이 연구는 포스트휴먼 시대의 예술과 윤리를 고찰하되, 포스트휴먼 페미니즘 윤리의 맥락을 확장해간 포스트휴머니즘의 관점에서 포스트휴머니즘 기술성의 예술과 이타성을 윤리를 해명하고자 한다. 사이보그 담론을 비롯한 대부분의 포스트휴먼 담론들은 비인간적 요소를 통해 다시 인간을 사유하는 방식을 취하며, 인간 이외의 존재들과 공존하는 윤리적 지평에 대한 설명으로 작용한다. 이러한 윤리적 지평에서 비판적 포스트휴먼 페미니즘은 인간중심적 사고인 휴머니즘을 비판하며, 기존 서사인간의 서사를 해체하면서 기술성을 미학을 추구한다. 이런 비판적 포스트휴먼 페미니즘의 주창자들은 먼저 우리가 ‘포스트휴먼 시대’에 살고 있음을 인정하고, 휴머니즘의 지속적인 해체를 통해서 다중접속 이타성의 윤리를 구현한다. (...) 결국 이 연구는 이런 포스트휴먼 페미니즘과 이를 확대계승한 포스트휴머니즘이 어떻게 다중접속 ‘기술성’의 미학을 구현하면서도 인간이 아닌 다른 타자를 인정하며, 공존을 추구하는 다중접속 이타성의 윤리로 미래적 가치를 열어가는지, 그 한계는 무엇인지를 살펴보고자 한다. (shrink)

With this paper, we walk out some central ideas about posthumanisms and the ways in which nursing is already deeply entangled with them. At the same time, we point to ways in which nursing might benefit from further entanglement with other ideas emerging from posthumanisms. We first offer up a brief history of posthumanisms, following multiple roots to several points of formation. We then turn to key flavors of posthuman thought to differentiate between them and clarify our collective understanding and (...) use of the terms. This includes considerations of the threads of transhumanism, critical posthumanism, feminist new materialism, and the speculative, affirmative ethics that arise from critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism. These ideas are fruitful for nursing, and already in action in many cases, which is the matter we occupy ourselves with in the final third of the paper. We consider the ways nursing is already posthuman—sometimes even critically so—and the speculative worldbuilding of nursing as praxis. We conclude with visions for a critical posthumanist nursing that attends to humans and other/more/nonhumans, situated and material and embodied and connected, in relation. (shrink)

Finishing this essay exactly one year after the official arrival of the SARS-COV-2 virus in Belgium and the Netherlands—where the cartographers of this essay are currently located—it is safe to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has immensely impacted our day-to-day lives. The pandemic has not only forced us to question various taken-for-granted existential certainties and luxuries provided by a capitalist system out to destroy the earth but has also re-spotlighted post-Enlightenment critiques of the human subject. If these pandemic (...) times are indeed more-than-human, then the clock is ticking for the discipline of philosophical anthropology to face these post-anthropological facts and receive what feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway has aptly called a thorough dose of “epistemological electroshock therapy” (1988, p. 578). Taking Haraway’s foregoing call and the idea of thinking-with the (end of the) Anthropocene seriously, we construct a critical cartography of Emmanuel Levinas’ take on philosophical anthropology in dialogue with other major philosophical anthropologists and feminist new materialists while arguing for a post-anthropology for the Chthulucene. (shrink)

The increased visibility of feminism in mainstream culture has recently been noted, with the presence of both online and offline campaigns embedding feminist claims in a variety of everyday spaces. By granting recognition to women’s experiences, these campaigns continue the feminist practice of generating critical knowledge on the basis of gendered experience. In the post-truth era, however, the norms governing claims-making are being significantly reconstructed, with significant consequences for critiques of gender inequality. It is argued here that these (...) norms are linked directly to a wider context of anti-feminism in which dismissing women’s claims is consistent with the goal that opponents of gender equality have of seeking and consolidating epistemic power in the face of what is perceived as systemic male disadvantage and victimhood. Returning to earlier debates within feminism, it is argued that the kinds of post-truth rhetoric used to dismiss women’s experience provide a challenge that feminism must confront. This rhetoric is often grounded in the authenticity of individual experience; however, experience cannot provide unmediated access to truth and, therefore, cannot provide the foundation for feminist claims. On the other hand, experience cannot merely offer one of many contested versions of ‘reality’. The excesses of both foundationalist and anti-foundationalist epistemology are countered with the argument that cognition is a human practice mediated by theoretical propositions which illuminate the question of what can be known. This is the role played by feminist theory in defending the role of experience. (shrink)

