Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Cavarero ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Bonnie Honig
Keyword(s):  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Feminist Ethics ◽  
Volume Forms ◽  
Musical Arrangement

This volume forms a tribute to Adriana Cavarero’s extraordinary contribution to feminist philosophy. Responding to Cavarero’s provocative style the text presents an engagement between Cavarero, Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, and seven other interlocutors, engaging with the themes of horrorism, sex, maternity, inclination, and the body to develop her feminist ethics of nonviolence. Presented as a musical arrangement that demonstrates Cavarero’s theory of pluriphony, this volume captures the collaborative yet diverse mood of much contemporary feminism, and particularly the inspirational, scholarly friendship between Butler, Honig, and Cavarero.

scholarly journals CONSTRUCTION AND DECONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IN THE CONTEMPORARY HUMANITIES

2019 ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Olga A. Voronina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Gender Perspective ◽  
Constructivist Model ◽  
And Gender

The purpose of this article is to analyze the evolution of the concept of gender in social knowledge and the humanities. The term «gender» encompasses biological (sexual), psychological, social, cultural, symbolic aspects of human life. Even before the introduction of this term into scientific publications in the 1960s, the phenomenon itself was discovered in three types of knowledge: in psychology and psychiatry when studying various forms of sexuality and sexual identity, in anthropological and ethnographic studies, and in the feminist philosophy of culture. This largely determined the main directions in the study and understanding of gender for several decades. The theory of socio-cultural construction of gender played the main role. It developed in parallel with other critical and constructivist scientific concepts, which in no small part led to its adoption by «academics» and the inclusion of the gender perspective in the body of scientific research. However, along with the development of postmodern feminist philosophy, the concept of gender undergoes redefinition. The constructivist model of gender is displaced by the performative concept of Judith Butler. She argues that not only gender but the biological sex does not exist outside the cultural framework and power discourse. The binary matrix of gender, gender identity and heterosexuality is approved within the framework of the dominant discourse with the help of various regulatory actions (performatives). Butler rejects this model because she claims that bodies, sex and gender identity have different configurations. The performative concept of sex was actively used in the queer project, as it provided justification for rejecting the normative binary concept of femininity and masculinity and the corresponding heterosexuality. Today, queer includes political movement, research, art, and discursive deconstruction of normative heterosexuality. The variant of mosaic nature, hybridity and relativism of identity proposed in the queer project destroys the possibility of social and political transformations in the sphere of gender equality. Instead, queer activists advocate an elusive equality of opportunity to try on different identities at one’s own discretion. At the present stage, the theoretical radicalism of queer makes the development of new social programs unlikely, while they appear to be necessary. In contrast, gender theory (in its feminist, constructivist, and cultural-symbolic modes) has had a significant scientific and social impact. The use of the gender perspective in social knowledge and the humanities has provided better understanding of the individual and society. The principle of achieving gender equality has been accepted by the world community and has become part of many programs at the international and national levels. However, the problems in the understanding of the relation between sex and gender, discovered in performative and queer theory, become significant against a background of spreading biotechnologies (from sex reassignment surgeries to assisted reproduction). This requires wider research and further discussion among different schools.

‘You be my body for me’

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Kellogg
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Politics Of Recognition ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Current Shift

Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s recent exchange, ‘You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, is remarkable because in their rereading of Hegel’s famous lord and bondsman parable, rather than focusing on recognition, work, or even desire, Butler and Malabou each wonder about how Hegel contributes to a new way of thinking about ‘having’ a body and how coming to ‘be’ a body necessarily involves a kind of dispossession. Butler and Malabou’s reading of Hegel is congruent with a current shift on the left away from a liberal politics of recognition to a (post-)Marxist analytic of dispossession: a move, in other words, away from liberal ‘solutions’ of redistribution – of either goods or recognition – towards thinking through issues of settler colonialism, forced migration and empire. Butler and Malabou’s piece points towards the insight that Hegel’s parable must be thought in terms of the political history of possessive individualism, and so in terms of the history of juridically defined property relations; the history of regarding both the body and the land as property. The ‘two valences’ of dispossession, in other words, refers in fact to a logic of property relations, one between those who ‘have’ property (either land or the property of their own bodies) and those who are juridically defined as propertyless.

Medicine: Experimentation, Politics, Emergent Bodies

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Michael ◽  
Marsha Rosengarten
Keyword(s):  
Public Health Policy ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Controlled Trial ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Evidence ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Healthy Human ◽  
Randomized Controlled

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental objects, the individualization of responsibility for health and even the precarity of life. We contrast what feminist theorists in the tradition of Judith Butler have referred to as the question of matter, and Science and Technology Studies with its focus on practice and the nature of emergence. As such we address tensions that exist in analyses of the ontological status of ‘the body’ – human and non-human – as it is enacted in the work of the laboratory, the randomized controlled trial, public health policy and, indeed, the market that is so frequently entangled with these spaces. In keeping with the recent turns toward ontology and affect, we suggest that we can regard medicine as concerned with the contraction and reconfiguration of the body’s capacities to affect and be affected, in order to allow for the subsequent proliferation of affects that, according to Bruno Latour, marks corporeal life. Treating both contraction and proliferation circumspectly, we focus on the patterns of affects wrought in particular by the abstractions of medicine that are described in the contributions to this special issue. Drawing on the work of A.N. Whitehead, we note how abstractions such as ‘medical evidence’, the ‘healthy human body’ or the ‘animal model’ are at once realized and undercut, mediated and resisted through the situated practices that eventuate medicine’s bodies. Along the way, we touch on the implications of this sort of perspective for addressing the distribution of agency and formulations of the ethical and the political in the medical eventuations of bodies.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
Trans Studies ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
The Rich

