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.     

Politics without Human Nature? Reconstructing a Common Humanity

Political action requires a concept of humanity grounded in an explicit notion of human nature. Feminists apprehensive about poststructuralism's implications for a feminist politics need methods and discourses that allow feminist politics to proceed toward a vision of human well-being. Recent work by Chris Weedon and Erica Sherover-Marcuse highlights the need for hypotheses that can guide efforts to dismantle oppressed habits of being and help women evaluate and develop political strategies for universal solidarity.     

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.     

Reconstituting the Subject: Feminism,Modernism, and Postmodernism

Political agency is vital to the formulation of a feminist politics so feminists have attempted to create a subject that eschews the sexism of the Cartesian subject while at the same time retaining agency. This paper examines some of the principal feminist attempts to reconstitute the subject along these lines. It assesses the success of these attempts in light of the question of whether the subject is a necessary component of feminist theory and practice.     

Gender sceptics and feminist politics

Some feminist gender sceptics hold that the conditions for satisfying the concept woman cannot be discerned. This has been taken to suggest that (i) the efforts to fix feminism’s scope are undermined because of confusion about the extension of the term ‘woman’, and (ii) this confusion suggests that feminism cannot be organised around women because it is unclear who satisfies woman. Further, this supposedly threatens the effectiveness of feminist politics: feminist goals are said to become unachievable, if feminist politics lacks a clear subject matter. In this paper, I argue that such serious consequences do not follow from the gender sceptic position. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the ‘Stirling Political Philosophy Group’ meeting and am grateful to those present for their constructive criticisms. I am also grateful to Alan Millar, the anonymous referees for this journal and Jenny Saul (who has read more than one version of this paper!) for their detailed and extremely helpful comments and suggestions.     

Poetic Politics: How the Amazons Took the Acropolis

This paper explores the poetic politics of lesbian and feminist writing, the textual violence that writing exercises and the amazon intertext it creates. In this particular essay, Jeffner Alien takes as her point of departure the writing of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig.     

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.     

Moving from Feminist Identity Politics To Coalition Politics Through a Feminist Materialist Standpoint of Intersubjectivity in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Identity politics deployed by lesbian feminists of color challenges the philosophy of the subject and white feminisms based on sisterhood, and in so doing opens a space where feminist coalition building is possible. I articulate connections between Gloria Anzaldúa's epistemological-political action tools of complex identity narration and mestiza form of intersubject, Nancy Hartsock's feminist materialist standpoint, and Seyla Benhabib's standpoint of intersubjectivity in relation to using feminist identity politics for feminist coalition politics.     

What Does It Mean to Be a Postcolonial Feminist? The Artwork of Mithu Sen

This article examines what the work of New Delhi‐based artist Mithu Sen brings to thinking about being a postcolonial feminist. Using images from Sen's solo exhibit in New Delhi and New York titled Half Full (2007), I theorize on the complexities that proliferate when thinking about postcolonial feminism. Sen's images play with “an” identity to showcase the hybrid and mobile configuration of postcolonial subjectivity. Sen's provocative aesthetic urges us to rethink defining a set of conditions or tenets for postcolonial feminism. Rather, her aesthetic politics propels through humor and provides a prism to constantly reimagine postcolonial feminist subjectivity by urging a consideration of maps that intersect and overlap.     

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.     

BEYOND THE PALE: Jewish identity,radical politics and feminist art in the United States

Historians have not yet recognized how the cultural legacy of East European Jews helped change the status of women artists in the United States. Immigrant Jewish women in general reacted to institutionalized patriarchy with a desire for social change and the will to act to that end. Jewish women who were artists had professional reasons to embrace feminism, given women's virtual exclusion from professional notice. This article focuses on two pioneering feminist artists — Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro — and demonstrates the importance of their Jewish heritage, showing how and why they set in motion important changes in the tumultuous 1970s that continue to resonate in the art world today. An unusually large number of American feminist artists of the 1970s were Jewish. Their heritage resembles that of the Jewish feminist activist Betty Friedan, whose father emigrated from Eastern Europe. Once we examine the linked roles played by Jewish identity and leftist politics in the formation of the feminist art movement in the United States, it becomes evident that activism in the community of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and the values that they passed on to the next generations made a significant contribution to the success of this movement.     

When Love and Violence Meet: Women's Agency and Transformative Politics in Rubaiyat Hossain's Meherjaan

In official and unofficial histories, and in cultural memorializations of the 1971 war for Bangladeshi independence, the treatment of women's experiences—more specifically the unresolved question of acknowledgment of and accountability to birangonas, “war heroines” (or rape survivors)—has met with stunning silence or erasure, on the one hand, or with narratives of abject victimhood, on the other. By contrast, the film Meherjaan (2011) revolves around the stories of four women during and after the war, and most centrally the relationship between a Bengali woman and a Pakistani soldier. In this article, I investigate the anxieties underlying the responses to Meherjaan, particularly in association with themes of trauma—its absence or omnipresence—to nonnormative gender frames of national sexuality, and the notion of loving the Other. Drawing from feminist theories of vulnerability, ethics, and love, I want to explore these themes at two levels: the political message the film transmits, and its aesthetic choices and affects. Finally, I want to comment on the potential of this film, as feminist art, in furthering a dialogue around healing and ethical memorialization in relation to 1971 in Bangladesh.     