For feminists, working in/with the ‘posts’ is, always has been, and must be, a collective and collaborative endeavour. Increasingly, post-inquiry involves taking seriously multiplicities of humans, nonhumans, more-than-and-other-than-humans, multispecies and natureculture entities, including viral, microbial, elemental and atmospheric relationalities. The individual papers in this Special Issue, this editorial, and the Special Issue as a whole attest to this imperative pull to the collective-collaborative in seeking to explore the entangled relations of/between feminisms and the ‘posts’. As a collaborative-collective multiplicity, the (...) Special Issue interrogates what these entangled relations offer for reconfiguring gender and education research, theory, pedagogic practice, activism and praxis. (shrink)

In this short paper, we introduce our Special Section in Feminist Theory titled ‘Feminist human-computer interaction: Struggles for past, contemporary and futuristic feminist theories in digital innovation’. Over the last years, we worked with the authors of the articles presented herein to bring together feminist theories with their practical application in the design, development, use and exploration of digital technologies. Our section follows three aspects: an overview of past feminist histories and discourse; the development of actionable, contemporary theory; and (...) speculative futures of what a feminist human-computer interaction could be. Together with the contributing authors, we are excited to explore these areas of post-disciplinary connection at the intersection of theory, practice and activism. (shrink)

In the face of forced migrants’ urgent needs and ongoing human rights violations endured within and across borders, scholars note the ‘dual imperative’ (Jacobsen and Landau 2003) of documenting these realities while also responding through humanitarian advocacy and/or political activism. This article documents one such experience, that is, an action research process that began with the first author’s accompaniment of Central American asylum-seeking mothers and children in Boston and included witnessing to and documenting these mothers’ narratives in a context (...) of systemic injustice, while contributing to the creation of a humanitarian grassroots network. The latter supported migrants’ needs while advocating for their right to asylum. Reflecting on these experiences, we explore how research that creates knowledge while acting in the world, demands what we herein describe as feminist activist scholarship grounded in dialogic relationality and compassionate care. The latter moves beyond empathetically feeling for or documenting the suffering of others, towards mutual accompaniment to engage in concrete actions to alleviate that suffering. The dialogic relationships of care in which scholars accompany and act with those at the margins have the potential to transform conventional, post-positivist knowledge production strategies from distancing or objectifying processes towards mutual accompaniment and activist scholarship. (shrink)

This article investigates the critical potential of a contemporary dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale (Miller 2017-), a U.S. television series adapted from a popular novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood (1985). The text is widely understood as a feminist intervention that speaks to ongoing struggles against gender oppression, but in this article I consider the invitations that the show offers its viewers in treating race the way that it does, and consider what it means to refuse these invitations in pursuit of (...) a critical feminist understanding of authority, legal subjectivity, and violence. Drawing on the recent turn to genre, my reading focuses on how whiteness is reproduced through this cinematic text and its inculcation of particular ways of seeing, modes of identification and attachment. The Handmaid’s Tale’s post-racial aesthetic means that its thematic engagement with gender, sexuality and resistance actively disavows national and international histories of racist state violence and white supremacy. Its problematic feminism is thus uniquely instructive for understanding how whiteness is reproduced in contemporary (neo)liberal configurations of legal subjectivity and state authority. (shrink)

Departing from the premise that the poststructuralist paradigm still reigns supreme in feminist and gender theory, that is, despite the niche efforts made in the past two decades to challenge it linked to the so called “speculative” turn or the materialisms (and realisms) emerging from the feminist field itself (such as the Utrecht School, inspired by Rosi Braidotti), we set the call for papers for the issue before you in terms that would invite authors ready to challenge the dominant epistemic (...) framework. We invited papers that engage with materialism(s), realism(s), sciences and projects engaged in rethinking the post-human beyond the poststructuralist (and, we dare say, postmodern/ist) norm. -/- . (shrink)

The relationship between postcolonialism and feminism is often complicated and conflict-laden in its struggles against empire and patriarchy and its related social categories of oppression. The question is, How have African women in former colonies balanced their act? To address this question, the article focusses on Boleo, A Setswana Novel. Firstly, theories of post-coloniality and feminism are explored. Secondly, four creative African women writers are analysed for their take on the intersection of postcolonialism and feminism prior (...) to reading Boleo, A Setswana Novel. Thirdly, the analysis of Boleo indicates boundary crossing and cross-border oppressions and solidarity in the struggle against apartheid that features a female protagonist and other minor characters. It is proposed that because the novel equates apartheid with sin ( boleo ), it thus constructs salvation as the concerted communal efforts of resistance and suspicion towards the institutions of the oppressor, characterised by baitiredi [independent or self-actualising workers], a political movement founded by Boleo. The analysis of the African novel indicates that the struggle against colonial and patriarchy gave rise to the First Things First; Second Things First and Both Things Simultaneously approaches, which are evident within African women creative writers. Contribution: This article adheres to the journal’s scope and vision by its focus on a systematic, historical, exegetical and practical reflection within a paradigm in which the intersection of philosophy, religious studies, social sciences and humanities generate an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary contested discourse. (shrink)

