Suchergebnisse

This chapter maps the emergence of a posthuman turn in feminist theory, based on the convergence of posthumanism with postanthropocentrism. The former critiques the universalist posture of the idea of "Man" as the alleged "measure of all things." The latter criticizes species hierarchy and the assumption of human exceptionalism. Although feminist posthuman theory benefits from multiple genealogical sources and cannot be reduced to a single or linear event, it can be analyzed in terms of its conceptual premises, the methodology and its implications for feminist political subjectivity and for sexual politics, notably in relation to nonhuman agents.

This paper argues for a particular meaning of feminism, in terms of a political struggle against the social relations of male supremacy and for a human status for women outside male control. It starts by acknowledging there are conflicts over the meaning of feminism, but points out that these are not resolved by references to 'feminisms' in the plural. Neither, it goes on to argue, is feminism an 'identity politics'. Although feminism is centrally concerned with women, that concern is necessary because of the existence of social relations based on the principle that only men count as 'human'. In that sense, feminism is both social theory and critical theory. It is also radical feminism, and the paper mounts a defence of radical feminism against charges that it is 'essentialist', 'white and middle-class' and 'right-wing', while at the same time criticising the typology which defines radical feminism as simply one 'feminism' among many.

This article presents conceptual bridges that exist between the philosophy of G.W.F Hegel and a feminist ethics of care. To do so, it engages with Slavoj Žižek's contemporary reading of Hegel in concert with existing feminist interpretations of Hegel's thought. The goal of doing so is to demonstrate how both Žižek and a selection of critical feminist thinkers interpret Hegel's perspective on the nature of subjectivity, intersubjective relations and the relationship between the subject and the world it inhabits, in a way that can further our thinking on the feminist ethics of care as a relational and contextualist ethics that foregrounds vulnerability as a condition of existence. These readings of Hegel highlight the radical contingency of human subjectivity, as well as the relationship between human subjectivity and the external world, in a way that is compatible with the feminist ethics of care's emphasis on the particularity, fluidity, and interdependency of human relationships. I argue that this confrontation between care ethics and mainstream philosophy is valuable because it offers mutual contributions to both care ethics as a moral and political theory and the philosophy of Hegel and Žižek.

This book offers an innovative rethinking of policy approaches to 'gender equality' and of the process of social change. It brings several new chapters together with a series of previously published articles to reflect on these topics. A particular focus is gender mainstreaming, a relatively recent development in equality policy in many industrialised and some industrialising countries, as well as in large international organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the International Labour Organization. The book draws upon poststructuralist organisation and policy theory to argue that it is impossible to 'script' reform initiatives such as gender mainstreaming. As an alternative it recommends thinking about such policy developments as fields of contestation, shaped by on-the-ground political deliberations and practices, including the discursive practices that produce specific ways of understanding the 'problem' of 'gender inequality'. In addition to the new chapters Bacchi and Eveline produce brief introductions for each chapter, tracing the development of their ideas over four years. Through these commentaries the book provides exciting insights into the complex processes of collaboration and theory generation. Mainstreaming Politics is a rich resource for both practitioners in the field and for theorists. In particular it will appeal to those interested in public policy, public administration, organisation studies, sociology, comparative politics and international studies.

In her article, Iris van der Tuin engages in a discussion concerning the way categorization and classification work and organize theoretical inquiries. The author elaborates closely on classification of feminist epistemology introduced by Sandra Harding in her book The Science Question, where the three strands are recognized: "feminist empiricism", "feminist standpoint theory", and "feminist postmodernism". Van der Tuin offers the term classifixation to demonstrate that classification is not a neutral mediator and that the way scholars establish canon matters epistemologically and politically. With her method of "jumping-generations" van der Tuin presents new materialisms and how new materialist cartographies work to overcome dualist thinking structures.

Gendering impact assessment: Can it be made to work? ; Mainstreaming and neoliberalism: A contested relationship ; Gender analysis and social change: Testing the water ; What are we mainstreaming when we mainstream gender? ; Approaches to gender mainstreaming: What's the problem represented to be? ; Power, resistance and reflexive practice ; Gender mainstreaming: The answer to the gender pay gap? ; Gender analysis and community participation: The role of women's policy units ; The invisibility of gendered power relations in domestic violence policy ; Gender mainstreaming versus diversity mainstreaming: Methodology as emancipatory politics ; University-public sector research collaboration: Mine the space, never mind the gap ; Obeying organisational 'rules of relevance': Gender analysis of policy ; Gender mainstreaming or diversity mainstreaming? The politics of 'doing'

AbstractThis paper has two goals: to show why Clare Hemmings' work, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011), which focuses on the types and consequences of feminist "stories," should be applied to Simone de Beauvoir; and to argue that Beauvoir's place in the history of feminist thinking should be revisited. I propose to use some of the critical tools gleaned from Hemmings' text to think through the place of Simone de Beauvoir in feminist theoretical storytelling.RésuméCet article a un objectif double : démontrer pourquoi le travail de Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011), qui met l'accent sur les types et les conséquences des « récits » féministes, doit s'appliquer à Simone de Beauvoir, et faire valoir que la place de Beauvoir dans l'histoire de la pensée féministe doit être réexaminée. Je propose d'utiliser certains des outils critiques du texte de Hemmings pour réfléchir à la place de Simone de Beauvoir dans la narration théorique féministe.

