Feminist Strategies: Flexible Theories and Resilient Practices – serie

The question of difference—how to accommodate the complexity and diversity of women’s experiences—remains a central point of reference in debates among feminist thinkers. In Transcultural Feminist Philosophy: Rethinking Difference and Solidarity Through Chinese-American Encounters, Yuanfang Dai addresses influential approaches to the feminist difference critique. Acknowledging that gender oppression assumes different forms in different social and cultural locations, Dai denies that this rules out generalizing about women’s experiences. She proposes a category of women that captures and respects differences and dynamics among women and that can inform possibilities for women in the future. Through a critical examination of multicultural and postcolonial feminisms, she argues that we need both to rethink the concept of culture and to rework multiculturalism as an analytical and political idea. Developing a notion of transculturalism, she draws on Chinese feminist scholarship as she explores how a transcultural approach can address tensions between cultural differences and feminist solidarity. Transcultural thought and action offers a new way to explore the conditions of women’s collective struggles.

By analyzing the labor involved in caregiving, this book shows how dimensions of care labor have liberatory possibilities.Although foundational to human life, the activities of care provision were not considered worthy of serious philosophical and theoretical analysis until feminist theorists argued that care provision was not simply an instinctive act but involved judgment and moral deliberation.In the first part, Monique Lanoix examines the concept of labor in the writings of Locke, Hegel, Marx, and Arendt. If these authors pay attention to the labor of reproduction and care provision, it is only to shore up the assumption that productive labor is a more worthy human activity. However, the denial of care labor as bona fide labor yields useful insights. Showing the neglect of the relational qualities of care labor implies that the relationality of labor as a human activity is expunged from productive labor. Consequently, such an impoverished concept of labor can only lead to Taylorism and to the complete alienation of the laborer from their laboring activities.The second part considers proposals to adapt the labor of care to post-Fordist societies: the commodification of care labor, the introduction of immaterial labor to better capture the increasing prevalence of unproductive labor and the recent enthusiasm for robotic care. These proposals, in addition to neoliberal attempts to mold care labor into a productive activity, have failed and increased the oppression of care laborers. Rather, inspired by the writings of Dejours and his concept of labor as a living activity, Lanoix argues that the path to follow is to reinstate the relational aspects of labor for a more complete understanding of productive labor and labor more generally. Therein lies the radical potential of care labor.

Antagonizing White Feminism: Intersectionality’s Critique of Women’s Studies and the Academy pushes back against the exclusive scholarship and discourse coming out of women-centered spaces and projects, which throw up barriers by narrowly defining who can participate. Vehement resistance to using inclusive language and renaming scholarly spaces like Women’s Studies and Critical Feminism expresses itself in concerns that women are still oppressed and thus women-only spaces must be maintained. But who is a woman? What are the characteristics of a woman’s lived experience? Do affinity and a history of oppression justify exclusion?This book shows how intersectional feminism is often underperformed and appropriated as a “woke” vocabulary by elite women who are unwilling to do the necessary emotional work around their privilege. As Trans Women, Femmes, Women of Color, Queer Women, Gender Variant, and Gender Non-Conforming scholars emerge, the heteronormative, cisgender, colonial idea of women and the feminine is rapidly under attack. The contributors believe that to engage in the necessary conversations about the oppressed performing oppression is to disrupt the exclusionary basis of monolithic understandings of the feminine. Only then can we advance the coalition needed to forge a multiracial, multicultural, queer-led, anti-imperialist feminism.

In Feminist Human Rights: A Political Approach, Kristen Hessler argues that the proper task of philosophical human rights theory is to theorize the multiple, contested moral visions of human rights that animate the practice itself. Drawing on a broadly pragmatist methodology, Hessler demonstrates that unjust social hierarchies concealed by entrenched ideologies can be exposed by the activism of marginalized groups for their own human rights, and the resulting understandings of human rights morality can then be realized in law. This more inclusive process both overcomes a significant obstacle to fulfilling human rights in practice and contributes to a fuller theoretical understanding of human rights morality in the abstract. Hessler closely analyzes an extended case study of the jurisprudence on crimes of rape and sexual violence in the ad hoc international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. By centering the voices of women testifying about their experiences of violence, and insisting that their experiences deserved accountability, the tribunals initiated a process of legal and social reform. This complex process constitutes a form of social moral discovery that illuminates human rights morality in light of long-ignored realities of women’s experiences.

Shame, Gender Violence, and Ethics: Terrors of Injustice draws from contemporary, concrete atrocities against women and marginalized communities to re-conceptualize moral shame and to set moral shame apart from dimensions of subordination, humiliation, and disgrace. The interdisciplinary collection starts with a contribution from a Yazidi-survivor of genocidal and sexual violence, whose case brings together core themes: gender, ethnic and religious identity, and violence and shame. Further accounts of shame and gendered violence in this collection take the reader to other and equally disturbing accounts of lesser-known atrocities from around the world. Although shame is sometimes posited as an inevitable companion to human life, editors Lenart Škof and Shé M. Hawke situate the discussion in the theoretical landscape of shame, and the contributors challenge this concept through fields as diverse as law, journalism, activism, philosophy, theology, ecofeminism, and gender and cultural studies. Their discussion of gendered shame makes room for it to be both a negative and a redemptive concept. Combining junior and senior scholarship, this collection examines power relations in the cycle of shame and violence.

Shame, Gender Violence, and Ethics: Terrors of Injustice draws from contemporary, concrete atrocities against women and marginalized communities to re-conceptualize moral shame and to set moral shame apart from dimensions of subordination, humiliation, and disgrace. The interdisciplinary collection starts with a contribution from a Yazidi-survivor of genocidal and sexual violence, whose case brings together core themes: gender, ethnic and religious identity, and violence and shame. Further accounts of shame and gendered violence in this collection take the reader to other and equally disturbing accounts of lesser-known atrocities from around the world. Although shame is sometimes posited as an inevitable companion to human life, editors Lenart Škof and Shé M. Hawke situate the discussion in the theoretical landscape of shame, and the contributors challenge this concept through fields as diverse as law, journalism, activism, philosophy, theology, ecofeminism, and gender and cultural studies. Their discussion of gendered shame makes room for it to be both a negative and a redemptive concept. Combining junior and senior scholarship, this collection examines power relations in the cycle of shame and violence.