Feminism: Identity Politics

Personal fulfilment depends upon knowledge of one’s identity. A person discovers her identity by trial and error. The experimentation and critical evaluation that are indispensable for that are inhibited by various strands of the currently trendy “identity politics.” I identify and criticise six errors: that self-identification determines identity; that one discovers one’s identity by looking inward; that a person’s identity is substantially determined by her inherited culture; that one can discover one’s identity through consciousness-raising; that criticism or microaggression undermines a (...) person’s identity; and that cultural appropriation is objectionable. I give an example from my own search for my identity to illustrate how each of the six errors subverts self-discovery and puts obstacles in the way of human fulfilment. (shrink)

‘Intersectionality’ is one of the rare pieces of academic jargon to make it out of the university and into the mainstream. The message is clear and well-known: your feminism had better be intersectional. But what exactly does this mean? This paper is partly an exercise in conceptual clarification, distinguishing at least six distinct types of claim found across the literature on intersectionality, and digging further into the most philosophically complex of these claims—namely the metaphysical and explanatory. It’s also partly a (...) reply to Sara Bernstein, who argued recently that the best interpretation of the metaphysical claim is explanatory priority. We’ll argue that duly clarified, it’s far from obvious that feminism had better be intersectional. At the very least, it had better not be only intersectional. (shrink)

Metaphysical considerations aside, today’s inheritors of the tradition of natural philosophy are primarily scientists. However, they are oblivious to the human factor involved in science and in seeing how political, religious, and other ideologies contaminate our visions of nature. In general, philosophers observe human (historical, sociological, and psychological) processes within the construction of theories, as well as in the development of scientific activity itself. -/- In our time, feminism—along with accompanying ideas of identity politics under the slogan “diversity, inclusion, equity”—has (...) emerged in science policies. The vast majority of scientists (including myself) are convinced that discrimination is reprehensible. We also believe that all individuals of any sex, race, ethnic group, or ideology should be valued in academia solely based on his or her merits and potential through equality programs. However, as I will show in this article, political indoctrination has inadmissibly undertaken the struggle for equality in academic institutions in Western countries. I argue here that universities and research institutes should be politically free (neutral) to encourage academic freedom. -/- One negative aspect of equality programs is that worldwide, scientists are harassed for expressing opinions related to the “gender” issue. This situation severely restricts scientists’ freedom of expression, even within the limits of the law. Codes of conduct extending beyond legal boundaries are examples of this issue. Scientists who express their views about “gender” are often harassed, bullied, and socially or academically excluded. Thus, we are witnessing a wave of proselytizing in research institutes and science-associated media. Today, there is widespread biased propaganda of “victimhood”. This propaganda proposes positive discrimination and increasing women’s participation in unnatural ways. It also bends the history of science by overvaluing the creations of forgotten women, offering lectures on indoctrination, organizing congresses on gender and science, and persecuting anyone who sees the subject differently. All of this covered by a multitude of associations that financially benefit from these discourses through succulent subsidies of public money. Apparently, feminism is no longer about fighting against discrimination. Instead, it is about imposing an ideology and giving more power to one group of people. Thus, we must ask whether the end justifies the means. (shrink)

An audacious and accessible guide to feminist philosophy—its origins, its key ideas, and its latest directions.​ .

Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism, I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. This analysis refuses the assumption that violence is in conflict with identity, and that, (...) therefore, the endurance of violence of liberal states/societies is dependent upon mechanisms of active blindness. I argue that this assumption, which is shared by many critiques of violence, fails to perceive that people can desire the violent arrangements supporting their communities. They therefore fail to address political settings wherein violence is an affirmative element of political identities. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the question of how to reconceptualize “women” in order to do a more intersectional feminism. Intersectionality—the idea that gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on operate not as separate entities but as mutually constructing phenomena—has become a gold standard in contemporary feminist scholarship. In particular, intersectionality has achieved success in showing that the old conception of women as a single, uniform concept marginalizes women and others who exist at the intersecting axes of multiple oppressions (e.g., women of (...) color, women in the global South, working-class women, and/or queer and trans people), and thus, demonstrating the need to develop a new way of conceptualizing women. However, the question of what such a new conception would be remains unanswered. Specifically, if feminist theory today is to destabilize the old notion of “women” that relegates multiply oppressed women to the margin of feminism, and yet still needs to use some notion of “women” to critically analyze how the social structure of sexist oppression operates to subordinate women and to dismantle this oppression, how should the concept “women” be reformulated? In this dissertation, I argue that we need to understand women as a concept that is open to constant redefinition, which is socio-historically situated in the actualities of oppression. This is what I refer to as the “situated redefinition” model of women, which is formulated in more detail as follows: -/- The Situated Redefinition Model of Women (SR) – The concept “women” should be always open to being redefined in a way that it could better serve political goals grounded in the actual, daily lives of the marginalized. That is, “women” should be always open to new meanings and provisional definitions that the marginalized would find more useful to achieve political goals, which grow out of their concrete experiences in the current intersecting structures of oppression. -/- My central argument is that we need to understand the concept “women” according to the situated redefinition model, in order to employ this concept for doing intersectional feminism. To support this thesis, the dissertation is divided into two main parts. By engaging with the intersectionality literature, critical race feminisms, Asian/American feminisms, and recent critiques of intersectionality, the first part of the dissertation elucidates what exactly it means for feminism to be more “intersectional.” The second part develops the situated redefinition model and articulates why this model is needed to do intersectional feminism, drawing on the social/political philosophy literature on non-ideal theory, postmodern discussions of universality, and feminist discussions of identity politics. Broadly, this dissertation seeks to shed new light on how we understand and use the concept women for feminist ends. My conceptual model offers a way for feminist scholar-activists to subvert the essentialist/exclusionary notion of “women” without abandoning altogether feminist-political deployments of the concept “women” for the purpose of ending sexist and intersecting oppressions. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the transition and its meaning of the central figure used by Donna J. Haraway. Along with her achievement in primatology and gender, her prior manifesto about cyborgs, in which she utilized the image of hybrids from science fiction as a tool for analyzing actual women, has received significant attention and has made her an essential researcher in feminist science studies. On the other hand, her recent concern has led her to publish another (...) manifesto about species relationships, discussing ethics in coexistence and cohabitation. Influenced by her complicated portrayal of “companion species” and the expression of artless intimacy with dogs, previous studies had often incorrectly interpreted Haraway’s new manifesto as a simple renunciation of her older notion of cyborg by the new companion species. The present study interrogated the validity of those interpretations by examining other texts and statements by Haraway published between the two manifestoes. As a result, this study elucidates that both manifestoes include a sustained inclination to create a specific type of solidarity to replace heteronormativity and human exceptionalism. It provides a broader philosophical basis for the consideration of difference and solidarity. (shrink)

This essay circles around two ideas. First, I try to answer the ethical question “What is the right thing to do?” through the application of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s affirmative philosophy. Second, I relate Deleuze’s philosophy to mindfulness. I do not wish to suggest that they are identical. They are not. Yet, mixing mindfulness with Deleuze leads to a philosophy of mindfulness. That is a philosophy that makes us less blind to our experiences, but also ethically responsible for what (...) actually happens. Hereby, I move mindfulness from the sphere of psychology into philosophy, or from being primarily a practice of turning inward to one of turning outward, but also make Deleuze’s ethic more operational. The latter I will – briefly – illustrate by touching on elements of feminism. (shrink)

In this paper I look at the philosophical struggles of one eighteenth-century woman writer to reconcile a desire and obvious capacity to participate in the creation of republican ideals and their applications on the one hand, and on the other a deeply held belief that women's role in a republic is confined to the domestic realm. I argue that Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland's philosophical writings—three unpublished essays, published and unpublished letters, as well as parts of her memoirs—suggest that even though she (...) adopted a Rousseau-style rural republicanism that relies on complementarity of men and women's virtues, she somehow succeeds in proposing a less sexist picture of the republican family, one that makes it possible for men and women to take an equal part in family business and politics. (shrink)

Motherhood, as it is practiced, constitutes an obstacle to gender equality in political participation. Several options are available as a potential solution to this problem. One is to advice women not to become mothers, or if they do, to devote less time and energy to caring for their children. However this will have negative repercussions for those who need to be cared for, whether children, sick people or the elderly. A second solution is to reject the view that political participation (...) is an important or necessary part of human flourishing, and allow that those who engage in caring activities can live good lives without having a say in how they are ruled. This has negative consequences for the carers who find themselves in a position, if not of direct oppression, of being dominated, and therefore susceptible of being oppressed. The solution I propose, inspired by the writings of Sophie de Grouchy, is that we look for a form of republicanism that regards caring activities as a form of political participation. (shrink)

Octavia Butler depicts a character with physical or mental disability in each of her works. Yet scholars hesitate to discuss her work in terms that emphasize the intersection with disability. Two salient questions arise: How might it change Butler scholarship if we situated intersectional embodied experience as a central locus for understanding her work? Once we privilege such intersectionality, how might this transform our understanding of the aesthetics of the novel? In this paper, I reorient the criticism of Butler's work (...) such that disability becomes one of the social categories under consideration. I read two prominent analyses of Butler's work because their interpretations—black feminist in orientation—centralize black female identity as a category of analysis. I contend these analyses grapple with ideas that can only be fully understood with disability as an integral portion of the discussion. Since categories of analysis like race, disability, and gender require and create cultural tropes and challenge accepted forms, I outline three components of Butler's aesthetic: open-ended conclusions that frustrate the narrative cohesion associated with the novel form, intricate depictions of power that potentially alienate the able-bodied reader, and contained literary chaos that upends the idea of ontological fixity. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Engaging with the work of Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, this book reconceptualises the language divide between humans and animals within the context of animal ethics.

