Feminist and trans theory challenges "the" binary sex/gender system, but can create a new binary opposition of subversive transgender versus conservative transsexual. This paper aims to shift debate concerning bodies as authentic/real versus constructed/mutable, arguing that such debate establishes a false dichotomy that may be overcome by reappraising scientific understandings of sex/gender. Much recent biology and neurology stresses nonlinearity, contingency, self-organization, and open-endedness. Engaging with this research offers ways around apparently interminable theoretical impasses.

Both the slasher movie and its more recent counterpart the "torture porn" film centralize graphic depictions of violence. This article inspects the nature of these portrayals by examining a motif commonly found in the cinema of homicide, dubbed here the "pure moment of murder": that is, the moment in which two characters’ bodies adjoin onscreen in an instance of graphic violence. By exploring a number of these incidents (and their various modes of representation) in American horror films ranging from Psycho (...) (1960) to Saw VI (2009), the article aims to expound how these images of slaughter demonstrate (albeit in an augmented, hyperbolic manner) a number of long-standing problems surrounding selfhood that continue to fuel philosophical discussion. The article argues that the visual adjoining of victim and killer onscreen echoes the conundrum that in order to attain identity, the individual requires and yet simultaneously repudiates the Other that constitutes unique subjectivity. (shrink)

By juxtaposing readings of selected feminist critics with a reading of Ovid's account of Philomela's rape and silencing, this essay interrogates the rhetorical, political, and epistemological implications of the feminist "we." As a political intervention that comes into being as a response to women's oppression, feminism must posit a collective "we." But this feminist "we" is best understood as an impersonal, performative pronoun whose political force is not derived from a knowable referent.

Accounts of mothering have both contributed to feminist theory's development and depended on certain of its central concepts. Some of its critics, however, argue that feminist theory is undermined by the problems of exclusion and essentialism. Here I distinguish between these two problems and consider their implications for questions about mothering. I conclude that exclusion and essentialism do not present insurmountable obstacles to theorizing motherhood, but do suggest new directions for such theorizing.

This paper provides an overview of twenty years of feminist philosophy in Northamerica. The professionalization of feminist theory that has occurred through the mainstreaming of feminist philosophy creates a danger of a gap between theory and practice that creates the danger of co-optation. Three stages of feminist philosophizing are outlined, including the radical critique, gender difference and difference/post-modernist stages. The last stage, it is argued, leads to an conceptual impasse about feminist strategies for social change.

Northern researchers and service providers espousing modernist theories of development in order to understand and aid countries and peoples of the South ignore their own non-universal starting points of knowledge and their own vested interests. Universal ethics are rejected in favor of situated ethics, while a modified empowerment development model for aiding women in the South based on poststructuralism requires building a bridge identity politics to promote participatory democracy and challenge Northern power knowledges.

The distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality does not allow for sufficient attention to be given to the question of non-normative heterosexualities. This paper develops a feminist critique of normative sexuality, focusing on alternative readings of sex and/or gender offered by Beauvoir and Irigaray. Despite their differences, both accounts contribute significantly to dismantling the lure of normative sexuality in heterosexual relations-a dismantling necessary to the construction of a feminist social and political order.

