First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Drawing parallels between gender essentialism and cultural essentialism, I point to some common features of essentialist pictures of culture. I argue that cultural essentialism is detrimental to feminist agendas and suggest strategies for its avoidance. Contending that some forms of cultural relativism buy into essentialist notions of culture, I argue that postcolonial feminists need to be cautious about essentialist contrasts between "Western" and "Third World" cultures.

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise (...) the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie. (shrink)

Science, Technology and Society: A Sociological Approach is a comprehensive guide to the emergent field of science, technology, and society (STS) studies and its implications for today’s culture and society. Discusses current STS topics, research tools, and theories Tackles some of the most urgent issues in current STS studies, including power and culture, race, gender, colonialism, the Internet, cyborgs and robots, and biotechnology Includes case studies, a glossary, and further reading lists.

This is a fresh and vitally important step past stymied debate on what is arguably the most pressing issue in cross-disciplinary feminist theory.

Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict ...

This article examines the discourses of the Indian state and of community élites during battles for the custody of a young Muslim girl, Ameena, who was ‘rescued’ from a marriage with an elderly Arab. The battles for Ameena's custody were fought as much in news reports, opinion columns, and letters to the editor of metropolitan and vernacular newspapers, as in courts. Questions were raised about Ameena's age, the viability of her marriage, the applicability of secular laws to Muslim communities, and (...) the political economy of the sexuality of girl-children. In these representations, Ameena became a symbol of minority identity, and was transformed into an unwilling and unwitting object of protection. Why did Ameena's story attract so much attention? What were the different positions underlying the arguments made for Ameena's ‘protection’? Without dismissing the protection of children and the advocacy of their rights, this article analyses the agendas shaping the discourses of the Indian state and national and community élites during the battles for Ameena's custody. The article situates the controversies surrounding Ameena in the wider context of the increasing polarization between Hindu and Muslim communities in India in the early 1990s, and focuses on the relationship between notions of childhood and discourses of community, gender and nation. The article argues that there was a synecdochic relationship between the purity of girl-children and the purity of the Indian nation: far from being ‘pre-cultural’ or apolitical, discourses of childhood were profoundly implicated in the politics of gender, sexuality, community and nation. What are the implications of Ameena's predicament for feminist epistemology and praxis? In pointing to the ways in which feminist critiques of modernist regimes of power and knowledge can enable us to understand the multiple positionalities of children in the contemporary world, the article explores the spaces available for feminist theorists and activists to engage in a politics of vigilance and intervention with regard to the state's positions towards children. (shrink)

While ideals of racial purity may be out of fashion, other sorts of purity ideals are increasingly popular in the United States today. The theme of purity is noticeable everywhere, but it is especially prominent in our contemporary fixation on health and hygiene. This may seem totally unrelated to issues of racism and classism, but in fact, the purveyors of purity draw upon the same themes of physical and moral purity that have helped produce white identity and dominance in the (...) US. Historically, this is where the purity rhetoric gets its power. To invoke purity ideals in the US is to mobilize this genealogy of racialized associations. Today's zealous preoccupation with hygiene is part of our living heritage in a racist culture.Just as ideas of race and racial purity were debunked by biologists long before the public would begin to question them, ideals of extreme hygienic purity linger with us, even flourish, despite scientific evidence of their futility and harm. Why are we still so enamored with purity? Because, to some extent, our very self-conceptions are at stake. Other scholars have described how our process of self individuation is based upon exclusion. The unique contribution of a genealogical approach to this issue is that, instead of merely locating the problem in ideologies held by others, it can evoke self-recognition and self-transformation. We will tend to assume the problem lies elsewhere until we learn to recognize ourselves in practices that reproduce cultural ideals. As inheritors of this racist culture, we are all lovers of purity, and we are all responsible for rethinking this value. (shrink)

The rosy dawn of my title refers to that optimistic time when the logical concept of a natural kind originated in Victorian England. The scholastic twilight refers to the present state of affairs. I devote more space to dawn than twilight, because one basic problem was there from the start, and by now those origins have been forgotten. Philosophers have learned many things about classification from the tradition of natural kinds. But now it is in disarray and is unlikely to (...) be put back together again. My argument is less founded on objections to the numerous theories now in circulation, than on the sheer proliferation of incompatible views. There no longer exists what Bertrand Russell called ‘the doctrine of natural kinds’—one doctrine. Instead we have a slew of distinct analyses directed at unrelated projects. (shrink)

Contains 4 chapters, the first 3 being from the end of vol. 2 of Heidegger's Nietzsche and the last from his Vortr©Þge und Aufs©Þtze. Includes bibliographical references. Stambaugh, J. Introduction.--Metaphysics as history of being.--Sketches for a history of being as metaphysics.--Recollection in metaphysics.--Overcoming metaphysics.

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated (...) social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

"The location of the author’s investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." —Alphonso Lingis "This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." —Judith Butler Volatile (...) Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists. (shrink)

Spivak engages general questions of theory; ongoing critical debates with political philosophers such as Habermas and Althusser, with psychoanalysts such as Kristeva, and with legal theorists such as Dworkin.

"The Laws", Plato's most lengthy dialogue, has longbeen regarded as the most comprehensive explanation of the possible consequences of a practical application of his philosophy.We might expect the first question Plato ponders to be "What is Law?" Instead, the question posed is "Who is given the credit for laying down your laws?"We are privy to an interaction between a powerfulstatesman and an Athenian philosopher on theisland of Crete. We watch as a plan for a new political order is worked out (...) that embodiesmany of the issues that we still struggle withtoday, such as the status of women, the statusof homosexuals, the family, criminal law, andthe role of religion in a healthy society.We at Timeless Classic Books hope that you enjoy this ancient thought-provoking story that may change the way you think about modern day issues.(Timeless Classic Books). (shrink)

"Moore's provocative conclusion is that monotheism - with its monopoly on virtue and failure to provide supernatural scapegoats - is responsible for some of the most virulent forms of intolerance and is a major cause of human nastiness and suffering.

The thinkers dealt with in the title, Kant, Deleuze and Guattari, are the most influential philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. It focuses on the key themes of Kantian philosophy and continental philosophy that came after Kant: critique and difference.

Based on a two-year critical ethnography, Performing Purity: Whiteness, Pedagogy, and the Reconstitution of Power demonstrates the potential of a performative conceptualization of whiteness - a way of seeing whiteness in production, in the process of reiteration. This book builds on prior studies by searching for the repetitions of whiteness in our daily communication. The move to the performative is an explicit detailing of whiteness in and through the repetitious acts that work to reconstitute whiteness as a communicative ideal. Performing (...) Purity creates a critical space of dialogue, shifting the conversation to how we make race, as a construct, matter. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE THE SEARCH FOR GOD He who separates the study of philosophy from holy religion errs no less than the man who would separate the pursuit of ...