Automation is once again raising concerns about the threat it poses to employment. Feminists in the 20th century believed that technology could liberate women from undesirable labor. However, historically, industry and automation have not reduced women’s workloads but have instead favored unpaid work, flexibility, and work overload. Rather than mitigating the care and ecological crises, technological development has exacerbated them. This raises an important question for feminist theory: should technology be rejected as a way of reducing women’s workload? To explore (...) this, we analyze classical and contemporary contributions from feminist theorists on the future of work and technology. Using philosophical and feminist theoretical methods, our aim is to examine the relationships between these imaginings and home, family, design, and consumption. This article argues that a feminist analysis of work must include the technological dimension, considering the production of human beings as a strategic technology for feminist purposes. To imagine an alternative near future, the article draws on Donna Haraway’s making kin, emphasizing defamiliarization and refamiliarization of social and ecological relations, pluralist science, and technology for sustainable regeneration of life; and finally, as suggested in this analysis, the ironic persistence of labour in a post-industrial or post-capitalist era. (shrink)

Joe L. Kincheloe (1950-2008) was one of North America's leading critical pedagogy scholars. He defined post-formalist thought in terms of deconstruction, affectivity, and non-linearity. His deconstruction focused on the context of ideas, ideologies, and teaching. It was a form of sociological deconstruction, and as such, inspired by Derrida, but different from him as well. In effect, Kincheloe was trying to marry Derrida to Foucault by making deconstruction see power in thought, relationships, and the world. Kincheloe's 'turn to affect' was (...) inspired by feminism and radical pedagogy. It was 'affect' focused on (in)justice and the social practices of repression. His 'self-other' construct was inherently politicized by his identification of 'unfreedom' with capitalism and the assumption that this link determines affect. Kincheloe assumed that linear rationality was inadequate to understanding human needs and hopes. Freedom as dynamism was seen to be inherently non-linear. The prison of rationality (it can only repeat the same, over and over again) was the crux of his critique of Newtonian-Cartesian linearity. Kincheloe attempted to construct a concept of 'place'--such as the classroom. But it was a particular, concrete classroom and not an abstract or theoretical one. Here, the three concepts could come together. 'Place' is context, and to understand it, deconstruction is needed. 'Place' exists as it is felt and requires affectivity; it is eventful, alive, and dynamic. It requires non-linearity to be understood. Post-formalism, Pedagogy Lives (in memory of Kincheloe's contribution) encompasses each of the basic principles of Kincheloe's post-formal thought. (shrink)

This revised second edition from our bestselling _Key Guides_ includes brand new entries on some of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth- and twenty-first century: Zizek, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Butler and Haraway. With a new introduction by the author, sections on phenomenology and the post-human, full cross-referencing and up-to-date guides to major primary and secondary texts, this is an essential resource to contemporary critical thought for undergraduates and the interested reader.

This is the first source-book for this cross-disciplinary area. It takes students through a wide range of readings from philosophy, politics, and sociology, to human geography, international relations, and feminist studies. Bringing together statements from leading twentieth-century thinkers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Laclau and Mouffe, and with the editor's substantial introduction, this is an ideal teaching text, inspiring debate about the future of Marxism as a cultural theory.

The issues that Foucault raises about reception and reading are certainly part of the contemporary discussion of literature. However, they are not the only issues with which we, as today’s readers, are concerned. Discussions about the role of the author persist and so we continue to have recourse to the notion of authorship.For instance, in her recent book Sexual / Textual Politics , the feminist critic Toril Moi feels called on to return to these twenty-year-old issues in French theory to (...) tell us what it has meant to speak of the author, when she says: “For the patriarchal critic, the author is the source, origin and meaning of the text. If we are to undo this patriarchal practice of authority, we must take one further step and proclaim with Roland Barthes the death of the author.”3In the course of this essay I wish to reopen the question of whether it is advisable to speak of the author, or of what Foucault calls “the author function,” when querying a text, and I wish to reopen it precisely at the site where feminist criticism and post-structuralism are presently engaged in dialogue. Here in particular we might expect that reasons for rejecting author erasure would appear. However, theoretically informed feminist critics have recently found themselves tempted to agree with Barthes, Foucault, and the Edward Said of Beginnings that the authorial presence is best set aside in order to liberate the text for multiple uses.4 4. See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method , p. 162. Cheryl Walker is professor of English and humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 and Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets . She is currently editing an anthology of nineteenth-century women poets and a book of essays about feminist criticism in the wake of post-structuralism. (shrink)

