A review of U. Mäki (ed.). Fact and Fiction in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xvi 384. ISBN 0521 00957. As people interested mainly in theory, methodologists and philos...

The contemporary Women’s Movement has generated major new theories of the social construction of gender and male power. The feminist attack on the masculinist assumptions of cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and most of the other academic disciplines has raised questions about some basic assumptions of those fields. For example, feminist economists have questioned the public/private split of much of mainstream economics, that ignores the social necessity of women’s unpaid housework and childcare. Feminist psychologists have challenged cognitive and psychoanalytic (...) categories of human moral and gender development arguing that they are biased toward the development of male children rather than female children. Feminist anthropologists have argued that sex/gender systems, based on the male exchange of women in marriage, have socially produced gender differences in sexuality and parenting skills which have perpetuated different historical and cultural forms of male dominance. Feminist philosophers and theorists have suggested that we must reject the idea of a gender-free epistemological standpoint from which to understand the world. Finally radical feminists have argued that the liberal state permits a pornography industry that sexually objectifies women, thus legitimizing male violence against women. (shrink)

The contemporary Women’s Movement has generated major new theories of the social construction of gender and male power. The feminist attack on the masculinist assumptions of cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and most of the other academic disciplines has raised questions about some basic assumptions of those fields. For example, feminist economists have questioned the public/private split of much of mainstream economics, that ignores the social necessity of women’s unpaid housework and childcare. Feminist psychologists have challenged cognitive and psychoanalytic (...) categories of human moral and gender development arguing that they are biased toward the development of male children rather than female children. Feminist anthropologists have argued that sex/gender systems, based on the male exchange of women in marriage, have socially produced gender differences in sexuality and parenting skills which have perpetuated different historical and cultural forms of male dominance. Feminist philosophers and theorists have suggested that we must reject the idea of a gender-free epistemological standpoint from which to understand the world. Finally radical feminists have argued that the liberal state permits a pornography industry that sexually objectifies women, thus legitimizing male violence against women. (shrink)

"Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference" looks at the question of difference across the full spectrum of feminist theory from liberal, radical, lesbian ...

Feminist Policymaking in Turbulent Times offers a unique and timely reflection of the critical debates around the institutionalisation of feminist and gender-focused ideas and norms into policy. Many states and non-governmental organisations are increasingly invested in 'feminist policymaking' at the domestic and international levels. Yet, this liberal (feminist) agenda is also vastly disputed by critical, intersectional and decolonial voices on the one hand, and by anti-gender movements around the world on the other. Indeed, while opposition to (...) 'gender ideology' is mounting from reactionary, religious and secular forces, feminist policymaking is also being challenged in important ways from within. Thus, this book situates feminist policymaking in a challenging and 'turbulent', global context. This book explores feminist policymaking in multiple areas of policy, examining various gender-focused programmes that states and international organisations have undertaken in the last decade, offering critical interventions and rethinking the relationship between feminism and policy. The book not only reflects on the advances of feminist policymaking globally, but also critically assesses the intersectional challenges embedded within it and lying ahead. It moves the field forward by creating opportunities, based on lived experiences, for re-imagining the transformative potential of the nexus between feminism and policymaking. Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing to the fore the voices of both academics and practitioners, the book is the product of an international collaboration, forging links and dialogue that are increasingly necessary to question some of the exclusionary, militaristic and hierarchical assumptions of policymaking which is labelled as feminist. Feminist Policymaking in Turbulent Times will be of interest to all scholars, students and practitioners interested in the role of gender in policymaking and concerned with contestations around gender-focused projects. (shrink)

The population of women farm operators continues to increase in the U.S. That growth, however, is mediated by research showing that women in agriculture experience persistent barriers to equality with men. The Feminist Agriculture Food Theory (FAST) developed by Sach et al. (The Rise of Women Farmers and Sustainable Agriculture, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, (Sachs et al., The rise of women farmers and sustainable agriculture, University of Iowa Press, 2016) posits that in the face of these (...) barriers, women farmers in the Northeast are engaging in six strategies to increase their success. These include (1) increasing gender equality on their farms, (2) asserting an identity as a farmer, (3) gaining greater access to resources, (4) shaping new food and farming systems, (5) negotiating roles in agricultural organizations, and (6) forming women-centered farming organizations. While researchers have applied FAST to Michigan, it has not been examined at a national level. In this paper, then, we use the 2017 Census of Agriculture Data to measure how women in agriculture in the U.S. are faring on each aspect of FAST we can measure (strategies 1–5). We compare women to men farmers across these FAST strategies and across three different farm types: Non-Organic Non-Value-Added Farms, Organic Farms, and Value-Added Farms. Our findings suggest for FAST strategies 1 and 2 there is an increase in equity and ability to identify as a farmer for women on organic and value-added farms. However, our findings also suggest that for FAST strategies that require more institutional and structural resources (I.e. strategies 3–5), inequities persist across farm types. (shrink)

