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Putting Feminist Theory to Work

Geraldine Pratt

in Working Feminism

The introductory chapter introduces the premise of the book: to force a close encounter between feminist theory and empirical analyses of the circumstances of migrant domestic workers. It outlines ... More

The introductory chapter introduces the premise of the book: to force a close encounter between feminist theory and empirical analyses of the circumstances of migrant domestic workers. It outlines some of the challenges and opportunities that come from working with an activist organisation.Less

The Dark Side of Desire: Racial-Sexual Alterity and the Play of Race

Ariane Cruz

in The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography

This chapter examines black women’s participation in BDSM and how these performances illustrate a complex and contradictory brokering of pain, pleasure, and power for the black female performer. I ... More

This chapter examines black women’s participation in BDSM and how these performances illustrate a complex and contradictory brokering of pain, pleasure, and power for the black female performer. I reveal BDSM as a critical site for reconsidering the entanglement of black female sexuality and violence. Within BDSM, violence becomes both a mode of pleasure and a vehicle for accessing and contesting power. The chapter begins with a brief section that frames black women practitioners of BDSM in the context of still very vigorous feminist debates surrounding sexuality, violence, and BDSM. Here, I stage the unique theoretical and practical challenges of the unspeakable pleasures aroused in racial submission and domination that BDSM presents to black women specifically. I examine race play as a particularly problematic yet powerful BDSM practice for black women, one that unveils the contradictory dynamics of racialized pleasure and power via the eroticization of racism and racial-sexual alterity. In particular, I argue that race play unsettles the dichotomies of transgression/compliance, subversion/reproduction, mind/body, and fantasy/reality that buttress BDSM. This chapter unveils performances of black female sexual domination and submission in BDSM as critical modes for and of black women’s pleasure, power, and agency.Less

Researching Sexuality: The Politics-of-Location Approach for Studying Sex Work

Tracy Berger Michele and Guidroz Kathleen

in Negotiating Sex Work: Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism

Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz use their own experiences researching street-level and indoor prostitution and telephone sex work to discuss how standard research approaches taught in ... More

Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz use their own experiences researching street-level and indoor prostitution and telephone sex work to discuss how standard research approaches taught in graduate school offer limited preparation for social scientists who confront the stigma of sexuality in their research, and the role that their own sexuality plays in conducting research with sex workers. They then offer a “politics of location” approach to fill this void.Less

Introduction: Governmentality against Itself

Saida Hodžić

in The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs

Introduction: Governmentality Against Itself lays out the book’s overarching arguments and analytical contributions to anthropology and feminist theory. Rather than debating how “we” as Western ... More

Introduction: Governmentality Against Itself lays out the book’s overarching arguments and analytical contributions to anthropology and feminist theory. Rather than debating how “we” as Western subjects should think about cutting, this book attends to the political concerns and ethical dilemmas of Ghanaian and other African women and men who are most engaged in and affected by the efforts to end and regulate cutting. It addresses two questions: Are efforts to end female genital cutting a problem, and if so, what kind of a problem are they and for whom? For whom is the ending of cutting a problem and why? I redefine answers to these two questions from the perspectives of Ghanaian lifeworlds rather than liberal debates about FGM. In Ghana, cutting has been ending in many districts, and dramatically so in areas where sustained, decades-long campaigns have taken place. The waning of cutting has been accompanied by critical responses to the colonial order of things and its afterlives in the liberal governance of everyday life. These critiques are voiced not in public protests or debates but in a different key: in indirect speech and in practices of living. They gather their force from sensibilities (that is entanglements of thought, affect, and habitus) formed at the interstices of social and governmental logics, and in consonance with tacit principles on which society is built, such as the ethics of relationality and mutual responsibility.Less

Precursor: River of Grass

E. Dawn Hall

in ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt

This chapter provides an overview of River of Grass, Riechardt’s first feature film, production details via interviews, a close reading of the film with applications of Marxist-Feminist film theory, ... More

This chapter provides an overview of River of Grass, Riechardt’s first feature film, production details via interviews, a close reading of the film with applications of Marxist-Feminist film theory, and an exploration of issues ranging from environmental concerns to the negation of heterosexual romance in a road movie genre. In contrast with her other features, River of Grass’s more overt feminist and experimental themes and gender role reversals align the film within an older feminist counter-cinematic tradition. Reichardt addresses theoretical film concepts such as the “male gaze” by emphasizing the female look and employs Godardian techniques to remind viewers they are watching a construction of reality.Less

Gender

Robyn Ferrell

in Sacred Exchanges: Images in Global Context

This chapter argues that the point of desert women's painting is to “make a mark.” These marks are designed to generate the experience of the ancestors' actions, keeping the continuity of the ... More

This chapter argues that the point of desert women's painting is to “make a mark.” These marks are designed to generate the experience of the ancestors' actions, keeping the continuity of the Dreaming acting in the present. Through the painting, there can be a magical extension of the Aboriginal world; the sacred nature of these canvases is embedded in the experience of viewing them. The chapter then talks about Little Children are Sacred, a government report about the routine abuse of Aboriginal children, and maintains that children are sacred in Western culture—a fact that is exemplified by the mystery of maternal love. Feminist theory meets Indigenous art along the affective lines of the sacred, through color and genre, and through incidental feelings of love and shame, and anger and resentment.Less

