Feminist Theory

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Disch ◽  
Mary Hawkesworth
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
The Political ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
The World ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Gender

This chapter introduces readers to feminist theory as a multifaceted and multi-sited project, not a bounded field. Grounded in the political struggles for women’s empowerment that have emerged in all regions of the world and convinced of the arbitrariness of exclusion based on sexual difference, feminist theory has flourished as a mode of critical theory that illuminates the limitations of popular assumptions about sex, race, sexuality, and gender. This introduction identifies three common characteristics of feminist theory projects in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries: (1) efforts to denaturalize that which passes for difference, (2) efforts to challenge the aspiration to produce universal and impartial knowledge, and (3) efforts to engage the complexity of power relations through intersectional analysis. It sets the stage for the principal aim of this Handbook: to demonstrate how feminist theory is crucial to grasping the power dynamics operating in contemporary life.

History, Politics, Law

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cross Section ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
International Institutions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global Order ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Many

Historians of political thought and international lawyers have both expanded their interest in the formation of the present global order. History, Politics, Law is the first express encounter between the two disciplines, juxtaposing their perspectives on questions of method and substance. The essays throw light on their approaches to the role of politics and the political in the history of the world beyond the single polity. They discuss the contrast between practice and theory as well as the role of conceptual and contextual analyses in both fields. Specific themes raised for both disciplines include statehood, empires and the role of international institutions, as well as the roles of economics, innovation and gender. The result is a vibrant cross-section of contrasts and parallels between the methods and practices of the two disciplines, demonstrating the many ways in which both can learn from each other.

Promoting the dignity and worth of all people: The privilege of social work

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (6) ◽  
pp. 758-766 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Henrickson
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Sexual And Gender Minorities ◽  
Gender Minorities ◽  
Conference Theme ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Successes And Challenges ◽  
International Social

The Dame Eileen Younghusband Lecture is presented every two years at the joint world conferences of international social work. In 2016 it was presented in Seoul and was based on the conference theme ‘promoting the dignity and worth of people’. The lecture includes a review of heroes, legal, political and social successes, and challenges for sexual and gender minorities around the world. It challenges the binary of gender and sexuality. The privilege of social work is to choose either to challenge or to reproduce oppression based on sexuality and gender, and protect the dignity and worth of all peoples.

Political Identity, Democratic Empowerment, and Political Learning

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Niels Noergaard Kristensen
Keyword(s):  
Political Identity ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Learning ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Turmoil

The political commotion of the world is rising anew. Political challenges and political turmoil unfold side by side, and at the fore of many current political struggles stands the notion of “political identity.” Identity is a key asset in citizens' orientations toward political issues, their selection of information, and not least their political participation at large. The character of political challenges and struggles suggests that we need a revitalized and more comprehensive conceptual framework and operationalization of political identity. Political identity plays a role in most political activity, and the authors engage in elaborating the concept. The discussion presents the notion of political learning in order to bridge the complex and vigorous relations between on the one side political orientations and awareness and on the other side current manifestations of democratic political identities.

On the notion of the political in feminist theory

Human Affairs ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ľubica Kobová
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Epistemic Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Challenging Issue ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Women's Emancipation ◽  
Number Of Publications

AbstractThe turn of the 1990s saw the emergence of “the political” in feminist theory. Despite there being a number of publications devoted to the theme, the concept itself has remained rather undertheorized. Instead of producing a thoroughly developed concept, it served to create an epistemic community devoted to the (supposedly dead, modernist) political aim of women’s emancipation. In the article, I argue that it would be beneficent for feminist theory to adopt an affirmative stance towards the contingency of politics. This of course poses a challenge to feminist politics, which still operates mainly within the framework of the politics of representation. Nevertheless, Linda Zerilli’s approach, which interprets contingency in an Arendtian vein as the condition of the world-creating and world-building power of feminism as a practice of freedom may prove to be a productive way of approaching the challenging issue of contingency in feminist theory

Matrix

2011 ◽  
pp. 882-884
Author(s):  
Irina Aristarkhova
Keyword(s):  
Information Technologies ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Maternal Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
And Gender ◽  
As If

