Over the past decades humor studies has formed an unprecedented interdisciplinary consolidation, connected with a consolidation in philosophy of humor scholarship. In this essay, I focus specifically on feminist philosophy of humor as an area of study that highlights relationships between humor, language, subjectivity, power, embodiment, instability, affect, and resistance, introducing several of its key themes while mapping out tensions that can be productive for further research. I first cover feminist theories of humor as instability and then move to feminist (...) theories of humor as generative of social relationships. Though I diagnose several tensions between these approaches that require further elaboration and discussion, I conclude that feminist philosophy of humor is a crucial area of humor research that focuses on systematic oppression, political engagement, embodiment, and affective ties. (shrink)

Capacitisme and validisme are two proposed translations, in the francophone world, of the concept of ableism. This concept arises in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, in the wake of the disability studies and feminist movements, in order to designate a hierarchical dichotomy between abled and disabled people as well as an system of oppression. This paper proposes to follow the theoretical developments and the activist mobilizations around the notions of capacitisme and validisme, which both appeared at (...) the beginning of the 2000s. Capacitisme appears initially in the Canadian context and in the disabled feminist movements. The gender analogy and the intersectional perspective structure these concepts. While seldom appearing in the activist world, it shows up as an operational concept in some empirical research. Validisme was created, developed and gained importance through the French activist space. It echoes previous work that established the relationship between disability and work/productivity. It has recently emerged in public debate, appearing in the media and dictionaries, but is the subject of little mobilization and theorization in academic research, particularly in empirical studies. (shrink)

The prospect of a transnational feminist coalition is one of the most challenging questions that feminism faces today. The author analyzes Beauvoir’s involvement with the Algerian decolonization movement and her own self-critique as instructive tools for forming better ways for feminists to engage transnationally. Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics, political writings, and activism continue to offer models for developing an anticolonial and anti-imperialist transnational feminist ethics and are an underexplored resource in transnational feminist scholarship.