The profession of nursing has recognized the need for contextual and relational frameworks to inform knowledge development. Two‐Eyed Seeing is a framework developed by Mi'kmaw Elders to respectfully engage with Indigenous and non‐Indigenous knowledges. Some scholars and practitioners, however, are concerned that Two‐Eyed Seeing re‐instantiates dichotomized notions regarding Western and Indigenous knowledges. As dichotomies and binaries are often viewed as polarizing devices for nursing knowledge development, this paper explores the local worldviews in which Two‐Eyed Seeing emerged, proposing that the onto‐epistemological (...) and axiological ‘roots’ of the framework are antithetical to divisiveness, paradoxically asserting space for the dichotomy to stand. Two‐Eyed Seeing, if understood as a relational, decolonial praxis, could fundamentally change the way nursing scholarship and practice operate by facilitating space for diverse knowledges, ways of being, doing and relating. In this paper, considerations for nursing scholarship and practice, as well as recommendations to support the uptake of Two‐Eyed Seeing are explored. The authors assert that conceptual divisiveness, dichotomization and exclusion can be mitigated if nursing is informed by contextual knowledge, seeks to enact accountable partnerships with Indigenous knowledge holders, and holds the Mi'kmaq worldview upon which the concept developed in positive regard. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 992-1013, September 2022. This article examines the connection between populism and post-foundationalism in the context of contemporary debates about populism as a strategy for the Left. I argue that there is something “populist” about every constitutional order, including liberal democratic ones. I argue so drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s theories of hegemony, agonistic democracy, and left populism. Populism is the quintessential form of post-foundational politics because, rightly understood, populism constructs the object it (...) claims to represent, namely the people. As such, it expresses the fact that, because there is no ultimate foundation, politics consists in the construction of contingent foundations. I develop this argument through readings of Jan-Werner Müller and Chantal Mouffe, showing the differences between their respective post-foundational approaches. I show that Müller cannot uphold the distinction between populism and democracy in the way he seeks to do, but I also argue that this does not mean that we must jettison all normativity, only that it requires that we rethink normativity in hegemonic terms. (shrink)

The central argument of this article is twofold. First, contemporary feminist gender theory, particularly as it has been used by feminist sociologists in recent years, has been misinterpreted by sexual difference theory in ways that may prevent scholars from fully appreciating current feminist work in the social sciences. Second, gender theory and sexual difference theory rely on different conceptualizations of fundamental concepts in feminist theory, including notions of “gender,”“sexuality,” and “symbolic.” An analysis of three key texts that critique the turn (...) to “gender” in favor of an allegorical notion of “sexual difference” suggests that feminist gender theory is a more useful perspective for feminist theory and research. The article concludes that gender theory allows feminist scholars to ask a wider range of empirical questions that are more readily of use for political action than does a sexual difference paradigm. (shrink)

This article provides an empirical example and an analytic argument for how queer theory can be useful for sociological inquiries of gender relations. Using data collected through participant observation of a rock music subculture, the author addresses the importance of conceptualizing sexuality and gender as analytically distinct. There are five major findings drawn from this analysis. First, members of this subculture queered sexuality despite identifying as heterosexual. Second, there is a dissonance between how members talked about sexuality and how they (...) enacted sexuality. Third, queering sexuality opened space for subverting hegemonic gender relations. Fourth, some forms of gender resistance relied on and reinscribed hegemonic sexual relations. Fifth, only by analyzing sexuality at multiple levels of analysis was this play of resistance and hegemony revealed. Both empirical and theoretical implications are suggested. (shrink)

I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, “What is it to be a woman?” Prior attempts by feminist theorists to provide a metaphysical account of what all and only women have in common have all failed for the same reason: there is nothing women have in common beyond being women. Although the social kinds man and woman are primitive, their existence can be explained. I say that human sex difference is the material ground of systems of gender; gender (...) systems serve to enable male control of female reproductive capacities. This explains the fact that most women are female, but it does not entail that all women are female or that all females are women. To clarify my position, I draw an analogy between the kind woman and the kind parent. While it is difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for being a parent, it is clear that the social institution or practice of parenting has its material ground in the biological facts about human reproduction together with facts about infantile dependency. Saying this does not entail that all and only biological progenitors are parents. (shrink)

The analysis of difference and identity questions brought Iris Marion Young to develop a metaphor of collective identity, the city, which included the diversity that characterizes all human groups. This article honors Iris Marion Young by challenging the question of identity in contemporary feminism and social sciences. María Martínez González argues that we need new identity and collective identity metaphors in order to understand the complexity of contemporary feminist praxis.

A critical analysis of Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (1989a) and Elizabeth Grosz's Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (1989).

This article begins by examining the status of “difference” in representations of perspectivist cosmologies, which are themselves often represented as radically different to Euro-American cosmologi...