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth- century technoscience. The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, (...) OncoMouse. Haraway sees the world of contemporary technoscience as a drama. Information sciences and life sciences are at the center of the dramatic action. Scenes are set in landscapes where maps of human genetic differences are stored in databases, racialized bodies are reconfigured by morphing for photographs in popular magazines, and transgenic mice important to breast cancer research are patented intellectual property. The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact. In later scenes, Haraway explores the kinship relations among the many cyborg creatures produced in the late twentieth-century--in nuclear research, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, computer-mediated representational practices, and mutations in biological approaches to "race.". (shrink)

The rise of AI-based systems has been accompanied by the belief that these systems are impartial and do not suffer from the biases that humans and older technologies express. It becomes evident, however, that gender and racial biases exist in some AI algorithms. The question is where the bias is rooted—in the training dataset or in the algorithm? Is it a linguistic issue or a broader sociological current? Works in feminist philosophy of technology and behavioral economics reveal the gender (...) bias in AI technologies as a multi-faceted phenomenon, and the linguistic explanation as too narrow. The next step moves from the linguistic aspects to the relational ones, with postphenomenology. One of the analytical tools of this theory is the “I-technology-world” formula that models our relations with technologies, and through them—with the world. Realizing that AI technologies give rise to new types of relations in which the technology has an “enhanced technological intentionality”, a new formula is suggested: “I-algorithm-dataset.” In the third part of the article, four types of solutions to the gender bias in AI are reviewed: ignoring any reference to gender, revealing the considerations that led the algorithm to decide, designing algorithms that are not biased, or lastly, involving humans in the process. In order to avoid gender bias, we can recall a feminist basic understanding—visibility matters. Users and developers should be aware of the possibility of gender and racial biases, and try to avoid them, bypass them, or exterminates them altogether. (shrink)

An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education of June 30, 1993, reported, “Two decades after it began redefining debates” in many other disciplines, “feminist thinking seems suddenly to have arrived in economics.” Many economists, of course, did not happen to be in the station when this train arrived, belated as it might be. Many who might have heard rumor of its coming have not yet learned just what arguments are involved or what it promises for the refinement of (...) the profession. The purpose of this essay is to provide a low-cost way of gaining some familiarity. (shrink)

Bonnie Honig invigorates debate over the politics of refusal by insisting that withdrawal from unjust political systems be matched with collective action to change them. Historical and fictional characters from Muhammad Ali to the Bacchants of ancient Greek tragedy teach us how to turn rejection into transformative efforts toward self-governance.

The book argues that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman and that many of the problems mothers face-socially, economically, politically, culturally, and psychologically-are specific to women's work and identity as mothers. Indeed, mothers, arguably more so than women in general, remain disempowered despite forty years of feminism. Mothers, thus, need a feminism of their own, one that positions mothers' concerns as the starting point for a theory and politic of empowerment. O'Reilly terms this new (...) mode of feminism matricentic feminism and the book explores how it is represented and experienced in theory, activism, and practice. The chapter on maternal theory examines the central theoretical concepts of maternal scholarship to include Adrienne Rich's distinction between mothering and motherhood, Sara Ruddick's model of maternal thinking and practice and Patricia Hill Collins' concept of othermothering while the chapter on activism considers the 21st century motherhood movement. Feminist mothering is likewise examined as the specific practice of matricentric feminism and this chapter discusses varies theories and strategies on and for maternal empowerment. Matricentric feminism is also examined in relation to the larger field of Feminist Theory and Women's Studies; here O'Reilly persuasively shows how matricentric feminism has been marginalized in feminist scholarship and considers the reasons for such exclusion and how such may be challenged and changed. (shrink)

Alongside other types of mass atrocities, genocide has received extensive scholarly, policy, and practitioner attention. Missing, however, is the contribution of economists to better understand and prevent such crimes. This edited collection by 41 accomplished scholars examines economic aspects of genocides, other mass atrocities, and their prevention. Chapters include numerous case studies, probing literature reviews, and completely novel work based on extraordinary country-specific datasets. Also included are chapters on the demographic, gendered, and economic class nature of genocide. Replete (...) with research- and policy-relevant findings, new insights are derived from behavioral economics, law and economics, political economy, macroeconomic modeling, microeconomics, development economics, industrial organization, identity economics, and other fields. Analytical approaches include constrained optimization theory, game theory, and sophisticated statistical work in data-mining, econometrics, and forecasting.A foremost finding of the book concerns atrocity architects' purposeful, strategic use of violence, often manipulating nonrational proclivities among ordinary people to sway their participation in mass murder. Relatively understudied in the literature, the book also analyzes the options of victims before, during, and after mass violence. Further, the book shows how well-intended prevention efforts can backfire and increase violence, how wrong post-genocide design can entrench vested interests to reinforce exclusion of vulnerable peoples, and how businesses can become complicit in genocide. In addition to the necessity of healthy opportunities in employment, education, and key sectors in prevention work, the book shows why new genocide prevention laws and institutions must be based on reformulated incentives that consider insights from law and economics, behavioral economics, and collective action economics. (shrink)

