This chapter contains section titled: Defining Postcolonial Feminisms US—based Postcolonial Theory Feminist Postcolonial Criticism What about Latin American Postcolonialism? References Further Reading.

Explores what the last few decades of European/American, feminist, and postcolonial science and technology studies can learn from each other. This book proposes new directions for thinking about objectivity, method, and reflexivity in light of the new understandings developed in the post-World War II world.

I argue that postcolonial feminist critiques draw our attention to four phenomena that are easily confused with what I call ?paradigmatic adaptive preference? ? and that the ability to distinguish these phenomena can improve the quality of development interventions. An individual has paradigmatic adaptive preferences (APs) if she perpetuates injustice against herself because her normative worldview is nearly completely distorted. The four look-alike phenomena postcolonial feminist critics help us identify are (a) APs caused by selective value distortion (SAPs), (...) (b) APs caused by forced tradeoffs (TAPs), (c) APs caused by misperceptions of the facts (MAPs), and (d) wellbeing-compatible preferences that are misunderstood because of a lack of cultural or contextual knowledge. The first three, I argue, are non-paradigmatic forms of AP that have gone previously unrecognized and that we need to expand our conceptual vocabulary to describe; the last is not a form of AP at all. Development practitioners can grapple more seriously with the real-world complexities of moral psychology and cross-cultural moral judgments if they are capable of distinguishing paradigmatic AP from the look-alike phenomena. (shrink)

In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-colonial feminisms emanate from), or as a platform to re-center internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually ‘decolonized’. By contrast, this article focuses on the specific contexts, issues and lifeworld concerns that ground anti-colonial feminisms and provides a brief (...) survey of the literature. Because the terms implicated in the analysis (Third World, transnational, women of color, postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous feminisms) are highly contested on their own, I only provide provisional and non-foundational histories and definitions for the purposes of resisting philosophical appropriations of anti-colonial feminist theory. (shrink)

In _Sciences from Below_, the esteemed feminist science studies scholar Sandra Harding synthesizes modernity studies with progressive tendencies in science and technology studies to suggest how scientific and technological pursuits might be more productively linked to social justice projects around the world. Harding illuminates the idea of multiple modernities as well as the major contributions of post-Kuhnian Western, feminist, and postcolonial science studies. She explains how these schools of thought can help those seeking to implement progressive social projects refine (...) their thinking to overcome limiting ideas about what modernity and modernization are, the objectivity of scientific knowledge, patriarchy, and Eurocentricity. She also reveals how ideas about gender and colonialism frame the conventional contrast between modernity and tradition. As she has done before, Harding points the way forward in _Sciences from Below_. Describing the work of the post-Kuhnian science studies scholars Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, and the team of Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowtony, and Peter Scott, Harding reveals how, from different perspectives, they provide useful resources for rethinking the modernity versus tradition binary and its effects on the production of scientific knowledge. Yet, for the most part, they do not take feminist or postcolonial critiques into account. As Harding demonstrates, feminist science studies and postcolonial science studies have vital contributions to make; they bring to light not only the male supremacist investments in the Western conception of modernity and the historical and epistemological bases of Western science but also the empirical knowledge traditions of the global South. _Sciences from Below_ is a clear and compelling argument that modernity studies and post-Kuhnian, feminist, and postcolonial sciences studies each have something important, and necessary, to offer to those formulating socially progressive scientific research and policy. (shrink)

Abstract:Gayatri Spivak and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writings are regularly and justifiably cited in reference to postcolonial and decolonial feminisms. Both grapple with the thorny matter of representing subalternity and indigeneity, not only in Eurocentric scholarship, but also by migrant and diasporic academics and national elites. In this commentary, I foreground how Spivak and Rivera Cusicanqui's persistent critiques of representation are imperative because they further postcolonial and decolonial feminist scholarship and call for dialogues between them. Such dialogues entail (...) reaching across linguistic, historical, geographical, political, and theoretical boundaries to establish anti-colonial alliances. (shrink)

This paper discusses Diana Meyers's book in light of postcolonial feminist insights. It argues that though Meyers's defense of empathy is admirably sensitive to the ways philosophical concepts and popular discourses can undermine our empathetic capacities, building a human rights culture requires attention to the relational and distributional dimensions of empathy. Meyers's criticism of the expectation of moral purity from victims attests to the richness of her work on agency and helps dismantle unduly narrow conceptions of who counts as (...) a victim of a human rights violation. Meyers's argument for empathy over sympathy is especially useful for understanding culturally encoded forms of degradation. However, human rights violations are caused not only by empathy deficits; they are caused also by empathy excesses toward some people and savior mentalities that can coexist with empathy. Empathy should be supplemented by a political analysis that helps us identify the causes of global injustice. (shrink)

The article interrogates transnational feminisms as a concept and as a practice. It frames its analysis using contemporary theories of globalization and the older concept of global sisterhood as a backdrop to the concept of transnational feminism. To assess the practical dimension of transnational feminisms, the analysis focuses on women's rights as a human rights movement and the transnationalization of Latin American feminisms. The article suggests that, although transnational feminisms (particularly feminist postcolonial theories) envision themselves (...) in a new frame and see themselves as committed to intersectional analysis and transversal politics, there are important gaps between the intentions (theory, tactics) and outcomes of their theory and practice. (shrink)

This article discusses the emergence of the concept of ‘transnational feminisms’ as a differentiated notion from ‘global sisterhood’ within feminist postcolonial criticism. This is done in order to examine its usefulness for interrogating the globalization of reproductive technologies and women’s right to selfdetermination over their own bodies by using these technologies. In particular, women’s use of technologies for assisted conception, and the local and global transactions in reproductive body parts form a testing ground for transnational feminisms. Does (...) the construction of individual reproductive rights still leave some ground for women’s collective struggles? It is proposed that, if at all, transnational solidarity on this issue is possible, it will have to be built on the concept of universal ethical norms regarding human dignity. (shrink)