An Interview with Kris Sealey on Creolizing the Nation

Michael Monahan, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, speaks with Kris Sealy about her recent book, Creolizing the Nation (Northwestern University Press, 2020). Drawing on Caribbean, decolonial, and Latina feminist resources, Creolizing the Nation identifies the nation‐form as a powerful resource for political struggles against colonialism, racism, and other manifestations of Western hegemony in the Global South even as it acknowledges the homogenizing effects of the politics of nationalism. Sealey argues that creolization provides a rich theoretical ground for rethinking the nation and deploying its political and cultural apparatus to imagine more just, humane communities.     

Working Together Across Difference: Some Considerations on Emotions and Political Practice

Uma Narayan attempts to clarify what the feminist notion of the ‘epistemic privilege of the oppressed’ does and does not imply. She argues that the fact that oppressed ‘insiders’ have epistemic privilege regarding their oppression creates problems in dialogue with and coalitionary politics involving ‘outsiders’ who do not share the oppression, since the latter fail to come to terms with the epistemic privilege of the insiders. She concretely analyzes different ways in which the emotions of insiders can be inadvertantly hurt by outsiders and suggests ways in which such problems can be minimized.     

Constructing Maternal Thinking

Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking represents a great contribution to moral philosophy—in particular, by bringing women's “private” virtues into the public sphere. However, there remain problems in the analysis which need to be addressed: How can one possibly generalize about the practice of mothering from one, necessarily limited, perspective, given the facts of cultural diversity? Is Ruddick's normative account of mothering congruent with the reflective judgments of others? Is her account of the transformation of parochial mothering into feminist peace work viable? After exploring these three questions, this reviewer calk, with Ruddkk, for the telling of more maternal stories, from different cultural, racial and economic perspectives.     

Mainstreaming ‘Women’ without feminisms in psychology

Although it has been argued that feminist work has gained recognition in mainstream psychology (Eagly, Eaton, Rose, Riger, & McHugh, 2012 ), these arguments tend to cite a proliferation of research in high‐ranking Euro‐American academic journals, on topics that concern women or gender in psychology. However, the majority of this work is not presented as explicitly feminist. Rather, it tends to be incorporated into mainstream spaces under the umbrella of the psychology of women. This is often interpreted uncritically to mean the study of womanhood as a stable category or variable, reproducing binary accounts of sex and gender that are largely devoid of feminist analysis. Not only do these interpretations reify essentialist constructions of womanhood; they also convert transformative feminist politics into singular and special interest ‘women's issues’. Indeed, broad feminist theoretical perspectives remain largely absent at the fundamental levels of mainstream psychological knowledge production (Eagly et al., 2012 ; Eagly & Riger, 2014 ). Thus, while credit has been given to the growing visibility of issues concerning women and gender in the discipline, less critical attention has been paid to the broader absence of feminist language in this work. As such, instances of mainstream inclusion have come to take priority over broader issues of feminist exclusions in psychology. Taking a critical position on the discipline from within the context of the Global North, this paper questions the state of mainstream inclusions and reasserts the transformative potentials of diverse feminisms (Liebert, Leve, & Hui, 2011 ), arguing that current inclusions of women without feminisms in psychology are problematic. Drawing on recent mobilisations of the psychology of women in the interests of ‘male psychology’, it is argued that the transformative potentials of feminist psychologies are more likely to be stifled than supported by mainstream inclusions.     

Multicultural Feminist Therapy

SUMMARY

Psychological theory needs to be representative of the full range of human experience by being based in the experience of all groups of people. The women honored in this chapter, Jean Lau Chin, Lillian Comas-Diaz, Oliva Espin, Beverly Greene, and Monica McGoldrick, are all feminist therapists, researchers, scholars, clinicians and writers who have directed some substantial portion of their professional attention toward understanding the critical nature of minority and dominant group status on the development of psychological and feminist therapy theory. Together, their professional contributions and personal stories provide a powerful understanding of the nature of the intersection of race, culture     

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.     

From body to body: A post‐gender politics for the cosmic homo1

This article engages in establishing some common ground, some human and humane politics for the global Luther, in contradistinction to the focus in much recent scholarship on difference/s as an almost hegemonic way of understanding human life. The aim is to move beyond feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories to a post‐gender politics by employing Judith Butler's concepts of performativity and “abject” bodies. Homo, the human being, will be the hermeneutical key for examining Luther's understanding of God's creation and incarnation as well as of baptism, the Lord's Supper, and the church. The aim is that of searching out Luther's differing performances of body, from the carnal body of the incarnate Christ and the human body to the spiritual body of church and community, and how these matter, materialize and intersect in the body of Christ as one body/homo.     

Why ‘punk’? Religion,anarchism and feminism in Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer

Pussy Riot became world famous after their Punk Prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. This paper looks at the religious and political statements of some Pussy Riot members against the background of their Russian context and explains why the politically radical left-wing, anarchist and feminist group used the form of a punk prayer to express protest. Elaborating the connection of punk, religion and politics, I argue that punk is a sub-culturally established medium to express leftist, anarchist and feminist political convictions and to offend the religious and political hierarchy, especially when performed in the country’s most prominent cathedral; and also that the religiosity of at least some of the Pussy Riot members is not an obstacle to using a punk performance as their form to express protest; by contrast, punk is an adequate medium for ‘liminoid’ anti-authoritarian forms of religion like that of Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. In Russia, a punk prayer is not only a way for young anarchistically orientated feminists to celebrate their lifestyle, but also one of the very few ways to get attention for their concerns.