In activist circles feminist political thought is often viewed as abstract because it does not help activists make the kinds of arguments that are generally effective with donors and policy makers. The feminist political philosopher's focus on how we know and what counts as knowledge is a large step away from the terrain in which activists make their arguments to donors. Yet, philosophical reflection on the relations between power and knowledge can make a significant contribution to women's human (...) rights work in the area of evaluation. Feminist political philosophy can offer guidelines for how to evaluate the work of women's human rights organizations and their funders in light of the social, political, and economic conditions that render their work necessary and difficult. This article offers 1) an account of the difficulty in showing the impact of social change activism using conventional modes of measurement, particularly those that focus on first order effects, 2) feminist theoretical insights into the interrelatedness of global gender injustices that may help us develop better benchmarks of evaluation for women's human rights programming, and 3) a sketch of how to approach the evaluation of organizations and donors who seek to support global gender justice. (shrink)

Details developments in feminist theory since 1970, with chapters on aspects such as feminist social theory, political theory, and jurisprudence, black feminisms, post-colonial feminist theory, lesbian theory, and feminist linguistic theories. Other topics include psychoanalytic feminist theory, postmodernism and feminism, feminist literary theory, feminist media and film theory, and women's studies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.1 (2003) 73-75 [Access article in PDF] Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Sonia Kruks. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 200. $35.00 h.c. 0-8014-3387-8; $16.95 pbk. 0-8014-8417-0. Sonia Kruks' latest book, Retrieving Experience, is a valuable contribution to ongoing debates about the relevance of feminist philosophy in a period of relative political quietism. It also (...) offers timely reminders of historical continuities between phenomenological and postmodern conceptions of subjectivity and political engagement. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Fanon, and the later Sartre, Kruks proposes to "explore women's embodied experiences" and to "ask whether they might not offer some means to help build affective bonds among women who are in many ways radically different from one another" (6). The book approaches this task by means of two secondary issues. First, should feminist thought be oriented by phenomenological or postmodernist theoretical strategies? Second, can women's embodied experience be the conceptual basis for political and epistemological practices that avoid the pitfalls of "identity politics" or an "epistemology of provenance"? The answer to both questions comes through the notion of praxis developed in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. By thinking of embodiment as praxis or work, a strategy implicit in Beauvoir's idea that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Kruks seeks to resolve the ethical affront of finding one's individuality reduced to the "generality" of a collective—the ethical affront to which feminists of various generations and theoretical persuasions must respond.Retrieving Experience explores the significance of recognition as a political norm. Identifying Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew as a pivotal work in the history of identitarian theorizing, she situates recent appeals for race- and gender-based political mobilization in the United States with respect to the dialectical relationship between the Look, shame, and recognition existentialists observed in situations of anti-Semitic and colonial domination during and immediately after the Second World War. Legitimating knowledge gained under oppressive conditions formed an important element of African, Southeast Asian, and ultimately African-American and feminist resistance to cultural imperialism. However, Kruks warns, discourses of "recognition" risk placing the blame for group domination on individuals' face-to-face interactions while concealing the role of state and economic institutions in enabling social disdain to systematically damage a group's quality of life. Moreover, they suggest that the experience of subjugation alone justifies knowledge claims or counts, without further elaboration, as an act of political engagement. Kruks argues that knowers and actors need to identify conceptual and practical mediations enabling individual interactions, experiences, and strategies to prompt the recognition and transformation of [End Page 73] group situations. Sartre's notion of praxis, she suggests, explains how an individual can participate in a collectivity while acting autonomously or acquiescing to subjection.The most important passages in Retrieving Experience examine the affective aspects of the decision to take up a political identity or engage in political action. Going beyond Sartre's account of mediations, Kruks suggests that the sensory and emotional qualities of embodiment are themselves mediators, the products of praxis as well as its vehicles. Since any act of social knowledge involves the emotions, affect plays an important role in the process whereby individuals from different cultural, economic, and bodily situations learn about and shape one another's' environment through the act of knowledge. Individuals, then, may have a moral responsibility to learn about others in a way that gives them "sympathetic bodies." Drawing on Maria Lugones' social epistemology, Kruks argues that "world-traveling" or existing simultaneously in several communities or sets of power relations is a bodily act, but also a fully cultural, ethical act rather than a natural way of being. One is not born, but becomes, an embodied knower. Understanding female embodiment as a kind of work or "world-traveling" praxis enables feminist solidarity—"respectful recognition" to replace a historically implausible "sisterhood" or a distinct epistemological perspective as a regulative ideal for feminist politics.But how far can the... (shrink)