ABSTRACTFeminist theory and critical realism should consolidate their collaboration since they have much in common. Nevertheless, feminist standpoint theory and critical realist ontology remain at odds, as extended debates have shown. I argue that this is because of the importance that feminism places on difference – which brings up the problem of relationality in a material way – and thus makes it hard to integrate into traditional critical realism. Dialectical critical realism contributes greatly to an understanding of relationality but lacks (...) difference’s historicity. This claim is elaborated through a discussion of intersectionality in feminism and feminist new materialism. The discussion shows that the mainstream understanding of both approaches has grave deficiencies and profits from critical realist metatheory. Notwithstanding, CR can learn from the motives and ways that difference is deployed in both strands. (shrink)

I argue that Nelson's feminist transformation of empiricism provides the basis of a dialogue across three currently competing feminist epistemologies: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theories, and postmodern feminism, a dialogue that will result in a dissolution of the apparent tensions between these epistemologies and provide an epistemology with the openness and fluidity needed to embrace the concerns of feminists.

Anglo-American embodiments of poststructuralist and French feminism often align themselves with the texts of either Michel Foucault or Luce Irigaray. lnterrogating this alleged distance between Foucault and Irigaray, I show how it reinscrihes the phallic field of concepts and categories within feminist discourses. Framing both Foucault and Irigaray as exceeding]acques Lacan's metamorphosis of G.W.F. Hegel's Concept, I suggest that engaging their styles might yield richer tools for articulating the differences within our different lives.

Bracha Ettinger (formerly known as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger) is an Israeli-born Paris-based artist, analyst and feminist theorist who has produced over the last decade a major theoretical intervention through a tripartite practice. This article offers an expository introduction and overview of core aspects of her theoretical contribution while relating it to major trends in feminist and general cultural theory of subjectivity, hysteria, memory, trauma and the aesthetic. Organized in several parts, each section addresses the developing vocabulary, terminology and significance of (...) her work. With core concepts are Matrix, metramorphosis, trans-subjectivity, co-poïesis, co-emergence and co-affection, Ettinger’s theory opens out beyond the blind spots of advanced feminist thought. From its independent and original theorization of subjectivity-as-encounter and an-other sexual difference, Bracha Ettinger challenges our attempts to think about femininity associated with the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Linked to, but distinct from, the philosophical speculations of Deleuze and Levinas, this work creates a transferential theoretical space for Jewish and feminine difference, sexuality, subjectivity and the traumatic residues of modern catastrophe that has major repercussions for cultural, aesthetic, ethical, political and psychoanalytic theory. (shrink)

Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of "woman" that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a "feminine" language is either groundlessly utopian or entails a biological essentialism.

In developing an "internal" sociology of science, the sociology of scientific knowledge drew on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to reinterpret traditional epistemological topics in sociological terms. By construing scientific reasoning as rule following within a collective, sociologists David Bloor and Harry Collins effectively blocked outside criticism of a scientific field, whether scientific, philosophical, or political. Ethnomethodologist Michael Lynch developed an alternative, Wittgensteinian reading that similarly blocked philosophical or political critique, while also disallowing analytical appeals to historical or institutional contexts. I criticize (...) these Wittgensteinian sociologies and argue for the historical and contemporary significance of methodological criticisms of scientific practice that conjoin epistemological and political categories. I consider two such cases briefly: the Baconian criticism of Scholastic science in the early Royal Society and the criticism of AIDS drug testing protocols by activists. Key Words: Wittgenstein • sociology of scientific knowledge • ethnomethodology • scientific method • interpretive sociology. (shrink)

This article reads Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien through Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of le corps sans organes and devenir-femme, devenir-animal in order to illuminate both Wittig's formal and figurative concerns and her larger literary objectives. The dismembered and dismember-ing lesbian lovers that Wittig describes in Le Corps lesbien illustrate a process of becoming-woman, becoming-animal and becoming-other that leads to a becoming-minoritarian and a renunciation of stratification and subjectification in the body without organs. This process is a celebration of dispersed, (...) multiplicitous identity that exists in haecceities. Wittig's lesbian lovers undergo various becomings in the text to illustrate the multiplicity of possibilities as they move towards the BwO, and the text as a whole uses this BwO to resist and dismantle the hetero-patriarchal order. (shrink)