What happens when well-defined disciplines meet or are confronted with transdisciplinary discourses and concepts, where transdisciplinary concepts are analytical tools rather than specifications of a field of objects or a class of entities? Or, if disciplines reject transdisciplinary discourses and concepts as having no part to play in their practice, why do they so reject them? This essay addresses these questions through a discussion of the relationship between philosophy – the most tightly policed discipline in the humanities – and what I will argue is the emblematically transdisciplinary practice of feminist theory, via a discussion of interdisciplinarity and related terms in gender studies. It argues that the tendency of philosophy to reject feminist theory in fact correctly intuited that the two defining features of feminist theory – its constitutive tie to a political agenda for social change and the transdisciplinary character of many of its central concepts – are indeed at odds with, and pose a threat to, the traditional insularity of the discipline of philosophy. It argues, further, that feminist theory operates with what we should now recognise as a set of transdisciplinary concepts – including, sex, gender, woman, sexuality and sexual difference – and that the use of these concepts (particularly 'gender') in feminist philosophy has been the most far-reaching continuation in the late 20th/early 21st centuries of the critique of philosophy initiated by Marx and pursued by 'critical theory'. This puts feminist philosophy in a difficult position: its transdisciplinary aspects open it up to an unavoidable contradiction. Nonetheless, this is a contradiction that can and must be endured and made productive. In order to draw out the specificity of the concept of transdisciplinarity at issue the essay begins with a discussion of attempts to define inter- and transdisciplinarity, particularly in gender studies. Arguing for the transdisciplinary origin of the concept of gender, it then suggests one way of ...

The growing impact of feminist scholarship, activism, and politics would benefit substantially from input by radical behaviorists. The feminist community, broadly defined, and radical behaviorists share interesting commonalities that suggest a potentially fruitful alliance. There are, however, points of divergence that must be addressed; most prominently, the construct of personal agency. A behavioral reconstruction of personal agency is offered to deal with the invisible contingencies leading to gender-asymmetric interpretive repertoires. The benefits of a mutually informing fusion are discussed.

"Emancipation" is one of the most opaque words in political language and political theory. It refers to the hope of overcoming all forms of domination, yet is articulated with the highly ambivalent notions of reason, progress, equality and liberty, and with the unfulfilled utopias that accompany them. In light of the different and contested uses that have been made of the concept of emancipation within and beyond contemporary feminist theory, I argue that a close examination of the concept and of the unresolved political and theoretical questions it articulates is a timely endeavour. With reference to Reinhard Koselleck's conceptual history of emancipation, in which he highlights three developments that helped to shape the modern concept of emancipation – first, the turn towards a reflexive understanding of emancipation as self-emancipation; second, the politicisation of the concept; and third, its temporalisation – I examine the ways in which subjectivity, domination and temporality have been articulated in contemporary feminist theory.

Feminism is a long established, often neglected empirical and theoretical presence in the study of organizations and social relations at work. This special issue provides a space for research that focuses on contemporary feminist practice and theory. We suggest that now is a new time for feminism, noting very recent examples of sexist oppression in social relations to illustrate why this rejuvenation is happening now. We then reflect on the process of knowledge production involved in guest editorial work for an organization studies journal like Human Relations, to address the issue of why feminism is so poorly represented in the journals that our academic community constructs as prestigious. We suggest that feminism provides opportunities for distinctive practices of knowledge production that challenge the patriarchal social formations which characterize academic work. We conclude with speculations about the future of feminism in organization studies.