Abstract:Across public and intellectual audiences, postcolonial feminism is often understood to only apply to the “post-colony”. This assumption fails to capture the significant intellectual contributions of postcolonial feminist theory, whilst relegating postcolonial feminist scholars' insights to the margins of the academy and social theory. This move reproduces temporal and geographic logics that presume imperialism “happened” only in the past (and is complete/over) and only in territories counted as the properties of (former) empires (i.e. in the global South (...) and not the global North). In this essay, we write against this conceptualization by highlighting some vital interventions of postcolonial feminist theory and demonstrating how the books under review build new theoretical pathways. We argue for the contemporary relevance of postcolonial feminism as a diverse body of theory offering analytical insights that extend beyond ‘the postcolony’ or a singular application to ‘women's lives’. In particular, we chart the significance of postcolonial feminisms as a lens through which we might ‘unsettle the global south’. Engaging recent calls for critical attention to the global South as a site of theory (rather than merely data extraction), we insist upon dislocating ‘the south’ from an imposed geographic fixity, which too often simply reproduces place-based and racialized hierarchies of ‘civility’ or modernity inherited from colonial science. Postcolonial feminist theory suggests we might instead view ‘south’ as a flexible and mobile marker that draws our gaze to the operation of imperial power, manifest in complex inequalities articulated at local and global scales. In this sense, we argue that ‘theorizing from the south’ requires both a divestment from the usual business of intellectual extraction that positions the global South as source of unprocessed data or ethnographic case study, and a kind of counter-mapping that centralizes the insights and theories that emerge from positions of struggle and marginality. Three themes organize our analysis of the monographs reviewed here and construct our argument about the role of postcolonial feminism in ‘unsettling’ imperial geographic imaginaries that haunt invocations of ‘the global south’. These theories include: (1) the central role of gender and sexuality in racialized imperialist projects; (2) liberal modernity and colonial definitions of ‘the human’; and (3) alternative approaches to capitalism that highlight hegemonic white property regimes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionAnthropocene Feminisms: Rethinking the UnthinkableClaire Colebrook and Jami WeinsteinIn her recent lecture on the Anthropocene (to which she adds the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene), Donna Haraway expresses some alarm that after two major insights into what counts as thinkable, it was “anthropos” that became the term for the post-Holocene (Haraway 2014). Haraway declares, with emphasis, that it is “literally unthinkable” to work with the individual unit of “man” (...) if one is to do good intellectual work. For Haraway, the two knowledge events that ought to have precluded the use of the figure of the “anthropos” are: first, the acceptance that any seeming individual is the outcome of a series of complex relations and must be studied as such (so there would be no epoch with anything, let alone “man,” as its first cause), and, second, intellectual inquiry has acknowledged a general becoming-with, such that in order to be anything at all, “one” must be in a dynamic relation. Haraway’s work is exemplary of post-liberal feminist resistance to the figure of man—as subject, agent, and center of knowing. Terms like “Woman” or “the feminine” do not extend the field occupied by man; they instead create a different intensity. So when Haraway questions the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene she neither asks that women, too, be included in those who have scarred the planet, nor does she claim that “Woman” would occupy some innocent outside. Instead, she proposes that one think of the “anthropos” as untimely, as out of sync with an intellectual milieu that theorizes the death of the subject and the eclipse of the human, and has even begun to renounce the notion of life in itself. It is odd that in the face of this destruction of any possibility of thinking by [End Page 167] way of individualism, the epic gesture of the present deploys the figure of the “anthropos,” as it should be unthinkable today to return to the figure of man.When Haraway invokes what is literally unthinkable, and then gestures to the Anthropocene, she suggests that perhaps the figure of the Anthropocene is a form of unthinking, and that it is precisely when complexities, timescales, predictions, manageability, and any form of sustainability ought to disturb and trouble our logics that we cease to think and ask for a single cause for an entire epoch. If this is so, and the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene is a reaction formation, then we might see the skirmishes and turf wars that surround the golden spike1 as diversions. If we spend our time disputing just when it was that man started to change the planet, then we allow a contested point in time to pass itself off as thinking, all the while allowing the intensive multiplicity of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene to remain unthought. By asking when the Anthropocene began, we revive a modified version of the time of man; once again, man is placed as the agent of history, albeit unwittingly, and he can look back upon and assess the past of his own making. Haraway is not alone in suggesting that such conceptions of a single line of time, and a conception of first cause, are highly gendered and racialized. The figure of “man” who creates his own history and recognizes himself as having come into being through a time that is readable is bound up with hegemonic conceptions of modernity, and has long been the target of feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critique (e.g., Foucault 1970; Amin 1989; Grosz 2004). If it is literally unthinkable to do good work from the premises of a methodological individualism, then asking who or what caused the Anthropocene, or when it began, would amount to a form of un-thinking or not-thinking. At the same time, perhaps the Anthropocene is literally unthinkable in a sense that marks a more positive and profound absurdity. Let us accept, following Haraway, that all “good work” both acknowledges the impossibility of accounting for the complexity of life by way of bounded, individual singularity, and dispenses with the exceptional man of reason as its foundation. If we do, what the Anthropocene... (shrink)

RACINE L and PETRUCKA P. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 12–20 Enhancing decolonization and knowledge transfer in nursing research with non-western populations: examining the congruence between primary healthcare and postcolonial feminist approachesThis article is a call for reflection from two distinct programs of research which converge on common interests pertaining to issues of health, social justice, and globalization. One of the authors has developed a research program related to the health and well-being of non-western populations, while the other author has (...) expanded the field of Aboriginal and international research in Canada and abroad. Based on examples drawn from our respective programs of research, we suggest conciliating the philosophy of primary healthcare to postcolonial feminism for decolonizing research and enhancing knowledge transfer with non-western populations. We contend that applying the theoretical and methodological strengths of these two approaches is a means to decolonize nursing research and to avoid western neocolonization. In conciliating primary health care and postcolonial feminism, the goal is to enhance the pragmatic relevance of postcolonial feminism to generate resistance through transformative research for achieving social justice. In tapping into the synergistic and complementary epistemological assumptions of the philosophy of primary health care and postcolonial ‘feminisms’, nurse researchers reinforce the anti-oppresive goals of postcolonial feminist research. Consequently, this approach may enhance both decolonization and knowledge transfer through strategies like photovoice. (shrink)

Argues for postcoloniality as a model for philosophical practice. In this ambitious book, Namita Goswami draws on continental philosophy, postcolonial criticism, critical race theory, and African American and postcolonial feminisms to offer postcoloniality as a model for philosophical practice. Moving among and between texts, traditions, and frameworks, including the work of Gayatri Spivak, Theodor Adorno, Barbara Christian, Paul Gilroy, Neil Lazarus, and Hortense Spillers, among others, she charts a journey that takes us beyond Eurocentrism by understanding postcoloniality (...) as the pursuit of heterogeneity, that is, of a non-antagonistic understanding of difference. Recognizing that philosophy, feminism, and postcolonial theory share a common concern with the concept of heterogeneity, Goswami shows how postcoloniality empowers us to engage more productively the relationships between these disciplines. Subjects That Matter confronts the ways Eurocentrism, an identity politics that considers difference as inherently oppositional, relegates minority traditions to a diagnostic and/or corrective standpoint to prevent their general implications from playing a critical and transformative role in how we understand subjectivity and agency. Through unexpected, often surprising, and thought-provoking analytic connections and continuities, this book’s interdisciplinary approach reveals a postcolonial pluralism that expands philosophical resources, confounds and limits our habitual disciplinary lexicons, and opens up new areas of inquiry. “This is a groundbreaking contribution to a number of distinct but intersecting fields.” — Amy Allen, author of The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. (shrink)

The essays in this volume bring to their focuses on philosophical issues the new angles of vision created by the multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminisms that have been developing around us.