In this article we explore how female sympathy and solidarity can be forged between transnational subjects and spectators. In particular, we place cinematic depictions of minority female suffering in the contexts of current feminist and postcolonial praxes. The aim is to demonstrate the ways in which world cinema can produce a transnational feminist solidarity through forms and narratives that reflect the experiences of women as gendered postcolonial subjects. Amongst the female and feminist theorists drawn upon, central to our understanding of (...) a transnational feminist solidarity is Sandra Lee Bartky's ‘mitgefühl’. From this understanding we suggest bonds of sympathetic solidarity between audiences and diegetic female subjects that bridge their ontological separation, without conflating the two, in relation to Rachida and Frontière. In combining film-philosophy, cinematic affect and feminist theory we formulate a radically new way of understanding and envisioning the construction of female suffering onscreen: as a means of producing transnational forms of spectator solidarity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 575 Geneviève Pagé Gender at the Crossing: Ideological Travelings of US and French Thought in Montreal Feminism This article recounts a story about Montreal feminism using the narrative thread of its conceptual language. It is a story of language as a political choice that guides our actions, but also language as a political issue, a barrier, (...) a tool that structures our thinking and that reflects and reproduces relations of power in knowledge production and dissemination. Gender is the central character in this story—its role representing the way US, French, and Quebec theoretical traditions are deeply in dialogue with each other; yet this dialogue is arbitrary and filled with long silences. In reviewing the dialogue, this article identifies a few elements that play a significant role in favoring or impeding the traveling of ideas and concepts, focusing, in the case of Quebec, on how part of the feminist movement, comprised of radical or “revolutionary” feminists, engages with and constructs theory. The article begins by briefly tracing the evolving meanings of gender in the United States from the 1920s to the twenty-first century. Then, turning to France, a second section identifies elements limiting the traveling of US understandings of gender in French feminist theory, especially the predominance of specific traditions of thought, namely existentialism and Marxism, leading to different ways of thinking about oppression, patriarchy, sexism, and the idea of womanhood. In a third section, I shift the focus to Quebec, particularly Francophone Montreal, to survey its feminist thought, political traditions, and 576 Geneviève Pagé translation. Its history, its people, and its geographic location put it at the convergence of US and French influences, but with a distinct added local imperative: the struggle for national liberation. The specific ways in which Quebec nationalism has foregrounded power and politics around language has had a major impact on how Quebec feminists have negotiated relations with their southern feminist neighbors. In this sense, Quebec feminism presents an excellent case study of language operating as an axis of power. Furthermore, in the context of globalization and resistances to globalizing processes, Montreal provides a perfect example by which to highlight both transnational influences and local specificities. Montreal, as a classic example of Mary Louise Pratt’s cultural and linguistic “contact zone”—the space where communities of practices interact—is a city in which one can clearly identify “the intellectual and linguistic points of contact between cultures, and make visible the political pressure that activates them.”1 I treat translations that occur in this context as the process of connecting and communicating between communities. As queer theorist Juana María Rodríguez has noted in another context, “the process of translation involves more than merely translating languages; it involves translating cultures, values, and institutions of power.”2 Similarly, translation here involves an exchange between symbolic and semiotic structures of both the original and the new communities. Zooming out of Montreal, I then address the politics of translation on a more global scale, pointing out the particular ways the production and dissemination of knowledge is especially beholden to market relations. All these reflections help us understand the traveling of ideas, concepts, and ideologies across linguistic barriers. I conclude that it is in the interest of feminists to pay particular attention to what knowledge is produced from different standpoints and in different languages and what it can teach us. 1. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), 36. 2. Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 19. Geneviève Pagé  577 Gender in the United States It is among US feminists that the conceptualization of the gender/sex dichotomy first developed. However, gender—the word—ironically comes to English from the French genre and shares with that word its derivation from the Latin genus, meaning “kind,” “sort,” or “type.” The derivation is most visible in the borrowing in English of the French genre, for example, in literary forms such as fiction or poetry. Similarly, both the English... (shrink)

Review of Maria del Guadaloupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano (eds), Convergences: Black Feminism and Philosophy (Albany: SUNY, 2010).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:14 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Melissa Oliver-Powell Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Unechante,l’autrepas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France In the spring of 1971, three years after the revolutionary fervor of May 1968 in France, 343 women put their names to a courageous manifesto announcing that they were criminals of a particularly gendered nature. The authors of Manifeste (...) des 343 (Manifesto of the 343) comprised a large group of culturally eminent French women and activists declaring that they had all illegally undergone abortions, which at this point, despite growing decriminalization throughout much of Western Europe, were still outlawed within their republic. Though many of the revolutionary fires had now eased to embers, French feminists demonstrated that reproductive rights were still a vital and unresolved topic of social justice. Including names as weighty as Simone de Beauvoir, Jeanne Moreau, and Catherine Deneuve, the manifesto brought together exceptional women from the fields of academia, law, theater, film and literature, alongside grassroots activists. Their action was a bold challenge to the French authorities, daring them to arrest some of the country’s brightest thinkers and cultural innovators under a law the signatories felt was deeply unjust, sexist, and antithetical to the values of individual liberty and citizenship. It was a case of those with the broadest shoulders weaponizing their privilege to present a robust front line in the wider struggle for women’s rights. One of the signatories was filmmaker Agnès Varda. Her name, like those of several others on the list, demonstrates the symbiosis between Melissa Oliver-Powell 15 cultural production and gender politics that has often characterized French feminist thought. From the multidisciplinary writings of Beauvoir, to the novels of the écriture féminine movement, to the lyrical academic prose of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and others, French and Francophone feminist writers have tended to connect art and politics with a great deal of fluidity. As a committed activist and a filmmaker, Agnès Varda falls very much within this tradition, often adopting and developing feminist practices within her cinema. This article examines how Varda’s 1977 film, L’Une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, The Other Doesn’t) interacts with and participates in the feminist political project of reproductive rights as well as the ongoing intellectual and moral debates over abortion taking place in France throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. I look particularly at the adversarial construction of abortion narratives within these debates and the location of victimhood therein. Within mainstream cultural representations in and beyond France, abortion is typically constructed as either a traumatic or a transgressive moment. The same is often true on either side of political and social debates on abortion, which have tended either to characterize the women who get abortions as irresponsible and amoral or as sympathetic victims in need of protection. Though the transgressive element persists, it is the interaction with representations of trauma that interests me here. In approaching discussions of gendered injustice, it is common for feminist writers and activists to leverage pathos as a rhetorical strategy. While suffering can be a highly effective and galvanizing expression of oppression, such discourses also run the risk of producing excessive depictions of victimhood, which can displace the capacity for action from the subject of hardship onto the privileged oppressor. This risk is particularly at stake within the cultural form of film, as its visuality and identificatory mechanics have the potential to spectacularize the female victim and make her relatable only through suffering. This was often the case in earlier French films that featured abortion such as Les Mauvaises rencontres (1955), Des gens sans importance (1956), Journal d’une femme en blanc (1965), and Une femme en blanc se révolte (1966), all of which made their subjects sympathetic by entwining them in long narratives of victimization ending in death or disgrace. This article looks at how Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas disengages from the spectacle of suffering that so often characterizes representations of women’s experiences 16 Melissa Oliver-Powell and rejects the idea that abortion narratives must... (shrink)

