Best of
Feminist-Theory

2012

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle


Silvia Federici - 2012
    Originally inspired by Federici's organizational work in the Wages for Housework movement, the topics discussed include the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, and the development of affective labor. Both a brief history of the international feminist movement and a contemporary critique of capitalism, these writings continue the investigation of the economic roots of violence against women.

Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race


Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman - 2012
    Abdur-Rahman interrogates and challenges cultural theorists' interpretations of sexual transgression in African American literature. She argues that, from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used depictions of erotic transgression to contest popular theories of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference in American culture. Connecting metaphors of sexual transgression to specific historical periods, Abdur-Rahman explains how tropes such as sadomasochism and incest illuminated the psychodynamics of particular racial injuries and suggested forms of social repair and political redress from the time of slavery, through post-Reconstruction and the civil rights and black power movements, to the late twentieth century.Abdur-Rahman brings black feminist, psychoanalytic, critical race, and poststructuralist theories to bear on literary genres from slave narratives to science fiction. Analyzing works by African American writers, including Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler, she shows how literary representations of transgressive sexuality expressed the longings of African Americans for individual and collective freedom. Abdur-Rahman contends that those representations were fundamental to the development of African American forms of literary expression and modes of political intervention and cultural self-fashioning.Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University."Against the Closet is an important and much-needed book, a significant contribution to African American literature, cultural studies, sexuality studies, and critical race theory. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman's close readings of fictional representations of race and sex are nuanced and illuminating, and the history of racial thought and sexual science that she presents is indispensable."—Maurice O. Wallace, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995"In this significant and timely text, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman complicates and expands our understanding of the queerness of blackness, making a welcome contribution to black cultural studies, black queer studies, literary studies, and work on lynching and the making of post-slavery whiteness."—Christina Sharpe, author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

Transformation Now!: Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change


AnaLouise Keating - 2012
    women-of-color feminist/womanist thought and queer studies, inviting us to transform how we think about identity, difference, social justice and social change, metaphysics, reading, and teaching. Through detailed investigations of women of color theories and writings, indigenous thought, and her own personal and pedagogical experiences, Keating develops transformative modes of engagement that move through oppositional approaches to embrace interconnectivity as a framework for identity formation, theorizing, social change, and the possibility of planetary citizenship. Speaking to many dimensions of contemporary scholarship, activism, and social justice work, Transformation Now! calls for and enacts innovative, radically inclusionary ways of reading, teaching, and communicating.

Don't Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities


Victoria LawClayton Dewey - 2012
    One of the few books dealing with community support for issues facing children and families, this reflection on inclusivity in social awareness offers real-life ways to reach out to the families involved in campaigns such as the Occupy Movement. Contributors include the Bay Area Childcare Collective, the London Pro-Feminist Men's Group, and Mamas of Color Rising.

Doing Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity


Susan Archer Mann - 2012
    Organized historically and by theoretical perspectives, author Susan Archer Mann:* Highlights the relationship between feminist theory and political practice and examines the diversity of feminist visions and voices by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and global location* Interweaves the history of feminist thought with the history of the U.S. women's movement to ground feminist perspectives in their socio-historical contexts* Bridges the local and global using theory application sections devoted to feminist analyses of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization* Offers a critical and dynamic approach to theory that is interdisciplinary and inclusive of alternative forms of theory construction, such as poetry, music, and zines* Illuminates how transformations in contemporary feminist thought reflect paradigm shifts from modernity to postmodernity

The Eye of the Crocodile


Val Plumwood - 2012
    Her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1992) has become a classic. In 1985 she was attacked by a crocodile while kayaking alone in the Kakadu national park in the Northern Territory. She was death rolled three times before being released from the crocodile’s jaws. She crawled for hours through swamp with appalling injuries before being rescued. The experience made her well placed to write about cultural responses to death and predation. The first section of The Eye of the Crocodile consists of chapters intended for a book on crocodiles that remained unfinished at the time of Val’s death. The remaining chapters are previously published papers brought together to form an overview of Val’s ideas on death, predation and nature.