Feminist decolonial scholars have called for disengaging from the current system built on a hierarchical logic of race and gender central to modern, colonial thinking. They have looked to worlds outside the modern system to lead us out of current unjust practices harming both humans and the environment. Although policymaking may be seen as the stronghold of the current political agenda and of the structures that have led to the climate crisis, we argue that climate policies too, are also crucial (...) for rethinking and transforming societies. Our examination of climate adaptation policies in Sweden and the literature from Europe shows how policy documents ignore and unknow the oppressive intersections of gender and power despite the knowledge that exists on these issues in the public domain. Drawing on the tools of agnotology, we examine how this is achieved by strategies of ‘denial, dismissal, diversion and displacement.’ Building on feminist post and decolonial scholarship, we make explicit the gendered and racial hierarchies and dichotomies underpinning these policy documents. At the same time, we bring attention to the nuances in the policy documents we study and look for the openings that might be used to bring about transformation by making these hierarchies explicit and calling them into question. We argue that a transformation is possible through a feminist post and decolonial intervention, even in policymaking otherwise ignorant of culture, values and the colonial histories that have produced contemporary society. (shrink)

What can psychoanalysis offer contemporary arguments in the fields of Feminism, Queer Theory and Post-Colonialism? Jan Campbell introduces and analyses the way that psychoanalysis has developed and made problematic models of subjectivity linked to issues of sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and history. Via discussions of such influential and diverse figures as Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva, Dollimore, Bhabha, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Campbell uses psychoanalysis as a mediatory tool in a range of debates across the human sciences, while also (...) arguing for a transformation of psychoanalytic theory itself. (shrink)

Feminist investigations into caring technologies emphasise the tension between their reproduction of care’s assumed femininity and their ability to destabilise gendered markers and systems. However, the existing literature ignores the historical racialisation of care and its perpetuation in the form of the posthuman caring object. This article examines how racialised relations of power shape the posthumanisation of care in three science-fiction works, Channel 4’s television show Humans (2015), Alex Riviera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008) and Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013). While (...) Her’s disembodied operating systems are premised upon an implicit whiteness, posthuman caring objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer take a racialised, embodied form. Drawing upon the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, this article examines how the racialised objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer are constituted as both labourers and commodities, purchased for the purpose of facilitating white reproductivity. Nonetheless, this article also documents how these caring technologies complicate key binaries such as subject/object, human/machine and productive/reproductive labour. In doing so, they disrupt the whiteness of the social reproduction paradigm. The article concludes by calling for greater feminist engagement with the racialisation of care labour in human and posthuman forms, in order to challenge white, heterosexual models of reproductivity based upon the exploitation of racialised labour. (shrink)

Abstract:This assessment of the field explores a confluence of feminist thinking about the 20th-century Great Acceleration in the United States: post-World-War II projects of modernization made the security of white nuclear families global models of well-being, while banishing the work of their securitization to non-white sacrifice zones—which eventually came to encompass most of the earth. “Anthropocene” is thus a project of making race and gender as much as making capital. The essay continues into feminist arguments for limiting the Anthropocene (...) to maintain spaces of more-than-human livability. We end with work of emerging scholars. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the emergence of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD) within American psychiatry and beyond in the postwar period, setting out what I believe to be important and suggestive questions neglected in existing scholarship. Tracing the nomenclature within successive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM), I consider the reification of the term ‘FSD’, and the activism and scholarship that the rise of the category has occasioned. I suggest that analysis of FSD benefits (...) from scrutiny of a wider range of sources (especially since the popular and scientific cross-pollinate). I explore the multiplicity of FSD that emerges when one examines this wider range, but I also underscore a reinscribing of anxieties about psychogenic aetiologies. I then argue that what makes the FSD case additionally interesting, over and above other conditions with a contested status, is the historically complex relationship between psychiatry and feminism that is at work in contemporary debates. I suggest that existing literature on FSD has not yet posed some of the most important and salient questions at stake in writing about women’s sexual problems in this period, and can only do this when the relationship between ‘second-wave’ feminism, ‘post-feminism’, psychiatry and psychoanalysis becomes part of the terrain to be analysed, rather than the medium through which analysis is conducted. (shrink)