In feminist theory, intersectionality has become the predominant way of conceptualizing the relation between systems of oppression which construct our multiple identities and our social locations in hierarchies of power and privilege. The aim of this essay is to clarify the origins of intersectionality as a metaphor, and its theorization as a provisional concept in Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s work, followed by its uptake and mainstreaming as a paradigm by feminist theorists in a period marked by its widespread and rather unquestioned--if, (...) at times, superficial and inattentive--usage. I adduce four analytic benefits of intersectionality as a research paradigm: simultaneity, complexity, irreducibility and inclusivity. Then, I gesture at, and respond to some critiques of intersectionality advanced in the last few years, during which the concept has increasingly come under scrutiny. (shrink)

The Asian American identity is intimately associated with upward class mobility as the model minority, yet women's earnings remain less than men's, and Asian American women are perceived to have strong family ties binding them to domestic responsibilities. As such, the exact class status of Asian American women is unclear. The immediate association of this ethnic identity with a specific class as demonstrated by the recently released Pew study that Asian Americans are “the highest-income, best-educated” ethnicity contrasts with another study (...) that finds Asian American women have the highest suicide rates in the United States. To understand these contrasting statistics, this article explores Asian American women's sense of authenticity. If the individual's sense of authenticity is intimately related with one's group identity, the association of the Asian American identity with a particular class ambivalently ensnares her as dichotomously inauthentic—as both the poor Asian American woman who fails to achieve economic upward mobility and the model minority Asian American woman who engages in assimilation practices. Feminist philosophers understand that identities change, but exactly how these transformations occur remains a mystery. The article ends with three speculations on the difficulties for practicing and recognizing individual acts that transform one's group identity. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft argues that women must be independent citizens, but that they cannot be that unless they fulfill certain duties as mothers. This is problematic in a number of ways, as argued by Laura Brace in a 2000 article. However, I argue that if we understand Wollstonecraft's concept of independence in a republican, rather than a liberal context, and at the same time pay close attention to her discussion of motherhood, a feminist reading of Wollstonecraft is not only possible but (...) enriching. I will attempt to show, in particular, that the seeds of a feminist argument for co-parenting are to be found in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (shrink)

In the 1980s extra-parliamentary social movements and critical theories of race, class, and gender added a new sociocultural understanding of justice—recognition—to the much older socioeconomic one. The best-known form of the struggle for recognition is the identity politics of disadvantaged groups. I argue that there is still another option to conceptualize their predicament, neglected in recent political philosophy, which understands exclusion not in terms of injustice, more particularly a lack of sociocultural recognition, but in terms of a lack of freedom. (...) I draw my inspiration from Hannah Arendt's model of political action. Arendt diagnoses exclusion not solely as a mode of injustice, but as a lack of participation and public freedom. Consequently, she advocates a struggle for participation, political equality, and freedom as a strategy for emancipation or empowerment. Arendt could help feminists see that collective empowerment is made possible not by a shared identity (the target of poststructuralist critics) but by common action in the service of a particular worldly issue or common end. In other words, feminists would do well to appreciate the revolutionary quality and heritage of the feminist movement better, that is, its character as a set of practices of freedom. (shrink)

This article is about an etymological study of the concept "Woman" and leads towards Feminism. Written in Marathi for the first time ever. Published in a Rationalist Journal from Maharashtra. This is first part of the three parts.

The religious right often aligns its patriarchal opposition to same-sex marriage with the defence of religious freedom. In this article, I identify resources for confronting such prejudicial religiosity by surveying two predominant feminist approaches to same-sex marriage that are often assumed to be at odds: discourse ethics and queer critical theory. This comparative analysis opens up to view commitments that may not be fully recognizable from within either feminist framework: commitments to ideals of selfhood, to specific conceptions of justice, and (...) to particular definitions of secularism. I conclude by examining the "postsecular" turn in feminism, suggesting that we can see the same-sex marriage debate not in terms of an impasse between differing feminist approaches, but in terms of shared existential and ethical affinities. (shrink)

Responds to a paper delivered by Ladelle McWhorter at the Spindel Conference. Argues that we must be more careful in distinguishing Foucault's thought from feminist criticism.

