Best of
Feminist-Theory

2015

The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory and Marxism at the Intersection


Holly Lewis - 2015
    But few thinkers have attempted to reconcile that knowledge—which is rooted in Marxism—with queer theory. The few who have, meanwhile, usually attempt to do so through issues of libidinal desire and sexual expression. In The Politics of Everybody, Holly Lewis argues powerfully that the emphasis on desire, though seemingly innocuous, is actually symptomatic of neoliberal habits of thought, and consequently, is responsible for a continued focus on the limited politics of identity. Instead, Lewis shows, we should look to the arena of body production, categorization, and exclusion; only through such a reorientation can we create a politics of liberation that is truly inclusive and grounded in lived experience.

All the Beginnings: A Queer Autobiography of the Body


Quinn Eades - 2015
    This is how I learn about love: in the violence of the senses. In the inside. In the outside coming in.This is an astonishing new work from a writer who is concerned not only with the question of how we survive after trauma, but how we thrive ... Quinn weaves together philosophy, autobiography, poetry, and queer theory to achieve a narrative that is as compelling as it is thought provoking, in a voice that is raw, poetic, and unafraid.— Dr Kylie Mirmohamadi

Fresh Courage Take: New Directions by Mormon Women


Jamie Zvirzdin - 2015
    In short, they define, from their diversity, what being a Mormon woman means and what type of path they feel they must take to be true to themselves and their beliefs.Authors include Carli Anderson, Rachael Decker Bailey, Erika Ball, Rachel Brown, Karen Critchfield, Ashley Mae Hoiland, Sylvia Lankford, Marcee Ludlow, Brooke Stoneman, Camille Strate Fairbanks, Colleen Whitley, and Jamie Zvirzdin.

Blood and Visions: Womyn Reconciling with Being Female


Autotomous Womyn's Press - 2015
    With writing and artwork by 10 women who detransitioned from living as trans men (FTM), this anthology offers stories, analysis, and resources for women who struggle with disidentification from their female reality.

Feminist Surveillance Studies


Rachel E. Dubrofsky - 2015
    The contributors to this field-defining collection take up these questions, and in so doing provide new directions for analyzing surveillance. They use feminist theory to expose the ways in which surveillance practices and technologies are tied to systemic forms of discrimination that serve to normalize whiteness, able-bodiedness, capitalism, and heterosexuality. The essays discuss the implications of, among others, patriarchal surveillance in colonial North America, surveillance aimed at curbing the trafficking of women and sex work, women presented as having agency in the creation of the images that display their bodies via social media, full-body airport scanners, and mainstream news media discussion of honor killings in Canada and the concomitant surveillance of Muslim bodies. Rather than rehashing arguments as to whether or not surveillance keeps the state safe, the contributors investigate what constitutes surveillance, who is scrutinized, why, and at what cost. The work fills a gap in feminist scholarship and shows that gender, race, class, and sexuality should be central to any study of surveillance.Contributors. Seantel Anaïs, Mark Andrejevic, Paisley Currah, Sayantani DasGupta, Shamita Das Dasgupta, Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Lisa Jean Moore, Yasmin Jiwani, Ummni Khan, Shoshana Amielle Magnet, Kelli Moore, Lisa Nakamura, Dorothy Roberts, Andrea Smith, Kevin Walby, Megan M. Wood, Laura Hyun Yi Kang

The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body


Luna Dolezal - 2015
    Body shame only finds its full articulation in the presence (actual or imagined) of others within a rule and norm governed milieu. As such, it bridges our personal, individual and embodied experience with the social, cultural and political world that contains us. Luna Dolezal argues that understanding body shame can shed light on how the social is embodied, that is, how the body-experienced in its phenomenological primacy by the subject-becomes a social and cultural artifact, shaped by external forces and demands. The Body and Shame introduces leading twentieth-century phenomenological and sociological accounts of embodied subjectivity through the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. Dolezal examines the embodied, social and political features of body shame. contending that body shame is both a necessary and constitutive part of embodied subjectivity while simultaneously a potential site of oppression and marginalization. Exploring the cultural politics of shame, the final chapters of this work explore the phenomenology of self-presentation and a feminist analysis of shame and gender, with a critical focus on the practice of cosmetic surgery, a site where the body is literally shaped by shame. The Body and Shame will be of great interest to scholars and students in a wide variety of fields, including philosophy, phenomenology, feminist theory, women's studies, social theory, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, and medical humanities.