The rise of nationalist, racist and anti-feminist ideologies is one of the most frightening repercussions of the collapse of socialism. Using psychoanalytic theories of fantasy to investigate why such extremist ideologies have taken hold, Renata Salecl argues that the major social and political changes in post-communist Eastern Europe require a radical re-evaluation of notions of liberal theories of democracy. In doing so she offers a new approach to human rights and feminism grounded in her own active partipation (...) in the struggles, first against communism and now against nationalism and anti-feminism. (shrink)

Reality exists independently of human observers, but does the same apply to its structure? Realist ontologies usually assume so: according to them, the world consists of objects, these have properties and enter into relations with each other, more or less as we are accustomed to think of them. Against this view, Rein Raud develops a radical process ontology that does not credit any vantage point, any scale or speed of being, any range of cognitive faculties with the privilege to (...) judge how the world ‘really’ is. In his view, what we think of as objects are recast as fields of constitutive tensions, cross-sections of processes, never in complete balance but always striving for it and always reconfiguring themselves accordingly. The human self is also understood as a fluctuating field, not limited to the mind but distributed all over the body and reaching out into its environment, with different constituents of the process constantly vying for control. The need for such a process philosophy has often been voiced, but rarely has there been an effort to develop it in a systematic and rigourous manner that leads to original accounts of identity, continuity, time, change, causality, agency and other topics. Throughout his new book, Raud engages with an unusually broad range of philosophical schools and debates, from New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology to both phenomenological and analytical philosophy of mind, from feminist philosophy of science to neurophilosophy and social ontology. Being in Flux will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities generally and to anyone interested in current debates about realism, materialism and ontology. (shrink)

During the past decade, women’s and human rights ‘language’ has moved from the margins to the ‘mainstream’ of international law and politics. In this paper, the author argues that while feminists and human rights activists criticise the ‘mainstream’s interpretation of women’s and human rights, ‘we’ do not question what becoming part of the mainstream and the cosmopolitan classes has meant for us. Drawing on examples of how women’s and human rights arguments have been used in the (...) post-conflict state-building process in Afghanistan, the author attempts to show how international women’s rights and human rights advocacy campaigns planned by well-meaning humanitarians in Western capitals can backfire when implemented in politically complex environments. (shrink)

In United Nations (UN) human rights reporting and analysis, ‘honour’ has been systematically conflated with ‘honour-related violence’ (HRV). However, honour and HRV are not the same thing. In this article I examine contemporary UN human rights discourses around honour. I argue that these discourses are underpinned by racialised and orientalist-colonial imaginaries which falsely categorise people and places as either having or not having honour. This conflation presents honour as a cultural problem attributed to racialised communities mostly associated with (...) the Muslim World. Adopting a critical post- and de-colonial perspective, I undertake a discourse analysis of UN human rights documents to expose orientalist tropes that reproduce epistemic and material violence against honour. There are three strategies employed to commit this violence: first, through the reduction of honour to physical and emotional HRV—a violence predicated upon the logic of coloniality and the orientalist division of the world into modern and pre-modern states; second, by associating honour as violence with Muslims and migrant communities, the discourse furthers structural Islamophobia; third, by reproducing colonial saviour narratives that designate honour as control over women’s sexuality. The human rights discourse on honour forecloses upon alternative ways of understanding what honour is and means for those who live with it. As such, the international human rights discourse on honour extends the coloniality of power and the geopolitics of knowledge. (shrink)

This unique anthology brings together readings from the works of the most significant post-Leninist Marxist thinkers. The selections reflect the diversity and high intellectual accomplishment of twentieth-century Marxism and show how these theorists have transformed traditional Marxism's general philosophical orientation, interpretation of historical materialism, models of socialist political practice, and conception of human liberation. The writings reveal the evolution of a sophisticated and democratic Marxism with a theoretical emphasis on class consciousness and subjectivity, a resistance to all forms (...) of domination--including sexism--and a belief in the political power of consciousness-raising. The selections include the work of forerunners Karl Korsch, George Lukacs, and Antonio Gramsci; figures from the 1930s, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Wilhelm Reich; post-war and New Left thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Gorz, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas; and contemporary socialist-feminists Sheila Rowbotham, Juliet Mitchell, Barbara Ehrenreich, Heidi Hartmann, and Ann Ferguson. Gottlieb places the readings in historical and theoretical context, providing a clear and insightful account of the intellectual problems and historical events that gave rise to the Western Marxism, and describing how it both anticipated and influenced contemporary radical movements. Each selection is prefaced by a biographical sketch and the book concludes with a bibliography suggesting further research. (shrink)

