The Power of Feminist Theory

The Power of Feminist Theory

Author: Amy Allen

Publisher: Westview Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13:

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Draws on the work of a diverse group of theorists in order to illustrate and construct a new feminist conception of power.


Eros and Power

Eros and Power

Author: Haunani-Kay Trask

Publisher:

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13:

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A careful synthesis of the leading radical feminist critics presented from an original point of view that makes their thought readily available to a general audience.


Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism

Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism

Author: Claudia Leeb

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-04-03

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190639903

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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.


Identities and Freedom

Identities and Freedom

Author: Allison Weir

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013-03-21

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0199936889

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How can we think about identities in the wake of feminist critiques of identity and identity politics? In Identities and Freedom, Allison Weir rethinks conceptions of individual and collective identities in relation to freedom. Drawing on Taylor and Foucault, Butler, Zerilli, Mahmood, Mohanty, Young, and others, Weir develops a complex and nuanced account of identities that takes seriously the ways in which identity categories are bound up with power relations, with processes of subjection and exclusion, yet argues that identities are also sources of important values, and of freedom, for they are shaped and sustained by relations of interdependence and solidarity. Moving out of the paradox of identity and freedom requires understanding identities as effects of multiple contesting relations of power and relations of interdependence. "This is a terrific book, one that stakes out an original and distinctive position in some well-worn debates, and that brings together diverse bodies of theory in an insightful and productive way. It is a real gem. It offers substantial new insights into how feminist theorists can go on in the wake of the relentless critique of the notion of identity. The book will make a significant contribution to ongoing debates in feminist theory over the vexed question of identity - a question that is absolutely central to feminist theory, and has been so for at least the last twenty years." - Amy Allen, Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College "This book makes great contributions to the feminist literature by reconceptualizing IDENTITY in terms of connectedness and FREEDOM in terms of practices of belonging. Through a fascinating and innovative synthesis of Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor, Weir's communitarian approach develops new arguments for the need to cultivate resistant identities and resistant communities. This impressive book is full of original ideas masterfully articulated in critical engagements with leading feminist scholars such as Saba Mahmood, Cynthia Willett, Iris Young, and Linda Zerilli. This provocative book is a must read for anyone interested in contemporary discussions of freedom, resistance, identity, and community." - José Medina, Department of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University


Fundamental Feminism

Fundamental Feminism

Author: Judith Grant

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1136650989

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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.


Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship

Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship

Author: Maria do Mar Pereira

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-02-10

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 131743367X

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Feminist scholarship is sometimes dismissed as not quite ‘proper’ knowledge – it’s too political or subjective, many argue. But what are the boundaries of ‘proper’ knowledge? Who defines them, and how are they changing? How do feminists negotiate them? And how does this boundary-work affect women’s and gender studies, and its scholars’ and students’ lives? These are the questions tackled by this ground-breaking ethnography of academia inspired by feminist epistemology, Foucault, and science and technology studies. Drawing on data collected over a decade in Portugal and the UK, US and Scandinavia, this title explores different spaces of academic work and sociability, considering both official discourse and ‘corridor talk’. It links epistemic negotiations to the shifting political economy of academic labour, and situates the smallest (but fiercest) departmental negotiations within global relations of unequal academic exchange. Through these links, this timely volume also raises urgent questions about the current state and status of gender studies and the mood of contemporary academia. Indeed, its sobering, yet uplifting, discussion of that mood offers fresh insight into what it means to produce feminist work within neoliberal cultures of academic performativity, demanding increasing productivity. As the first book to analyse how academics talk (publicly or in off-the-record humour) about feminist scholarship, Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship is essential reading for scholars and students in gender studies, LGBTQ studies, post-colonial studies, STS, sociology and education. Winner of the FWSA 2018 Book Prize competition The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315692623, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.


Power Lines

Power Lines

Author: Aimee Carrillo Rowe

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-09-25

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0822389207

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Like the complex systems of man-made power lines that transmit electricity and connect people and places, feminist alliances are elaborate networks that have the potential to provide access to institutional power and to transform relations. In Power Lines, Aimee Carrillo Rowe explores the formation and transformative possibilities of transracial feminist alliances. She draws on her conversations with twenty-eight self-defined academic feminists, who reflect on their academic careers, alliances, feminist struggles, and identifications. Based on those conversations and her own experiences as an Anglo-Chicana queer feminist researcher, Carrillo Rowe investigates when and under what conditions transracial feminist alliances in academia work or fail, and how close attention to their formation provides the theoretical and political groundwork for a collective vision of subjectivity. Combining theory, criticism, and narrative nonfiction, Carrillo Rowe develops a politics of relation that encourages the formation of feminist alliances across racial and other boundaries within academia. Such a politics of relation is founded on her belief that our subjectivities emerge in community; our affective investments inform and even create our political investments. Thus experience, consciousness, and agency must be understood as coalitional rather than individual endeavors. Carrillo Rowe’s conversations with academic feminists reveal that women who restrict their primary allies to women of their same race tend to have limited notions of feminism, whereas women who build transracial alliances cultivate more nuanced, intersectional, and politically transformative feminisms. For Carrillo Rowe, the institutionalization of feminism is not so much an achievement as an ongoing relational process. In Power Lines, she offers a set of critical, practical, and theoretical tools for building and maintaining transracial feminist alliances.


Feminism and the Final Foucault

Feminism and the Final Foucault

Author: Dianna Taylor

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780252029271

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Feminism and the Final Foucault is the first systematic offering of contemporary, international feminist perspectives on the later work of philosopher Michel Foucault. Rather than simply debating the merits or limitations of Foucault's later work, the essays in this collection examine women's historical self-practices, conceive of feminism as a shared ethos, and consider the political significance of this conceptualization in order to elucidate, experiment with, and put into practice the conceptual "tools" that Foucault offers for feminist ethics and politics. The volume illustrates the ways in which Foucault's later thinking on ethics as "care of the self" can reintroduce a number of issues and themes that feminists jettisoned in the wake of postmodernism, including consciousness raising, feminist therapy, the subject woman, identity politics, and feminist agency. Taken as a whole, the diversity of feminist viewpoints presented provide important new insights into "the final Foucault," and thus serve as a productive intervention in current Foucault scholarship.


The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory

Author: Lisa Disch

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 1088

ISBN-13: 0190623616

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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.


The Gender of Power

The Gender of Power

Author: Kathy Davis

Publisher: SAGE Publications Limited

Published: 1991-11-04

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780803985421

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Drawing on feminist theories of women's oppression and on social theories of power, this book offers original analyses of the relationship between gender and power. The Gender of Power presents a critique of feminist theories of power as simply top-down models of the oppression of women. The authors argue that this notion presents women as passive victims and ignores the diversity and complexity of women's experiences. The ideas on power of Bourdieu, Giddens, Lukes and Foucault are also evaluated in terms of their usefulness in explaining relations between men and women, which can often be covert, consensual and intimate.