Feminist Standpoints and Critical Realism. The Contested Materiality of Difference in Intersectionality and New Materialism (original) (raw)
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Feminist theory and critical realism should consolidate their collaboration since they have much in common. Nevertheless, feminist standpoint theory and critical realist ontology remain at odds, as extended debates have shown. I argue that this is because of the importance that feminism places on difference – which brings up the problem of relationality in a material way – and thus makes it hard to integrate into traditional critical realism. Dialectical critical realism contributes greatly to an understanding of relationality but lacks difference’s historicity. This claim is elaborated through a discussion of intersectionality in feminism and feminist new materialism. The discussion shows that the mainstream understanding of both approaches has grave deficiencies and profits from critical realist metatheory. Notwithstanding, CR can learn from the motives and ways that difference is deployed in both strands.
The Case for Working with Feminism New Materialisms against the Dualisms that Divide Us
Journal of International Women's Studies, 2023
This paper provides a theoretical overview of dualisms which lie at the foundation of Western thought in an attempt to highlight the fundamental contribution that feminist new materialisms bring to sociological theory and practice and beyond. To delineate the oppressive patterns of thought generated by anthropocentric dualistic thinking, I will draw on the influential works of ecofeminist Val Plumwood, science studies scholar and feminist Donna Haraway, and feminist theorist Karen Barad within the material turn. The exploration begins with an analysis of the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy rejected by post-humanists and new materialists, a dichotomy which spawns many others, and continues with a mapping of the crisis of reason that Western thought is confronting. The crisis of reason is held in place by human attachment to binary conceptual pairs which serve to naturalize systems of domination. The materializing effects of this crisis include the marginalization, oppression, and exploitation of bodies human and nonhuman, justified through the uneven valorization of mind/spirit/masculine/culture over matter/body/feminine/nature, shaping the hazard-ridden epoch that we now call the Anthropocene. In this context, I then provide a brief outline of the material turn’s proposal for situated, embodied knowledges, which entails a consistent non- dualist philosophy, and its urgent relevance in the contemporary global context. Notions of responsibility (defined as the capacity for response), the nature of the epistemic subject and the generation of knowledges, embodiment, boundaries, and positioning, as well as the very mechanisms we use to conceptualize the world, are being reconfigured within the material turn. Across disciplines, scholars are proposing new frameworks that encourage non-typological, engaged, accountable positioning within the world on the part of the human subject. Finally, a parallel is drawn with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose insights complement the epistemological work of feminist new materialisms and their call for situated, embodied knowledges, thus providing a fertile ground for exploration in the areas of exclusion between the disciplines of sociology and philosophy. The aim of this paper is to offer new avenues for critical interdisciplinary thinking meant to re-assess and reconfigure the underlying assumptions of Western systems of thought.
Critical Realism, Gender and Feminism: Exchanges, Challenges, Synergies
Journal of Critical Realism, 2016
An increasing number of scholars have become familiar with critical realism, finding it a robust alternative to the poststructuralist perspectives that currently dominate gender studies and feminism. This trend has coincided with an increased interest among feminist theorists in the issues of ontology, materiality and nature, which have always been at the heart of critical realist interventions. However, despite these thematic alignments, and the fact that both critical realism and feminist theory are inherently critical-emancipatory, the critical realist approach continues to occupy a marginal role within both feminist and gender studies debates. Concurrently , the field of critical realism has remained decidedly 'masculine' in nature, both in the sense that men dominate it, and in terms of the issues with which critical realists have most commonly concerned themselves. Recent critical realist feminist work, the International Association of Critical Realism's adoption of a proactive policy to enhance the representation of women in its organs and activities, and the growing critical realist preoccupation (particularly in Bhaskar's philosophy of metaReality) with historically 'feminine' topics such as love, mark a potential shift away from these trends. The most important aim of this special issue on Critical Realism, Gender and Fem-inism is therefore to intensify and refine the conversations between critical realism and feminist theory and gender studies. Our hope is that it will encourage both further critical realist work on feminism and gender, and increased exchanges between critical realism and existing forms of feminist theory and gender studies.