This article takes up the commonplace antagonism between ‘second wave’ lesbian feminism and ‘third wave’ queer theory and politics, and argues that the antagonism itself is both historically and politically reductive. First, I make the case that ‘third wave’ queer theory actually shares its central concern – namely, accountability for intra-group inequalities – with lesbian feminism. However, I argue that ‘third wave’ queer theories ultimately founder in their bid for a more reflexive political praxis by tending to hold others – (...) lesbian feminists – accountable for ongoing inequalities rather than grappling with them directly. By contrast, I show that lesbian feminists from the late 1970s to the late 1980s developed a reparative politics that succeeds where ‘third wave’ theories stumble by developing relationships of mutual accountability around issues of race and racism, and by establishing processes by which to repair these relationships when they founder. I conclude by arguing that a fuller attention to the history of lesbian feminism, in fact, offers important resources for feminists and queers dealing with issues of intra-group marginalization, such as transphobia, in the present. (shrink)

This project draws on scholarship of feminist and womanist scholars, and on results of interviews with scientists currently involved in molecular genetics. With reference to Margaret Urban Walker's “practices of moral responsibility,” the social practices of molecular geneticists are exphred, and strategies identified through which scientists negotiate their moral responsibilities. The implications of this work for scientists and for feminists are discussed.

My essay incorporates Irigaray's notion of the sensible transcendental, a dynamic attempt to reconstitute the body/mind dualism which founds Western thought, into a reading of the practice of European concert dance. I contend that Irigaray's efforts toward articulating a language of the body as active agent have much to offer analyses of dance practice, and develop this claim through a reading which reflects philosophically on the changing nature of my own dance activity.

In this paper, I explore the meaning of bodily integrity in disfiguring breast cancer. Bodily integrity is a normative principle precisely because it does not simply refer to actual physical or functional intactness. It rather indicates what should be regarded and respected as inviolable in vulnerable and damageable bodies. I will argue that this normative inviolability or wholeness can be based upon a person's embodied experience of wholeness. This phenomenological stance differs from the liberal view that identifies respect for integrity (...) with respect for autonomy (resulting in an invalidation of bodily integrity's proper normative meaning), as well as from the view that bodily integrity is based upon ideologies of wholeness (which runs the risk of being disadvantageous to women). I propose that bodily integrity involves a process of identification between the experience of one's body as “Leib” and the experience of one's body as “Körper.” If identification fails or is not possible, one's integrity is threatened. This idea of bodily integrity can support breast cancer patients and survivors in making decisions about possible corrective interventions. To implement this idea in oncology care, empirical-phenomenological research needs to establish how breast cancer patients express their embodied self-experiences. (shrink)

This essay examines the contemporary masculinity of straight, white men in the business classes of the United States as a category of identity. I argue that this form of masculine identity is currently in crisis, and, through a reading of the 1995 film Toy Story, develop an argument about the value of ‘downsizing’ masculinity in an era of diminished work expectations.

This article examines some recent theoretical objects of feminism with a view towards a reinvigorated dialogue with psychoanalysis. Against the backdrop of debates on essentialism, universalism, social constructionism and historical change, it aims to reintroduce the value of psychoanalytic ideas to feminism by unfolding a dimension of history in the divided subject and adding a positive value to psychoanalytic universalism. This argument is carried out with the help of the writings of Julia Kristeva, from the early essay, `Women's Time', to (...) the psychoanalytic publications of the 1980s and 1990s. (shrink)

This essay examines two tendencies in lesbian ethics as differing visions of community, as well as contrasting views of the relationship between the erotic and the ethical. In addition to considering those authors who make explicit claims about lesbian ethics, this paper reflects on the works of some lesbians whose works are less frequently attended to in discussions about lesbian ethics, including lesbians writing from the perspectives of theology and of literature.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