1. Matrix = Womb. 2. The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here, even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth ... that you, like everyone else, was born into bondage ... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste or touch. A prison for your mind. A Matrix. (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) 3. What is Matrix? Simply ... the “big Other,” the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. (S. Zizek, 1999) What is Matrix? In the past years, the notion of the Matrix has become dominant in figurations of cyberspace. It seems as if it is the most desirable, the most contemporary and fitting equation; however, its gendered etymology is rarely obvious. On the opposite, the gender of the matrix as a notion and term has been systematically negated in such disciplines as mathematics, engineering, film studies or psychoanalysis. It is necessary thus to explore and critique the Matrix as a most “fitting” metaphor in/for cyberspace that has conceived it (cyberspace) as a free and seamless space very much like the maternal body (Aristarkhova, 2002). The challenge today, therefore, is to reintroduce the maternal as one of embodied encounters with difference, to recover the sexual difference and gender in the notion of matrix with reference to cyberspace and information technologies that support it.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Jane Anna Gordon ◽  
Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Radical Politics ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Historical Moment

The introduction outlines major periods in Richard Wright’s intellectual life, emphasizing the similarities between the historical moment in which he wrote and the post-Obama period in which this text is being published. It also explains the thematic organization of the text into five sections focused, respectively, on radical politics, sexuality and gender, black internationalism, the range of genres in which Wright wrote, and on using Wright’s ideas to address contemporary black political struggles. Running through the text is an exploration of how Wright thought one could build more inclusive forms of solidarity across gender and national lines through careful attention to the distinct but related expressions of capitalist and imperialist exploitation. For Wright, the starting point was always the life worlds of the black masses whose liberation it was the task of the black writer to advance.

Late Twentieth-Century Controversies in Sexual Ethics, Gender, and Ordination

2019 ◽  
pp. 317-332
Author(s):  
Lesley Orr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Women's Ordination ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
The Church

During the second half of the twentieth century, a seismic shift in outlook, norms, behaviours, and laws transformed Western societies, particularly in relation to sexuality and gender relations. These changes were characterized and facilitated by escalating rejection of dominant sources of moral authority, including organized religion. This chapter considers the Church of Scotland’s response to the ‘permissive society’. It attempted to grapple theologically with questions concerning marriage and divorce, homosexuality, and women’s ordination, confronted unavoidably with profound questions concerning gender, power, and sexuality. These debates generated controversy and division as the moral consensus fractured. Fault lines opened up between conservatives who defended the validity of Christian moral certainties, and others who embraced more liberal and contextual interpretations of Scripture and tradition. Previously silenced or subordinated voices emerged, challenging but failing to provoke radical institutional change at a time of rapid declension in the status and cultural influence of the national Church.

Shame

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan Popa
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Great Capacity ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Negative Feelings ◽  
Political Norms

Shame has often been considered a threat to democratic politics, and was utilized to degrade and debase sex radicals and political marginals. But when and why have certain forms of shame have been embraced by political activists? How is it used to reverse entrenched power dynamics? The book brings together Jacques Rancière’s techniques of disrupting inequality with a queer curiosity in the performativity of shame to show that 19th-century activists denaturalized conventional beliefs about sexuality and gender. For Victorians, shame does not merely generate negative feelings and low self-esteem but also has a great capacity to provoke political activism, leading to strategies for transforming political norms that exclude political outlaws. Shame fills a glaring absence in political theory by undertaking a genealogy of political interventions that predate the twentieth century. These practices, which are performative, and emerge from shame, include unconventional relationships, slurs, humiliation, and silence.

Darwin's Orchids

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-550
Author(s):  
Donovan O. Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Single Moment ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Life On Earth

Abstract Is there a queer Darwin? It is often assumed that Darwinian biology is an ally of conservative approaches to sexuality and gender. The Christian legal framework known as natural law philosophy, for instance, reads Darwin as a champion of heterosexual coupling, proving the biological imperative of straight sex. Some feminist readings of Darwin (such as that of Elizabeth Grosz) find in Darwin a confirmation of the necessity of sexual difference organized around masculinity and femininity—an approach Myra Hird has called the “ontology of heterosexuality.” But these interpretations are incorrect. Schaefer argues that far from being an advocate for the ontology of heterosexuality, Darwin provides tools to demolish it. Turning to his research on barnacles and orchids and his speculation on the sources of organic variation, this essay highlights the irreducible importance of diversity and change for Darwin's framework. The ongoing ferment of variation that is the guideline of all life on earth extends not only to the morphology of sex organs but to desire itself. Darwin shows that the ontology of heterosexuality is an arbitrary snapshot, a single moment in the fluid trajectory of life, rather than a law that can be arbitrarily cast over the whole arc. In this, Darwin supports Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's first axiom for queer theory: “People are different from each other.” The essay concludes by connecting a Darwinian approach to sex with José Esteban Muñoz's call for a queer ecstasy that anticipates the futurity of desire.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document