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This article explores the so-called `postsecular' turn from two different but intersecting angles. The first part of the argument offers a reasoned cartography of the postsecular discourses, both in general and within feminist theory. The former includes the impact of extremism on all monotheistic religions in a global context of neo-conservative politics and perpetual war. The context of international violence has dire consequences for the social space, which is increasingly militarized, but also for academic debates, which become more and more (...) restricted in scope and freedom. The article then shifts to mapping the intersection between feminism and the postsecular condition. The main argument is that the postsecular turn challenges European feminism because it makes manifest the notion that agency, or political subjectivity, can be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality. This statement also implies that political agency need not be critical in the negative sense of oppositional and thus may not be aimed solely or primarily at the production of counter-subjectivities. Subjectivity is rather a process ontology of auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values, and hence also multiple forms of accountability. The double challenge of linking subjectivity to religious agency, and disengaging both from oppositional consciousness and critique defined as negativity, is one of the main issues this article wants to address. In the conclusion the article raises the issue of the affirmative power of critical theory and the kind of ethical values it may be able to engender. (shrink) | |
Abortion has long been a central issue in the arena of applied ethics, but, the distinctive analysis of feminist ethics is generally overlooked in most philosophic discussions. Authors and readers commonly presume a familiarity with the feminist position and equate it with liberal defences of women's right to choose abortion, but, in fact, feminist ethics yields a different analysis of the moral questions surrounding abortion than that usually offered by the more familiar liberal defenders of abortion rights. Most feminists can (...) agree with some of the conclusions that arise from certain non-feminist arguments on abortion, but they often disagree about the way the issues are formulated and the sorts of reasons that are invoked in the mainstream literature. (shrink) | |
This article revisits Irigaray's theory of sexual difference in the light of more contemporary developments in terms of nomadic becomings and non-unitary subjectivity, especially in Deleuze. It defends the notion of embodied materiality on philosophical grounds, by linking it to the issues of power, access, hegemony and exclusion, which are central to post-structuralism. Through a detailed analysis of the sexual politics of difference feminism, the author argues for a non-reactive redefinition of the feminine as a project of becoming, and connects (...) it firmly to feminist discussions about gender and queer theory. (shrink) | |
This paper considers the advantages of incorporating Foucault's anti-essentialist theory of the body into feminist explanations of women's oppression. There are also problems in that Foucault neglects to examine the gendered character of the body and reproduces a sexism endemic in "gender neutral" social theory. The Foucauldian body is essentially passive resulting in a limited account of identity and agency. This conflicts with an aim of feminism: to rediscover and revalue the experiences of women. | |
By reading the analyses of mysticism found in Beauvoir and Irigaray with and against some medieval women's mystical texts, the paper articulates a possible space for the divine within feminist thought. | |
Possibilities for critical social theory and Foucault’s work: a toolbox approach The benefits and constraints of philosophical frameworks using the work of Michel Foucault and critical social theorists, such as Fay, Giroux and McLaren, are examined in the light of their traditions. The reasons nurse researchers adopt these frameworks are explored, as are the tensions between the respective theories. A complementary ‘toolbox’ approach to the research process addresses some of the theoretical and methodological challenges presented by each framework. Such an (...) approach provides distinctive insights into nursing practice that the other has ignored or missed. It is argued that by converging the two frameworks into a toolbox approach, it is possible to examine or deconstruct existing practices, whilst also providing an avenue for nurses to reconstruct or change such practices. (shrink) | |
This article places Foucault's 1977 suggestions regarding the reform of French rape law in the context of ongoing feminist debates as to whether rape should be considered a sex crime or a species of assault. When viewed as a disciplinary matrix with both physical and discursive effects, rape and the rape trial clearly contribute to the “hysterization” of women by cultivating complainants' confessions in order to demonstrate their supposed lack of self-knowledge. | |
