Patricia Moynagh – författare

By exploring the life and work of the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, this book shows how each of us lives within political and social structures that we can--and must--play a part in transforming. It argues that Beauvoir’s careful examination of her own existence can also be understood as a dynamic method for political thinking.

As the contributors illustrate, Beauvoir''s political thinking proceeds from the bottom up, using examples from individual lives as the basis for understanding and transforming our collective existence. For example, she embraced her responsibility as a French citizen as making her complicit in the French war against Algeria.  Here, she sees her role as an oppressor.  In other contexts, she looks to the lives of individual women, including herself, to understand the dimensions of gender inequality. 

This volume’s six tightly connected essays home in on the individual’s relationship to community, and how one’s freedom interacts with the freedom of other people. Here, Beauvoir is read as neither a liberal nor a communitarian. The authors focus on her call for individuals to realize their freedom while remaining consistent with ethical obligations to the community. Beauvoir''s account of her own life and the lives of others is interpreted as a method to understand individuals in relations to others, and as within structures of personal, material, and political oppression. Beauvoir''s political thinking makes it clear that we cannot avoid political action. To do nothing in the face of oppression denies freedom to everyone, including oneself.

Illustrating the collective power and relevance of feminist theory today, Mary Caputi and Patricia Moynagh have carefully selected a diverse international range of leading scholars and activists to critically assess key social and political challenges in the twenty-first century. This Research Handbook demonstrates a variety of feminist analyses that offer compelling insights into an array of topics, including police brutality, the carceral state, racial and sexualised violence, trans rights, climate change, and the denial of reproductive rights.With a focus on the crucial role of feminism in envisioning a more equal world, chapters examine critical and care based approaches to feminist political thought; hostility to the feminist movement; and feminist attempts to unseat institutionalised power and violence. The lived experiences of women, variously situated in a host of cultural and geographic contexts, are explored. These experiences include the thematics of longing and bereavement, as well as different forms of feminist protest and political awakening. Ultimately, this Research Handbook illustrates the continuing need for reinterpretation and reconstruction in this vital field of feminist political thought.The Research Handbook on Feminist Political Thought will prove an essential read for students and scholars of feminist, political and postcolonial theory. Its real-world implications will mean it will additionally appeal to policymakers and activists, as well as academics of philosophy, political science, sociology, and gender and cultural studies.