Introduction: Speaking of feminism

This essay comes from a place of tension and discomfort in my position as a young feminist and newly employed academic, struggling to negotiate my place within the (neo)liberal (Sothern, 2007) academy. I’m passionate about the subjects of my work: my writing spans feminist, queer, disability, and critical youth theories, meaning my activist and academic endeavours, my life and work, tend to blur. It is a position that I sometimes think I should feel ‘lucky’ to be in (Tokumitsu, 2014). Yet, this blurring is proving difficult to negotiate and rife with contradiction. The feeling that I should be grateful of my employment is spurred by entwined feelings of guilt and privilege, relative power and powerlessness (Pillow, 2003). The result of which is a relationship with a ‘work/life thing’ that is personally unsustainable and contributes to maintaining an exclusive academic arena. I attempt to unpack this here by using feminisms, queer theories and ableism to interrogate my own academic journey.

Women's History Review, 2015

2017

What does it mean to be feminist today? This is not a simple question given that the current climate of relativism seems to have deprived feminism of a coherent political position. To be clear, there are many feminisms and many feminists-the question here is, what do they all hold in common apart from the name? The event of feminism takes different forms in different contexts, institutions and cultures. Moveover, despite this and particularly in the university, discourses of gender politics have increasingly eclipsed or possibly colonised discussions of feminism. Here feminism has become a question and praxis grappling with its historicisation and it seems to us that feminism today is struggling with a nuanced problem which permeates its very discourse: how to stage a subjectivity which is distinctly feminist? It is in response to this question that this issue of Continental Thought and Theory arose with the intention of providing a space where various possibilities can be articulated and engaged. All too often feminism seems to appear to variously foreground, retreat or convolute within a larger gender politics that is arguably still entangled within postmodern relativism. We consider it crucial to restate that the importance of feminism is its emphasis on 'life' as primarily a material question. For instance, questions concerning feminist scholars today focus on economic struggles, class, entrapment within conduits of historicisation, foregrounding women's experiences and how the experiences of minority and marginalised groups are documented,

Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, 2011

Yee, Jessica, ed. 2011. Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. ISBN 978-1-926888-49-1. Paperback: 15.00 CAD. Pages: 176.

Hitotsubashi journal of social studies, 1994

In order to examine feminist critiques of and contributions to sociology it is first necessary to say something about feminism in Britain. Although there existed women's groups and organizat.ions who were concerned with women's equality throughout this century, from the end of the 1920s, after the Suffragette movement, there was no coherent feminist movement in Britain. This was to change in the late sixties with the emergence of the women's liberation movement. This was a new style of feminism, which went much further and asked for far more than had feminists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Prior to 1970, feminists in Britain had campaigned for a better deal for mothers, to help make work within the home less tiring and stressful for women. Very few feminists earlier this century ever questioned that childcare and housework were women responsibility. They challenged the social conditions in which women had and looked after children, and did the work within the home-seeking protection for motherhood. For example, feminists wanted governments to provide better housing and nursery schools to relieve the stress and strain on tired mothers. They also demanded greater respect for mothers and wider social recognition of the value of women's domestic role in the care of the home and the family. This has since been termed welfare feminism . In the late 1960s/early 1970s feminists began to challenge these assumptions, claiming that it was precisely women's traditional role in the home as wives and mothers that was the key to understanding women's unequal position in society. Feminists in the early seventies were very critical of the traditional family structure, in which the respons ibility for housework and childcare is assumed to be the woman's. It was argued, and still is by most feminists, that gender equality is dependent on women being able to participate on equal terms with men in paid employment outside the home. For this ever to become a reality women frst had to be relieved of their traditional responsibilities for looking after children and the home (and men). The campaigns of the women's liberation movement reflected this. The first four demands agreed upon at the first women's liberation conference in Britain, in Oxford in HITOTSUBASHI JOURNAL OF SOCIAL STUDIES [ Jul y 1970, were free 24 hour nursery provision, equal pay, improved education for women and free contraception and abortion on demand. In the years since then the assumptions and principles of contemporary western feminism have changed dramatically. Feminism in Britain in the nineties is very different from feminism in Britain in the early seventies. What it means to say you are a feminist ha also changed, it is much less specific than it once was as the feminist movement has become diffuse and fragmented. For example, in the 1970s feminism assumed that it was possible to identify a cause of women's oppression. There was disagreement among feminists as to what exactly this cause might be, maybe the answer could be found by analysing women's position in the sphere of work, the family, motherhood, economic structures, male control over women's sexuality and reproduction, and so on. However, the question What causes v,'omen oppression was seen as fundamental. Much early feminist work emphasised ways in which women in all cultures had less power than men, and looked for evidence of this in continuities in women's position throughout history as well as in cross-cultural analysis. (A good example of this was the political concept of Sisterhood.) In the past decade there has been a shift away from trying to find a general explanation of women's oppression, which presumes a commonality between women and their interests. This overlaps with the debate about similarities/differences between women. Some of the early feminist works have been criticised for the ways in which theories were based on a particu]ar view of 'woman.' In particular they have been challenged for failing to pay sufficient attention to differences between women, especially along the lines of race, class and sexuality. Feminist theories have been criticised for focusing on white, middle class.