This chapter suggests an approach to decolonial feminism drawing from Latina feminist theory and practice. Rejecting an imperial feminism involves something else besides “going local”: it requires a genuine reorientation of feminist theory toward the everyday. This chapter considers how this affects the central debates about gender identities and gender liberation. How might we approach gender questions in the context of learning from, rather than teaching, lo cotidiano of the impoverished? This would counter the popular accounts (...) of identity formation that view it as necessarily involving either authoritarianism from above, or irrationality from below. The chapter then explores the late theologian Ada-María Isasi-Díaz’s development of a mujerista theology, which adapted certain aspects of liberation theology’s “preference for the poor” to US Latinas. (shrink)

Do men and women perceive cybercrime types differently? This article draws on the distinction between socio-economic and psychosocial cybercrime proposed by Lazarus (2019) to investigate whether men and women hold different perceptions of digital crimes across these two dimensions. Informed by the synergy between feminist theory and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF), our survey examined respondents’ differential perceptions of socio-economic cybercrime (online fraud) and psychosocial cybercrime (cyberbullying, revenge porn, cyberstalking, online harassment) among men and women in (...) the United Kingdom. The results revealed that women considered psychosocial cybercrime worse than men. Conversely, we found no differences between men and women with regard to socio-economic cybercrime. The article concludes that psychosocial cybercrimes are more gendered than socio-economic cybercrime, suggesting problems with the meaning of ‘cyber-enabled crimes’, and substantiating the synergy between the TCF and feminist perspectives. (shrink)

Introduction -- By way of nomadism -- Context and generations -- Sexual difference theory -- On the female feminist subject : from "she-self" to "she-other" -- Sexual difference as a nomadic political project -- Organs without bodies -- Images without imagination -- Mothers, monsters, and machines -- Discontinuous becomings : Deleuze and the becoming-woman of philosophy -- Envy and ingratitude: men in feminism -- Conclusion. Geometries of passion : a conversation.

What can money do? Can it be put to work to address deepening forms of social and economic inequality associated with the financial crisis, ongoing recession and still unfolding politics of austerity? Can we have faith in money as an injustice-remedying substance in a crisis-ridden and (still thoroughly) financialised reality? While the latter scenario is implied in recent feminist calls to redistribute resources to redress widening socio-economic inequalities under austerity, in this article I suggest that such a (...) redistributive logic fails to account for the shifting capacities of resources, including the capacities of money. To track these shifting capacities, I revisit the demands of the 1970s women's liberation movement and especially the assumptions at play in these demands that money both measure and distribute justice. While these assumptions were arguably politically efficacious in that moment, in the contemporary present, pervasive financialisation has involved a material transformation to the capacities of money, a transformation that, I will suggest, leaves its justice-distributing potential in doubt. This article therefore not only calls for careful exploration of the capacities of resources in analyses of crisis, recession and austerity, but also for feminist theory to rethink redistributive justice in the light of such transformations. Central to these considerations is money in the wages form. (shrink)

What happens when well-defined disciplines meet or are confronted with transdisciplinary discourses and concepts, where transdisciplinary concepts are analytical tools rather than specifications of a field of objects or a class of entities? Or, if disciplines reject transdisciplinary discourses and concepts as having no part to play in their practice, why do they so reject them? This essay addresses these questions through a discussion of the relationship between philosophy – the most tightly policed discipline in the humanities – and what (...) I will argue is the emblematically transdisciplinary practice of feminist theory, via a discussion of interdisciplinarity and related terms in gender studies. It argues that the tendency of philosophy to reject feminist theory in fact correctly intuited that the two defining features of feminist theory – its constitutive tie to a political agenda for social change and the transdisciplinary character of many of its central concepts – are indeed at odds with, and pose a threat to, the traditional insularity of the discipline of philosophy. It argues, further, that feminist theory operates with what we should now recognise as a set of transdisciplinary concepts – including, sex, gender, woman, sexuality and sexual difference – and that the use of these concepts in feminist philosophy has been the most far-reaching continuation in the late 20th/early 21st centuries of the critique of philosophy initiated by Marx and pursued by ‘critical theory’. This puts feminist philosophy in a difficult position: its transdisciplinary aspects open it up to an unavoidable contradiction. Nonetheless, this is a contradiction that can and must be endured and made productive. In order to draw out the specificity of the concept of transdisciplinarity at issue the essay begins with a discussion of attempts to define inter- and transdisciplinarity, particularly in gender studies. Arguing for the transdisciplinary origin of the concept of gender, it then suggests one way of understanding its function as a critical concept, before making explicit how this leads to the historical antagonism between traditional philosophy and the critical, transdisciplinary concept of gender and with feminist theory more generally. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to shed light on women’s experience of informal trade on one of the EU external borders: Belarus–Lithuania. The article suggests looking at the informal economy beyond the notion of precarity and to pay attention to how women themselves understand their involvement in trading practices. The author argues that, although economic necessity is an important motivation for women to start trading activities, this experience rewards them not only financially but also through non-economic aspects (...) such as self-respect, solidarity and socializing. Theoretically, the article brings together the discussion of the gendered nature of informal work with the feminist theory of agency. It shows that women’s experience of informal cross-border trade is agentive. Trade provides women with a sense of pride, self-confidence and respect and enables them to recognize their self-sufficiency. However, it is also argued that agency is not synonymous with autonomy and individualism. Theoretically and empirically, the article stresses a relational understanding of agency. On the one hand, women acknowledge their financial achievements as the capability to take proper care of their children, especially in situations when the second breadwinner is absent. On the other hand, they also value their trading experience as a space of socializing with other women. The success of cross-border trade depends on the sense of solidarity and collective action to resist the system represented by customs and border control. (shrink)

