Solidarity after identity politics: Hannah Arendt and the power of feminist theory

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Allen
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Hannah Arendt

Julia Kristeva and Female Genius

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Melanie Klein ◽  
French Theory

This chapter turns to Julia Kristeva's discussion of female genius. It presents Kristeva's three biographical studies of Hannah Arendt (1999), Melanie Klein (2000), and Colette (2002), published under the collective title Le Génie feminine. Her perspective is predominantly psychoanalytic as she approaches her subject with a certain boldness as she treats female genius as a given rather than defensively pleading the cause. Hence, collectively, the trilogy offers a psychoanalytically grounded account of gender and femininity as part of its reflection on genius. Genius takes a new, explicitly gendered form here and it does so thanks to the mix of literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis that is characteristic of the later years of “French theory.”

scholarly journals Beyond agency and passivity: Situating a gendered articulation of urban violence in Brazil and El Salvador

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mo Hume ◽  
Polly Wilding
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Partner Violence ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Intimate Partner ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Violence ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
San Salvador

This paper argues for a situated politics of women’s agency in enduring intimate partner violence (IPV) in contexts of extreme urban violence. We contend that interrogating agency as dynamic and lived facilitates an acknowledgement of the multi-scalar entanglements of violence across urban spaces. Recognising the complexities in human agency holds the potential for a radical gendered urban politics to emerge whereby people are neither simplistically victims nor pawns of violent processes, but located within dynamic ‘webs of social relations’ (Cumbers A, Helms G and Swanson K (2010) Class, agency and resistance in the old industrial city. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 42(1): 54). Drawing on feminist theory, our conceptualisation of agency serves as a lens through which we can examine the dynamic and gendered nature of urban violence as rooted in multiple social relations (McNay L (2010) Feminism and post-identity politics: The problem of agency. Constellations 17(4): 512–525). The paper draws on research in the urban peripheries of Rio de Janiero and San Salvador.

Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions

Hypatia ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Women's Oppression

Julia Kristeva is known as rejecting feminism, nonetheless her work is useful for feminist theory. I reconsider Kristeva's rejection of feminism and her theories of difference, identity, and maternity, elaborating on Kristeva's contributions to debates over the necessity of identity politics, indicating how Kristeva's theory suggests the cause of and possible solutions to women's oppression in Western culture, and, using Kristeva's theory, setting up a framework for a feminist rethinking of politics and ethics.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Identity Theory ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Stable Category ◽  
Gender Trouble

This chapter discusses Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (GT) and its legacy in political theory. It sets out five themes of GT: the claim that identity is always the result of power; the interplay between sex, gender, and desire; the critique of “identity politics,” including any feminism that posits a stable category of “women”; the concept of performativity; and the possibility of change via subversive performance. The chapter then goes on to discuss the major impact that GT has had on feminist theory, queer theory, trans theory, and intersectionality, along with the surprising lack of impact on theories of multiculturalism and identity theory more broadly. Finally the chapter discusses some main criticisms of the book.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Hellier
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Women's Music ◽  
Music Making ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Musical Genres

This introductory chapter discusses the conceptual and methodological issues regarding the study of women's music-making, including vocality, subjectivity, individuals, theorization, contextualization, feminist theory and politics, understandings of woman and gender, identity politics, and authoring. The analysis is varied in terms of musical genres, geographical areas, and the role of singing in the life of the singer. The chapter develops its ideas around the proposition that the current understandings of what and how music means could be expanded by more flexible and socially based notions of “selves” as locally articulated in specific contexts. In mapping these occurrences, the chapter encompasses major events, life markers, moments of decisions, and elements of vocality, all placed in a broadly chronological life-story framework.

Religious Agency and the Limits of Intersectionality

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 657-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakeet Singh
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Women’S Agency ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This article probes the relative absence of religion within discussions of intersectionality, and begins to address this absence by bringing intersectionality studies into conversation with another significant field within feminist theory: the study of religious women's agency. Although feminist literatures on intersectionality and religious women's agency have garnered a great deal of scholarly attention, these two bodies of work have rarely been engaged together. After surveying both fields, I argue that research on religious women's agency not only exposes an ambiguity at the heart of intersectionality between identity and oppression, but also challenges several aspects of intersectionality studies, especially as recent theorists increasingly turn away from identity politics in favor of a structural critique of power. These aspects of intersectionality include its often unsituated critique of power, as well as its reliance on a negatively defined consensus on anti‐oppression.

scholarly journals Gender Precarity: Gender Identity and the Economy of Authenticity

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-75
Author(s):  
Benjamin Carpenter
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Trans People ◽  
The Common ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Trouble

In this paper I examine the role of authenticity within contemporary debates about gender identity with an eye to exploring the structure of sex and gender-based oppressions - with particular consideration with the marginalisation of trans subjects. I begin with a return to Butler's Gender Trouble to critically examine her ontology of gender and the suggestion that gender cannot be a matter of authenticity. Though this disagrees with the common schematic of trans identity mobilised within contemporary identity politics, this paper seeks to use this critique to provide a deeper explanation of trans oppression within the context of Butler's heterosexual matrix. The aim of this move is to situate trans struggles as central within philosophical feminist theory - whilst breaking from several of the shortcomings of contemporary identity ontology. These considerations will then be explored alongside Butler's work in Precarious Life, wherein the oppression of trans people will be explored in how these subjects bear a greater burden of authenticity - wherein trans genders are automatically regarded as authentic whereas cis genders remain unquestioned. This contextualises the rhetorical and ontological move adopted by many trans activists whereby they present gender as a matter of absolute and inviolable fact - which is incompatible with Butler's ontology of gender. Using bother of Butler's texts, we can regard this move as the pursuit of an impossible security, a move that serves to obscure the inauthenticity of gender overall. Instead, we are encouraged to embrace in inauthenticity of gender and to refuse to allow ourselves to sink into an economy of authenticity that marginalises trans subjects.

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