Making Waves

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Review ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Political History ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second Wave

French feminisms were central to the theory and culture of Second Wave feminism as an international movement, and 1975 was a key year for the women’s movement in France. Forty years on, this book offers a critical review of the political activism and the cultural creativity of that moment, from the perspective of both preceding and subsequent ‘waves’ of feminism. It explores the importance and the legacies of 1975, and their strengths and limitations as new questions and new conjunctures have come into play. Edited and written by an international collective of feminist scholars, the book represents both a critical re-evaluation of a vital moment in women’s cultural and political history - and a new analysis of the relationship between Second Wave agendas and contemporary feminist politics and culture.

1975 The Year of Women

Making Waves ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Diana Holmes ◽  
Imogen Long
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Student Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Status ◽  
Cultural Themes ◽  
Impossible Task ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second Wave

The relationship between 1970s French radical feminists (the MLF) and Françoise Giroud, the first ‘Minister for Women’ in France, was a difficult one. Second-wave feminism in France was grounded in the contestation of the status quo, in the wake of the 1960s student movement out of which some of the groups emerged. Being part of the political establishment was therefore in itself an anathema to some second-wave feminists, as can be seen, for example, by satirical feminist films mocking Giroud’s role and her interventions. Through the prism of 1975, officially declared ‘International Women’s Year’ by the United Nations, this chapter explores the key campaigning and cultural themes of the MLF and their relationship to Giroud’smore reformist and, arguably, impossible task as Minister for Women.

scholarly journals User Errors: Reason, (Xeno)-Feminism and the Political Insufficiency of Ontology

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 54-68
Author(s):  
Ben Woodard
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Vexed Question ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second Wave

This paper revisits elements of second wave feminism—in its psychoanalytic, radical, materialist, Marxist and deconstructionist aspects—the better to understand how it is we might define sexual difference today. The vexed question of sexuation, of what it means to be a woman in particular has today generated great tensions at the theoretical, legal and philosophical level. This paper is an attempt to return to aspects of the second wave—an unfinished project where many enduring feminist concerns were for the first time thoroughly and metaphysically articulated—the better to defend the importance of sexual difference. To this end, the transcendental and parallax dimensions of sexed life will be discussed, alongside a defence of the centrality of the mother to our thinking about the relevance and necessity of preserving the importance of sexual difference, not only for thought but also for political and legal life. Author(s): Ben Woodard  Title (English): User Errors: Reason, (Xeno)-Feminism and the Political Insufficiency of Ontology Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 54-68 Page Count: 15 Citation (English): Ben Woodard, “User Errors: Reason, (Xeno)-Feminism and the Political Insufficiency of Ontology,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020): 54-68. Author Biography Ben Woodard, Independent Researcher Ben Woodard is an independent scholar living in Germany. His work focuses on the relationship between naturalism and idealism during the long nineteenth century. He is currently preparing a monograph on the relation of naturalism and formalism in the life sciences. His book Schelling’s Naturalism was published in 2019 by Edinburgh University Press.

Risk, Desire and Adaptation: The Paradox of Queer Solidarity and the Political Possibility of Death Under Neoliberalism and Homonationalism

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Strategy I

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.

The Personal is the Political

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-148
Author(s):  
Mercilee M. Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Community Member ◽  
The Political ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Feminist Organization ◽  
Second Wave

This paper explores the transformation of oral histories into a play about the founding of San Francisco Women's Building based on extensive interviews. My impetus for writing She Rises Like a Building to the Sky was to portray the kind of grass roots feminist organization primarily composed of lesbians that made up a large part of the second wave of the Women's Movement in the 1970's and early 1980's. The evolution of She Rises is discussed from three positionalities I occupied over an extensive period of time: oral historian, playwright and eventual community member. Excerpts from She Rises are used to illustrate the lessons I learned in the process of creating this work. I will discuss my self-collaboration in terms of the oral historian's concern for fidelity, the playwright's desire to bring such material to life whether by fact or fiction, and the community member's fears of how others will view this rendition of their stories. The behind the scenes dramas reveal as much as the play itself about the challenges and rewards of undertaking such projects.

The Personal Is Archival

2021 ◽  
pp. 102-127
Author(s):  
Laura Stamm
Keyword(s):  
Body Politics ◽  
Aids Activism ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
Queer Archives ◽  
Lesbian Body ◽  
Second Wave

Chapter 4 investigates Barbara Hammer’s creation and use of queer archives to tell stories—via particular lesbians—of lesbian cultures past. The chapter’s turn to a lesbian filmmaker is an assertion that the preservationist impulse that accompanied much AIDS activism was genealogically connected to and politically aligned with feminist historiographical practice and body politics. The queer body politics of the AIDS crisis, politics rooted in the care of queer bodies, draws from the feminist politics and cinema originating in second-wave feminism. The chapter argues, then, that the lesbian body politics established in Hammer’s cinema, beginning in the 1970s, informed queer filmmakers’ activist approach to filmmaking during the AIDS crisis. Through readings of Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), Welcome to This House (2015), and Lover/Other (2006), this chapter argues that a distinctly lesbian-feminist aesthetic does not exist independently of a distinctly queer one.