The study of the Chinese feminism rose in 1980s. Its theoretical premise is that Chinese woman has divided into different groups and has gotten the uneven development, caused by the command economic system into the market economic system. By this premise, the given questions of Chinese feminism only accordwith the given woman groups, namely, each woman group has its own problems. All of the problems have shown that the key question in the study of the Chinese feminism is (...) why the unequal between sexes occurs in such a society of the equal between sexes in law as China. This paper will analyze this question through three aspects: (1) study the present condition of the Chinese woman groups and the cause for the occurrence; (2) analyze the causes that the unequal between sexes occur in china; (3) rethink the practice and theory of the Chinese woman movement. (shrink)

Recent feminist critiques of development have questioned some fundamental assumptions of feminist political theory; such critiques have also been successful in subverting long-held assumptions of conventional economic development. Viewed in the context of women’s subordination in third world countries, a redefinition of development must not only be about economic growth, but ensure a redistribution of resources, challenge the gender-based division of labour and also seek to provide for an egalitarian basis in social arrangements. Further, as (...) this article argues, any starting point for feminist critiques of development must also seek to link the end of gender oppression to multiple theories of justice – a justice not juridical but one that recognises the cultural membership of women in the community. (shrink)

The necessity of consent is widely justified on the basis of the principle of respect for autonomy. Also, it is widely believed that shared decision making (SDM) is the practical device to seek patients’ consent for medical treatment. In this essay, I argue that SDM, while necessary, is insufficient for consent; because, in the paradigm of evidence-based medicine, SDM is contingent upon other practices to identify appropriate treatments that form the subjects of SDM. Indeed, case law emphasises normative decision-making practices (...) that precede SDM. Furthermore, case law supplies a nuanced understanding of SDM, which includes not only exchange of information but also attention to human vulnerability that persists despite formal retention of decision-making capacity. In addition, the law marks out a space in which people with capacity are absolutely entitled to self-determination. Thus, a four-step framework of decision making can be induced from legal doctrine. This legal framework corresponds to a construct of respect for autonomy that draws upon feminist theory. Feminist scholars have objected to the focus on individuals in traditional theories of autonomy; instead, they insist that people have to be considered in the context of their social influences and relationships. Feminists separate out four ideas of autonomy, and these ideas can be used to construct a four-layered model of respect for autonomy, in which each layer corresponds sequentially to a step in the legal framework of decision making. This model of respect for autonomy provides both conceptual clarity and theoretically robust justification for doctors’ various obligations in decision-making practices for consent. (shrink)

Work is fundamental to human society and modern organizations, and consequently has been central to the thinking of major social theorists and social science disciplines. This book offers a 'one-stop-shop' guide to classical and contemporary perspectvies of work written by leading international experts. Schools covered include: Weberian, Marxian, Durkheimian, feminist, neo-classical economics, institutional economics, ethics, Foucauldian, postmodernist, organizational sociology and economic sociology. Each chapter traces the origins of the theoretical school, reviews seminal contributions,and considers major criticisms of the (...) approach. In addition, the book features a section on key aspects of work - professions, technology, identity and globalisation - to which these theories have been applied. The book makes a major contribution in a number of ways: · Provides systematic coverage of major social and economic theories and the way they aid our understanding of work;· Includes a section of chapters that consider, in an applied way, how social theories have helped the analysis of key substantive areas of work;· Includes contributions from leading academics from both Europe and the USA; · Each chapter can be read as free-standing summary of a particular school of theoretical approach;· In addition, the introductory and concluding chapters examine themes cross-cutting the other chapters in the book.It is an essential text for academics and advanced students concerned with the sociology of work, management, and organization studies. (shrink)