Abstract:This paper takes Chicana/Xicana indigeneity as a productive and problematic site to consider the vexed conjuncture between decolonial and postcolonial approaches to critical knowledge production. I examine the intersection between Chicana and Native feminisms as a point of entry to consider how the incommensurabilities between these formations get played out within specific sites of knowledge production. I read my positionality as a Californio Rancho descendent to explore urgent questions of landedness raised by Indigenous studies scholars and consider how (...) we might productively center questions of settlement within Chicana feminism. While Chicana relationships to land are varied, I reflect on my own positionality as a “settler Xicana” in an effort to sense the political and epistemic stakes for centering decolonial approaches in conversation with postcolonial/transnational feminisms. (shrink)

Research often characterized as “new materialist” has staged a return/turn to nature in social and critical theory by bringing “matter” into the purview of our research. While this growing impetus to take nature seriously fosters new types of interdisciplinarity and thus new resources for knowing our nature-cultural worlds, its capacity to deal with power’s imbrication in how we understand “nature” is curtailed by its failures to engage substantively with the epistemological interventions of postcolonial feminist science studies. The citational practices (...) of many new materialist thinkers eschew the existence of what Sandra Harding has called “a world of sciences.” I argue that the “science” privileged and often conflated with matter in new materialist storytelling is the same science destabilized by postcolonial feminist science studies. This does not mean that new materialist feminisms and postcolonial feminist science studies are necessarily at odds, as new materialist storytelling and prevailing conceptualizations of the postcolonial seem to suggest. On the contrary, I suggest that thinking creatively, capaciously, pluralistically, and thus irreverently with respect to the rules of science––about the boundaries and meanings of matter, “life,” and “humanness”––could be understood as a central project for a postcolonial feminist science studies. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on the work of the South Asian Network for Gender Transformation to show how it goes beyond the current turn to the Global South in much contemporary transnational feminisms. It does so in two ways. One, as evident in the name, it defines a regional imaginary, which is place-based and informed by the long history of interactions in the area beyond the colonial, postcolonial, and recent global forces, as well as in conversation with (...) discourses and practices from the North. Second, its praxis connects activists across borders in a process of mutual learning that acknowledges power inequalities and draws upon local as well as transnational feminist theories and methodologies to enable sustainable collaborations for social and gender justice in the region. Thus, rather than reproducing the North/south binaries with its attendant erasures SANGAT seeks to go beyond them to develop place-based yet connected ‘solidarities of epistemologies’ and praxis. (shrink)

The first version of this piece was written for the opening panel of the 2017 Conference of the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory in Florida. The panel, “Decolonial Feminism: Theories and Praxis,” offered the opportunity for Black and Latinx feminist philosophers and decolonial scholars to consider their arrival to decolonial feminisms, their various points of emergence, and the utility of decolonial politics for liberation movements and organizing. I was prepared to discuss some genealogies of US Latina decolonial (...) feminisms with a focus on the relationship of decolonial feminisms to other feminist articulations—for example, a consideration of the relation and divergence between decolonial and postcolonial feminism. I was particularly interested in examining some of the “decolonizing constellations of resistance and love” created by Black, Indigenous, Latinx feminisms. I wanted to track the intergenerational labor of relationality as a part of women of color politics and to discuss how these politics unseat coloniality in its variant iterations. (shrink)

"Although the feminist debate on the ethics of care has demonstrated that philosophical concepts are gender-laden, the relation of care to justice and autonomy is not self- explanatory. Moreover, given its Western context, the normative relevance of the care debate to non-Western feminisms remains problematic. This book addresses this debate and investigates the extent to which notions of justice and autonomy can be reformulated without Eurocentrism from the perspective of care. In this endeavour, this book maps the shifts in (...) feminist approaches to care from the colonial to the post-colonial periods, taking both inter- disciplinarity and inter- sectionality into account. The book also argues that the feminist debate on care has contributed towards making philosophy's boundaries with culture and social science more porous."--Rabat de la jaquette. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This special issue provokes a conversation between decolonial and postcolonial feminisms by asking what they are, how they speak about each other, and how they can speak to each other. Read together, the articles engage and sometimes trouble the temporal and spatial distinctions drawn between decolonial and postcolonial approaches. Kiran Asher explores overlaps between decolonial and postcolonial thought by comparing the ideas of Gayatri (...) Chakravorty Spivak and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui on representation. Aimee Carrillo Rowe also stages a dialogue between these approaches when interrogating her family ’s Chican@ settler history. Tiara R. Na’puti and Judy Rohrer offer an account of how recent scholarship from Hawai‘i and Guåhan (Guam) has elaborated Indigenous epistemologies in settler contexts. Two articles excavate colonialism’s relationship to science: Jennifer Hamilton, Banu Subramaniam, and Angela Willey explore how two instances of population genetic research illustrate the racialized knowledge systems that undergirded colonialism, while Sandra Harding points out how the colonization of Latin America contributed to the edifice of Western science. In a related vein, Breny Mendoza centers the material role of Abya Yala (the preferred term for Latin America) in not just Spanish colonialism but British colonial expansionism and eventually the eclipsing of China. Patricia A. Schechter reflects on her trajectory as a scholar and teacher of US women’s history and the insights she has gained through 504Preface engaging decolonial scholarship. Amy Piedalue and Susmita Rishi argue for a more expansive understanding of postcolonial feminism’s reach as they review recently published titles in the field. Although Anna Tsing and Paulla Ebron’s review of feminist scholarship about the Anthropocene does not directly mention postcolonial or decolonial approaches, it nonetheless engages relevant scholarship on the environmental impact of settler modernization and capitalism. An art essay by Hyunji Kwon introduces the largely unrecognized paintings of former comfort woman Duk-kyung Kang (1929–1997) and focuses on the potential of Kang’s work to challenge Japanese colonial hierarchies. Our featured poets in this issue are Emily Zhang, Megan Kaminski, and Raina J. León. Both postcolonial and decolonial scholars have been committed to critiquing the material and epistemic legacies of colonialism. The distinctions that are frequently drawn between the two approaches, however, have been a source of disquiet to the editors of Feminist Studies, and they prompted our journal’s call for papers in 2016. A common temporal marking that concerned us was the eclipsing of postcolonialism, which was increasingly becoming viewed as passé, and a setting up of decolonial feminism as always already better in time. Decolonial approaches sometimes depicted postcolonial feminism as being only about the past, despite postcolonial feminism’s stated commitment to studying the continuing impact of colonial processes and its complex use of the prefix “post.” Our concern was, as well, with misrepresentations of postcolonial feminist priorities. The depiction of postcolonial feminism as deconstructive, abstract, elite theory confined to the ambit of modern colonial knowledge systems overlooked the important quandaries that postcolonial feminism raised about how to represent marginalized people ethically and, indeed, how to understand the very desire to represent the marginalized—whether or not we claim belonging to them. Postcolonial feminists warned against an easy embrace of alterity, noting that the desire for positioning oneself outside colonialism could naively ignore the power of colonial discourses to frame colonialism’s Other. Another set of hopes for this special issue was to dwell on the spatial markings of decolonial and postcolonial feminisms: decolonial feminism is often associated with Indigenous scholars and those from the Americas, and postcolonial feminism with scholars from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These regional emphases, although not always as tidy as sometimes depicted, have produced distinct intellectual Preface 505 priorities. We must heed decolonial feminism’s insistence on engaging with the genocidal history of settler colonialism, the current manifestations of the violent dispossession of land, and its constitution of gendered racial capitalism the world over. (FeministStudies will soon publish a special issue on Indigenous Feminisms). Yet, if postcolonial feminism is circumscribed geographically to only South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, we risk ignoring its powerful transcontinental mapping of imperial gender formations and its scrupulous attention to the ethics of representing... (shrink)

