Following in Joan Scott's anti-foundationalist footsteps, Linda Zerilli argues for a theory of feminist political judgement not framed in terms of epistemological certainty but assimilated to aesthetic judgement. Tani Barlow criticises Zerilli for not taking adequate account of history in her theory. I analyse the implications of Zerilli's ‘abyssal’ approach to political judgement and Barlow's critique of it. Despite their shared concerns, Zerilli's, Barlow's, and Scott's abyssal approaches struggle to effectively ground the validity of historical analysis and political judgement within (...) a context of plurality and historical difference. All three thinkers focus extensively on discursive and imaginative potential for change while marginalising the role of materiality in the creation of new horizons for women. Incorporating a dynamic account of the materiality of human life into their work would allow them to tie politics and history to an explanation of the role material life plays in constituting plurality, factuality, and historicity. (shrink)

The paper explores the potential and limitations of big data for researching racism on social media. Informed by critical data studies and critical race studies, the paper discusses challenges of doing big data research and the problems of the so called ‘white method’. The paper introduces the following three types of approach, each with a different epistemological basis for researching racism in digital context: 1) using big data analytics to point out the dominant power relations and the dynamics of racist (...) discourse, 2) complementing big data with qualitative research and 3) revealing new logics of racism in datafied context. The paper contributes to critical data and critical race studies by enhancing the understanding of the possibilities and limitations of big data research. This study also highlights the importance of contextualisation and mixed methods for achieving a more nuanced comprehension of racism and discrimination on social media and in large datasets. (shrink)

This article theorises the relationship between 1970s US Third World queer and feminist movements and Latin American anti-imperialist revolutions of the late twentieth century. I focus upon the historically occluded relationships between Third World feminists and queers in Chile and the United States throughout the transition to neoliberalism. My archive includes June Jordan’s little-known writings on Chile, the writings of Audre Lorde, and, primarily, a 1973 Third World feminist poetry reading staged in San Francisco shortly after the Pinochet coup. By (...) assembling this unconventional archive, I intervene into the domestication of US anti-racist queer, black and feminist of colour politics. I argue for the profoundly internationalist foundation of these formations. I work to re-animate a moment when the affective economies of anti-colonial ‘global revolution’ opened up space for the imagination of joint struggle – allowing a visceral sense of struggle’s urgency and vitality in ways that have since been partially eclipsed. (shrink)

This article approaches Ovid’s story of Echo and Narcissus in the Metamorphoses through some of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on expression and speech. Echo’s speech as portrayed by Ovid clearly illustrates how Merleau-Ponty describes speech in Phenomenology of Perception as a “paradoxical operation” through which we use words with already given sense and in that very process both stabilize and alter established meaning. Instead of reducing Echo to a moment of the identity and fate of Narcissus, I bring out Echo’s own (...) voice and the expression of her subjectivity through creative repetition. The short dialogue between Echo and Narcissus makes manifest that Echo’s words cannot be reduced to a simple repetition of a clear and distinct original. Rather, her speech emerges in relation to an original that is only made present as an original of a repetition in that very repetition. Echo’s voice is disruption of the words she repeats and each repetition is also its own origin. Echo’s own voice is only made present when we listen to it as something other than a simple repetition of the voice of Narcissus. The fragments she returns through her echo, lose their fragmented character through modifying and altering their already given meaning. What Echo lacks is not primarily a voice of her own but rather an unbound origin which by itself remains mute and thereby runs the risk of not expressing anything at all. Echo is repetition but it is precisely as repetition that she is also originating speech. (shrink)

