Plastic Actions: Linguistic Strategies and Le Corps lesbien1

Hypatia ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 74-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Cope
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Monique Wittig ◽  
Linguistic Strategies ◽  
Lesbian Body ◽  
Language Literature

In both her fiction and her essays on writing and feminist theory, Monique Wittig takes up and redeploys traditional themes and genres as well as recent theories of language, literature, and writing in order to force change in and through the dominant categories of thought and language. She has announced her project as one which would “do away with the category of sex” by way of reconfiguring the grammatically and conceptually enforced compulsory heterosexual order. I examine the specific linguistic mechanisms by which Wittig accomplishes this abolition of “sex” and the political/philosophical/ linguistic consequences of her “lesbianization” of language. Throughout, I aim to suggest what the political importance of The Lesbian Body as a diversified and written corpus is.

The Distribution of Emotions: Affective Politics of Emancipation

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Bargetz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social

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.

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

Tracks of My Tears: Smokey Robinson and the Art of Loving

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 337-341
Author(s):  
Les Back
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Valentine's Day

This piece written for Valentine’s Day 2014 links the love songs of Smokey Robinson with writing on romantic love from classical theorists to feminist writers like Mary Evans and bell hooks. Through a discussion of Smokey Robinson’s biography it argues that the political and affective key of his songs is similar to the arguments provided by feminist theory. It makes a case for holding to a ‘love ethic’ that is a doing, not confined to one person alone but rather circulated and routed within wider communities.

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

Paragraph ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-379
Author(s):  
Lisa Downing
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Monique Wittig ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Family ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Second Wave

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.

23. J. S. Mill on the Subjection of Women

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ring
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Liberal Feminism ◽  
Methodological Perspective ◽  
Women's Rights Movement ◽  
Intellectual Context

This chapter examines John Stuart Mill's treatise The Subjection of Women, a manifesto of liberal feminism that advocates ‘perfect equality’ between the sexes. Written in 1861 and published in 1869, The Subjection of Women has been criticised by contemporary feminist theorists, who find Mill's theory lacking because of its political shortcomings and contradictions. The chapter analyses the political and intellectual context in which The Subjection of Women was written as well as its significance from the standpoint of contemporary feminist theory. It considers Mill's relationship with his father, James Mill, and with his wife, Harriet Taylor, along with the emergence of the women's rights movement in the United States and England. It also assesses the political import and methodological perspective of the work and concludes with a discussion of Mill's utilitarianism.

Part III The Relationship Between the Judiciary and the Political Branches, 6 An Overview of Judicial and Executive Relations in Lusophone Africa

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bastos Fernando Loureiro
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
Sao Tome And Principe ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Law Professors ◽  
Language Literature

This chapter examines judicial–executive relationships in Africa’s Lusophone systems, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and the island nations of Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, which are often neglected in the English-language literature. These systems continue to follow the Portuguese system closely not only because of their colonial history but also due to an ongoing process in which Portuguese sources are widely used and judicial officers and law professors often receive training in Portugal. The result is the persistent view of the separation of powers wherein the judiciary is subordinate to the legislature, the executive, and to the law that those branches alone create; its role is understood chiefly as a resolver of disputes between private parties. While the constitutions of these states offer textual protection for the judiciary’s independence, only Cape Verde has made important strides to realizing this in practice. Executive influence over the judiciary is strong.

Old Schools

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramsey McGlazer
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Progressive Education ◽  
The Political ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Teaching Techniques ◽  
Pier Paolo Pasolini ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
School Teaching ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
Language Literature

This book marks out a modernist counter-tradition. The book proceeds from an anachronism common to Italian- and English-language literature and cinema: a fascination with outmoded, paradigmatically pre-modern educational forms that persists long after they are displaced in modernizing, reform-minded pedagogical theories. Old Schools shows that these old-school teaching techniques organize key works by Walter Pater, Giovanni Pascoli, James Joyce, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Glauber Rocha. All of these figures oppose ideologies of progress by returning to and creatively reimagining the Latin class long since left behind by progressive educators. Across the political spectrum, advocates of progressive education, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to John Dewey and Giovanni Gentile, had targeted Latin in particular. The dead language—taught through time-tested techniques including memorization, recitation, copying out, and other forms of repetition and recall—needed to be updated or eliminated, reformers argued, so that students could breathe free and become modern, achieving a break with convention and constraint. By contrast, the works that Old Schools considers valorize instruction’s outmoded techniques, even at their most cumbersome and conventional. Like the Latin class to which they return, these works produce constraints that feel limiting but that, by virtue of that very limitation, invite valuable resistance. As they turn grammar drills into verse and repetitious lectures into voiceovers, they find unlikely resources for creativity and critique in the very practices that progressive reformers sought to clear away.

scholarly journals Theoretical Stories

1970 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Serisier
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Political

A review of Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Duke 2011) and Janet Halley & Andrew Parker (eds.) After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (Duke 2011).

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