This article explores the problems and possibilities of different feminist theoretical models of identity for challenging women's symbolic and strategic positioning in the discourses and conflicts that produce national, ethnic and racialized community identities. The discussion focuses on two of the most popular alternative models to emerge within white western feminism, the nomad and the cyborg, while also considering some other suggested paradigm shifts emerging from diasporic and postcolonial feminisms. It asks how successfully these feminist alternative models of (...) the self and community identities deal with two key issues relating to women's positioning in prevailing identity discourses – on the one hand, women's relationship to questions of ‘place’, location and dislocation, and on the other, questions of female embodiment and the ways in which the specifically female body becomes both a symbolic and material target of conflict and contestation in processes of constituting community identities. (shrink)

La pregunta por la sujeto de enunciación emerge de una experiencia académica y nutre la visibilización de las diferencias que nos atraviesan como mujeres. Revisar las heridas abiertas que la invasión-conquista-colonización-evangelización europea provocó con la implantación de la matriz moderna, colonial, capitalista, patriarcal, occidental permite localizar la doble subalternidad de las mujeres latinoamericanas. Un desencuentro con el humanismo académico permite traducir las raíces que nos atraviesan a nosotras, las mujeres de América Latina. El constructo delimita en la designación un espacio (...) común, surgido ahora, de una experiencia común que disloca los discursos hegemónicos y gesta un "entre" el feminismo occidental y el feminismo poscolonial, que habilita particulares puntos de vistas en los devenires de mujeres como potencia epistemológica-política. The question of the subject of enunciation emerges from an academic experience and nourishes the visibility of the differences that cross us as women. Revising the open wounds that European invasion-conquest-colonization-evangelization is urgent for us. The occidental, modern, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, implanted matrix permits to locate the double subordination of Latin American women. A disencounter with the academic humanism allows to translate the roots that cross us, the women of Latin America. In its designation the construct delimits a common space. Now this common space emerges from a common experience which dislocates hegemonic discourses and makes an "in between" among occidental and postcolonial feminisms, which enables individual views on women´s processes as epistemological and political power. (shrink)

Debates about cosmopolitanism in the spheres of political philosophy, sociology and postcolonial criticism have on the whole ignored specific histories of the cosmopolitan imagination and its vernacular expressions in everyday life. This article draws on aspects of the urban and often feminized worlds of entertainment, commerce, the arts and the emotions in metropolitan England during the first decades of the 20th century, in which an interest in abroad and cultural ‘others’ increasingly signalled an engagement with the new, in order (...) to argue for a notion of cosmopolitan modernity. This should be understood not just as a reflexive stance of openness, but also as a dialogic formation – a counterculture – part of a psychic and often gendered revolt against the conservatism and xenophobia of the parental culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 379 Amy Bhatt The Butterfly Effect of Women’s Studies My entry into women’s studies began over two decades ago when I was an undergraduate at Emory University. I took Introduction to Women’s Studies in 1998, the same year that Feminist Studies published a formative issue on the evolution of women’s studies in the academy. I turned to doctoral (...) programs in women’s studies after graduation, all the while growing aware of the heated debates over the future (and the past) of the field, the challenges of crafting interdisciplinary graduate programs, the relationship between academic and activist feminisms, and the ramifications of institutionalization. By the time I entered the University of Washington’s PhD program in 2004, these conversations were further enlivened by the expansion of graduate degrees and certificates across the country and internationally. In 2017, I was promoted to associate professor after being hired as the first women’s studies tenure-track faculty member at my current institution, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Having been a part of three differently situated women’s studies programs/departments, I have experienced both the advantages that the field offers for engaged scholarship and teaching, but also the conceptual, resourcing, and workload problems that arise from doing interdisciplinary work. While not engaging the longer history of the scholarly and institutional evolution of women’s studies, my perspective as a relatively recently minted PhD student considers two areas: the promises and pitfalls of 380 Amy Bhatt graduate training (particularly in light of a constricted academic job market) and the impact of integrating women’s studies into the academy. Impossibilities and Promises In her introduction to a special forum on the paradoxes and challenges of women’s studies in graduate education in a 2003 issue of Feminist Studies (which took up the themes raised in the 1998 issue), Pamela Caughie points out that tension is at the core of women’s studies: “Interdisciplinary work depends on disciplinary knowledges; professional training may thwart social activism; theory cannot always be applied.”1 While women ’s studies programs have proliferated across higher education, even ardent feminist academics have levied forceful arguments against institutionalizing women’s studies as stand-alone units. In the same Feminist Studies article, Caughie argues that women’s studies should avoid “disciplining interdisciplinarity,” in part, because such attempts presume a (false) coherence in traditional disciplines that is oppositional to the interstitial nature of interdisciplinarity. While she advocates for graduate training in the field, she expresses concern that by hiring faculty in women’s studies and advocating for a shared research agenda, “we risk reproducing rather than critiquing disciplinary structures.”2 Likewise, in her introduction to Women’s Studies on the Edge, Joan Wallach Scott argues that, because of its formalization within the academy, women’s studies has lost its connection to activism and institutional critique.3 And perhaps most famously, Wendy Brown argues that the work of feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonial theory ought to be returned to the disciplines, rather than remain within the separate, 1. Pamela L. Caughie, “Graduate Education in Women’s Studies: Paradoxes and Challenges (Introduction to Forum),” Feminist Studies 29, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 406. 2. Pamela L. Caughie, “Professional Identity Politics,” Feminist Studies 29, no. 2 (2003): 430. See also Robyn R. Warhol, “Nice Work, If You Can Get It— And If You Can’t? Building Women’s Studies Without Tenure Lines,” in Women’s Studies on Its Own, ed. Robyn Wiegman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 224–32. 3. Joan Wallach Scott, “Introduction: Feminism’s Critical Edge,” in Women’s Studies on the Edge, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–16. Amy Bhatt 381 often marginalized, domain of women’s studies.4 Such critics caution against the formalization of and, in some cases, expansion of women’s studies across academe. On the other hand, advocates of women’s studies point out that the disciplines themselves are a taxonomy that reflects particular power/content /methodologicalinterventionsandthattheyarenotself-evidentspaces of knowledge production. They argue that formalization ought to be celebrated and that the debate over interdisciplinarity versus traditional disciplines has... (shrink)

