Search results

"This edited volume brings transnational feminisms in conversation with intersectional and decolonial approaches. The conversation is pluriversal; it voices and reflects upon a plurality of geo- and corpopolitical as well as epistemic locations in specific Global South/East/North/West contexts. The aim is to explore analytical modes that encourage transgressing methodological nationalisms which sustain unequal global power relations, and which are still ingrained in the disciplinary perspectives that define much social science and humanities research. A main focus of the volume is methodological. It asks how an engagement with transnational, intersectional and decolonial feminisms can stimulate border-crossings. Boundaries in academic knowledge-building, shaped by the limitations imposed by methodological nationalisms, are challenged in the book. The same applies to boundaries of conventional - disembodied and ethically un-affected - academic writing modes. The transgressive methodological aims are also pursued through mixing genres and shifting boundaries between academic and creative writing. Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, teachers, professionals, students (from undergraduate to postgraduate levels), activists and NGOs, interested in questions about decoloniality, intersectionality, and transnational feminisms, as well as in methodologies for boundary transgressing knowledge-building"--

The essay contemplates retirement as a portal of possibilities which may open time for diving into both haunting and joyful questions that being tied up with admin work formerly prevented the pursuit of. Questions which the retired academic could engage in are piled up, e.g. the haunting ones concerning classical humanities' celebration of Universal (White) Man and human exceptionalism. Questions about portals leading from the haunted space of the Humanities to an elsewhere, and what to take with us through these portals, are also addressed. Critique and aesthetics are discussed as possibly worthwhile to carry to the other side.

Highlights the issues in feminist theory, epistemology and methodology. Combining introductory overviews with reflections, this title focuses on analytical approaches to gendered power differentials intersecting with other processes of social in/exclusion based on race, class and sexuality.

Through a personalized story, anchored in historical reflections on the formative years of feminist research in the Nordic context in the early 1970s, the article engages in transversal conversations. The focus is dissonances and resonances between intersectional feminisms and socialist feminisms, and their critiques of monocategorical (neo)liberal feminisms. The method is transversal dialoguing, implying that participants in politically conflicted conversations, shift between "rooting" (situating their own stakes along the lines of feminist epistemologies of situated knowledges) and "shifting" (seriously trying to imagine what it takes to inhabit the situated perspective of interlocutors). A starting point for the articles transversal conversations is recent critiques of white feminist intersectionality research in Nordic and broader European contexts, claimed to neoliberalize and whitewash intersectionality. Shifting to the perspective of the critics, the author takes responsibility for her stakes in epistemologies of white ignorance. A historical reflection on her becoming a socialist feminist in the context of New Left students and feminist movements in Denmark in the aftermath of the students revolts of 1968 is used as prism to a discussion of socialist feminisms in the Nordic context in the 1970s, and their paradoxes of being attentive to class, while entangled in classic marxisms eurocentrism and epistemologies of white ignorance. To dig further into the question of genealogies of leftwing epistemologies of ignorance, characterizing Nordic socialist feminism in the 1970s (and haunting European socialism more generally), the article critically rereads a piece of the authors research from the 1970s-an analysis of the work of socialist feminist, Alexandra Kollontaj, and her role in the Russian revolution. Rooting, the author suggests that the epistemologies of white ignorance in Nordic feminist research rather than emerging from monocategoricality and (neo) neoliberalism, as the critics suggest, should be sought after through a critical scrutiny of leftwing versions of eurocentrism.

With a focus on global cancer epidemics, the article discusses biopolitics in the Anthropocene against the background of a notion of dual governmentality, implying that efforts to make populations live and tendencies to let them die are intertwined. The conceptualization is based on postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembes notion of necropolitics and cultural critic Lauren Berlants notion of slow death, developing Foucauldian understandings of biopower. Liver cancer and breast cancer serve as cases showing the operations of an Anthropocene necropolitics, that is, its modes of working through political neglect of carcinogenic effects of conditions of poverty in postcolonial capitalism and chemical modernity. The article introduces Anthropocene necropolitics as an analytics, useful for a critical understanding of the global cancer epidemics. But it aims also to transgress a merely critical approach and to contribute to the search for critically affirmative points of exit into new and more promising worlding practices. Therefore, it engages in the discussion of the Anthropocene concepts lack of potentials to go beyond critique. Instead, the author tries out Donna Haraways proposal to complement the Anthropocene concept with the figuration of Chthulucene, calling for a shift of ethical stance and position of enunciation from the sovereign (white, Western) "I," waging "war" on cancer to a "we," based on a planetwide kinship of vulnerable bodies. Underlining that this shift can also commit to alternative modes of writing, the article ends with a poem, "Anthropos and the Canary in the Mine." The poem situates the analysis in the entanglement of political, ethical, theoretical, and personal passions brought about by the authors process of mourning her life partners cancer death.

This article reviews current debates on epistemic habits of critique and affirmation, specifically focusing on approaches which combine criticality with ways to encourage unfoldings of alternative futurities, figurations and worlding practices. Embedded in a process of critical self-reflection regarding epistemic habits, the article discusses disidentification (Butler 1993, Muñoz 1999), cruel optimism (Berlant 2011), and everyday utopianism (Cooper 2014) understood as examples of such habits. The article explores how feminisms, unfolding within academia, and thus institutionally embedded in the logics of global capitalism, neoliberalism and particular nation-state politics, on the one the hand, are bound to a performance of cruel optimism, glossing over dilemmas and contradictions, and, on the other hand, perhaps enabled to enact messy kinds of everyday utopianism. Finally, the article reflects upon possibilities for changing one's epistemic habits, suggesting a couple of changes: to systematically integrate reflections on changing conditions of academic knowledge production, as well as on geopolitical grammars. These issues are addressed as being interwoven with and mixed up in the epistemic practices that are produced by messy links with both feminist activist resistance and institutionalized and professionalized academic feminisms.

A response to Stacy Alaimo: ";Insurgent Vulnerability and the Carbon Footprint of Gender";.

The article is a discussion of two cyberfeminists, Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant, and their innovative posthuman approaches to feminist decontruction of the masculine connotations of cyberculture. The author compares Haraway's cyborg-figure that represents a post-gender, post-origin and post-nature position to the alliance of women and machines, promoted by Plant, who, inspired by Luce Irigaray, attempts to inscribe an embodied feminine subject in cyberspace and trace a digital écriture féminine. In conclusion the article profiles the posthuman approaches of Haraway and Plant with the humanist critique of the social relations of gender, culture and technology, which is articulated in a "cyborg"-novel by Dorrit Willumsen "Programmeret til kærlighed" (Programmed to Love) (1981).