Mapping the Feminist Imagination:From Redistribution to Recognition to Representation (original) (raw)
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This timely new series publishes leading monographs and edited collections from scholars working in the disciplinary areas of politics, international relations and public policy with specifi c reference to questions of gender. The series showcases cutting-edge research in Gender and Politics, publishing topical and innovative approaches to gender politics. It will include exciting work from new authors and well-known academics and will also publish high-impact writings by practitioners working in issues relating to gender and politics.
Western American Literature, 2018
What will it take to bring feminism out of the shadow in US West Studies? Essay offers genealogy of feminist thought across history, literary studies, and decolonial theory. Urges us to stop dooming feminism out of a mistaken sense that all feminism is Euro settler white feminism.
The social realities of the developed and the under developed world are different and so is the nature and reality of feminism within them. The differences in communal culture, social hierarchy and economic structures are responsible for such variations. The growth of a woman within a social environment, her thought process, and the way her familial traditions and beliefs mould her cultural and mental outlook are all to be considered. These factors vary so much owing to the nation, culture and community that the nature and reality of feminism in each space becomes distinct from one another. Generalizing these complexities into a few simplistic structures, therefore, creates gaping discrepancies in such studies. Economic independence alone cannot ensure a woman's liberty and autonomy. The realities of women in the Western world and those of the East are different and thus are the processes through which feminism manifests itself in these societies. But those who ignore these facts in order to propose themselves as the spokes-people for feminism internationally, often make this mistake. The differences between the aspirations, beliefs, expectations and demands of European or American women are drastically different from those of the women of the third world. Thus, international feminism is an elusive concept.
Locating the complexities of feminist Europe
European Journal of Women's Studies, 2012
When the European Journal of Women's Studies was first set up, one its main aims was to offer a space in which specifically European takes on and approaches to issues central to feminist praxis and Women's Studies scholarship could be published and offered as part of an ever more complex but increasingly urgent global conversation. Such a global conversation needed to be built around a conception of feminist praxis as multi-centred and multi-sited in a way that rejected a centre-margin geometry of feminism with the consequent hierarchies of status and import that follow such representational orderings of emancipatory vision and struggle. At the time chief among the journal's interlocutors were feminist debates and forms of scholarship emerging from the USA, and perhaps also Canada, conceived in an implicit epistolary relation which simultaneously attempted to undermine a privileged position being accorded to feminist thought emerging from the USA, especially in regard to theory, yet which also slightly undermined the attempt to situate European feminist scholarship and practice in a global field of differing yet interconnected gender dynamics. Despite this tension the aim of the EJWS to 'locate' European feminisms remains central to the journal's project, as has been recently emphasized in its pages. Such 'location' is multi-dimensional and constituted in an endless dynamic of normative stabilization and contestation across multiple registers but three dimensions of this 'location' are worth mentioning here. One kind of location involves situating European feminisms and Women's Studies in a global frame and dynamic, including their connections to counter-global flows, alliances and visions of which the current Occupy camps and protests that circle the globe are a high profile example. Second, is to locate in time and the temporal, remembering that the temporal is multi-dimensional and involves non-linear movements as well as linear movements of chronological time. As such locating historically will involve biographical (individual and collective), secular, sacred, psychic and embodied time/ temporalities as well as political, ideological, productive, technological times/temporalities. Finally, locating also involves the simultaneous and highly complex task of conceiving European feminisms as a socio-cultural-ideological formation, i.e. locating it in terms of general patterns, preoccupations, modes of practice, orientations towards that deemed 'other' to itself, etc. and as a set of highly differentiated and heterogeneous fields of sociocultural-political-psychic-institutional-ideological formations with varying and shifting constellations of gender, class, ethno-religious, sexual, bodily, aesthetic and moral relations. This poses feminist practitioners, including Women's Studies scholars, the complex task 436224J NT19210.
Like Freud’s famous inquiry ‘what does a woman want?’, this paper asks a similar question of the signifier ‘Feminism’ for if one aims to (re)imagine feminism for the new millennium one must first ask: what does Feminism want? This (imperfect) reference to Freud’s question hopes to draw attention to the particular and the universal underpinning the signifier Feminism, a slipperiness that works idiosyncratically at the threshold of public and private politics which, though it is perhaps the most unifying aspect of feminism, nevertheless undermines it. To politicize the personal one must question the signifier that comes to universalize an indefinite article for, as I argue in this paper, what ‘a’ woman wants is beneath the bar of what Feminism wants when it is mounted in public discourse. To continue to invest publically in a signifier of personal politics––as Jacqueline Rose advocates (2014)––then, one must rephrase the question: of what does this signifier Feminism speak when it is mounted in public discourse? This paper considers some mechanisms by which this signifier generates and mobilizes desire, fantasy, and phobia in public politics where feminism’s knowledge product covers over or, in Rose’s terms, “sanitizes” those “disturbing insight[s]” (2014: x) of experience, “everything that is darkest, most recalcitrant and unsettling” (2014 xii), in the “furthest limits of conscious and unconscious life” (2014: x). Here, where this signifier constitutes an ideal-ego, its effects are inhibiting. In short, this paper argues that before any future of feminism can be imagined, those occupying a feminist position—discourse, politics, or identity—must ask what their unconscious investment in this signifier is. In Lacanian terms, one must relinquish Feminism’s discourse of protest and complete the circuit through the analyst’s discourse to ask: what does a woman want in feminism? What does Feminism want?