In this article, I draw on theories of gender performativity and on postcolonial African feminisms to develop an account of femininities in the rural context of northern Ghana. In doing this, I reflect on Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative, that is, as constituted by the reiterative power of discourse to create and also constrain that which it names. Through an analysis of the findings from my participant observation fieldwork amongst the Dagaaba community in Serekpere in north-western (...) Ghana, I demonstrate that there exists a profound resonance between the theories of performativity of gender and Dagaaba constructions of gender identities and power relations. The key assumptions of performativity theories are instructive in helping to make sense of the subtleties of gendered performance and power relations in this Dagaaba community. This article diverges from Butlerian theories of gender performativity by focusing on heteronormative marriage practices and the role they play in forming gendered identities. In this regard, it participates in acts of cultural translation – between European and North American settings and a West African milieu. Based on my analysis of the performative practices that constitute gender relations amongst the Dagaaba, I argue that femininity can be understood as forming a continuum, namely: ‘ideal woman’, ‘woman’ and ‘beyond woman’. (shrink)

This article focuses on the articulations of migration and gender, from the vantage point of women whose feminist experiences have been both enriched and challenged by migration and vice versa. It presents the results of a qualitative research study of five Latin American women who migrated to Barcelona and felt close to feminisms. The author draws on feminist and postcolonial approaches to migration studies that highlight the active role women play in migratory processes as well as how intersectional (...) variables of ethnic origin, socioeconomic class, education and family contexts are articulated, configuring different power relations and resources in specific sociohistorical contexts. The results challenge widespread stereotypes about migrant women by revealing a rich diversity of profiles, motivations and migratory pathways, as well as how informants’ experiences of social activism across national borders have transformed their subject formation processes and re-positioned them as active subjects of political action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:298 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Priti Ramamurthy AlterNotes on the Politics of Women’s Studies Graduate Certificates Jennifer Nash’s “Feminist Credentials: Notes on the Politics of Women ’s Studies Graduate Certificates,” published in this same issue of Feminist Studies, provokes a crucial, if difficult, conversation about graduate certificates in women’s studies.1 Nash asks us to question the value of graduate certificates in two (...) registers: first, if the certificate is valuable to those doing PhDs in the disciplines—as professional certification in feminist theory and interdisciplinarity—is women’s studies reproducing its own discounting by continuing to privilege disciplinary formations? And, second, in the highly constrained job market for academic jobs in women’s studies, do those with graduate certificates in women’s studies and PhDs in the disciplines compete with women’s studies PhDs, thereby undercutting the latter’s distinction and chances of getting academic jobs in the very field in which they have been trained? Nash makes it clear that she is not suggesting the graduate certificate be eliminated, nor that only women’s studies PhDs be hired for women’s studies jobs, but rather that this predicament is an effect of the corporatization of the university. To elaborate on the nuance in Nash’s argument and not reproduce the logic of supply and demand that the neoliberal university is producing, I’d like to raise other aporias in the relationship between graduate certificates and PhD education and point to alternate possibilities. 1. In keeping with Nash’s essay, I am using the term “women’s studies” throughout this alternote as well. Priti Ramamurthy 299 The fiscal realities in favor of the graduate certificate in women’s studies highlighted by Nash are all too real. An additional reality is that graduate certificate students subtend women’s studies PhD programs in vital ways. In terms of course offerings, graduate students in certificate programs take a mix of core and elective classes. Given the very small size of most incoming women’s studies PhD student cohorts, without graduate certificate students in women’s studies, departments would be hard pressed to justify offering core and elective courses. For women’s studies faculty, the opportunity to teach not just core but elective courses that draw on their areas or sub-fields of expertise is enabled by graduate certificate students taking their courses. For women’s studies PhD students, this provides a larger range of elective courses to choose from. Many graduate certificate students shape their doctoral projects deeply with the knowledges they get from the certificate courses. Beyond the courses they are required to take, graduate certificate students often continue to work with women’s studies faculty and invite them to serve on their PhD committees. On the one hand, we may posit, as Nash does, that women’s studies faculty thereby service students in other disciplines, but on the other hand, the feminist knowledge produced in the process is exciting and valuable for not just their disciplines but for women’s studies. Departments such as history, geography, and anthropology may have a large cohort of feminist scholars, but graduate certificate students still seek out feminist scholars in women’s studies for their sub-discipline or area studies, and for methodological and/ or theoretical expertise. Unfortunately, many disciplinary and interdisciplinary departments still lack feminist scholars, and in these departments graduate certificate students make important feminist interventions through their doctoral research. To take a recent example, Karin Eriksson, a doctoral student in Scandinavian studies at the University of Washington, was transformed by her GWSS graduate certificate coursework in women of color, indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms, queer studies, and feminist epistemologies. She is questioning why her department does not offer a single course on settler colonialism and Sámi ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies. Her doctoral work, in close collaboration with Sámi indigenous and feminist activists and communities in Sweden, will address questions of settler colonialism. Not only does Scandinavian studies get transformed in the process, but so does women’s studies, especially our own doctoral program and 300 Priti Ramamurthy the students in it who had not engaged with the unique feminist issues raised... (shrink)

