Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions

Julia Kristeva is known as rejecting feminism, nonetheless her work is useful for feminist theory. I reconsider Kristeva's rejection of feminism and her theories of difference, identity, and maternity, elaborating on Kristeva's contributions to debates over the necessity of identity politics, indicating how Kristeva's theory suggests the cause of and possible solutions to women's oppression in Western culture, and, using Kristeva's theory, setting up a framework for a feminist rethinking of politics and ethics.     

A Golden Lever for Politics: Feminist Emotion and Women's Agency

Pervasive feminism is a component located in emotionality—feminist emotion—and contains women's primary agency. Because affect and emotions are elusive, an interpretive conceptual tool is necessary and is key to making use of their potential for feminist politics aimed at women's empowerment and well‐being and to build gender equality. This essay builds on contemporary feminist theory and affect theory and draws from multidisciplinary research. It presents a new theoretical framework anchored in hermeneutics and phenomenology to pin down the affective component of women's multifaceted, intersectional emotional experiences of gender. A case study also illustrates how the theoretical premises around the concept of feminist emotion are compatible with and useful for feminist praxis.     

Women's Lives/Feminist Knowledge: Feminist Standpoint as Ideology Critique

Feminist standpoint theory posits feminism as a way of conceptualizing from the vantage point of women's lives. However, in current work on feminist standpoint the material links between lives and knowledges are often not explained. This essay argues that the radical marxist tradition standpoint theory draws on—specifically theories of ideology post-Althusser—offers a systemic mode of reading that can redress this problem and provide the resources to elaborate further feminism's oppositional practice and collective subject.     

The Impersonal Is Political: Spinoza and a Feminist Politics of Imperceptibility

This essay examines Elizabeth Grosz's provocative claim that feminist and anti‐racist theorists should reject a politics of recognition in favor of “a politics of imperceptibility.” She criticizes any humanist politics centered upon a dialectic between self and other. I turn to Spinoza to develop and explore her alternative proposal. I claim that Spinoza offers resources for her promising politics of corporeality, proximity, power, and connection that includes all of nature, which feminists should explore.     

The Radical Future of Feminist Empiricism

I argue that Nelson's feminist transformation of empiricism provides the basis of a dialogue across three currently competing feminist epistemologies: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theories, and postmodern feminism, a dialogue that will result in a dissolution of the apparent tensions between these epistemologies and provide an epistemology with the openness and fluidity needed to embrace the concerns of feminists.     

Coyote Politics: Trickster Tales and Feminist Futures

This essay is a first attempt at thinking through the ways in which Native American Coyote stories can illuminate options for lesbian and feminist politics. I follow the metaphors of trickery and shape-shifting common to the stories and recommend the laughter they evoke as we engage in feminist politics and philosophy.     

Feminist Identity Development: Implications for Feminist Therapy With Women

This article discusses the implications of the Downing and Roush (1985) model of feminist identity development for feminist therapy with women. Following a summary of the model, the potential pitfalls of feminist therapy with the passive-acceptant client are described, as well as potential issues at subsequent stages of the client's identity development. Suggestions are made regarding how to facilitate clients' movement to higher levels of development. Finally, a research agenda is proposed that suggests hypotheses to be tested that arise from applying this model to conducting therapy with women.     

Identity Politics and Dialectical Reason: Beyond an Epistemology of Provenance

Identity politics is important within feminism. However, it often presupposes an overly subjectivist theory of knowledge that I term an epistemology of provenance. I explore some works of feminist standpoint theory that begin to address the difficulties of such an epistemology. I then bring Sartre's account of knowledge in the Critique of Dialectical Reason to bear on these difficulties, arguing that his work offers tools for addressing them more adequately.     

Bridging the Social and the Symbolic: Toward a Feminist Politics of Sexual Difference

By clarifying the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference (and contrasting it with a feminist analysis of gender as social reality), I argue that the symbolic dimension of psychical life cannot be discarded in developing political accounts of identity formation and the status of women in the public sphere. I discuss various bridges between social reality and symbolic structure, bridges such as body, language, law, and family. I conclude that feminist attention must be redirected to the unconscious since the political cannot be localized in, or segregated to, the sphere of social reality; sexual difference is an indispensable concept for a feminist politics.     