Feminist Review 95, 2010

"‘Feminist competency’ is a nascent term that has been identified in three general critiques of contemporary feminism that emerged in the course of research for The Great Feminist Denial (2008), a book on feminist debates in Australia that I co-authored with Monica Dux. The first critique highlights the importance of feminist knowledge,typically generated through the academy, to feminist identification. The second posits a perceived lack of feminist competency as an obstacle to feminist affiliation. The third assessment insists that spokespeople for feminism should be sufficiently competent. Using these responses to feminism as a starting point, combined with a reflection on my own framing as an academic feminist in the public sphere, I make a case for the potential value of ‘feminist competency’ as a means to assess the impact of academic feminism, in Australia and elsewhere.

Feminist Review, 1994

This special issue opens with an article by Ellen Mortensen assessing Rita Felski’s (2015) account of critique and her alternative postcritical position. Mortensen focuses on the question of mood and does this from the viewpoint of affirmative affective thinking, paying attention especially to the notion of mood within Deleuzian affect theory. The next two articles give historical interpretations on the formation of feminist epistemologies. With a personal and autobiographical account, Nina Lykke’s article concentrates on dis/identification, ‘cruel optimism’ and everyday utopianism as instances of feminist epistemic habits, but also as structuring themes for feminist thought. Elina Vuola also on her part engages in a re-reading of academic feminism, but from a very different point of view compared to Lykke: Vuola discusses the epistemic habit of exclusion within academic feminism focusing on religious feminisms. In Vuola’s text the critique becomes ‘cure’, ‘correcting’ or reconstructing versions of a particular theoretical development. Three articles deal with feminist epistemic habits of de/constructing dualisms. In order to problematise the binary between poststructuralist and new materialist feminist work, Sari Irni examines as her case study the history of steroid hormones, rethinking the relations between natural sciences and politics. She pays special attention to Helga Satzinger’s (2012) ‘politics of gender concepts’ and suggests that in particular in relation to steroids a feminist critique is required which does not reproduce, but bridge the binary mentioned. Monika Rogowska-Stangret and Malou Juelskjær investigate temporalities and possibilities of thinking through new materialist theorising and concepts in order to examine conditions of the im/possibility of living live-able (learn-able, teach-able, and response-able) academic lives in current political climates. Addressing the temporal ontologies that drive and haunt university life, they deal with the notion of ‘slowing down’ as a response to the ‘fast neoliberal university’. They make visible epistemic habits from the context of our everyday lives and practices and show the challenge in engaging in critique, proposing an ethics of a pace of our own. The third text in the cluster of articles all engaging with the question of dualisms, is written by Liu Xin and deals with another set of binaries, namely both specificity and universality, and unity and plurality discussing especially the question of origin. Based on the (Irigarayan) idea of the impossibility of counting zero, Liu Xin suggests a form of feminist critique similar to what Trinh T. Minh-ha (2016) has named ‘lovecidal’. The last group of articles close in quite different ways around the question of feminist politics and knowledge production. Katariina Kyrölä investigates the knowledge of Black feminist thought in the music videos of Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé through the notion of disidentification, Kyrölä takes feminist criticism as her object in asking what kind of racialised, sexualised and gendered power relations and affects are articulated in the habit of asking: ‘whether the videos and artists are – or are not – feminist or empowering’? In their article about Valerie Solanas’ controversial SCUM Manifesto, Salla Peltonen Mio Lindman and Sara Nyman and read the politics of philosophy as the grammar of patriarchy, claiming that the SCUM Manifesto text has critical, philosophical and political significance they also point to certain difficulties of judgement that characterise feminist and queer critique. Like Kyrölä also the authors of this article highlight the importance of asking ‘non-habitual’ questions, refusing to apply a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in reading Solanas, but considering the Manifesto as a highly relevant, queer philosophical text. In addition to the articles the special issue contains two separate interviews with Robyn Wiegman and Heather Love on current debates about critique and postcritique, addressing especially the question of epistemic habits. Assessing the state and status of critique in feminist, gender and queer studies Wiegman and Love both historicise and contextualise the ongoing debates. They address the impact of neoliberalism, and the changing academic practices, linking it to personal investments. Furthermore, they also reflect on the psychoanalytical and affective aspects of critique. Considering habitual gestures and habits of feminist academic knowledge production, and the questions, reflections, viewpoints and thoughts expressed and discussed in the published texts, that we think are particularly important within current feminist analysis, we hope that this special issue contribute to the surely intensifying debate about contemporary critique/postcritique.