Acknowledgements -- Some notes on terminology -- Introduction -- Early feminist thought -- Liberalism and beyond : mainstream feminism in the nineteenth century -- The contribution of Marx and Engels -- The vote and after : mainstream feminism in the United States and Britain from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War -- Left-wing feminism in Britain and the United States -- Marxist feminism in Germany and Russia -- Feminism after the second World War -- Liberalism and beyond (...) : feminism and equal rights from the 1960s -- Radical feminism and the concept of patriarchy -- Radical feminism : patriarchy in private and public life -- Marxist and socialist feminism from the 1960s -- Theoretical developments : postmodern feminisms and beyond -- Theoretical developments : postcolonial feminism, black feminism and intersectionality -- Western feminist theory in the twenty first century : developments in liberal and socialist thought -- Western feminism in the twenty first century: continuities, challenges and change -- Conclusions: feminist political theory today -- Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

Reading Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity interweaves classical and contemporary writings from the social sciences and the humanities to represent feminist thought from the late eighteenth century to the present. Editors Susan Archer Mann and Ashly Suzanne Patterson pay close attention to the multiplicity and diversity of feminist voices, visions, and vantage points by race, class, gender, sexuality, and global location. Along with more conventional forms of theorizing, this anthology points to multiple sites of theory production--both inside and outside (...) of the academy--and includes personal narratives, poems, short stories, zines, and even music lyrics. Offering a truly global perspective, the book devotes three chapters and more than thirty readings to the topics of colonialism, imperialism and globalization. It also provides extensive coverage of third-wave feminism, poststructuralism, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and transnational feminisms. (shrink)

Ecofeminist political philosophy is an area of intellectual inquiry that examines the political status of that which we call “nature” using the insights, theoretical tools, and ethical commitments of ecological feminisms and other liberatory theories such as critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, environmental philosophy, and feminism. Ecofeminist political philosophy is concerned with questions regarding the possibilities opened by the recognition of agency and subjectivity for the more-than-human world; and it asks how we can respond politically to (...) the more-than-human world on mutual, dialogical terms. Such philosophy insists that a gendered and liberatory analysis is needed to adequately address the environmental dilemma of how to include nonhuman nature as co-interlocutor in the green public sphere. It also asks critical questions of “traditional” philosophies that exclude the more-than-human world from ethico-political consideration. These themes run throughout the work of three contemporary environmental feminist theorists who compellingly examine the entanglements between concepts and categories of gender, nature, and the political: specifically, the work of ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood, radical democratic theorist Catriona Sandilands, and feminist phenomenologist and philosopher of place Bonnie Mann. Karen Warren’s quilt metaphor shows how such ecofeminist political philosophy fits into the larger tapestry of ecofeminism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:178 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nathan Snaza Biopolitics without Bodies: Feminism and the Feeling of Life Against a restrictive and imperialist concept of “the human,” which has become globalized during the long march of colonialist, heterosexist modernity, Samantha Frost’s Biocultural Creatures summons “counter-concepts” of the human that might authorize new political possibilities and theories of what it means to be human. She (...) writes, “These counter-concepts of the human are creatures who are embedded in various ecologies and networks of relations and who can integrate their acknowledgement of their embodiment, animality, physicality, dependence, and vulnerability into their self-conception and their orientation toward and modes of being in the world” (3). As this formulation suggests, whatever the new theory of the human is, it has been emerging at the edges of imperialist humanism for some time in a number of distinct political and intellectual projects clustering around decolonization, feminism, queer critique, technoscience, and ecology.1 Frost’s book, 1. Vandana Shiva and Ingunn Moser, editors, Biopolitics: A Feminist and Ecological Reader on Biotechnology (London: Zed Books, 1995); Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey, eds., Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017); Sandra Harding, Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Sandra Harding, ed., The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 179 Nathan Snaza Books Discussed in This Essay Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human. Samantha Frost. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Flourishing Thought: Democracy in an Age of Data Hoards. Ruth A. Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. The Biopolitics of Embryos and Alphabets: A Reproductive History of the Nonhuman. Ruth A. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. The Economization of Life. Michelle Murphy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. along with recent work by Michelle Murphy and Ruth Miller, among many other feminist biopolitical thinkers, summons us to reconceive and decolonize the human by feeling it differently, and in so doing, open our intellectual and political projects toward what Miller calls “democracy as a nonhuman affair” in The Biopolitics of Embryos and Alphabets (9). My sense is that this reconception throws into question the ways that we have understood both the human and politics through specific ideas about bodies. The body has a certain phenomenological obviousness for (some) humans, which might explain why it has been so central to most political projects of modernity, many of which share at least some commitment to the liberal individual as a self-contained entity.2 However, something else is beginning to press on contemporary feminist biopolitical thought. Karen Barad’s claim that “[o]bjects are not already 2. For a rich overview of the ways in which the body has animated feminist thought and politics, especially in light of debates in the physical and biological sciences, see Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (New York: Routledge, 1990. A different sense of the body begins to appear a few years later in Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 180 Nathan Snaza there; they emerge through specific practices” attunes us to this new orientation.3 For Barad, knowledge practices are open-ended, and “the differential constitutions of human and nonhuman designate particular phenomena that are themselves implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity, including their enfolding and reconstitution in the reconfiguring of apparatuses.”4 In other words, knowledge emerges from the world through “cuts” that reconfigure it: entities—such as “the body” or “the human”—come into being through specific apparatuses. These include theoretical concepts: “Theorizing, like experimenting, is a material practice.”5 The concept of the body, then, is a material part of the intra-active becoming of the world in knowledge production—its meaning exceeds the fact of its existence. While the body has been useful to an enormous number of projects, contemporary feminist thought, in a wide variety of ways, is feeling... (shrink)