Feminist Pedagogy in Higher Education: Critical Theory and Practice


Tracy Penny Light - 2015
     This book discusses the processes employed to engage learners by challenging them to ask tough questions and craft complex answers, wrestle with timely problems and posit innovative solutions, and grapple with ethical dilemmas for which they seek just resolutions. Diverse experiences, interests, and perspectives--together with the various teaching and learning styles that participants bring to twenty-first-century universities--necessitate inventive and evolving pedagogical approaches, and these are explored from a critical perspective. The contributors collectively consider the implications of the theory/practice divide, which remains central within academic feminism's role as both a site of social and gender justice and as a part of the academy, and map out some of the ways in which academic feminism is located within the academy today.

Queer Inhumanisms


Mel Chen - 2015
    Contributors examine the queer dimensions of recent moves to think apart from or beyond the human in affect theory, disability studies, critical race theory, animal studies, science studies, ecocriticism, and other new materialisms. Essay topics include race, fabulation, and ecology; parasitology, humans, and mosquitoes; the racialization of advocacy for pit bulls; and queer kinship in Korean films when humans become indistinguishable from weapons. The contributors argue that a nonhuman critical turn in queer theory can and should refocus the field’s founding attention to social structures of dehumanization and oppression. They find new critical energies that allow considerations of justice to operate alongside and through their questioning of the human-nonhuman boundary.Mel Y. Chen, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, also published by Duke University Press. Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America and editor, with Ivy G. Wilson, of Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies.Contributors: Neel Ahuja, Karen Barad, Jayna Brown, Mel Y. Chen, Jack Halberstam, Jinthana Haritaworn, Myra Hird, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Eileen Joy, Eunjung Kim, Dana Luciano, Uri McMillan, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, ​Jasbir K. Puar, Susan Stryker, Kimberly Tallbear, Jeanne Vaccaro, Harlan Weaver, Jami Weinstein

Practising Feminist Political Ecologies (Gender, Development and Environment)


Wendy Harcourt - 2015
    Offering a collective critique of the ‘green economy’, it features the latest analyses of the post-Rio+20 debates alongside a nuanced reading of the impact of the current ecological and economic crises on women as well as their communities and ecologies.This new, politically timely and engaging text puts feminist political ecology back on the map.

Voices for Equality: Ordain Women and Resurgent Mormon Feminism


Gordon Shepherd - 2015
    Spearheaded by a new generation of internet-savvy feminists, equality issues in Mormonism attained high public visibility in 2013 through online profiles posted by the Ordain Women organization and its plea to Church authorities to pray about an expanded role for LDS women. The June 2014 excommunication of OW co-founder Kate Kelly generated increased international media attention. This volume is the first book to provide a comprehensive examination of these issues and is based on chapters written by both scholars and activists. Its twenty-five authors explore in detail theological debates about gender and priesthood authority, the historical and cultural context of these debates, and the current role played by lay activists seeking to stimulate change in the Church.

Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected,,


Kimberlé Crenshaw - 2015
    

The Biopolitics of Gender


Jemima Repo - 2015
    As Jemima Repo argues in this book, gender has come to be the major sexual signifier of the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first century. In fact, in thishistorical excavation of the biopolitical significance of the term, she argues that it could not have emerged at any other time. Repo shows that gender is not originally a feminist term, but emerged from the study of intersex and transsexual persons in the fields of sexology and psychology inthe1950s and 1960s. Prior to the 1950s gender was used to refer to various types of any number of phenomena - sometimes sex, but not necessarily. Its only regular usage was in linguistics, where it was used to classify nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter. In the mid-twentieth century, gendershifted from being a nominator of types to designating the sexual order of things. As with sexuality in the Victorian period, over the last sixty years, the notion of gender has become an entire field of knowledge. Feminists famously took up the term in the 1970s to challenge biological determinism, and in government, women have been replaced by gender in policy-making processes that aim to advance equality between women and men. Gender has also become a key variable in social scientific surveys of different socio-political phenomena like voting, representation, employment, salaries, andparental leave decisions. The Biopolitics of Gender analyzes the strategies and tactics of power involved in the use of gender in sexology and psychology, and subsequently its reversal and counter-deployment by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. It critiques the emergence of gender in demographicscience and the implications of this genealogy for feminist theory and politics today. Drawing on a wide variety of historical and contemporary sources, the book makes a major theoretical argument about gender as a historically specific apparatus of biopower and calls into question the emancipatorypotential of the category in feminist theory and politics.

Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence


Anne Thériault - 2015
    My babysitter’s son, who is five but a whole head taller than me, likes to show me his penis. He does it when his mother isn’t looking. One time when I tell him not to, he holds me down and puts penis on my arm. I bite his shoulder, hard. He starts crying, pulls up his pants and runs upstairs to tell his mother that I bit him. I’m too embarrassed to tell anyone about the penis part, so they all just think I bit him for no reason.