Feminist Perspectives on Erikson 's Theory: Their Relevance for Contemporary Identity Development Research

In view of recent controversies about theory and self, identity development researchers need to examine the utility of their own theory. In an effort to begin this enterprise, we define what we see as the central concerns of Erikson 's theory a life-span, psychosocial emphasis, and the notion of agentic identity development and use a feminist standpoint analysis to examine the usefulness of these aspects of his theory in a rapidly changing, multicultural context. We critique the theory 's emphasis on biology as a significant component of psychosocial development, including the emphasis on the biological distinctiveness of women and men as an explanatory construct. We also address the issue of an androcentric bias that many have argued is interwoven with the theory 's core concepts. Finally, we offer conclusions regarding the aspects of the theory we find most useful and most in need of clarification or revision.     

Redirecting Feminist Critiques of Science

Applying the insights of Donna Haraway (1989 , 1991 ) and Helen Longino (1989 , 1990 ), this paper reviews Sandra Harding's (1986a) tripartite model of feminist critiques of science—empiricist, standpoint, and postmodern—and argues that it is based on misunderstandings of the relationship between scientific inquiry, objectivity, and values. An alternative view of scientific inquiry makes it possible to see feminist scientists as postmodern and postmodern feminists as having standpoints.     

Global Feminism and Transformative Identity Politics

In this paper, Weir reconsiders identity politics and their relation to feminist solidarity. She argues that the dimension of identity as “identification‐with” has been the liberatory dimension of identity politics, and that this dimension has been overshadowed and displaced by a focus on identity as category. Weir addresses critiques of identification as a ground of solidarity, and sketches a model of identity and identity politics based not in sameness, but in transformative historical process.     

Hannah Arendt,Feminism, and the Politics of Alterity: “What Will We Lose If We Win?”

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the “female condition” of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a “politics of alterity” with applications for feminist practice.     

Scientific Reforms,Feminist Interventions,and the Politics of Knowing: An Auto‐ethnography of a Feminist Neuroscientist

Feminist science studies scholars have documented the historical and cultural contingency of scientific knowledge production. It follows that political and social activism has impacted the practice of science today; however, little has been done to examine the current cultures of science in light of feminist critiques and activism. In this article, I argue that, although critiques have changed the cultures of science both directly and indirectly, fundamental epistemological questions have largely been ignored and neutralized through these policy reforms. I provide an auto‐ethnography of my doctoral work in a neuroscience program to a) demonstrate how the culture of science has incorporated critiques into its practices and b) identify how we might use these changes in scientific practices to advance feminist science agendas. I critically analyze three areas in current scientific practice in which I see obstacles and opportunities: 1) research ethics, 2) diversity of research subjects and scientists, and 3) identification of a project's significance for funding. I argue that an understanding of the complicated and changing cultures of science is necessary for future feminist interventions into the sciences that directly challenge science's claim to epistemic authority.     

Using Conversation Analysis in Feminist and Critical Research

Conversation analysis – the study of talk‐in‐interaction – is proving a valuable tool for politically engaged inquiry and social critique. This article illustrates the use of conversation analysis in feminist and critical research, drawing on a range of empirical studies. After introducing conversation analysis – its theoretical assumptions, methodological practices and empirical findings – it highlights projects based on two key conversation analytic domains: turn‐taking and turn design, and sequence organization and preference structure. The final section examines the key contributions of conversation analysis to feminist and critical work in the areas of categories and gender; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues; women's labour; and the politics, ethics and design of the research process.     

