scholarly journals Theorizing Feminism

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-44
Author(s):  
Éléonore Lépinard

This chapter develops the implications of considering feminism as a moral and political project and articulates this conception with intersectionality. It argues that to capture both the political and moral dimensions of feminism we must explore feminists’ political subjectivations. Such an approach places at the center of its inquiry the moral dispositions that feminists cultivate toward other feminists, taking into account the power inequalities—particularly, but not only, along axes of race and religion—that shape these relations between feminists. This perspective is indebted to specific genealogies of intersectional feminist theory that have insisted on how social locations and hierarchies of power shape feminist subjectivities through emotions and moral sentiments. Theorizing feminism in this way also offers important insights on intersectionality theory when it comes to analyzing feminist movements and how they address power hierarchies of race and religion.

Author(s):  
Éléonore Lépinard

For more than two decades Islamic veils, niqabs, and burkinis have been the object of intense public scrutiny and legal regulations in many Western countries, especially in Europe, and feminists have been actively engaged on both sides of the debates: defending ardently strict prohibitions to ensure Muslim women’s emancipation, or, by contrast, promoting accommodation in the name of women’s religious agency and a more inclusive feminist movement. These recent developments have unfolded in a context of rising right-wing populism in Europe and have fueled “femonationalism,” that is, the instrumentalization of women’s rights for xenophobic agendas. This book explores this contemporary troubled context for feminism, its current divisions, and its future. It investigates how these changes have transformed contemporary feminist movements, intersectionality politics, and the feminist collective subject, and how feminists have been enrolled in the femonationalist project or, conversely, have resisted it in two contexts: France and Quebec. It provides new empirical data on contemporary feminist activists, as well as a critical normative argument about the subject and future of feminism. It makes a contribution to intersectionality theory by reflecting on the dynamics of convergence and difference between race and religion. At the normative level, the book provides an original addition to vivid debates in feminist political theory and philosophy on the subject of feminism. It argues that feminism is better understood not as centered around an identity—women— but around what it calls a feminist ethic of responsibility, which foregrounds a pragmatist moral approach to the feminist project.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001458582110054
Author(s):  
Guylian Nemegeer ◽  
Mara Santi

This article argues that Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Notturno conveys a conscious political and cultural message which is consequent of his long-lasting political commitment to the nation. This political value of the book has been mainly overlooked. Therefore, the first part of the article shows the locations of the political and war-related content, and how the book can be considered as a war diary. Moreover, the first part of the article relates the Notturno to d’Annunzio’s political project for the nation at the time when the book was composed (1915–1921). The aim of this part is to dispel the enduring critical misinterpretation of the Notturno as an intimate collection of memories and visions and to foreground its national value. The second part of the article addresses the roots of the Notturno’s political message from a literary point of view by relating it to the national commitment underlying d’Annunzio’s works since the 1880s. This commitment is based on the revalorization in the author’s literary works of the Italian national past, in particular of the 16th century, where d’Annunzio continues and renews the national storytelling of the Risorgimento.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

AbstractThere has been a firestorm of moral outrage regarding the collection and misuse of personal information by data-informed digital companies. In framing their actions we often make a distinction between “good” and “bad” actors. I investigate the hidden presupposition that informs this dichotomy, by using the figure of the citizen to reveal an underlying structural transformation in the fog of our times. I ask, what can we reverse engineer from this historical phenomenon to derive a meaning of the political project defining the making of “digital space,” which shares meaning with the supposed inherent characteristics of the age, and its relationship to the production, validation, and dissemination of information? I’ll present a case for how an atomization of affinity and failure maps and draws energy from a broader historical agenda of social, political, and economic deregulation. On this basis I ask, what are the implications for understanding the figure of the digital citizen?


2013 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 605-623 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter

AbstractMachiavelli often seems to advocate a conception of religion as an instrument of political rule. But in the concluding chapter ofThe PrinceMachiavelli adopts a messianic rhetoric in which politics becomes an instrument of divine providence. Since the political project at stake inThe Prince, especially in this last chapter runs against both the interests and the ideology of the Catholic Church in Italy, some commentators have argued that Machiavelli appeals to providence merely in order to fool the Church and the Medici. This article argues that it is not necessary to appeal to such exoteric readings of the 26thchapter ofThe Princeif one envisages the possibility that Machiavelli may have drawn upon an alternative, non-Christian conception of divine providence coming from medieval Arabic and Jewish sources that is more compatible with his desire to return to Roman republican principles than is the Christian conception of divine providence.


Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Bargetz

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well‐known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics.


2021 ◽  
pp. e20210043
Author(s):  
Fernando Limongi

This article reconstructs Operation Car Wash’s (Operação Lava Jato) political project. Three different moments of the operation are analysed: its conception, its encounter with political and administrative corruption, and its attempt to mobilize popular support to combat political and administrative corruption. The analysis characterizes the operation as a particular manifestation of judicial intervention in the system of representative politics, presenting a critical view of its effects on the balance of power between non-elected and elected officials.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
María Isabel Peña Aguado

<p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">La teoría feminista heredó de una tradición filosófica hostil la identificación de cuerpo y mujer. Partiendo de esta identificación de mujer y cuerpo es comprensible que un cuestionamiento del concepto ‘mujer’  influya asimismo en el lugar que va a encontrar el cuerpo dentro del movimiento y teoría feministas. Ese lugar será diferente dependiendo de las diversas reivindicaciones que marcan las diferencias entre los distintos feminismos y teorías </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US"><em>queer</em></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">. La pregunta que se plantea es hasta qué punto la precariedad del cuerpo femenino dentro de la misma teoría feminista es consecuencia del cuestionamiento del concepto de mujer o si, por el contrario, no será más bien el rechazo a una realidad corporal concreta lo que ha permitido y ayudado a desarmar los conceptos de ‘mujer’ y ‘mujeres’ hasta el punto de considerarlos como innecesario para el mismo discurso y políticas feministas contemporáneos.</span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">Palabras claves: cuerpo, mujeres, feminismo, Teoría Queer</span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US"><br /><em>Indeterminacy of the body: precariousness of body in the feminist discourse</em></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><em><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">Feminist theory inherited the identification of woman and body from a hostile philosophical tradition. Given this identification, it is understandable that a questioning of the concept ‚woman‘ also influences the place that the body will find in the feminist movements and theories. The question that arises is how far the precariousness of the female body within feminist theory itself is the result of a questioning of the concept of ‘woman’ or whether, on the contrary, it is the rejection of a concrete corporal reality which has enabled and helped to disarm the concepts of ‚woman‘ and ‚women‘ to the point of considering them unnecessary for contemporary feminist discourse and politics.<br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></em></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"><em><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">Keywords: body, women, feminism, Queer Theory<br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></em></p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"> </p><p lang="de-DE" align="JUSTIFY"> </p>


Author(s):  
Cristina Cirtita-Buzoianu

This paper aims to analyze the image and identity of political actors during an electoral campaign, as these two elements are defining for political marketing in attracting and convincing voters. With that in mind we will monitor the image of the two candidates for the position of mayor in the 2012 electoral campaign in Bacău, as it appeared in the written local press. The analysis of the two politicians will be made from the perspective of two pre-established image indicators: the political and the human dimensions. Each of the two dimensions has sub indicators pre-established in order to validate the general mediatized image of the candidate. Regarding the political dimension we will measure the sub indicators: political communication, attitude towards corruption, interest for civil problems, the ability to negotiate and political project, while the human dimension has the following sub indicators: faith, empathy, morality, honesty, charisma, consistency and leadership. Thus, we will try to identify if there are major differences between the two dimensions, for the two candidates, from a quantitative as well as a qualitative perspective.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Marchetti

The statue of Glauco that the sea and the storms have disfigured so as to make its appearance more like a ferocious beast than a god, is the famous image with which Jean Jacques Rousseau, in the Discourse on the origin of inequality, questions himself on Human Nature, in a reflection that will have its purpose both in the political project of the Contract and in the pedagogical project of the Emilio. The image serves in fact to reiterate that that deterioration, that ugliness, is only external and that the statue (the man) has remained in its depths beautiful and good, since in him the feeling of piety, of his own and of his remains unchanged. dignity and the vocation to freedom of others. If this were not the case, there would be no possibility for political democracy and democratic education. The growing social inequalities, the artificialization of feelings and relationships due to technology, as well as the spread, after the pandemic, of a sort of mass "claustrophilia", a love for the closed, for one's own, with the consequent rejection of everything that comes from "outside", which is different, foreign or new, seems instead to give credit to Hobbes's thesis, namely that Human Nature is violent and aggressive and that man is always a wolf for the other man. However, it will be the task of the arts, sciences and, above all, of education, to demonstrate that, under the debris left by the salt, Glauco has remained good and that he can rediscover his true essence, the beauty of his original substance.


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