The Literary and the Political in the Fifteenth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-80
Author(s):  
Pankaj Jha
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political History ◽  
North India ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Literature History ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Regional Histories

Historians rarely write about the fifteenth century in north India. When they do, it is within certain set frames, for instance, as an interregnum, or as part of ‘regional’ histories. Occasionally, they write about the ferment of the bhakti ‘movement’ during the period. Tracing the narrow lanes of this historiography, the chapter also points to recent researches that raise some interesting questions. These relate to military labour, literary cultures, vernacularization, multilingualism, and so on. Apart from taking a critical stock of this historiography, the chapter explores how literary history might be fruitfully linked to ‘mainstream’ political history. It analyses meanings of, and the relationship between, literature, history, and power. Texts are not just innocent sources and repository of information. They are also seen as interventions in an ongoing conversation with other texts in the same and related themes and areas.

scholarly journals Modern Rape-Revenge Movies and Shelley’s The Cenci

k ta ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-78
Author(s):  
Sahar Jamshidian ◽  
Fazel Asadi Amjad
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Female Victim ◽  
Prometheus Unbound ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Face ◽  
Traditional Pattern ◽  
Second Wave

Viewing Shelley’s The Cenci from the political upheavals of the nineteenth century would limit one’s response to the play to the issues of that century. However, this play continues to be played in the twenty first century, which makes one wonder how a modern spectator with a feminist inclination might react to the theme of rape and revenge. The Cenci shares with a number of movies flourishing with the rise of the second wave feminism during the 1970s, the theme of a female victim transformed into a hero-avenger, who takes law into her own hands and avenges herself in the face of a dysfunctional legal state. As revisions of the archetypal narratives of violation-revenge-violation, these modern movies have been praised for depicting heroines who are no longer powerless, miserable and victimized, but strong enough to avenge themselves with impunity. Though The Cenci repeats the traditional pattern of violation-revenge-violation, it focuses on the corruption and irresponsibility of the patriarchal legal system as well as its reformation, which have been neglected by both mythical narratives and modern rape-revenge movies. By reading The Cenci along with William Blake’s “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” and Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” we examine how The Cenci challenges the modern rape-revenge movies and how Beatrice could have used her agency and her anger in a more effective way to fight against tyranny. 

scholarly journals War Veterans, Demobilization and Political Activism: Greater Romania in Comparison

Fascism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantin Iordachi ◽  
Blasco Sciarrino
Keyword(s):  
Political Activism ◽  
The Political ◽  
War Veterans ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Ideological Polarization ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Postwar Italy ◽  
The Relationship

This article aims to further problematize the relationship between patterns of demobilization, fascism and veterans’ activism, on several inter-related counts. We argue that the relationship between fascism and war veterans was not a fixed nexus, but the outcome of a complex political constellation of socio-economic and political factors that necessitates a case-by-case in-depth discussion. Also, we argue that these factors were both national and transnational in nature. Finally, we contend that researchers need to employ a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, thus accounting for various stages and forms of mobilization of war veterans over time. To substantiate these claims, the current article focuses on a relevant but largely neglected case study: the demobilization of soldiers and war veterans’ political activism in interwar Romania. It is argued that, contrary to assumptions in historiography, demobilization in Romania was initially successful. Veterans’ mobilization to fascism intensified only in mid-to late 1930s, stimulated by the Great Depression, leading to a growing ideological polarization and the political ascension of the fascist Legion of ‘Archangel Michael’. To better grasp the specificities of this case study, the concluding section of the article compares it to patterns of veterans’ activism in postwar Italy.

No One Home to Answer the Phone

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lily Geismer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Economic Climate ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second Wave

This chapter looks at the growth of suburban feminism as a means to consider the persistence of certain elements of suburban liberal activism and ideology in a changed political and economic climate. The increasing wedding of feminism with suburban politics had key trade-offs for the larger cause of women's equality. The sensibility and organizing strategies of suburban liberal politics were both crucial to the success of several campaigns, especially the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The pivot also helped the movement further earn the notice and attention of politicians eager to win suburban votes. Yet the relationship hardened the middle-class orientation of second-wave feminism and elevated class-blind and consumerist ideas of choice.

Sangre sin Revolución

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Manley
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Many ◽  
Second Wave

Chapter 6 addresses the ways in which many Dominican activists interrogated the role of Balaguer’s government in the regulation of individual’s women’s lives and families and challenged many of its violent, dictatorial tendencies. Refuting the regime’s argument for a “revolution without blood,” many women described the government’s agenda to national and inter-American audiences as “blood without revolution” and continued to mobilize within the opposition through the discourse of motherhood and family. However, the chapter also looks at the many cracks developing in the discourse of maternalism that, coupled with an ever-deepening awareness of the tools and tactics of international second-wave feminism, pushed many women to challenge a model of political participation that constructed their roles in the political arena merely as nurturers and caretakers.

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