International media have reported cases of pregnant women who have had their children apprehended by social services, or who were incarcerated or forced into treatment programs based on a history of substance use or lack of adherence to addiction treatment programs. Public discourse on the biology of addiction has been criticized for generating stigma and a diminished perception of self-control in individuals with an addiction, potentially contributing to coercive approaches and criminalization of women who misuse substances during pregnancy. We explored (...) whether this is the case based on literature from social psychology, ethics, addiction research, science communication, and philosophy. The literature shows that the relationship between public discourse on biological aspects of addiction and issues such as stigma and perceptions of diminished self-control are unclear, largely due to the complexity of these phenomena. However, concerns about the biological approach are nevertheless legitimate given the broader social and policy context of women’s health. (shrink)

Building on the advances made by feminist reconsiderations of methods, methodology and epistemology, this paper calls for an alliance between feminist social science and the emerging field of queer theory. By challenging traditional scientific approaches to research on sexual minority groups, a distinctly ‘queer’ approach is advocated that adopts a reflexive position on subjectivity and sexuality. While essentialist approaches privilege gay/lesbian, man/woman, and object/subject, this approach advances a framework of critical sexualities that moves social science into an arena of inclusivity (...) and multiple identities, rather than reductionistic categorical thought. The implications are clear: a rethinking of identity categories that transcend stagnant dualisms. (shrink)

In the 1970s and 1980s a strong opposition and anxiety towards biological and naturalizing knowledges was the norm in feminist discourse. In the past decades the certainties of that ‘anti-biologism’ have been challenged, in part because of a new recognition of the role of contingency in both biological determination and biological science. What seems to have survived the shift is a set of normative assumptions concerning the role of determinacy and contingency in the political implications of ontological claims: an assumed (...) political valorization of contingency. This article challenges those assumptions. It draws attention to the embrace of contingency and processuality on the part of supremacist biopolitical discourse, and suggests the need to think again about the politics of contingency and becoming. Focusing on the issue of racism and supremacist-specification, the article takes a genealogical look at ‘second-wave’ feminist anti-biologism. Monique Wittig’s materialist feminist attack on naturalizing ideology and ‘the myth of woman’ provides the historical example. The article draws attention to curious absences in Wittig’s anti-biologistic statements concerning early 20th-century biologistic feminism: the absence of a critique of eugenics, racism and supremacism. Arguably the condemnation of biology as a conservative ‘ideology of the status quo’ created masks for biopolitical ontology, obscuring the progressive, dynamic, processual character of biologism and of modern racism. While dislodging some powers of biologistic discourse, feminist anti-biologism might also have played a part in facilitating the revitalization of biopolitical racism within the constructivist culturalist rubric. The aim of the article is not to critique ‘second-wave’ feminism from the perspective of contemporary scholarship, but to help generate new ways of thinking and feeling about the role of ontology, contingency and temporality in the present politics of classification. (shrink)

A critical analysis of Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (1989a) and Elizabeth Grosz's Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (1989).

Several decades ago, feminists differentiated between the biologically given basis of sex identity (sex) and the socially constructed cultural practices anchored by sex identity (gender). In recent years, many feminists have challenged that distinction, arguing that biological sex is as much a social construct as are the practices comprising gender. I survey two examples from biological studies of sex identity that, by contrast (I maintain), warrant saving the concept of biologically given sex identity. The result is not antithetical to feminism, (...) however, since these studies also suggest that sex identity proliferates beyond the rigid female/male dichotomy. If articulated carefully, this view can avoid metaphysically essentialist baggage while enriching feminist conceptions of sex identity. (shrink)

This article takes as its point of departure Luce Irigaray'sElemental Passions, in which a woman‐speaker tries to make her lover and the discipline of philosophy understand that she is not how they have imagined her to be; that she is not at all but that she keeps becoming through perpetual movement. The article investigates Irigaray's investment in a form of materialist difference feminism that offers conceptual links to the posthumanist work of Karen Barad's agential realism, especially her theorization of intra‐action. (...) The link between Irigaray and Barad is established via a diffractive reading that incorporates the dance/movement research practice of Contact Improvisation. Although expressed through written language,Elemental Passionscreates the impression of the woman‐speaker dancing, of encountering herself, her environment, and her lover through moved and moving contact, searching for a practice of moving‐together, feeling‐with, and feeling‐between that can be experienced in an improvised dance duet. Exploring how touch and the sharing of weight in Contact Improvisation challenges boundaries and establishes ever‐changing configurations and entanglements between dancers, the article proposes that Irigaray's woman‐speaker envisions herself as a posthuman/ist woman and that improvised dancing offers a practice of intra‐action through which she can encounter the world in her becoming. (shrink)