This paper provides an overview of twenty years of feminist philosophy in Northamerica. The professionalization of feminist theory that has occurred through the mainstreaming of feminist philosophy creates a danger of a gap between theory and practice that creates the danger of co-optation. Three stages of feminist philosophizing are outlined, including the radical critique, gender difference and difference/post-modernist stages. The last stage, it is argued, leads to an conceptual impasse about feminist strategies for social change. | |
Radical feminism has critiqued heterosexuality both as a primary means through which people are constituted as women and as men, and as inherently oppressive for women. Two recent developments challenge this critique: the concept of “virgin” heterosexuality, a form of heterosexuality in which the performance of heterosexual sex, with or without sexual intercourse, is voluntarily chosen, and “queer” heterosexuality, a concept derived from postmodernist and queer theory, which does not only reinscribe, but also actively subverts and disrupts, oppressive categories of (...) gender and sexual orientation. This article analyzes the attempts made in “virgin” and “queer” theory to rehabilitate heterosexuality, and finds both fundamentally flawed from a radical feminist perspective. It ends by considering why such rehabilitatory attempts are currently being made, and what they reveal about heterosexuality. (shrink) No categories | |
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Single mothers spark what Nancy Fraser calls “needs talk,” the language for translating daily life into professional practice and social policy. The author analyzes expert needs talk in 709 case vignettes, published in the United States between 1900 and 1988, in which experts turn single mothers into “file persons,” the basic unit of bureaucratic welfare management. The author shows how expert needs talk in these sources determines single mothers' worthiness for philanthropic or government support according to their conformity with historically (...) specific notions of proper womanhood. Demographic, political, institutional, and especially professional changes help explain the observed shifts in expert needs talk and the social construction of single motherhood. (shrink) No categories | |
This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucauk: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them—the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain—both attempt to think (...) through and thus revisudize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how “feminism as critique” can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both. (shrink) | |
In feminist linguistic analysis, women's speech has often been characterized as "powerless" or as "over-polite"; this paper aims to challenge this notion and to question the eliding of a feminine speech style with femaleness. In order to move beyond a position which judges speech as masculine or feminine, which are stereotypes of behavior, I propose the term "discourse competence" to describe speech where cooperative and competitive strategies are used appropriately. | |
The notion of desire in theorizing pedagogical relations has a long tradition within foundations of education. Contemporary scholarship on desire in educational theory is informed by sexuality studies and queer theory. This article both builds and expands contemporary dialogue on desire as informed by some of the debates within sexuality studies, and feminist and queer theory. In this article, I investigate elements of desire that are considered dangerous in pedagogical contexts such as ?excess? and ?devotion.? I then provide an interpretation (...) of the productive nature of conflict and desire in pedagogical encounters. Finally, I explore the pleasure and pain of desires, tension, and conflict as necessarily dangerous and dangerously necessary elements of learning and pedagogical encounters. (shrink) | |
This article explores how the Portuguese legal system’s efforts to determine paternity of children born outside legal marriage, automatically initiated by the Registry Office when a birth registration does not indicate the father, reveal cultural models which reinforce the naturalisation of the differences between mothers and fathers, with significant effects on the social construction of parental roles and on expectations of family organisation and female sexual behaviour. The article relies on ethnographic data drawn from direct observation of court proceedings for (...) the determination of paternity, as well as interviews with judges and prosecuting counsels all over the country. It is argued that judicial practices in the specific context of courtroom investigations of paternity reinforce gender inequalities in two interrelated ways. On the one hand, they are strengthened in the discursive practices performed during the course of the interactions between judges, prosecuting counsels and the mother of the child, as well as the alleged father. On the other hand, the normative model of family life and the dominant ideology of women’s and men’s relationships, which emphasise women’s socially subordinate position, are revealed by the selective use of DNA testing in paternity cases, based on the judge’s evaluation of the mother’s sexual behaviour. The article argues that legal attempts to establish the paternity of children born outside marriage—though based on novel technical and supposedly objective procedures—tend, nevertheless, to reproduce the prevailing patriarchal structures. (shrink) |
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