Critical Realism, Feminism, and Gender: A Reader
2020
In assessing the current state of feminism and gender studies, whether on a theoretical or a practical level, it has become increasingly challenging to avoid the conclusion that these fields are in a state of disarray. Indeed, feminist and gender studies discussions are beset with persistent splits and disagreements. This reader suggests that returning to, and placing centre-stage, the role of philosophy, especially critical realist philosophy of science, is invaluable for efforts that seek to overcome or mitigate the uncertainty and acrimony that have resulted from this situation. In particular, it claims that the dialectical logic that runs through critical realist philosophy is ideally suited to advancing feminist and gender studies discussions about broad ontological and epistemological questions and considerations, intersectionality, and methodology, methods, and empirical research. By bringing together four new and eight existing writings this reader provides both a focal point for renewed discussions about the potential and actual contributions of critical realist philosophy to feminism and gender studies and a timely contribution to these discussions. Purchase here: https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Realism-Feminism-and-Gender-A-Reader/Ingen-Grohmann-Gunnarsson/p/book/9781138083707 Google books preview here: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=e7fjDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT123&dq=critical+realism+feminism+gender+reader&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjd2eijvtvpAhWORhUIHZdTCEUQuwUILDAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
New Feminist Materialisms – Review Essay (2011)
This review essay discusses and contextualizes four recent publications in and on ‘new feminist materialism’. The discussion of the three edited volumes and one monograph demonstrates what the new feminist materialism wants to provoke in different (inter)disciplines, and the contextualization is aimed at dealing with the question of what is ‘new’ in new feminist materialism. Ultimately, the essay boils down to exploring the theoretical tools that scholars from diverse (inter)disciplinary fields, continents and generations have developed for dealing with agential matter rather than (gendered) passive matter. The contextualization exercise wants to show how the new materialism is not a paradigm shift or a rewriting of, for instance, the linguistic turn. These two seemingly opposite epistemological tools are both grounded in an epistemology of recognition, whereas the new materialism wants to move away from such linguisticism. Experimenting with the tool of the ‘quantum leap’, the essay ends with openings for future (epistemic) research on and of the material turn.
ŠUM, 2017
In this paper I offer a close reading of Iris van der Tuin's and Rick Dolphijn's new materialist rereading of The Second Sex in their essay 'Sexual Differing'. In manifestatively articulating a feminist new materialist position, the author's rereading turns Beauvoir into a difference feminist and new materialist avant la lettre. I argue that by rejecting critique and an analysis of the weight of a history of oppression, hierarchical social relations and institutional constraints, the author's rereading makes it difficult to conceptualise the possibilities of politically transforming unequal social relations and envisioning a non-patriarchal future. Meanwhile, The Second Sex became such an important work in modern feminist philosophy, theory and activism also because it offered us conceptual resources for thinking oppression, transformation, liberation. My paper thus forms the basis of an argument in favour of a non-new materialist, materialist return to Beauvoir.
Historical materialism and intersectionality: the future of Western feminist critical thought
More than a third of a century has passed since Chandra Mohanty’s influential work on the colonizing effect of key parts of Western feminist work on the ‘Third World woman’. In this paper, I argue that her original critique and also her revision of the paper should remain valid for two reasons: making feminist theoretical inquiries more critical and salvaging the method of historical materialism. A such, the first part of the paper consists of the assessment of her two works from this perspective. In the second part, I try to show that her change in focus, i.e. her accent on neoliberalism and anti-globalization movements, implies a point of convergence of antagonisms which should be used to move beyond the mere cultural relativism that characterizes a significant portion of the political Left today. The conclusions I draw have some fundamental limits, mainly regarding theoretical divides within leftist political theory. Although I recognize these limitations and try to offer, briefly, some insights that I believe future theoretical endeavors have to take into account, it remains true there is a need for a new form of emancipatory political thought that manages to address cultural contingencies without falling into the trap of postmodernist relativism. In other words, the fight on this political battlefield, I recognize, cannot be won only through academic disputes and inquires, but is rooted in a much more profound cleavage between, on the one hand, what has remained of academic Marxism and other emancipatory practices, among which I count, broadly speaking, feminism, and, on the other hand, the actual political practices of our time.