This article examines the conceptualisation of materialities in feminist theory through two paradigmatic examples: (French) materialist feminism and new materialisms. What can be interpreted as an opposition between different paradigms can also be disrupted as long as we define what matters as a relation or a process rather than a substance or a lost paradise to which we should return. New materialisms indeed help to investigate aspects such as corporeality, human/non-human interaction and textures, but the role of (...) class='Hi'>feminist materialism is invaluable in highlighting the social structures of power relations; more than ever, it makes a decisive contribution to the understanding of domination, such as the social relations and hierarchies implied in femosecularism conceptualised in this article. Ultimately, the tool of hybridised materialisms aims to articulate the theoretical perspective of materialist feminism with that of the new materialisms – in order to avoid the binarism between materiality and culture. (shrink)

This article offers a feminist perspective on contract theories in law,economics and law-and-economics. It identifies masculine traits presentcontract theories in all three disciplines. It then describes andassesses some developments that appear to be ‘feminising’: Therecognition of the importance of social norms in contract theory andtheories of contract as relationship. The article's main claim is that amasculine model of decision-making persists even within the less overtlymasculine models of contract. The problem of sexually transmitted debtresulting from a surety contract is (...) analysed in detail as a specificexample supporting the article's general argument. The article concludesthat the way forward is to be found in a recognition of other ways ofmaking decisions. (shrink)

Lorey develops an original concept of a presentist democracy based on care and interrelatedness.

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Damnation of Women," which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

In this short paper, we introduce our Special Section in Feminist Theory titled ‘Feminist human-computer interaction: Struggles for past, contemporary and futuristic feminist theories in digital innovation’. Over the last years, we worked with the authors of the articles presented herein to bring together feminist theories with their practical application in the design, development, use and exploration of digital technologies. Our section follows three aspects: an overview of past feminist histories and discourse; the development (...) of actionable, contemporary theory; and speculative futures of what a feminist human-computer interaction could be. Together with the contributing authors, we are excited to explore these areas of post-disciplinary connection at the intersection of theory, practice and activism. (shrink)

: In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Damnation of Women," which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

This collection breaks new ground in four key areas of feminist social thought: the sex/gender debates; challenges to liberalism/equality; feminist ethics; and feminist perspectives on global ethics and politics in the 21st century. Altogether, the essays provide an innovative look at feminist philosophy while making substantive contributions to current debates in gender theory, ethics, and political thought.

Every day consumers use and purchase products whose supply chains begin with natural resources in countries plagued by widespread human rights deficits. Many economists and political scientists argue that there is a resource curse: those countries which possess valuable natural resources, especially oil, natural gas, and minerals, are prone to authoritarianism, civil war, and economic mismanagement. The combination of these two empirical facts—that consumers indirectly purchase resources from countries plagued with human rights abuses, and that these abuses are systematically (...) correlated with dependence on natural resource exports—has recently led philosophers to argue that consumers, corporations, and the governments that represent them bear some moral responsibility for human rights deficits in resource exporting countries. I agree. However, analyses of the resource curse rarely mention gender. This masks the gendered aspects of the harms that result from the natural resource trade. First, there is a high correlation between dependence on natural resource exports and gender inequality. Second, the commonly recognized resource curses—of authoritarianism, civil war, and economic mismanagement --result in gender specific harms. If these empirical assertions are correct, consumers, corporations, and the governments that represent them bear some moral responsibility for the foreseeable, avoidable gender-specific injustice that many women and some men suffer as a result of the resource curse. After reviewing the causal and moral links between natural resources and gender inequality, I consider a range of proposed reforms to the resource curse, and argue that integrating gender into these reforms will help create enabling conditions for women’s rights movements to move from the resource ‘curse’ to opportunity and equality. (shrink)

In this article on Elizabeth Grosz's philosophy and its implications for discussions about feminist theory, I first suggest that Charles Darwin plays a particular role in Grosz's recent ontological thought. This role is to provide help in joining together two incompatible sources in her work: Gilles Deleuze's monistic ontology of a constant flow of new differentiations, on the one hand, and Luce Irigaray's thought of sexual difference as the primary ontological difference, on the other. I argue that Grosz's (...) intellectual project has developed into a grand general theory of change in which both Darwin and Irigaray are turned into ontologists in a Deleuzian vein. I then point out that Grosz's ontology also includes a political aspect, which manifests in the fact that Grosz redescribes Darwin through interpreting him primarily as a theorist of “event” and the unexpected. However, through an analysis of the discussion on Grosz between Luciana Parisi and Jami Weinstein, I speculate whether Grosz's ambition to provide a total and complete explanation of change encourages the tone of feminist discussion toward one of explanation rather than intervention. (shrink)

Transnational Feminist Itineraries demonstrates the key contributions of transnational feminist theory and practice to analyzing and contesting contemporary political and economic trends, including growing authoritarian nationalism and the extension of global corporate power.