Inspired by Adriana Cavarero’s recent work on maternal inclinations as a postural term, the overall purpose of this article is to seek out a geometry of the educational relation that is alien to the masculine myth of the ‘economic man’. Drawing on Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’s critique of the marketization of education, reading their giving ‘shape and form’ to the scholastic school through the geometry of Cavarero’s ‘maternal inclinations’, the article shows how images and metaphors associated with the posture (...) of rectitude infuse the scholastic model of the school. At the same time, we argue, it testifies to a geometry of an inclined subject and, in doing so, it offers an opening for recovering the significance of the feminine and maternal to educational theory. Affirming this opening, the paper makes a shift of emphasis from scholastic techniques to educational postures. (shrink)

This essay deals with the essentialism controversy concerning Luce Irigaray through looking into her strategic use of mimicry, which has not been fully addressed by her critics. The author argues that what appear to be essentialist elements in Irigaray's writings are in fact the "sites" where she is mimicking the phallogocentric discourse in order to uncover its essentialist and "sexed" nature and at the same time to resist being reabsorbed into its reductive order.

The dualistic structures permeating western culture emphasize radical discontinuity between humans and nonhumans, but receptive attention to nonhuman others discloses both continuity and difference prevailing between other forms of life and our own. Recognizing that agency and subjectivity abound within nature alerts us to our potential for dominating and oppressing nonhuman others, as individuals and as groups. Reciprocally, seeing ourselves as biological beings may facilitate reconstructing our social reality to undo such destructive relationships.

In this paper we aim to shed light on the dynamics of regional identity construction and deconstruction. We will argue that four forms of identity can be identified that are linked through various processes of change. To that end, we will theoretically conceptualise 'identity' by discussing historical and current scholarly debates on identity in a variety of scientific disciplines. Then, we will argue that the mutual contradiction of the current theories is a paradox if seen from the angle of regional (...) identity construction and deconstruction. Building upon elements from the various theoretical approaches, we propose a heuristic model describing the dynamics of identity construction and deconstruction, which will be explored by means of the example of the Green Heart region, a spatial planning concept in western Holland. (shrink)

Bridging feminist new materialism and feminist phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis’s volume, Bodies of Water, discusses water in terms of nurturing maternality based on a figural reservoir of what she terms “amniotics” and “planetary breastmilk” in order to posit this maternality as the material condition of the embodiment of life. In this article I show that this imagery is a construction consistently haunted by figures of anxiety and loss. I do this by first revisiting earlier interventions in deconstruction concerning materiality and feminist (...) theory as follows. First, pointing out a resonance between this figuration of wateriness and Kant’s notion of the dynamic sublime, I turn to Paul de Man’s reading of materiality in the Kantian sublime in order to suggest that Neimanis’s figuration of maternal water is an effect of an aesthetic ideology. Subsequently, I will revisit Diana Fuss’s reading of Irigaray – Neimanis’s main feminist resource – to show that the ontological status of water as maternal is constructed via an Irigarayan distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Finally, in order to show ways in which the maternal materiality of water is haunted by figures of anxiety and loss, I will consult Elissa Marder’s more recent work on the maternal function. (shrink)

The relation between Australia’s First Nations peoples and settler-colonial Australians may be characterised as having “miscarried” to the extent that colonial difference is unacknowledged,...

Third wave anti-essentialist critique has too often been used to dismiss second wave feminist projects. I examine claims that Carol Gilligan's work is "essentialist," and argue that her recent research requires this criticism be rethought. Anti-essentialist feminist method should consist in attention to the relations of power that construct accounts of gendered identity in the course of different forms of empirical enquiry, not in rejecting any general claim about women or girls.