Feminist Experiences

Feminist Experiences develops and defends a distinctive understanding of feminist philosophy as social critique. Feminist philosophy is essentially a political endeavor, Johanna Oksala argues, aiming to expose, analyze, and ultimately change gendered power relations. However, such an understanding of feminist philosophy raises a host of theoretical problems and paradoxes. Oksala investigates the philosophical challenges and outlines the ontological presuppositions and methodological innovations the project requires. Drawing on conceptual tools from the thought of Michel Foucault, but also from the tradition of phenomenology, she explores the role of experience in feminist philosophy and its relationship to language and linguistic meaning. Oksala concludes by sketching a feminist ontology of the present through a critical investigation of neoliberalism and the challenges it presents to feminist theory and politics.

In Retrieving Experience, Sonia Kruks engages critically with the postmodern turn in feminist and social theory. She contends that, although postmodern analyses yield important insights about the place of discourse in constituting subjectivity, they lack the ability to examine how experience often exceeds the limits of discourse. To address this lack and explain why it matters for feminist politics, Kruks retrieves and employs aspects of postwar French existential theory—a tradition that, she argues, postmodernism has obscured by militantly rejecting its own genealogy.Kruks seeks to refocus our attention on the importance for feminism of embodied and "lived" experiences. Through her original readings of Simone de Beauvoir and other existential thinkers—including Sartre, Fanon, and Merleau-Ponty—and her own analyses inspired by their work, Kruks sheds new light on central problems in feminist theory and politics. These include debates about subjectivity and individual agency; questions about recognition and identity politics; and discussion of whether embodied experiences may sometimes facilitate solidarity among groups of different women.

Feminist Political Ecology explores the gendered relations of ecologies, economies and politics in communities as diverse as the rubbertappers in the rainforests of Brazil to activist groups fighting racism in New York City. Women are often at the centre of these struggles, struggles which concern local knowledge, everyday practice, rights to resources, sustainable development, environmental quality, and social justice. The book bridges the gap between the academic and rural orientation of political ecology and the largely activist and urban focus of environmental justice movements.

The Women's Movement is usually referred to as if it were a constant, global phenomenon. Susan Bassnett has lived and been involved in the struggles of the women's movement in the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom, and has had extensive contacts with feminists in the German Democratic Republic. On the basis of her personal experiences and study of women's history and literature in these countries she is able to present a striking picture of the variety of feminist aims, tactics and priorities in the four countries, and of the character of the women's movement in four very different cultures. Throughout, the author writes with a double commitment: first, to furthering our understanding of the diversity of aims of women's movements and their common ground - the no-man's land of female existence; second, to making her book as accessible as possible to all feminists, through drawing on her own personal experience of countries in which she has lived, worked, travelled, and made friends.

The Women’s Movement is usually referred to as if it were a constant, global phenomenon. There are women’s movements in Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, India, Japan and Australia, and many women and men assume that they are regional manifestations of the same thing, and share a common core. Susan Bassnett has lived and been involved in the struggles of the women’s movement in the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom, and has had extensive contacts with feminists in the German Democratic Republic. On the basis of her personal experiences and study of women’s history and literature in these countries she is able to present a striking picture of the variety of feminist aims, tactics and priorities in the four countries, and of the character of the women’s movement in four very different cultures. In Italy, she focuses on the violence of the women’s movement – its intellectualism and energy. In analysing the American women’s movement she dwells on its roots in the past, and its faith in pragmatic solutions. The GDR presents completely different questions, hinging on the relationship between state socialism and feminism. In the UK, Susan Bassnett finds herself returning to that all-pervasive aspect of British life – class, and its importance for feminists. Throughout, the author writes with a double commitment: first, to furthering our understanding of the diversity of aims of women’s movements and their common ground – the no-man’s land of female existence; second, to making her book as accessible as possible to all feminists, through drawing on her own personal experience of countries in which she has lived, worked, travelled, and made friends.

In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.

Interviewing is one of the most common techniques used to conduct qualitative research in the social sciences and humanities. As a result of globalization, researchers increasingly conduct interviews cross-, inter- and intra-nationally. This raises important questions about how differences and sameness are understood and negotiated within the interview situation, as well as the power structures at play within qualitative research, and the role that reflexivity plays in mediating these. What does it mean to interview Black women as a Black woman? How is ethnicity negotiated across various qualitative research encounters? How are differences bridged or asserted in feminist interviewing? These are just some of the questions explored in the chapters in this volume. Drawing on their recent research, the contributors detail their experiences of engaging in qualitative interviewing and examine how they negotiated the various dilemmas they encountered. The contributions challenge some of the assumptions made in early feminist work on interviewing, providing nuanced accounts of actual research experiences. This volume explores the practice and implications of conducting cross-, inter- and intra-cultural interviewing, bringing together researchers from a range of disciplines and countries to describe and analyse both its vicissitudes and its advantages.

"Through Feminist Eyes gathers in one volume the most incisive and insightful essays written to date by the distinguished Canadian historian Joan Sangster. To the original essays, Sangster has added reflective introductory discussions that situate her earlier work in the context of developing theory and debate. Sangster has also supplied an introduction to the collection in which she reflects on the themes and theoretical orientations that have shaped the writing of women's history over the past thirty years. Approaching her subject matter from an array of interpretive frameworks that engage questions of gender, class, colonialism, politics, and labour, Sangster explores the lived experience of women in a variety of specific historical settings. In so doing, she sheds new light on issues that have sparked much debate among feminist historians and offers a thoughtful overview of the evolution of women's history in Canada."--Pub. desc.