Despite the achievement of formal equality, women as a group continue to be politically, socially and economically disadvantaged relative to men as a group. Feminists overwhelmingly concur that liberal equality, understood as equal political and civil rights, is incapable of realizing substantive equality for women and that liberalism's core theoretical commitments are incompatible with a commitment to gender equality. ; My view, and the motivation for this inquiry, is that there is in fact a deep philosophical issue between feminism liberalism which warrants the attention of anyone doing equality theory. Liberal theory cannot be saved from these feminist criticisms by invoking a bright line distinction between theory and practice, and gesturing to the inevitable imperfection of humans and their institutions. The concern is deeper than the apparent inability of liberal regimes to recognize and address significant injustice. The feminist emphasis on women's equality may have overshadowed the truly subversive potential of the charges to call into serious question liberalism's adequacy as a theory of justice. At the deepest level, the concern is that liberalism may not only be inappropriate or inadequate as a theory for women, but somehow inimical to achieving the kind of substantive equality to which women are entitled and to which liberalism itself traditionally has been thought to aspire. ; My aim in this work is to examine the claim that feminism and liberalism are fundamentally incompatible. As the title suggests, this is a work of feminist philosophy, but in the broadest sense. It utilizes the standard tools of analytic philosophy, but it proceeds from an understanding of the significance of gender in the organization of social life and the distribution of power and resources in our society. It analyzes a certain claim about the theoretical and political adequacy of philosophical liberalism as a theory of justice for women, but it is ultimately concerned with analyzing a kind of injustice that is not exclusive to women-subordination. ; In the course of my analysis, I reconstruct dominant liberal conceptions of liberty, equality and neutrality that have been antithetical to the realization of liberalism's egalitarian promise for women. While my work breaks with the most well known versions of contemporary liberalism at a number of points, I intend the result to be "a philosophically better kind of liberalism" as well as a better theory for women. ; Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 59-06, Section: A, page: 2056. ; Mentors: Madison Powers; Mark N. Lance; Margaret E. Little. ; Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 1997.

Feminist scholars engaged in the study of women and religion often grapple with the problem of how to theorize the phenomenon of women's attraction to, and active involvement in politico-religious movements characterized by strongly "patriarchal" authority structures, and by ideologies that either seem to denigrate women or assign them to subordinate social and symbolic roles. This paper looks at some of the approaches that have been taken by feminist scholars to this issue. It reviews some key adaptations of feminist theory to the rising phenomena of women's public participation in religious, right-wing agendas. It specifically explores the relevance of feminist theory for understanding women's involvement in movements driven by Hindu religious revivalism in India. Using ethnographic data collected on the activities of the women's wing of the right-wing, Shiv Sena party (Shivaji's Army) in India, it explores the alternative ways by which feminist theorization might engage with the construction of the female subject that comes into being through religiously motivated political and social agendas in the post-colonial world.

Transgender studies is a heterogeneous site of debate that is marked by tensions, border wars, and rifts both within the field and among feminist and queer theorists. Intersecting the domains of women's studies, sexuality, gender and transgender studies, Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory provides a critical analysis of key texts and theories, engaging in a dialogue with prominent theorists of transgendered identity, embodiment and sexual politics, and intervening in various aspects of a conceptually and politically difficult terrain. A central concern is the question of whether the theories and practices needed to foster and secure the lives of transsexuals and transgendered persons will be promoted or undermined - a concern that raises broader social, political, and ethical questions surrounding assumptions about gender, sexuality, and sexual difference; perceptions of transgendered embodiments and identities; and conceptions of divergent desires, goals and visions.

Contents Editorial, Paul-Erik Korvela, 5 Johan Strang, The rhetoric of analytic philosophy. The making of the analytic hegemony in Swedish 20th century philosophy, 11 Esther Abin, Political Realism, Contingency and Philosophy, 39 Annabel Herzog, Representing Political Subjectivity: Cameron's Avatar and McCarthy's The Road, 61 Benoît Godin, The Politics of Innovation:The Controversy on Republicanism in Seventeenth Century England, 77 Mika Ojakangas, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Liberty and Slavery of Conscience in the Context of Christian Political Theology, 106 Henk te Velde, Parliamentary Obstruction and the "Crisis" of European Parliamentary Politics around 1900, 125 REVIEW ARTICLES Peter Stone, A Renaissance for Random Selection?, 148 Olivia Guaraldo, Totalitarianism and the Social Sciences: Revisiting a "Forgotten Debate" , 160 Suvi Soininen, Conversations with Michael Oakeshott – An Interlude to Oakeshott Scholarship A Companion to Michael Oakeshott, 172 REVIEWS Helge Jordheim, Reinhart Koselleck: Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte 2010, 188 Moya Lloyd, Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, Durham, Duke University Press, 2009, 200 Emilia Palonen, Michael J. Shapiro: The Time of the City: Politics, Philosophy and Genre, Routledge 2010, 208 Kari Palonen, The Life and Work of Reinhart Koselleck (Niklas Olsen, History in the Plural. An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck. New York: Berghahn Press 2012, 338 p.), 215 Tuula Vaarakallio, Ilie, Cornelia (ed.), European Parliaments under Scrutiny. Discourse strategies and interaction practices, 222 Affiliations, 230