Signifying Otherwise: Liveability and Language

Nathan Gies

in Butler and Ethics

This chapter reads Judith Butler’s engagements with Emmanuel Levinas, showing how those encounters extend and radicalize (rather than, as many critics have assumed, retreat from) the political charge ... More

This chapter reads Judith Butler’s engagements with Emmanuel Levinas, showing how those encounters extend and radicalize (rather than, as many critics have assumed, retreat from) the political charge of Butler’s earlier writing in gender theory. In particular, thinking with and against Levinas, Butler develops her previous work on the notions of viability and survival, ontology and agency, the political and the ethical. The chapter concludes by focusing on minor themes in Levinas’s work on communication, so far unexplored by Butler, to draw out and further develop her theorizations of the politics of coalition.Less

A Feminist Perspective on Children and Law: From Objectification to Relational Subjectivities

Laura A. Rosenbury

in International Perspectives and Empirical Findings on Child Participation: From Social Exclusion to Child-Inclusive Policies

The relationship between feminism, children, and law is varied and complex. Feminists have long sought to improve children’s lives, including their treatment in law, and advocates for children have ... More

The relationship between feminism, children, and law is varied and complex. Feminists have long sought to improve children’s lives, including their treatment in law, and advocates for children have long built upon feminist arguments to argue for changes in law’s approach to children, with much success. At the same time, women’s rights have not generated a comparable regime of children’s rights. The difference is, in part, intentional: some feminists argue for new understandings of rights tailored to children’s needs whereas others argue that rights are not appropriate tools for addressing children’s dependencies. Yet critics also question whether conflicts of interest inevitably arise when feminists purport to address the interests of both women and children. This chapter offers a new framework for thinking about feminism and children, a framework rooted in children’s participation in multiple relationships mediated by law. As such, the framework focuses on children’s subjectivities rather than their rights.Less

Thinking as the Stuff of the World

Stacy Alaimo

in Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

The conclusion of Exposed critiques substantial paradigms by the ways of new materialism. It critiques object-oriented ontology by ways of material feminisms. It argues that there is no positions ... More

The conclusion of Exposed critiques substantial paradigms by the ways of new materialism. It critiques object-oriented ontology by ways of material feminisms. It argues that there is no positions outside, no straight paths, no transparent global systems of knowledge, but only modest protests and precarious pleasures from within compromised locations shadowed by futures that will surely need repair.Less

Editor’s Introduction: Scholarship’s Afterlife: The Return of Rage

Jane Marcus

Jean Mills (ed.)

in Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger

This chapter charts the editor’s journey in re-organizing, editing, and seeing through to publication a posthumous unfinished manuscript by her mentor, Jane Marcus. The chapter highlights the book’s ... More

This chapter charts the editor’s journey in re-organizing, editing, and seeing through to publication a posthumous unfinished manuscript by her mentor, Jane Marcus. The chapter highlights the book’s significance to feminist scholarship, Modernism, post-colonial and critical race theory, and to historians of race, gender, class, fascism, war, and peace. The book’s response to issues of reputation and representation are considered, here, while making connections to the uses of feminist anger in current debates and strategies in activism against racism and sexual assault.Less

Dwelling in the Dissolve

Stacy Alaimo

in Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, ... More

The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and politics that interconnect the human with the nonhuman, the inhuman and the more than human. As a cultural studies project, Exposed takes activist and other “low” practices seriously, as potent modes of political contestation.Less

Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of “Queer” Animals

Stacy Alaimo

in Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

The second chapter explores how, although scientists and cultural theorists have denied or dismissed the sexual diversity of nonhuman animals, they are important for new materialism, animal studies, ... More

The second chapter explores how, although scientists and cultural theorists have denied or dismissed the sexual diversity of nonhuman animals, they are important for new materialism, animal studies, and queer, green politics. The wonder, awe, and pleasure of contemplating the countless modes of nonhuman sexual diversity, which pulse with desire and erotic ingenuity, may generate environmentalisms that are already fabulously queer.Less

Your Shell on Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves

Stacy Alaimo

in Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times

The sixth chapter critiques the prevailing visual and theoretical models of the anthropocene from a material feminist perspective. It shifts the book’s focus from geological formations to the ... More

The sixth chapter critiques the prevailing visual and theoretical models of the anthropocene from a material feminist perspective. It shifts the book’s focus from geological formations to the acidification of the ocean, insisting that the anthropocene must be thought with the countless sea creatures that will dissolve in mind.Less

Literature Review and Background

Katherine Irwin and Karen Umemoto

in Jacked Up and Unjust: Pacific is lander Teens Confront Violent Legacies

The youth’s narratives can add depth to many literatures, and chapter one reviews some of the core assumptions within the fields of youth violence, critical youth studies, and punishment in the ... More

The youth’s narratives can add depth to many literatures, and chapter one reviews some of the core assumptions within the fields of youth violence, critical youth studies, and punishment in the juvenile justice system and schools. Chapter one also includes a brief review of the colonial history of Hawai‘i.Less