Backlash,Repetition, Untimeliness: The Temporal Dynamics of Feminist Politics

Susan Faludi's Backlash, first published in 1991, offers a compelling account of feminism being forced to repeat itself in an era hostile to its transformative potentials and ambitions. Twenty years on, this paper offers a philosophical reading of Faludi's text, unpacking the model of social and historical change that underlies the “backlash” thesis. It focuses specifically on the tension between Faludi's ideal model of social change as a movement of linear, step‐by‐step, continuous progress, and her depiction of feminist history in terms of endless repetition. If we uphold a linear, teleological ideal of social change, I argue, repetition can only be thought of in negative terms—as a step backwards or a waste of time—which in turn has a negative and demoralizing impact within feminism itself. To explore an alternative model of historical time and change, I turn to the work of feminist philosopher Christine Battersby, who rethinks repetition through the Kierkegaardian mode of “recollecting forwards,” and the Nietzschean notion of “untimeliness.” I suggest that Battersby's philosophical reconceptualization of historical repetition, as a potentially creative, productive phenomenon, can be of great utility to feminists as we enact and negotiate the dynamics of backlash politics.     

Religious Agency and the Limits of Intersectionality

This article probes the relative absence of religion within discussions of intersectionality, and begins to address this absence by bringing intersectionality studies into conversation with another significant field within feminist theory: the study of religious women's agency. Although feminist literatures on intersectionality and religious women's agency have garnered a great deal of scholarly attention, these two bodies of work have rarely been engaged together. After surveying both fields, I argue that research on religious women's agency not only exposes an ambiguity at the heart of intersectionality between identity and oppression, but also challenges several aspects of intersectionality studies, especially as recent theorists increasingly turn away from identity politics in favor of a structural critique of power. These aspects of intersectionality include its often unsituated critique of power, as well as its reliance on a negatively defined consensus on anti‐oppression.     

Catharine Macaulay on the Paradox of Paternal Authority in Hobbesian Politics

Catharine Macaulay's first political pamphlet, “Loose remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr. Hobbes's philosophical rudiments of government and society with a short sketch for a democratical form of government in a letter to Signor Paoli,” published in London in 1769, has received no significant scholarly attention in over two hundred years. It is of primary interest because of the light it sheds on Macaulay's critique of patriarchal politics, which helps to establish a new line of thinking about the historian as an early feminist writer. It appears she was working from an unauthorized edition of the Thomas Hobbes's De Cive (1647) entitled Philosophicall Rudiments of Government and Society, printed by a royalist bookseller in London 1651. Some errors in this translation may explain Macaulay's skewed understanding of Hobbess argument in support of the premises of monarchy. Her intriguing analysis of paternal authority in “Loose Remarks” anticipates recent feminist explorations of Hobbesian political thought.     

Virtue Ethics,Social Difference,and the Challenge of an Embodied Politics

Following the revival of virtue theory, some moral theorists have argued that virtue ethics can provide the basis for a radical politics. Such a politics essentially departs from the liberal model of the moral agent as an autonomous reason‐giver. It instead privileges an understanding of the agent as conditioned by her community, and in the case of social oppression and marginalization, communal virtues may become a vehicle for social change. This essay compares political appropriations of virtue theory by Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas and secular feminist thinkers Lisa Tessman and Margaret Urban Walker. Hauerwas and feminist theorists both embrace a kind of embodied vulnerability as a political virtue, arguing that it enables more genuine social recognition. The virtue feminist critique is more robust than Hauerwas's, however, insofar as it understands mutual recognition to involve acknowledgment of social difference and the concomitant pursuit of justice.     

What Makes a Feminist? Predictors and Correlates of Feminist Social Identity in College Women

What factors predict self-identification as a feminist? College women ( N = 233) were given measures of feminist ideology, feminist identity development, evaluation of feminists, collectivism and individualism. Feminist identification was measured both as a dichotomous and a continuous variable. Measured dichotomously, feminist self-identification was predicted by not having conservative beliefs and having a positive general evaluation of feminists. In addition, self-identified feminists were more likely to believe in collective action, to hold liberal, radical, and womanist ideologies, and to endorse items in the Synthesis stage of identity development. They were less likely to believe a feminist is a lesbian, to endorse items in the Passive Acceptance stage, and to believe in the existence of a meritocracy. Measured continuously, degree of feminist identity was predicted by having a positive general evaluation of feminists, not having conservative beliefs, and endorsing items in the Revelation and Embeddedness/Emanation stages of identity development. The two measures of feminist identity were not entirely congruent, underlining the importance of methodological differences in measuring social identity.