucial causal variable aggregating material and ideational energies in an idiosyncratic fashion and thereby shaping decisions and outcomes. The majority of the article is devoted to surveying the comparatively small literature on political leaders within International Relations scholarship. The article concludes by inviting our colleagues to be receptive to the idiosyncrasies, as well as the regularities, of statespersonship.

Prefiguring a feminist academia: a multi-vocal autoethnography on the creation of a feminist space in a neoliberal university

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 325-347
Author(s):  
Claire Jin Deschner ◽  
Léa Dorion ◽  
Lidia Salvatori
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Academic Activism ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
The University

Purpose This paper is a reflective piece on a PhD workshop on “feminist organising” organised in November 2017 by the three authors of this paper. Calls to resist the neoliberalisation of academia through academic activism are gaining momentum. The authors’ take on academic activism builds on feminist thought and practice, a tradition that remains overlooked in contributions on resisting neoliberalisation in academia. Feminism has been long committed to highlighting the epistemic inequalities endured by women and marginalised people in academia. This study aims to draw on radical feminist perspectives and on the notion of prefigurative organising to rethink the topic of academic activism. How can feminist academic activism resist the neoliberal academia? Design/methodology/approach This study explores this question through a multi-vocal autoethnographic account of the event-organising process. Findings The production of feminist space within academia was shaped through material and epistemic tensions. The study critically reflects on the extent to which the event can be read as prefigurative feminist self-organising and as neoliberal academic career-focused self-organising. The study concludes that by creating a space for sisterhood and learning, the empowering potential of feminist organising is experienced. Originality/value The study shows both the difficulties and potentials for feminist organising within the university. The concept of “prefiguration” provides a theoretical framework enabling us to grasp the ongoing efforts on which feminist organising relies. It escapes a dichotomy between success and failure that fosters radical pessimism or optimism potentially hindering political action.

The Dialectic of Sex, after the Post-1960s

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-342
Author(s):  
Madeline Lane-McKinley
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Radical Feminism ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second Wave

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.

Sangre sin Revolución

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Manley
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Many ◽  
Second Wave

Chapter 6 addresses the ways in which many Dominican activists interrogated the role of Balaguer’s government in the regulation of individual’s women’s lives and families and challenged many of its violent, dictatorial tendencies. Refuting the regime’s argument for a “revolution without blood,” many women described the government’s agenda to national and inter-American audiences as “blood without revolution” and continued to mobilize within the opposition through the discourse of motherhood and family. However, the chapter also looks at the many cracks developing in the discourse of maternalism that, coupled with an ever-deepening awareness of the tools and tactics of international second-wave feminism, pushed many women to challenge a model of political participation that constructed their roles in the political arena merely as nurturers and caretakers.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily E. LB. Twarog
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cost Of Living ◽  
Traditional Family ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Second Wave

The introduction traces the involvement of working-class housewives in political action from the 1930s as their involvement in cost of living protests, such as meat boycotts, led to a complicated involvement in organized political action. Tracing the entrance of these women into the political sphere through the emergence of the conservative right, it argues that as housewives negotiated the intersection of their homes, labor, community, and the marketplace, they formed a unique political constituency group in the twentieth century, which failed to find cohesion with the second-wave feminism in the 1970s, which dismissed domestic politics that these women were engaged in because it was rooted in the traditional family model, viewed with suspicion by works like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. This left a distinctive form of activism to pave the way for conservative women’s movement made famous by anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly and the conservative watch group the Eagle Forum.

scholarly journals “Il en faut un peu”: Farm Women and Feminism in Québec and France Since 1945

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96
Author(s):  
Gail Cuthbert Brandt ◽  
Naomi Black
Keyword(s):  
Rural Women ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Demographic Characteristics ◽  
Farm Women ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Social ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second Wave

Abstract Certain farm women's organizations continue to represent the social feminist tradition of Canadian suffragism and the broader social Catholic feminism still influential elsewhere. Canadian historians have often criticized such groups in contrast with a more aggressive, equal-rights feminism found among urban and rural women in both waves of feminism. We argue that, far from being conservative, groups identified as social feminist serve to integrate farm women into public debates and political action, including feminism. We outline the history of the Cercles de fermières of Québec, founded in 1915, and the French Groupements de vulgarisation-développement agricoles féminins, founded since 1959. A comparison of members with nonmembers in each country and across the group, based on survey data collected in 1989 for 389 cases, suggests that club involvement has counteracted demographic characteristics expected to produce antifeminism. In general, we find less hostility to second-wave feminism than might be expected. Relying mainly on responses to open-ended questions, we argue that, for our subjects, feminism is tempered by distaste for confrontation. Issues supported by the movement for women's liberation are favoured by farm women, but the liberationist style and tactics are eschewed. Those of our respondents identified as feminists express preference for a complementarity modelled on the idealized family.

Year Zero Art

Joanna Russ ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 39-68
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Women In Science ◽  
Science Content ◽  
Many Worlds ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Many ◽  
Second Wave

“Year Zero Art” situates Second Wave feminism in the context of the “domestic revival” decreed by Cold War politics; examines historical female-ordered utopias, and provides a close reading of the polemic, idyllic, and lyric voices; the layered realities and the “many worlds” speculative-science content of Joanna’s highly personal 1975 novel, The Female Man. Essays and reviews described include radical feminist criticism of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels; the groundbreaking “Why Women Can’t Write”; the controversial “Image of Women in Science Fiction” and “Alien Monsters,” in which Joanna defines the pernicious sf figure of the “he-man.” Stories related to The Female Man (1971-75) include “When It Changed,” the Nebula Award-winning conventional sf version of The Female Man.

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