American feminism’s anti-Black racism is often presented as a failure of white feminists to integrate Black women into their movement. This historiographic approach presumes that feminism was a progressive movement that merely suffered from blind spots in its approach to women’s rights due to the biases of some white women. Unlike previous research which has pointed out the individual racism of suffragettes and mid-twentieth-century feminists, this chapter argues for an understanding of the theories created and endorsed by feminists from 1860 (...) to 1980 as the consequence of feminism’s dependence on racist theories predicated on research from ethnologists and evolutionary theorists in the nineteenth and criminologists in the twentieth centuries. By looking at the primary racial target of feminist thought and activism over the centuries, the Black male, I argue scholars can more accurately trace the theories feminists used to derail Black American’s struggle for civil rights. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:510 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Shelley Streeby Speculative Writing, Art, and World-Making in the Wake of Octavia E. Butler as Feminist Theory The late great speculative fiction writer Octavia E. Butler often referred to herself as a feminist. In an autobiographical note she revised frequently over the course of her lifetime, now held in the massive archive (...) of more than 8,000 individually cataloged items that comprise The Octavia E. Butler Papers (OEB) at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, Butler called herself a “hermit in the middle of Los Angeles,” a pessimist when she wasn’t “careful,” and “a feminist” as well as “a Black” and “a former Baptist.”1 Throughout her published work, Butler explores intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class in ways shaped by her life growing up “black, female, and working class” across town in Pasadena, California.2 The keywords “feminism” and “feminist” pop up often in her archive. In 1988, in one of dozens of notebooks Butler filled with writing, she proudly claimed to be writing “true cross-over science fiction ” that reached both science fiction and general audiences, “encompassing feminists and blacks as well,” a claim she often repeated.3 The thousands of clippings Butler kept and annotated on subjects of interest to her included many on feminism, which she organized to emphasize 1. OEB, Folder 95. The OEB collection organized by Curator Natalie Russell, who authored the finding aid. 2. OEB, Folder 3093. 3. OEB, Folder 3239, November 9, 1988. 511 Shelley Streeby Books Discussed in This Essay Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times. Aimee Bahng. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader. Edited by Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds. adrienne maree brown. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2017. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015. Radio Imagination: Artists and Writers in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler. Edited by Janet Duckworth and Savanah Wood. Los Angeles: Clockshop, 2018. M Archive: After the End of the World. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption. Walidah Imarisha. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2016. Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility. Alexis Lothian. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Sami Schalk. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. intersections among feminist and other struggles. A 1991 piece by Black syndicated columnist Clarence Page, for instance, called “The F. Word to Watch For: Feminists,” which was written in the wake of the HillThomas hearings and speculated that the Bush administration would demonize “feminists” as a “smoke screen” for “real economic problems,” 512 Shelley Streeby was filed under “Economy.”4 Much of the archival material and fiction that Butler produced relevant to the keyword “feminism” addresses intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class in right-wing projects of the neoliberal era, from the 1970s through the early 2000s. As both a pejorative epithet used by the right to demonize women who deviated from patriarchally defined gender and sex roles as well as a term she counter-valued by claiming it for herself, intersectional “feminism” was central to Butler’s speculative collecting, research, and fiction-writing. Since her untimely death in 2006, Butler’s fame continues to grow as new generations embrace her work, since it speaks to our present in powerful ways. Butler rejected narrow genre categories and was ambivalent about the term “science fiction” as a descriptor for her writing, often expressing frustration with marketing categories and wondering if they stood in the way of reaching a wider audience. The umbrella term “speculative ” is useful both for recognizing the boundary-crossing dimensions of Butler’s writing, in its defiance of narrow definitions of genre, and for describing Butler’s contributions to feminist theories of knowledge production, political leadership, and imagining the future. Since Butler’s archive at the Huntington opened to researchers in 2013... (shrink)