While the postmodern critique of universals provides important insights, it also leaves us in an unacceptable position---lacking solid justification for moral judgments and political action, and unable to generalize about human experience. I argue that the best response to relativism lies in a new humanism. Any new humanism must be "post-humanist"---taking into account valid critiques of past humanisms, incorporating multicultural voices, and building upon an understanding of the common human condition that does not erase or ignore difference. (...) My project is to present a re-conceptualized notion of the "human condition" that meets these conditions, to serve as a basis for a new humanism. ;As a starting point, I take up the framework found in Jean-Paul Sartre's later Marxist-Existentialist works. These are helpful in two respects. First, as he attempts to reconcile Marxism and Existentialism, Sartre re-examines central categories of human experience and ultimately arrives at an understanding of the human that transcends both essentialism and anti-essentialism. Second, I argue that the methods Sartre develops anticipate crucial postmodern insights without losing moral and political ground, and that a reworking of these methods enables us to theorize beyond postmodernism today. My project also draws upon Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonialism, African Philosophy, and the Frankfurt School. ;The central elements of my articulation of the human condition include: a rethinking of the relationship of the individual and the social; an account of the social constitution of the individual; a new approach to understanding freedom and necessity in human experience; and a reconsideration of social identities such as race, class, and gender. I ask, given this understanding of the human condition, what problems remain inherent to human relationships, and what are the possibilities? Are we doomed to alienating and objectifying interactions with others, or are authentic love and cooperation also possible? Finally, I explore the ways in which we might achieve equality and reciprocity in a democracy necessarily built upon differences in identity and social power. (shrink)

Some Romanian feminist scholars argue that welfare policies of post-communist states are deeply unjust to women and preclude them from reaching economic autonomy. The upshot of this argument is that liberal economic policy would advance feminist goals better than the welfare state. How should we read this dissonance between Western and some Eastern feminist scholarship concerning distributive justice? I identify the problem of dependency at the core of a possible debate about feminism and welfare. Worries about how decades (...) of communism have shaped citizenry feed feminists' suspicion of the welfare state and fears of paternalist policies. I criticize the arguments in favour of neoliberal policies and I suggest a crucial distinction between legitimate, universal forms of human dependency and dependencies that result from particular social arrangements. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to provide an overview and examination of the thought of the significant contemporary sociologist, Peter L. Berger. Berger is concerned with the issue of how meaning is constructed in modern, secular, bureaucratic society. Furthermore, this thesis seeks to outline, and trace the development of, Berger's thought. To achieve this the thesis examines Berger's use of the disciplines of the sociology of knowledge and religion, along with contemporary studies in religion and theology. Berger, by linking the function of (...) a theodicy with that of making meaning, allows for theodicies to be conceived of in the broader context of making meaning in contemporary society. As such, a contemporary theodicy needs to include (indeed, it needs to be inclusive, rather than exclusive) such factors as the relationship between self, others, the world, and the transcendent so as to provide some basis for an authentic and meaningful existence. There is a need for a more inclusive theodicy (other than the traditional individualistic type) which has hermeneutic concern for the 'whole' (wholeness of self, wholeness in relationships with others, wholeness with the world/environment, and wholeness with the transcendent). However, this 'wholeness' will not be provided by over-arching, public, structures or systems; it will need to be through chosen, private means which reflect the Post-Modernist situation where 'closure' on a grand scale is unobtainable (Marshall, 1992, pp. 192 -193). Berger's work provides the possibility for this legitimation of a theodicy (or theodicies) which will provide meaning in Post-Enlightenment society. The construction of meaning in contemporary society needs an ability to cope with complexity, it needs to be reasonable, as well as contemporary (to cope with the plurality in modern society), and it is on the way (that is, not given to closure). Therefore any contemporary theodicy, or system of meaning, must be able to be historically concerned (that is, conscious of its origins and open to the future), empirical (that is, open to scrutiny and review), inductive (that is, dealing with concrete reality, not abstract theory), and concerned with people's lived experience. Berger's signals of transcendence allow for the legitimation of this private, deinstitutionalized religion; that is, they legitimate a meaningful theodicy for contemporary humanity. This theodicy, which is able to accommodate the wider view current in modern society provided by the ecological movement, interaction between the various religious traditions, the feminist movement, the reality of multi-culturalism, and the resulting pluralism from the above factors, can provide some basis for a meaningful and authentic existence in contemporary society. The signals of transcendence are able to correlate people's lived experience (their 'natural reality') to a reality which is "in, with and under" that natural reality (Berger, 1992, p. 155). (shrink)

