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.

Write Your Mother

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda C. Seaman
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Japanese Women ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pregnancy And Childbirth ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second Wave

This chapter traces the literary history of Japanese women writing about pregnancy and childbirth, focusing on two key figures in this development. The first is Meiji-era poet Yosano Akiko whose works explored her experiences as an expectant mother and highlighted the unsettling aspects of pregnancy. While Yosano’s works permitted the literary treatment of formerly taboo issues, later writers rejected her lead, instead treating pregnancy as the prelude to motherhood, as a quasi-sacred moment. This persisted until the 1960s and 70s, when writers influenced by second-wave feminism challenged patriarchal society, rejecting the roles of wife and mother. The second was Tsushima Yuko, whose novels and stories explored alternative, mother-centered family models. Since then, writing about pregnancy rests on these two authors: on one side, treatments of pregnancy that emphasize the alien and the disquieting, and on the other, more ironic works, focusing upon the self-assertive and individualistic nature of childbearing.

Hollywood Can’t Wait: Elaine May and the Delusions of 1970s American Cinema

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Maya Montañez Smukler
Keyword(s):  
Women Directors ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
First Time ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Made In

Elaine May began her career as a filmmaker during the 1970s when the mythology of the New Hollywood male auteur defined the decade; and the number of women directors, boosted by second wave feminism, increased for the first time in forty years. May’s interest in misfit characters, as socially awkward as they were delusional, and her ability to seamlessly move them between comedy and drama, typified the New Hollywood protagonist who captured America’s uneasy transition from the hopeful rebellion of the 1960s into the narcissistic angst of the 1970s. However, the filmmaker’s reception, which culminated in the critical lambast of her comeback film Ishtar in 1987, was uneven: her battles with studio executives are legendary; feminist film critics railed against her depiction of female characters; and a former assistant claimed she set back women directors by her inability to meet deadlines. This chapter investigates Elaine May’s career within the lore 1970s Hollywood to understand the industrial and cultural circumstances that contributed to the emergence of her influential body of work; and the significant contributions to cinema she made in spite of, and perhaps because of, the conflicts in which she was faced.

Feminist Bunker Fantasies

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-262
Author(s):  
David L. Pike
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Spatial Association ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Core Element ◽  
Cultural Perception ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
Nuclear Condition

Feminist science fiction emerged during the late 1970s as a creative and political force, with the nuclear condition as a core element of this new form and its new approach to science fiction. Despite the full awareness and acknowledgment of the horrors underpinning the postapocalyptic world, this body of work as a whole is hopeful and open to the future in ways that most other 1980s bunker fantasies were not. These are not only survivors’ songs, in other words; they are critical engagements with the complexity of historical change that refunctioned the spaces of the Cold War into new configurations. One of the primary, and often the only, positively bunkered spaces in the texts themselves during this period were the analogous forms of language, storytelling, words, and writing. While the positive, enabling bunker potentials of language—and the stultifying effects of its loss—remain a constant theme through this period, the changing representations of physical spaces in relation to language fall into roughly three periods, analogous to political changes in the cultural perception of nuclear threat. The sheltering power of language remains a constant throughout, as do the spatial association of the fallout shelter with masculine social structures and the nuclear condition, along with the central problematic of reproduction and reproductive futurism in relation to survival in a post-holocaust world; however, writers’ treatment of these themes changes.

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.

Home and Away

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-177
Author(s):  
Micha Rahder
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Evolutionary Time ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
New Development ◽  
Gaia Theory

This article examines the reinvigoration of outer space imaginaries in the era of global environmental change, and the impacts of these imaginaries on Earth. Privatized space research mobilizes fears of ecological, political, or economic catastrophe to garner support for new utopian futures, or the search for Earth 2.0. These imaginaries reflect dominant global discourses about environmental and social issues, and enable the flow of earthly resources toward an extraterrestrial frontier. In contrast, eco-centric visions emerging from Gaia theory or feminist science fiction project post-earthly life in terms that are ecological, engaged in multispecies relations and ethics, and anticapitalist. In these imaginaries, rather than centering humans as would-be destroyers or saviors of Earth, our species becomes merely instrumental in launching life—a multispecies process—off the planet, a new development in deep evolutionary time. This article traces these two imaginaries and how they are reshaping material and political earthly life.

scholarly journals ‘A Marriage of Freud and Euclid’: Psychotic Epistemology in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Samuel Francis
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Scientific Status ◽  
Contemporary Status ◽  
Mathematical Sciences ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theories

The writings of J.G. Ballard respond to the sciences in multiple ways; as such his (early) writing may productively be discussed as science fiction. However, the theoretical discipline to which he publicly signalled most allegiance, psychoanalysis, is one whose status in relation to science is highly contested and complex. In the 1960s Ballard signalled publicly in his non-fiction writing a belief in psychoanalysis as a science, a position in keeping with psychoanalysis’ contemporary status as the predominant psychological paradigm. Various early Ballard stories enact psychoanalytic theories, while the novel usually read as his serious debut, The Drowned World, aligns itself allusively with an oft-cited depiction by Freud of the revelatory and paradigm-changing nature of the psychoanalytic project. Ballard’s enthusiastic embrace of psychoanalysis in his early 1960s fiction mutated into a fascinatingly delirious vision in some of his most experimental work of the late 1960s and early 1970s of a fusion of psychoanalysis with the mathematical sciences. This paper explores how this ‘Marriage of Freud and Euclid’ is played out in its most systematic form in The Atrocity Exhibition and its successor Crash. By his late career Ballard was acknowledging problems raised over psychoanalysis’ scientific status in the positivist critique of Karl Popper and the work of various combatants in the ‘Freud Wars’ of the 1990s; Ballard at this stage seemed to move towards agreement with interpretations of Freud as a literary or philosophical figure. However, despite making pronouncements reflecting changes in dominant cultural appraisals of Freud, Ballard continued in his later writings to extrapolate the fictive and interpretative possibilities of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas. This article attempts to develop a deeper understanding of Ballard’s ‘scientific’ deployment of psychoanalysis in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash within the context of a more fully culturally-situated understanding of psychoanalysis’ relationship to science, and thereby to create new possibilities for understanding the meanings of Ballard’s writing within culture at large.

Joanna Russ

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
University Teaching ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Joanna Russ ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Experimental Novel ◽  
The Cold War

Joanna Russ (1937-2011) was an outstanding writer, critic, and theorist of science fiction at a time when female writers were marginal to the genre, and very few women, perhaps only Judith Merril and Joanna herself, had significant influence on the field. In her university teaching and in her writing she championed the integration of new social models and higher literary standards into genre works. In her review columns for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she dissected the masters of the New Wave with appreciation, wit, and incisive intelligence. Her experimental novel The Female Man (1975) is an essential seventies Feminist text, still relevant today; her groundbreaking academic articles are recognized as foundation studies in feminist and science fiction literary scholarship. Drawing on Jeanne Cortiel’s lesbian feminist appraisal of Russ, Demand My Writing (1999), Farah Mendelsohn’s essay collection On Joanna Russ (2009), and a wide range of contemporary sources, this book aims to give context to her career in the America of her times, from the Cold War domestic revival through the 1960s decade of protest and the Second Wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, into the twenty-first century, examining her novels, her remarkable short fiction, her critical and autobiographical works, her role in the science fiction community, and her contributions to feminist debate.

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