The death of Jean Baudrillard in 2007 brought about a resurgence of feminist scholarship on his work. But in all recent feminist scholarship on Baudrillard, save for Victoria Grace’s Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading (2000), feminists focus on Baudrillard’s later theory of simulation, forestalling any reconsideration of his earlier text Seduction (1979). In this article I argue that a theory of seduction facilitates the unveiling of a hitherto unnoticed strain of feminist writing that proposes an ongoing challenge to masculine power (...) and politics. This strategy of seduction is one that can be traced through a history of modern feminism, from Joan Rivière’s concept of ‘womanliness’ in ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ to Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ to Virginia Woolf’s ‘mulberry tree’ in Three Guineas. (shrink)

Hallucination: the perception of an impossible image. That which can never appear suddenly does so anyways - a private world that appears only to the eye of the one imagining it... until now. Ted Serios, psychic photographer, claimed he could project images directly from his mind onto photographic film. Under the sign of the psychic photograph, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” is a theorization of the dominant forms of uncertainty that persist in postmodern evaluations of representation, interpretation and identity. The central thesis (...) of this paper is that the imaginary and the real have collapsed into the spectral hallucination of one another, rendering impossible the rhetorical separation of hallucination from image. With the collapse of the boundary between the fictive and the real, the world of representation becomes intelligible only as an imaginary phenomenon; with the collapse between the object and the observer, interpretation is rendered deceptively magical; and, with the collapse between the self and its anonymous double, identity itself is relegated to a state of impossibility. Consequently, under the persisting signs of the imaginary, the magical and the impossible, “Hallucinating Ted Serios” asserts that in our contemporary world there no longer exists the possibility of failed performativity – psychic, imaginary or otherwise. (shrink)

This article discusses some current research claims on gender and state socialism in Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989. It raises questions about claims by Revisionist Feminist Scholars that official state socialist women’s organizations were ‘agents’ on behalf of women, or women’s movements, perhaps feminist, and not ‘transmission belts’ of communist parties. State socialist policies are described as ‘friendly towards women’ and ‘pro-women’. In contrast, the author claims that these organizations both were and were not agents on behalf of women, (...) and also prevented women’s agency. Meaningful women’s agency is not actually shown to occur intermittently throughout their history, but in two contexts – before 1955 or in moments of political rupture. Scholars do not distinguish the who, when, and what – Who could be agents? When could they be agents? And what kind of agents could they be? State policies, the author claims, were also at one and the same time ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’ towards women, sometimes harming women. The author explores why this research is happening now, discussing research on Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the Democratic Women’s Organization of Germany, the Democratic Association of Hungarian Women, later renamed MNOT, the Romanian National Council of Women and the Yugoslav Anti-Fascist Women’s Organization. (shrink)

With this paper, I will interrogate some of the implications of nursing's dominant historiography, the history written by and about nursing, and its implications for nursing ethics as a praxis, invoking feminist philosopher Donna Haraway's mantra that ‘it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’ First, I will describe what I have come to understand as the nursing imaginary, a shared consciousness constructed both by nurses from within and by those outside the discipline from without. This imaginary is (...) fashioned in part by the histories nursing produces about the discipline, our historical ontology, which is demonstrative of our disciplinary values and the ethics we practice today. I assert that how we choose to constitute ourselves as a discipline is itself an ethical endeavour, bound up with how we choose to be and what we allow as knowledge in nursing. To animate this discussion, I will outline the received historiography of nursing and dwell in the possibilities of thinking about Kaiserswerth, the training school that prepared Nightingale for her exploits in Crimea and beyond. I will briefly consider the normative values that arise from this received history and consider the possibilities that these normative values foreclose upon. I then shift the frame and ask what might be possible if we centred Kaiserswerth's contested legacy as a training school for formerly incarcerated women, letting go of the sanitary and sanitised visions of nursing as Victorian angels in the hospital. Much energy over the past 250 years has been invested in the professionalisation and legitimation of nursing, predicated (at least in our shared imaginary) on the interventions of Florence Nightingale, but this is one possibility of many. I conclude with a speculative dream of the terrain opens up for nursing if we shed this politics and ethos of respectability and professionalism and instead embrace community, abolition and mutual aid as organising values for the discipline. (shrink)