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice explores the intersections of the carceral in projects of oppression, while at the same time providing intellectual, pragmatic, and undetermined paths toward abolition. Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional political project calling for the end of the social structured by settler colonialism, anti-black racism, and related oppressions. Beyond this, prison abolition is a constructive project that imagines and strives for a transformed world in which justice (...) is not equated with punishment, and accountability is not equated with caging. Composed of sixteen chapters by an international team of scholars and activists, with a Foreword by Perry Zurn and an Afterword by Justin Piché, the book is divided into four themes: - Prisons and Racism - Prisons and Settler Colonialism - Anti-Carceral Feminisms - Multispecies Carceralities. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, and scholars working in the areas of Critical Prison Studies, Critical Criminology, Native Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Animal Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as, Feminist Legal Studies, Animal Law, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Transnational Feminisms. (shrink)

This article examines the work of six South African gender researchers working in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It suggests that their work should be understood as situated in terms of politics, educational histories, theoretical connections and transnational engagements. It reflects on whether this work can be considered an example of Southern theory, and in turn suggests that Southern theory should itself be understood in relational terms that acknowledge both geopolitical connection and distance. The researchers who were interviewed (...) by the author all draw on a feminist language and conceptual toolbox initially developed in Northern contexts, but in the recent period modified and extended by engagements with postcolonial and other feminisms. The article shows how South Africa’s repressive political conditions and deep racial and social class inequalities influenced the research. There was a strong link between anti-apartheid activism and research choices which reflected a battle for the inclusion of gender in struggles that prioritised the focus on race and class inequalities. Research was also shaped by the researchers’ relationship to activism and their engagement with marginality stemming from histories of colonialism and imperialism. (shrink)

Rather than ‘superbugs’ signifying recalcitrant forms of life that withstand biomedical treatment, drug resistant infections emerge within and are intricate with the exercise of social and medical power. The distinction is important, as it provides a means to understand and critique current methods employed to confront the threat of widespread antimicrobial resistance. A global health regime that seeks to extend social and medical power, through technical and market integration, risks reproducing a form of triumphalism and exceptionalism that resistance itself should (...) have us pause to question. An alternative approach, based on a postcolonial as well as a ‘post-colony’ approach to health and microbes, provides impetus to challenge the assumptions and norms of global health. It highlights the potential contribution that vernacular approaches to human and animal health can play in altering the milieu of resistance. (shrink)

The lack of access to gender-affirming surgery represents a significant unmet health care need within the transgender community, frequently resulting in depression and self-destructive behavior. While some transgender people may have access to gender reassignment surgery, an overwhelming majority cannot afford facial feminization surgery. The former may be covered as a “medical necessity,” but FFS is considered “cosmetic” and excluded from insurance coverage. This demarcation between “necessity” and “cosmetic” in transgender health care based on specific body parts is in direct (...) opposition to the scientific community’s understanding of gender dysphoria and professional guidelines for transgender health. GRS affects one’s ability to function in an intimate relationship, while FFS has the same impact on social interactions an, therefore may have a far greater implication for one’s quality of life. FFS is a cost-effective intervention that needs to be covered by insurance policies. The benefits of such coverage far exceed the insignificant costs. (shrink)

_Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education_ provides a range of powerful theoretical and innovative methodological examples to illuminate how new material feminism can be put to work in education to open up new avenues of research design and practice. It poses challenging questions about the nature of knowledge production, the role of the researcher, and the critical endeavour arising from inter- and post-disciplinarity. Working with diffractive methodologies and new materialist ecological epistemologies, the book offers resources for hope which widen (...) the scope for how educational problems are interrogated, and provides a political counter-movement to neo-positivist, outcomes-based approaches within education. Inspired by writers such as Barad, Bennett, and Deleuze and Guattari, the book makes a radical break with cognitive, dualist, and universal conceptions of human subjectivity and intelligence in education. By taking its starting point as the co-consitutiveness of discourse, materiality, corporeality, and place, the book foregrounds educational practices as material enactments of multiple, non-linear, entangled, affective, and relational forces. It offers new insights into how gender, class, and ethnicity are constituted in, and by, material assemblages that are often submerged or ‘unseen’. This book is an essential starting place for those intrigued by what new theoretical accounts of materiality, posthumanism, and affect can offer educational research. Diffractive methodologies challenge readers to take a fuller range of actors into account than in ‘objective’ humanist methodologies, and in so doing to pay closer attention to what data is. It invites researchers to engage with long-standing feminist concerns about power and knowledge production in research processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Gender and Education. _. (shrink)

“Feminicity” is the term for a predicate register that enables feminist work be accounted for as relational “active-points” that collectively can be seen through what they have achieved. But going further, it marks where those active-points contribute to the dynamic field of feminist epistemologies and where change occurs. This article contributes to my larger project’s discussion of this concept. Broadly, feminicity argues that the active-points of feminist practices need to be understood within their situated fields as materialist informatics. In the (...) digital era, examples of the affects of digital feminicity are as identified in works such as those by Wajcman ; Haraway, Hayles, VNSMatrix, Adam, Plant. Collectively, such authors and artists opened a creative, and sometimes radical discourse of the digital field as multidirectional, multidimensional, multitemporal platform of “gender actions”. Taken as a predicated field sense of the term “predicate”), this work contributes to the feminist materialist reappraisal of feminist epistemology, and larger radical feminist deconstructive projects. Thus conceived, the genealogy of digital feminicity problematizes the monopolitical terms of feminism in its collation of actions, enabling a re-situation of feminist practices as positive material interventions and expressions of the ontological constitution of the political sphere. Feminicity does not propose a chronological account of the active-points, but processually and systemically addresses the terms of generational epistemological political change. This article describes the ways in which a materialist constructed register – “feminicity”– can be used to think about encounters between the domains of gender, politics and technology, as manifested by materialist informatics. For reasons of brevity, this article focuses on just two aspects of feminicity: the terms of predication of the female as gendered, and the issue of the image, as digital informatics, comprised of activitypoints of feminist practice. Consequently, these are measurable and offer practical resources for the general problem of gendering politics that operate in governance, resource distribution and a non-equal opportunity social/cultural power structure, under which minorities are disadvantaged. Feminist practice here refers to forms produced through feminist activities, ie, forms generated through relations with the matter of life through specific modalities of needs-based practices. (shrink)