This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field. The editors’ introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, to feminist perspectives on prominent subfields of philosophy. The first section contains chapters that explore feminist philosophical engagement with mainstream and marginalized histories and traditions, while the second section parses feminist philosophy’s contributions to with numerous philosophical subfields, for example metaphysics and bioethics. A third section explores what feminist philosophy can illuminate about crucial moral and political issues of identity, gender, the body, autonomy, prisons, among numerous others. The Handbook concludes with the field’s engagement with other theories and movements, including trans studies, queer theory, critical race, theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. The volume provides a rigorous but accessible resource for students and scholars who are interested in feminist philosophy, and how feminist philosophers situate their work in relation to the philosophical mainstream and other disciplines. Above all it aims to showcase the rich diversity of subject matter, approach, and method among feminist philosophers.

The Inherent Link between Gender and Sexuality: A Queer View to the Portrayal of Women in Herland, Things Fall Apart, Bombay Brides, and The Winner Stands Alone

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-22
Author(s):  
Suparna Roy
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Gender Trouble

Stevie Jackson and Jackie Jones regarded in her article- Contemporary Feminist Theory that “The concepts of gender and sexuality as a highly ambiguous term, as a point of reference” (Jackson, 131, ch-10). Gender and Sexuality are two most complexly designed, culturally constructed and ambiguously interrelated terms used within the spectrum of Feminism that considers “sex” as an operative term to theorize its deconstructive cultural perspectives. Helene Cixous notes in Laugh of Medusa that men and women enter the symbolic order in a different way and the subject position open to either sex is different. Cixious’s understanding that the centre of the symbolic order is ‘phallus’ and everybody surrounding it stands in the periphery makes women (without intersectionality) as the victim of this phallocentric society. One needs to stop thinking Gender as inherently linked to one’s sex and that it is natural. To say, nothing is natural. The body is just a word (as Judith Butler said in her book Gender Trouble [1990]) that is strategically used under artificial rules for the convenience of ‘power’ to operate. It has been a “norm” to connect one’s sexuality with their Gender and establish that as “naturally built”. The dichotomy of ‘penis/vagina’ over years has linked itself to make/female understanding of bodies. Therefore my main argument in this paper is to draw few instances from some literary works which over time reflected how the gender- female/women characters are made to couple up with a male/man presenting the inherent, coherent compulsory relation between one’s gender and sexuality obliterating any possibility of ‘queer’ relationships, includes- Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Bombay Brides (2018) by Esther David, Paulo Coelho’s Winner Stands Alone (2008) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall apart (1958).

scholarly journals ADOLESCÊNCIA, SUBJETIVIDADE E QUESTÕES DE GÊNERO NO TEATRO DE MARK RAVENHILL

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-39
Author(s):  
Fabiano Fleury Souza Campos
Keyword(s):  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
And Gender

A partir da análise estrutural, focada, sobretudo, nos personagens da peça Shopping and Fucking (1996), escrita pelo dramaturgo britânico Mark Ravenhill, evidenciamos uma relação incomum entre os elementos formadores desse trabalho teatral e as discussões sobre subjetividade, gênero e sexualidade voltadas para os adolescentes, nos dias atuais. Os contornos dos personagens dessa peça desestabilizam certas noções pré-concebidas sobre a individualidade e a corporeidade, por exemplo. Para a nossa análise, apoiamo-nos sobre os apontamentos de teóricos dedicados tanto ao teatro, como Pierre Sarrazac e Elinor Fuchs, quanto à sociologia e política, como Judith Butler. A peça por meio do discurso agressivo e a violência direcionadas ao corpo dos personagens é capaz de abalar as certezas e a moralidade previamente determinadas de seus espectadores.YOUTH, SUBJECTIVITY AND GENDER IN MARK RAVENHILL’S THEATER Abstract: from the structural analysis, focused mainly on the characters of the play Shopping and Fucking (1996), written by British playwright Mark Ravenhill, our study shows an unusual relationship between the elements of theatre and the contemporary discussions about subjectivity, gender, and sexuality among adolescents presented in this play. The contours of the characters destabilize certain preconceived notions to individuality and embodiment, for example. Our analysis are supported, for instance, by theater theories developed by Pierre Sarrazac and Elinor Fuchs, and sociology concepts implemented by Judith Butler.  Through aggressive discourse and violence directed to the body of the characters, the play is able to shake the certainties and moralities previously found in Ravenhill’s viewers.Keywords: Ravenhill. Contemporary British Theater. Adolescence. Subjectivity. Gender. 

The New Feminist Philosophy of the Body

1998 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Renée Matisons
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Philosophy

Queer Theory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gayle Salamon
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
Gay Studies ◽  
Lesbian And Gay Studies ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in queer theory, with particular attention to the challenges it has posed to the concepts of normativity, identity, and the category of “woman.” It explores queer theory’s emergence from lesbian and gay studies, and considers its relation to feminist philosophy and trans theory. The chapter outlines the founding contributions of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, along with several other influential queer theorists, and traces the concept of heteronormativity from its central place in queer theory’s earliest works to more recent reconsiderations.

Precariousness, kinship, and care: Becoming human in Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096798
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Female Subject ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article employs Christine L. Marran’s notion of “obligate storytelling” to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron’s novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel’s use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins.

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