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

The paper explicates the stages of the author’s philosophical evolution in the light of Kopnin’s ideas and heritage. Starting from Kopnin’s understanding of dialectical materialism, the author has stated that category transformations of physics has opened from conceptualization of immutability to mutability and then to interaction, evolvement and emergence. He has connected the problem of physical cognition universals with an elaboration of the specific system of tools and methods of identifying, individuating and distinguishing objects from a scientific theory domain. (...) The role of vacuum conception and the idea of existence (actual and potential, observable and nonobservable, virtual and hidden) types were analyzed. In collaboration with S.Crymski heuristic and regulative functions of categories of substance, world as a whole as well as postulates of relativity and absoluteness, and anthropic and self-development principles were singled out. Elaborating Kopnin’s view of scientific theories as a practically effective and relatively true mapping of their domains, the author in collaboration with M. Burgin have originated the unified structure-nominative reconstruction (model) of scientific theory as a knowledge system. According to it, every scientific knowledge system includes hierarchically organized and complex subsystems that partially and separately have been studied by standard, structuralist, operationalist, problem-solving, axiological and other directions of the current philosophy of science. 1) The logico-linguistic subsystem represents and normalizes by means of different, including mathematical, languages and normalizes and logical calculi the knowledge available on objects under study. 2) The model-representing subsystem comprises peculiar to the knowledge system ways of their modeling and understanding. 3) The pragmatic-procedural subsystem contains general and unique to the knowledge system operations, methods, procedures, algorithms and programs. 4) From the viewpoint of the problem-heuristic subsystem, the knowledge system is a unique way of setting and resolving questions, problems, puzzles and tasks of cognition of objects into question. It also includes various heuristics and estimations (truth, consistency, beauty, efficacy, adequacy, heuristicity etc) of components and structures of the knowledge system. 5) The subsystem of links fixes interrelations between above-mentioned components, structures and subsystems of the knowledge system. The structure-nominative reconstruction has been used in the philosophical and comparative case-studies of mathematical, physical, economic, legal, political, pedagogical, social, and sociological theories. It has enlarged the collection of knowledge structures, connected, for instance, with a multitude of theoreticity levels and with an application of numerous mathematical languages. It has deepened the comprehension of relations between the main directions of current philosophy of science. They are interpreted as dealing mainly with isolated subsystems of scientific theory. This reconstruction has disclosed a variety of undetected knowledge structures, associated also, for instance, with principles of symmetry and supersymmetry and with laws of various levels and degrees. In cooperation with the physicist Olexander Gabovich the modified structure-nominative reconstruction is in the processes of development and justification. Ideas and concepts were also in the center of Kopnin’s cognitive activity. The author has suggested and elaborated the triplet model of concepts. According to it, any scientific concept is a dependent on cognitive situation, dynamical, multifunctional state of scientist’s thinking, and available knowledge system. A concept is modeled as being consisted from three interrelated structures. 1) The concept base characterizes objects falling under a concept as well as their properties and relations. In terms of volume and content the logical modeling reveals partially only the concept base. 2) The concept representing part includes structures and means (names, statements, abstract properties, quantitative values of object properties and relations, mathematical equations and their systems, theoretical models etc.) of object representation in the appropriate knowledge system. 3) The linkage unites a structures and procedures that connect components from the abovementioned structures. The partial cases of the triplet model are logical, information, two-tired, standard, exemplar, prototype, knowledge-dependent and other concept models. It has introduced the triplet classification that comprises several hundreds of concept types. Different kinds of fuzziness are distinguished. Even the most precise and exact concepts are fuzzy in some triplet aspect. The notions of relations between real scientific concepts are essentially extended. For example, the definition and strict analysis of such relations between concepts as formalization, quantification, mathematization, generalization, fuzzification, and various kinds of identity are proposed. The concepts «PLANET» and «ELEMENTARY PARTICLE» and some of their metamorphoses were analyzed in triplet terms. The Kopnin’s methodology and epistemology of cognition was being used for creating conception of the philosophy of law as elaborating of understanding, justification, estimating and criticizing legal system. The basic information on the major directions in current Western philosophy of law (legal realism, feminism, criticism, postmodernism, economical analysis of law etc.) is firstly introduced to the Ukrainian audience. The classification of more than fifty directions in modern legal philosophy is suggested. Some results of historical, linguistic, scientometric and philosophic-legal studies of the present state of Ukrainian academic science are given. (shrink)

The concept of the individual and his/her motivations is a bedrock of philosophy. All strands of thought at heart contain to a particular theory of the individual. Economics, though, is guilty of taking this hugely important concept without questioning how we theorize it. This superb book remedies this oversight. The new approach put forward by Davies is to pay more attention to what moral philosophy may offer us in the study of personal identity, self consciousness and will. This crosses (...) the traditional boundaries of economics and will shed new light on the distinction between positive and normative analysis in economics. With both heterodox and orthodox economics receiving a thorough analysis from Davies, this book is at once inclusive and revealing. (shrink)

Born out of the struggles of the feminist movements of the 20th century, feminist political theory is characterized by its commitment to expanding the boundaries of the political. Feminism, as a political movement, works to fight inequality and the social, cultural, economic, and political subordination of women. The goal of feminist politics is to end the domination of women through critiquing and transforming institutions and theories that support women’s subordination. Feminist political theory is (...) a field within both feminist theory and within political theory that takes a feminist approach to traditional questions within political philosophy, contemporary and historical. In this entry, I will explore the nature of feminist political theory by asking two questions: what is feminist about feminist political theory, and what is specifically political about feminist political theory. (shrink)