Gender and Intersectionality: The Material and the Symbolic in Theorising Gender Relations
Gender is not a simple concept and feminists have theorised the concept of gender from various stand points. Whilst some argued that gender is a form of power, others have argued that ‘it is a complex phenomenon’. In most studies on gender relations between women and men researchers tend to take on either material or symbolic feminist approach to gender. Whilst structural and material feminists suggest that gender should be seen as a system of power and in relation to male domination and economic constructions of gender that results in women’s subordinate position, discursive feminists looked at cultural and social constructions of gender and suggest that gender is constructed through and by discourse within which the network of power relations operates. This paper argues for an approach which allows us for analysing gender at a level that neither dismisses the arguments that found in the structural and material feminism, nor place the discursive and cultural approaches to gender at the centre. I suggest that we consider the ontological basis of gender, and we should interrogate the differences in explanations between structural and discursive feminism. We need an approach that is informed by both materialist and discursive feminist scholarships, but which does not ‘put one over the other’ (Anthias, 2001:378). I argue, with Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis (2002), that we need to use a ‘situated’ feminist standpoint which would allow us to grasp the specific social, political and economic processes involved in each historical instance as important for any investigation on gender and social divisions. Further, I see, as Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1983), that an intersectional approach to gender is an appropriate tool for understanding the concept of gender. I discuss four specific areas relating to the constructions of gendered relations: a) the political construction of gender; b) the cultural and social construction of gender; c) multiplicity and locality of gender relations; and d) intersectionality and relations of gender with other social categories and inequalities. Gender and gendered identities are discussed as separate notions. First, I discuss the structural, radical and material conceptualisations of gender, and I review the ways that I use the material notion of gender in my work. Second, I discuss the problems associated with radical and structural theorisations of gender. Third, I discuss deconstructive theorisations of gender and move on to explain my own understanding to the concept of the gender, in which I stress that gender should be recognised as a social category, and in relation to how it interweaves with other social categories. Fourth, I give a clarification of what I mean by intersectionality and how my approach to intersectionality is different than that found in the structural and radical feminism. In doing so, this paper aims to provide a theoretical and methodological framework for conceptualising gender as a social category.
'Feminist Matters: The Politics of New Materialism' (2014)
From the PREFACE (by Hinton and Van der Tuin): "[...] we have asked ourselves the following questions for the current special issue of Women: a cultural review: What can new materialism(s) bring to the question of a feminist genealogy of ‘the political’ and how is it here that we find (feminist) new materialist concerns anticipated? What does a third-wave feminist new materialist politics look like? How does it deal with the received notions of feminist political theory and practice (considering gender, equality, difference and location, for example)? How does it approach the push to affirmative, affective and durational stances? And how does it embrace the empirical as a well-known parameter of any political reasoning? These are the questions that define the contributions to this special issue and to which we promise no easy resolution, only the anticipation of their dynamic and materially productive engagement." ARTICLES Pushing Dualisms and Differences: From ‘Equality versus Difference’ to ‘Nonmimetic Sharing’ and ‘Staying with the Trouble’ KATHRIN THIELE Inventive Feminist Theory: Representation, Materiality and Intensive Time REBECCA COLEMAN The Living Present as a Materialist Feminist Temporality RACHEL LOEWEN WALKER Politics Materialized: Rethinking the Materiality of Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics NOELA DAVIS Reassembling Gender: On the Immanent Politics of Gendering Apparatuses of Bodily Production in Science DAGMAR LORENZ-MEYER ‘Situated Knowledges’ and New Materialism(s): Rethinking a Politics of Location PETA HINTON 99 A Quest for Feminist Space and Time OLGA CIELEMECKA, MONIKA ROGOWSKA-STANGRET, MAGDALENA S ́RODA"