The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic women's (...) "motherwork.". (shrink)

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The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic women's (...) "motherwork.". (shrink)

How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social (...) body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political projects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political projects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s writings on the scream, as a vehicle to uncover new terrains of struggle and new possibilities for collectivity. (shrink)

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 1989 Philosopher, mother, and feminist Sara Ruddick examines the discipline of mothering, showing for the first time how the day-to-day work of raising children gives rise to distinctive ways of thinking.

Building on Deleuze’s theories of the becoming of bodies, and notions of the geographic maturity of the disabled body we formulate an emplaced model of disability wherein bodies, social expectations and built form intersect in embodied experiences in specific environments to increase or decrease the capacity of disabled children to act in those environments. We join a growing effort to generate a more comprehensive model of disability, which moves beyond a binary between the individual and the social. Drawing on in-depth (...) case studies conducted with 13 physically disabled children, we consider the intersections between their primary environments (homes, schools and neighbourhoods) and the multiple subjectivities they embody. Ultimately we make a case about the importance of responsive, situated models of subjectivity for the development of adaptations, and that physical and social adaptations must respond to these children’s complex and varied needs and desires. (shrink)

This is a selective reading of Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. My aim is twofold: to continue Love Labor's focus on dependency work and relations, adding certain distinctions and questions of my own; and to recognize the conjunction of three perspectives—theoretical, social/political, and personal—that strengthen this focus. I scant particulars of argument and ignore certain issues in the hope of providing a vivid outline of the rewards and demands of dependency as Eva Kittay envisions them.

The contributors to two new anthologies A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity and Feminist Epistemologies are philosophers for whom feminism is an intellectual as well as political commitment and they produce original, valuable feminist and philosophical work. I focus on differences between the anthologies and on two themes: the social character of knowledge and the allegedly oppressive “masculinism” of epistemological ideals.

This is a selective reading of Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. My aim is twofold: to continue Love Labor's focus on dependency work and relations, adding certain distinctions and questions of my own; and to recognize the conjunction of three perspectives-theoretical, social/political, and personal-that strengthen this focus. I scant particulars of argument and ignore certain issues in the hope of providing a vivid outline of the rewards and demands of dependency as Eva Kittay envisions them.

For many of us, entry into motherhood involves an ambiguous visibility and intelligibility, where our acceptance into mainstream spaces as mothers entails a loss of lesbian difference. Mann explores this loss using the work of two philosophers of lesbian difference, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler. She argues that the figure of the lesbian mother is deployed on a broad cultural scale to reinvigorate and renaturaUze the myth of the happy, natural, heterosexual mother.

An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers. This book considers how thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Nancy Choderow and Adrienne Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of (...) difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice Di Quinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering. (shrink)

This is a selective reading of Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. My aim is twofold: to continue Love Labor's focus on dependency work and relations, adding certain distinctions and questions of my own; and to recognize the conjunction of three perspectives—theoretical, social/political, and personal—that strengthen this focus. I scant particulars of argument and ignore certain issues in the hope of providing a vivid outline of the rewards and demands of dependency as Eva Kittay envisions them.

This book brings together the stories of biographers, novelists, scholars, and artists as they have written about the journeys (some literal, some figurative) they have made to their subjects. Contributors include Elizabeth Wood, J.J. Wilson, Leah Glasser, Jane Lazarre, and Alice Walker.

This article presents diagrams developed from the insights of three middle school children with limited mobility about their experiences navigating social and spatial relations in their home, school and neighbourhoods. The paper explores the concept of assemblage as well as operationalising the Deleuzian idea of the diagram. The diagrams we produce are developed in connection with dominant idealisations of neighbourhood and home range that function in North America to choreograph children's progression from infancy through adolescence. We undertake this diagramming in (...) order to immediately and affectively illustrate the limits and possibilities of the challenges these young people face. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the question of the ways we might form enabling assemblages with non-human others, by returning to Spinoza’s theory of the composite individual. The challenge, as I see it, is less that of a need to move beyond a romanticized view of Nature as a harmonious whole, Nature as a perpetual threat, or Nature as motivated by a final cause (whether good or evil). The problem that confronts us, rather, is a problem of composition—which Nature do (...) we ally with, what components? How do we understand or define, much less defend, localized ecosystems which are supported (and threatened) by a dizzying and infinite array of intensive and extensive properties? This is a problem of the monstrous infinite. (shrink)

In this paper I explore this question of the ways we might form enabling assemblages with non-human others, by returning to Spinoza’s theory of the composite individual. The challenge, as I see it, is less that of a need to move beyond a romanticized view of Nature as a harmonious whole, Nature as a perpetual threat, or Nature as motivated by a final cause. The problem that confronts us, rather, is a problem of composition—which Nature do we ally with, what (...) components? How do we understand or define, much less defend, localized ecosystems which are supported by a dizzying and infinite array of intensive and extensive properties? This is a problem of the monstrous infinite. (shrink)

_Hegel or Spinoza_ is the first English-language translation of the modern classic _Hegel ou Spinoza._ Published in French in 1979, it has been widely influential, particularly in the work of the philosophers Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze. _Hegel or Spinoza_ is a surgically precise interrogation of the points of misreading of Spinoza by Hegel. Pierre Macherey explains the necessity of Hegel’s misreading in the kernel of thought that is “indigestible” for Hegel, which makes the Spinozist system move in (...) a way that Hegel cannot grasp. In doing so, Macherey exposes the limited and situated truth of Hegel’s perspective—which reveals more about Hegel himself than about his object of analysis. Against Hegel’s characterization of Spinoza’s work as immobile, Macherey offers a lively alternative that upsets the accepted historical progression of philosophical knowledge. He finds in Spinoza an immanent philosophy that is not subordinated to the guarantee of an a priori truth. Not simply authorizing a particular reading—a “good” Spinoza against a “bad” Hegel—_Hegel or Spinoza_ initiates an encounter that produces a new understanding, a common truth that emerges in the interval that separates the two. (shrink)

: I try to identify the distinct moral horror occasioned by the attacks of September 11 in order to accord them an appropriate, limited place in the ongoing history of terror and violence. I consider the agents of evil and the victims as evil constructs them. I conclude with victim stories that reveal evil by showing the goodness it violates, making us feel the bitter loss of what violence has killed, kills, and will kill again.

Feminists have long hoped to intervene in the practice of war. Many have thought of war as a masculine endeavor which endangers women in distinctive ways and reflects and contributes to men's violence against women in civil society. Some have also believed that women have distinct capacities for making peace. In recent decades, feminists have elaborated these insights, offering a more precise understanding of war's masculinity, war's victimization of women and feminine peacefulness. Despite the vitalizing presence of many military feminists, (...) the cumulative effect of feminist intervention has been to question the practice of warmaking itself and to challenge the cultures which prepare, justify, and suffer from war. (shrink)

The contributors to two new anthologies A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (edited by Louise Antony and Charlene Witt) and Feminist Epistemologies (edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter) are philosophers for whom feminism is an intellectual as well as political commitment and they produce original, valuable feminist and philosophical work. I focus on differences between the anthologies and on two themes: the social character of knowledge and the allegedly oppressive "masculinism" of epistemological ideals.