Beauvoir's influence on contemporary conceptions of French feminism is undeniable, but it is unclear how to assess the influence and relevance of her thought for feminist social movements today in France's least advantaged neighborhoods. Beginning with the question of the legacy of The Second Sex to feminist activism in general, I identify key points of resonance between Beauvoir's work and contemporary women's struggles in the banlieues, then turn to Beauvoir's own intervention on behalf of Arab and North African women (...) in the case of Djamila Boupacha in order to raise the question of how far Beauvoir can really be extended into the activist worlds of the banlieues. The chapter ends with a modest proposal for a way of using Beauvoir to help draw out a methodology and an ethical imperative in recent works by women whose heritage links them to France's colonial past and present. (shrink)

Résumé Dans Le Deuxième Sexe comme dans les Mémoires d’ une jeune fille rangée, Simone de Beauvoir, pour composer ses études de femmes, s’ appuie aussi bien sur des ouvrages considérés comme « sérieux » que sur des romans. Parmi ces derniers, un corpus d’ œuvres de romancières anglo-saxonnes publiées au tournant des XIXe et XXe siècles apparaît comme fondamental pour la formation de Beauvoir, à la fois en tant que féministe et en tant qu’ autrice.

Résumé L’ autrice analyse l’ influence de Richard Wright sur la philosophie féministe de Simone de Beauvoir. Après avoir observé le virage théorique et philosophique que représente Le Deuxième Sexe dans la pensée de Beauvoir, elle en interroge les influences possibles. C’ est chez Richard Wright que l’ autrice trouve les racines de la pensée beauvoirienne de l’ oppression des femmes, de l’ engagement de l’ écrivaine et du féminisme radical selon lequel les femmes doivent se constituer en groupe à (...) part entière pour se libérer. (shrink)

Résumé À mi-chemin entre le témoignage de lecture et l’ analyse de la réception du Deuxième Sexe à La Paz, Bolivie, entre 1990-2019, le présent article examine comment l’ essai y a circulé. Le récit de l’ expérience de lecture de l’ autrice est complété par d’ un exercice d’ objectivation sociologique à la lumière de l’ intersectionnalité. Suit une analyse de l’ image de Beauvoir dans les milieux lettrés et féministes. L’ autrice conclut par une étude des usages bibliographiques (...) du livre dans un corpus de travaux universitaires. (shrink)

This article defends the ethical importance and contemporary relevance of Beauvoir’s 1945 play, Useless Mouths. While the core of Beauvoir’s moral philosophy is already present in this play, she develops it not as a universal maxim but in terms of a historically grounded struggle against exploitation. A Marxist-feminist reading of Beauvoir’s play reveals the moral problem immanent to capitalist modernity: despite the ideals of liberal morality, human life is ontologically worthless.