This paper deals with the concept of three eras, as brought to us firstly in the Babylonian Talmud, and later reshaped and reformulated by Christian theologians Joachim of Fiore, Amalric of Bène, and finally by Luce Irigaray. In the first part, we start with the idea of the three eras. This is followed by a critical approach to Sloterdijk’s You must change your life in which religion is substituted by the anthropotechnics. We argue that even in these secular times, the (...) salvation history still remains unfulfilled and that our world is in need of a new, post-Christian materially spiritual narrative. The second part is entirely dedicated to Amalricians and their teachings. Also by tackling strong Islamic influences, we try to find a new opening towards the post-Christian era beyond the mentioned anthropotechnics/atheism divide. In the third part, the Age of the Spirit is approached and defined as a future messianic-utopian era in which a hidden and forgotten inner spiritual core will be revealed to us and in which humanity will give itself a gift of becoming spiritually transformed and divinized. (shrink)

The prevalence of dementia is increasing worldwide but there is still no hope of a cure. Huge resources go into biomedical research, whose reductive ‘enactment’ has severe consequences for women, who are predominantly affected by dementia. To challenge such tragic enactment, this article considers ‘multiple ontologies’ of the most common type of dementia – Alzheimer’s disease – in the popular fictional film adaptations Still Alice and A Song for Martin. Using a post-humanist account of feminist visual studies of technoscience, (...) this comparative film analysis reveals how gender supersedes AD oversteering the hierarchical dualisms between health and pathology, human and nonhuman, and biomedical and artistic modes of knowing about Alzheimer’s. The author argues that these films stress the potential of the arts, as a multisensorial post-humanist embodied state of becoming with AD, to challenge hierarchical dualisms and innovatively contribute to dementia care. (shrink)

Sri Lanka completed eloquent pull Dage described the love of wisdom is a holistic, practical way of life, which of course requires an abstract, theoretical science of meditation, more importantly, it also contains many religious practices is legal, such as flexible do not rot the soul, bitter conduct regular ring legal, social and political reform program, sustained ethics reflection, body control, dietary rules and taboos. However, this Pythagorean philosophy as a better life to all the light and fade away In (...) order to view at any time. The original philosophy of travel to another utterly abnormal interest in the pilgrimage of the way, that is abstract, a clear knowledge and commitment of this knowledge by the certainty of pursuit. "Knowledge" and "real management" into the vocabulary of philosophy In order systems, "smart" In order to become a college corridor in the West has been seriously neglected under the words. With the flow of time driving on the theory and psychiatric abstract admiration, which means practical wisdom, rhetoric and aesthetics into a whole都In order to two yuan regardless. Philosophy - the "love of wisdom" - in all intent and purposes都becomes In order to philo-episteme-"love of knowledge certainty." Started with the ancient Chinese culture, hope臘different. It is rooted in Confucianism, "the next school on up," the admonition of Chinese philosophy from the initial thinking on the road from the daily behavior persist in the pursuit of wisdom, relationships conducted by the "self" as the meaning of things by the event source. Everyone from family, community, political relations, to obtain a unique perspective, they participate in the growth of sperm heart and minds of thinking, their family and community relationships to adjust to a clearer, more meaningful position. Personal self-cultivation increased by the universe meaning, and meaning of the universe has increased over the coming anti-In order for individuals to provide a self fertile soil. For the eloquent Pythagoras, the holistic way of life he described as philosophia-"the love of wisdom"-while entailing the contemplation of abstract, theoretical science, involved much more importantly religious practices based upon the immortality of the soul, ascetic observances, a program of social and political reform, ethical reflection, a physical regimen, and even dietary prescriptions and prohibitions. But this conception of philosophy as a holistic vision of the good life faded in time, and gave way to the search for apodictic knowledge and its promise of certainty. "Knowledge" and "truth" became the vocabulary of systematic philosophy, and "wisdom" was banished from conversation in the corridors of the Western academy. The worship of the theoretically and spiritually abstract meant that in the fullness of time practical wisdom , rhetoric, and the aesthetic were relegated to the down side of a prevailing dualism. The Chinese cultural narrative unfolded differently. Grounded in the Confucian exhortation-"Study what is near at hand and aspire to what is lofty the next school on the up"-the Chinese philosophical narrative has from earliest times sustained a commitment to the pursuit of wisdom by understanding personal cultivation as the ultimate source of an emergent cosmic meaning. It is the revolution currently taking place within the Western philosophical community as an attempt to reinstate wisdom that provides an opening and an invitation to take Chinese philosophy and culture more seriously. An internal critique continues to be waged within professional Western philosophy under the many banners of process philosophy, hermeneutics, post-modernism, neo-pragmatism, neo-Marxism, deconstructionism, feminist philosophy , and so on, that takes as a shared target what Robert Solomon has called "the transcendental pretense"-idealism, objectivism, logocentrism, essentialism, the master narrative, "the myth of the given"-the familiar reductionistic "isms" that have emerged as putatively novel choices as philosophers switch horses on the merry-go-round of systematic philosophy. In place of a Cartesian philosophical language that privileges the function of clear and distinct ideas in our quest for an objective certainty, vocabularies of process, change, and indeed productive vagueness have increasingly come into vogue. These recent developments in Anglo-European philosophy itself have begun to foreground interpretative vocabularies more relevant to the articulation of Chinese culture. In this essay, I will argue that the pragmatic theory of truth as expounded by William James and particularly John Dewey is an attempt to reauthorize "wisdom" as a philosophical goal in the Western philosophical narrative. This development opens a space for a conversation between Deweyan pragmatism and Confucianism on how best to achieve it. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow has recently claimed that unless there are reasons to think the sexed nature of human beings is normatively significant, current trends in bioethical reasoning force the conclusion that “we may do well to move toward a ‘post sex’ humanity” (American Journal of Bioethics 10: 7 (2010)). This commentary uses basic methodological principles from feminist ethics to argue that he has, in fact, given no reasons to think that a 'post sex' humanity is any more valuable (...) than gender diverse one, and no reason to think that sexual dimorphism has normative significance as a brute biological fact. (shrink)