In an effort to deny the ongoing effect of colonialism and imperialism on contemporary political life, the death knell for a multicultural society has been sounded from all sides. That's the provocative argument Paul Gilroy makes in this unorthodox defense of the multiculture. Gilroy's searing analyses of race, politics, and culture have always remained attentive to the material conditions of black people and the ways in which blacks have defaced the "clean edifice of white supremacy." In _Postcolonial Melancholia_, he continues (...) the conversation he began in the landmark study of race and nation _'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack'_ by once again departing from conventional wisdom to examine--and defend--multiculturalism within the context of the post-9/11 "politics of security." This book adapts the concept of melancholia from its Freudian origins and applies it not to individual grief but to the social pathology of neoimperialist politics. The melancholic reactions that have obstructed the process of working through the legacy of colonialism are implicated not only in hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants, and aliens but in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multiculture that has evolved organically and unnoticed in urban centers. Drawing on the seminal discussions of race begun by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy crafts a nuanced argument with far-reaching implications. Ultimately, _Postcolonial Melancholia_ goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance to propose that it is possible to celebrate the multiculture and live with otherness without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent. (shrink)

Integrative Feminisms presents a unique discussion of feminist radicalism in North America in the context of feminism's global development since the 1960s. Across divergent agendas, Angela Miles illuminates the transformative power she argues is common to apparently diverse radical, eco-, Black, socialist, lesbian and "third world" feminists. Drawing on interviews with activists, historical and documentary research, and her own participation, she provides powerful analysis of concentric feminisms in a transnational context. The book shows how transformative practices have led (...) these various feminisms in their own ways to refuse industrial/patriarchal categories, and how they have sustained their own projects against great odds. Skating the edge of controversy, Miles argues that the charges of political naivete, utopianism and essentialism levelled against these integrative feminisms are reductionist denials of the most progressive aspects of North American feminism, aspects central to the rapidly developing feminisms in the "third world." Within this original framework the author takes on the issues of pornography, prostitution, identity politics, postmodern feminism, and censorship, all of which continue to be hotly debated among feminists, the media and the courts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.1 (2001) 39-40 [Access article in PDF] Remembering Feminisms:A Response to the Commentary Erica Burman I am grateful to Gwen Adshead for outlining the broader arguments surrounding feminist critiques of science and their relevance for mental health, particularly in forensic contexts. As she highlights, the debates about the status of accounts of memory hinge upon contested concepts of objectivity and the problem of discursive (...) and provisional (but also necessary) claims to external reality, these being debates to which feminists have actively contributed. There are four additional points I would like to make in response to her comments.Firstly, while I am in general agreement with her presentation of feminist positions in relation to scientific theory and method--and this does largely reflect a current consensus within feminist approaches--it is important not to overstate this consensus. Feminist debates about science, method, and claims to truth are precisely debates. There is no unitary feminist approach. Key arguments between feminists concern, for example, whether to lay claim to (forms of "strong") subjectivity rather than objectivity (see Harding 1986, Hollway 1989, Griffin et al. 1998) or whether to re-work criteria for objectivity to takeaccount of well-known gender biases (Eichler 1988).In my analysis of feminist approaches to "false memory syndrome" (FMS), I wanted to highlight the diversity of feminist positions in order to indicate something of the interconnections between feminist and other political, theoretical, and cultural analyses--ranging from the modernist and empiricist to the postmodernist and constructionist. Hence, while I agree with Adshead that much feminist analysis seems unremarkable since its impact on cultural practice has been so great, I would argue that her account glosses over the many different feminist positions mobilized within the debate around "false/recovered memories." There are widely different views, for example, about the status of evidence/science. Another key area of debate is the role of psychiatric diagnosis between those who subscribe to and those who reject the "terms of art" of psychiatric diagnostic categories.This may sound like a mere effort to attest to the rigor and rationality of feminist scholarship, including feminist re-workings of these terms. However, to come to my second point, there is a material consequence of this closer attention to the conditions for, and reception of, specific feminist analyses. For the debate about "false" or "recovered" memories goes beyond questions about the circulation of the roles of victim versus perpetrator that surround claims of credibility, legitimacy, manipulation, or gullibility. [End Page 39]Thus, Laura Brown and I (1997) and Jan Haaken (1998) have suggested that in order to understand how the current debates surrounding (women's) reported memories could have come about, we need to analyze what has happened through, and what the stakes have been in, the (limited) institutionalization of feminism within models and practices of therapy. This involves attending to the particular forms of feminism that have been included and excluded: For example, how far do therapeutic models accept, and how far do they problematize, the forms and functioning of families? We also need to consider the broader societal response (or backlash?) to a feminized/therapeutic culture, including consequences of the confounding of the therapeutic with the feminized. In particular, Haaken draws attention to the gender essentialism that pervaded second wave (1960s and 1970s) U.S. feminist therapies. This essentialism, she argues, has fueled a failure to interrogate power dynamics (including therapeutic dynamics) between women that make possible displacements of transferential dynamics to an outside party, whether past or present.My third point concerns the ever closer relationship between the therapeutic and legal arenas reflected within the career of FMS. Adshead's reference to a film narrative to highlight competing versions of legal knowledge puts me in mind of how FMS--as a potent cocktail of psychiatric labeling, familial conflict and abuse, and litigation--is the U.S. television courtroom drama writ large. It may be the case that, as Adshead argues, I fail adequately to address the complexity of legal process, with its assumptions about what makes certain accounts more credible or legitimate than others... (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern China unwittingly (...) absorbed Western Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

What does the politics of the self mean for a politics of liberation? Morwenna Griffiths argues that mainstream philosophy, particularly the anglo-analytic tradition, needs to tackle the issues of the self, identity, autonomy and self creation. Although identity has been a central concern of feminist thought it has in the main been excluded from philosophical analysis. _Feminisms and the Self_ is both a critique and a construction of feminist philosophy. After the powerful challenges that postmodernism and poststructuralism posed to liberation (...) movements like feminism, Griffiths book is an original and timely contribution to current debate surrounding the notion of identity and subjectivity. (shrink)

Quantum feminicity is a term that refers to the intersection of quantum theory, a technological branch of physics, with feminist theory, a social and political movement. Engaging the modal logics of this intersection, the article explores this intersection through one aspect of quantum literacy; that of the quantum splitting of the concept of the temporal narrative. The article examines what are the interdisciplinary convergences of feminist and physics’s respective philosophies. Focussing on the quantum modalities that are being practiced in relation (...) to the situated nature of technological platforms engaged, the article proposes that modelling a quantum feminicity can assist in disengaging modes of sexual difference that are used to gender all kinds of bodies through a countermanding the temporal. Experiences of bodies are considered as experimental modes that provide quantum vectors for feminist actions. (shrink)