Résumé Dans cet entretien, la politologue et militante féministe décoloniale Françoise Vergès met en lumière le rôle du féminisme civilisationnel dans les luttes subversives menées par les féminismes décoloniaux du Sud pour mettre en échec le capitalisme racial, l’impérialisme, le (néo)colonialisme et le patriarcat. Vergès revient sur ses positions dans A Decolonial Feminism et place le problème « qui nettoie le monde? » aux fondements du capitalisme racialisé et sexué : l’incapacité à dépasser ce problème garantit l’échec de toute (...) révolution visant à donner naissance à un monde nouveau, décolonisé. (shrink)

As the International Simone de Beauvoir Society celebrates the relaunch of Simone de Beauvoir Studies, the author looks back with gratitude to longtime editor Yolanda Patterson and reviews what the journal’s thirty-year history has to tell us about Beauvoir scholarship, past, present, and future. Topics discussed include the history of the Society; engagements with Beauvoir from the perspectives of literary criticism, philosophy, and the social sciences; and controversies over Beauvoir’s character, her response to the Occupation, her relationship to Sartre, and (...) her legacy for feminism. (shrink)

Colette Audry pointed to a mystery in observing that during the 1930s Simone de Beauvoir had not been concerned with the “woman question” and that her friend must have encountered a “serious obstacle” that “made her change her mind” and write The Second Sex. Unfortunately, Beauvoir obscured the genesis of her most important work. Using evidence uncovered by her biographers about her relationship with Sartre, and digging more deeply into their posthumously published letters and diaries, this paper uncovers a series (...) of events that together tell a likely story of Beauvoir’s feminist turning point. (shrink)

This article reads The Second Sex from the perspective of transmasculinity, using gender dysphoria as a critical approach. Following the threads of an intergenerational history of feminist and queer thinkers, the author is led to examine the particular position of trans men regarding feminism. How does one acknowledge that the category of woman is rooted in oppression without failing to support those who align with it? The true legacy of The Second Sex is a feminist transmasculine ethics.

La mort de Françoise Collin laisse un grand vide sur la scène féministe francophone et internationale. Certes, elle n’était pas qu’une féministe et refusait de se laisser réduire à la posture de la « militante », mais c’est principalement dans ce domaine qu’elle a agi et laissé une empreinte. Elle s’illustre d’abord dans le domaine de la littérature. Déjà, pendant ses études secondaires en pleine Seconde Guerre mondiale, elle avait découvert dans celle-ci une ouverture vers la liberté. Elle s...

Critique of Latin American Reason is one of the most important philosophical texts to have come out of South America in recent decades. First published in 1996, it offers a sweeping critique of the foundational schools of thought in Latin American philosophy and critical theory. Santiago Castro-Gómez argues that “Latin America” is not so much a geographical entity, a culture, or a place, but rather an object of knowledge produced by a family of discourses in the humanities that are inseparably (...) linked to colonial power relationships. Using the archaeological and genealogical methods of Michel Foucault, he analyzes the political, literary, and philosophical discourses and modes of power that have contributed to the making of “Latin America.” Castro-Gómez examines the views of a wide range of Latin American thinkers on modernity, postmodernity, identity, colonial history, and literature, also considering how these questions have intersected with popular culture. His critique spans Central and South America, and it also implicates broader and protracted global processes. This book presents this groundbreaking work of contemporary critical theory in English translation for the first time. It features a foreword by Linda Martín Alcoff, a new preface by the author, and an introduction by Eduardo Mendieta situating Castro-Gómez’s thought in the context of critical theory in Latin America and the Global South. Two appendixes feature an interview with Castro-Gómez that sheds light on the book’s composition and short provocations responding to each chapter from a multidisciplinary forum of contemporary scholars who resituate the work within a range of perspectives including feminist, Francophone African, and decolonial Black political thought. (shrink)

