Feminists Theorize The Political

A collection of work by leading feminist scholars, engaging with the question of the political status of poststructuralism within feminism, and affirming the contemporary debate over theory as politically rich and consequential.

Where is feminist state theory today? This book offers novel insights into social science debates by analyzing feminist theories of the state. The themes are developed within a comparative perspective. Focusing on devolution in Scotland and the European Union, the book further explores how feminist state theories conceive multi-level governance.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides a rich overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts that feminist theorists have developed to analyze the known world. Featuring leading feminist theorists from diverse regions of the globe, this collection delves into forty-nine subject areas, demonstrating the complexity of feminist challenges to established knowledge, while also engaging areas of contestation within feminist theory. Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory, the chapters offer innovative analyses of topics central to social and political science, cultural studies and humanities, discourses associated with medicine and science, and issues in contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization. The handbook identifies limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women's and men's lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.

Recent debates in contemporary feminist theory have been dominated by the relation between identity and politics. Beyond Identity Politics examines the implications of recent theorizing on difference, identity and subjectivity for theories of patriarchy and feminist politics. Organised around the three central themes of subjectivity, power and politics, this book focuses on a question which feminists struggled with and were divided by throughout the last decade, that is: how to theorize the relation between the subject and politics. In this thoughtful engagement with these debates Moya Lloyd argues that the turn to the subject in process does not entail the demise of feminist politics as many feminists have argued. She demonstrates how key ideas such as agency, power and domination take on a new shape as a consequence of this radical rethinking of the subject-politics relation and how the role of feminist political theory becomes centred upon critique. A resource for feminist theorists, women′s and gender studies students, as well as political and social theorists, this is a carefully composed and wide-ranging text, which provides important insights into one of contemporary feminism′s most central concerns.

Calling for inclusion and dialogue, these essays by an international group of feminist scholars and activists stress the need to put into relation seemingly discrepant approaches to reality and to scholarship in order to build coalitions across the usual North/South and East/West divides. This diverse group of authors, who spent fourteen weeks working collaboratively, dispense with unity and seek instead to use dialogue and difference in their production of knowledge about effective political action. The dialogues materialized here among women's movements that have emerged within different contexts and cosmologies take feminisms' challenges to contemporary corporate globalization in new empirical and theoretical directions.

According to postmodern scholars, subjects are defined only through their relationship to institutions and social norms. But if we are only political people insofar as we are subjects of existing power relations, there is little hope of political transformation. To instigate change, we need to draw on collective power, but appealing to a particular type of subject, whether "working class," "black," or "women," will always be exclusionary. This issue is a particular problem for feminist scholars, who are frequently criticized for assuming that they can make broad claims for all women, while failing to acknowledge their own exclusive and powerful position (mostly white, Western, and bourgeois). Recent work in political and feminist thought has suggested that we can get around these paradoxes by wishing away the idea of political subjects entirely or else thinking of political identities as constantly shifting. In this book, Claudia Leeb argues that these are both failed ideas. She instead suggests a novel idea of a subject in outline. Over the course of the book Leeb grounds this concept in work by Adorno, Lacan, and Marx - the very theorists who are often seen as denying the agency of the subject. Leeb also proposes that power structures that create political subjects are never all-powerful. While she rejects the idea of political autonomy, she shows that there is always a moment in which subjects can contest the power relations that define them.

Since its initial publication in 1990, this book has become a key work of contemporary feminist theory, and an essential work for anyone interested in the study of gender, queer theory, or the politics of sexuality in culture. This is the text where the author began to advance the ideas that would go on to take life as "performativity theory," as well as some of the first articulations of the possibility for subversive gender practices. Overall, this book offers a powerful critique of heteronormativity and of the function of gender in the modern world.

In Fundamental Feminism, Judith Grant explores the evolution of feminist theory as well as the state of today's feminist thought. Pointing to the main problems within feminism, Grant calls for a substantial revision of the core concepts responsible for shaping today's feminist theory. Grant identifies and critiques three core concepts in feminist theory--"woman," "experience," and "personal politics"--from their origins in pamphlets and writings in the early women's liberation movement to their current construction in feminist thought. She connects a number of key debates in feminism today to the longstanding influence of these core assumptions. These debates include the hegemony of the white female perspective, the tension between anti-pornography and pro-sex feminists, and the challenges presented by postmodernism. Fundamental Feminism is provocative reading for anyone interested in the future of feminist theory and the power of feminist politics.