Transnationalism prevailing in current anthropological studies of international migration encourages pointing out the other paradigms such as politics of identity and testing their applicability to address the new global flows of human location. The article includes a short account of analytical categories related to transnationalism and politics of identity and also provides a case study of the application of identity empowerment as a research perspective for the analysis of the Lithuanian migration to the US. Two ways – “diasporic” and “recognitionist” (...) – of transatlantic Lithuanian-ness are exemplified. These are enacted and emplaced in politics and practices of: in the first way – retaining nation-ness, culture as well as politics of return to homeland; in the other way – reclaiming local “roots”, culture and ethnic heritage as well as the ambition of “re-writing” the local histories of multiculturalism of the US. (shrink)

The “fathers’ rights” movement represents policies that undermine women’s reproductive autonomy as furthering the cause of gender equality. Khader argues that this movement exploits two general weaknesses of equality claims identified by Luce Irigaray. She shows that Irigaray criticizes equality claims for their appeal to a genderneutral universal subject and for their acceptance of our existing symbolic repertoire. This article examines how the plaintiffs’ rhetoric in two contemporary “fathers’ rights” court cases takes advantage of these weaknesses.

This paper argues that the difference model provided by Iris Marion Young is useful for clarifying and defending the contemporary radical movement for US former prisoners. First, I examine how ignoring the group difference of ex-prisoners produces oppressive consequences, and second, I show how embracing some group differences can empower ex-prisoners to overcome the obstacles posed by their sociopolitical, economic, and legal marginalization. Lastly, I briefly consider how rejecting sameness, despite the problems associated with “identity politics,” can help former prisoners (...) know and express their needs, thus creating the foundations necessary for building authentic global coalitions against structural oppression. (shrink)

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.

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.

Drawing on Iris Marion Young’s essay, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” Weir argues for an alternative ideal of home that involves: (1) the risk of connection, and of sustaining relationship through conflict; (2) relational identities, constituted through both relations of power and relations of mutuality, love, and flourishing; (3) relational autonomy: freedom as the capacity to be in relationships one desires, and freedom as expansion of self in relationship; and (4) connection to past and future, through reinterpretive (...) preservation and transformative identification. (shrink)

This essay examines the stereotype that transgender people are “deceivers” and the stereotype's role in promoting and excusing transphobic violence. The stereotype derives from a contrast between gender presentation and sexed body. Because gender presentation represents genital status, Bettcher argues, people who “misalign” the two are viewed as deceivers. The author shows how this system of gender presentation as genital representation is part of larger sexist and racist systems of violence and oppression.

In this article I reply to four critics. Responding to Linda Alcoff, I contend that my original two-dimensional framework discloses the entwinement of economic and cultural strands of subordination, while also illuminating the dangers of identity politics. Responding to James Bohman, I maintain that, with the addition of the third dimension of representation, my approach illuminates the structural exclusion of the global poor, the relation between justice and democracy, and the status of comprehensive theorizing. Responding to Nikolas Kompridis, I defend (...) a view of recognition that prioritizes the critique of institutionalized injustice. Responding to Rainer Forst, I argue that such a critique is better formulated in participation-theoretic than justification-theoretic terms. (shrink)

Reflections on the importance of epistemic nomadism for women and queers in the academy.

This article explores Donna Haraway’s overlooked theories of coalition-building along with the tactics of transversalism. I initially outline Haraway’s contributions and discuss why the cyborg of coalition has been ignored. I then relate this work to transversal politics, a form of coalition-building that acknowledges both the need for more open understandings of the subject and also the threatening circumstances that form these ‘hybrid’ subjects. The intriguing alliance that can be formed between them offers ways of dealing with the fears and (...) self-defensiveness that often stand in the way of creating effective political groups. Having explored the tactics that could productively structure interactions between Haraway’s cyborg actors, I broaden this out to discuss community more generally, in order to further explore the possible applications of these theories of coalition. Finally, through the work of Linnell Secomb and Jean-Luc Nancy, I suggest a vision of a community of cyborgs. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how a politics of difference, in particular that of Iris Marion Young, can give a much more robust justification for feminist goals and a more cogent diagnosis of and response to oppression than other political philosophies, such as liberalism, communitarianism, and post-socialism,. Nancy Fraser has nonetheless made several compelling criticisms of Young’s conception of the politics of difference, and I address these criticisms by demonstrating how the politics of difference can be ‘split’ into different differences.