Dans ce livre, Isabelle Lacoue-Labarthe fournit aux lecteurs francophones un résumé de l’histoire des mouvements féministes dans le Yishouv (colonie juive de Palestine avant 1948) puis dans le jeune État d’Israël. L’objectif principal du livre est de démentir le mythe, très présent dans la mémoire collective israélienne, que les femmes auraient joui d’une égalité exceptionnelle en terre d’Israël, du début de la colonisation à nos jours. Dans le premier chapitre, I. Lacoue-Labarthe décrit la c...

Differences in Common engages in the ongoing debate on ‘community’ focusing on its philosophical and political aspects through a gendered perspective. It explores the subversive and enriching potential of the concept of community, as seen from the perspective of heterogeneity and distance, and not from homogeneity and fused adhesions. This theoretical reflection is, in most of the essays included here, based on the analysis of literary and filmic texts, which, due to their irreducible singularity, teach us to think without being (...) tied, or needing to resort, to commonplaces. Philosophers such as Arendt, Blanchot, Foucault, Agamben or Derrida have made seminal reflections on community, often inspired by contemporary historical events and sometimes questioning the term itself. More recently, thinkers like Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak or Rada Ivekovic—included in this volume are essays by all three—have emphasized the gender bias in the debate, also problematizing the notion of community. Most of the essays gathered in Differences in Common conceive community not as the affirmation of several properties which would unite us to other similar individuals, but as the “expropriation” of ourselves (Esposito), in an intimate diaspora. Community does not fill the gap between subjects but places itself in this gap or void. This conception stresses the subject’s vulnerability, a topic which is also central to this volume. The body of community is thus opened by a “wound” (Cixous) which exposes us to the contagion of otherness. The essays collected here reflect on different topics related to these issues, such as: gender and nation; nationalism, internationalism, transnationalism; nationalism’s naturalization of citizenship and the exclusion of women from citizenship; the violent consequences of a gendered nation on women’s bodies; gendering community; preservation of difference(s) within the community; bodily vulnerability and new politics; community and mourning; community and the politics of memory; fiction, historical truth and (fake) documentary; love, relationality and community; interpretive communities and virtual communities on the Web, among others. Joana Sabadell-Nieto is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature (Gender and Feminist Studies) at Hamilton College (USA) and Researcher at the Center for Women and Literature at the University of Barcelona. Marta Segarra is Professor of French and Francophone literature and Gender Studies at the University of Barcelona (Spain), Director of the UNESCO Chair Women, Development and Cultures and co-founder and director of the Center for Women and Literature (2003-2012). (shrink)

The Second Sex can be read as a compelling philosophical exploration of masculinity. Beauvoir proposes to understand masculinity as a situation. It is an impasse as men are stuck in a position where they seek recognition from women, but they construct women in such a way that the recognition women can give them is incomplete and unsatisfying. This understanding of masculinity is crucial for Beauvoir’s emancipatory agenda and suggests that men have nonaltruistic reasons to take part in feminist movements.

Résumé Michèle Le Dœuff est une philosophe qui a beaucoup contribué aux études beauvoiriennes, mais dont l’ apport a été sous-évalué. Pourtant, Le Dœuff a été la première à faire un travail critique, philosophique et féministe autour du Deuxième Sexe, d’ abord dans son célèbre article « Cheveux longs, idées courtes » (1977), puis de façon plus approfondie dans L’ Étude et le rouet (1989). Les études beauvoiriennes ont sans doute encore beaucoup à puiser dans l’ œuvre de Le Dœuff.