In the past few decades, awareness around gender-based violence has expanded on a global scale with increased attention in global treaties, organizations, and conferences. Previously a taboo topic, it is now viewed as a human rights violation in the broader world culture. Drawing on a quantitative analysis of 568 textbooks from 76 countries from across the world, we examine the extent to which this growing global attention to GBV has filtered down into national educational curricula. We find that textbook (...) discussions of GBV are more prevalent in the post-1993 period and are linked to discussions of women’s rights. In addition, discussions of GBV are more common in countries with more linkages to the global women’s movement. Findings from our study underscore the influence of the women’s rights movement and the radical feminist perspective on the reframing of GBV as a human rights issue. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the philosophical concept of 'tabula rasa' originates with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and refers to a state in which a child is as formless as a blank slate. Given that both these beliefs are entirely false, this article will examine why they have endured from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the history of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and feminist scholarship it will be shown how the image of the tabula rasa has (...) been used to signify an originary state of formlessness, against which discourses on the true nature of the human being can differentiate their position. The tabula rasa has operated less as a substantive position than as a whipping post. However, it will be noted that innovations in psychological theory over the past decade have begun to undermine such narratives by rendering unintelligible the idea of an 'originary' state of human nature. (shrink)

In the early seventies, American feminist literary criticism had little patience for psychoanalytic interpretation, dismissing it along with other forms of what Mary Ellmann called “phallic criticism.”1 Not that psychoanalytic literary criticism was a specific target of feminist critics, but Freud and his science were viewed by feminism in general as prime perpetrators of patriarchy. If we take Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics2 as the first book of modern feminist criticism, let us remark that she devotes ample space and energy (...) to attacking Freud, not of course as the forerunner of any school of literary criticism, but as a master discourse of our, which it to say masculinist, culture. But, although Freud may generally have been a target for feminism, feminist literary critics of the early seventies expended more of their energy in the attack on New Criticism. The era was, after all, hardly a heyday for American psychoanalytic criticism; formalist modes of reading enjoyed a hegemony in the literary academy in contrast with which psychoanalytic interpretation was a rather weak arm of patriarchy.Since then, there have been two changes in this picture. In the last decade, psychoanalytic criticism has grown in prestige and influence, and a phenomenon we can call psychoanalytic feminist criticism has arisen.3 I would venture that two major factors have contributed to this boom in American psychoanalytic criticism. First, the rise of feminist criticism, in its revolt against formalism, has rehabilitated thematic and psychological criticism, the traditional mainstays of psychoanalytic interpretation. Because feminism has assured the link between psychosexuality and the socio-historical realm, psychoanalysis now linked to major political and cultural questions. Glistening on the horizon of sociopolitical connection, feminism promises to save psychoanalysis from its ahistorical and apolitical doldrums.The second factor that makes psychoanalytic reading a growth industry in the United States is certainly more widely recognized: it is the impact of French post-structuralist thought on the American literary academy. There is, of course, the direct influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis which promotes language to a principal role in the psychoanalytic drama and so naturally offers fertile ground for crossing psychoanalytic and literary concerns. Yet I think, in fact, the wider effect in this country has come from Derridean deconstruction. Although deconstruction is not strictly psychoanalytic, Freud’s prominent place in Derridean associative networks promises a criticism that is, finally, respectably textual and still, in some recognizable way, Freudian. Although this second, foreign factor in the growth of American psychoanalytic criticism seems far away from the realm of homespun feminist criticism, I would content that there is a powerful if indirect connection between the two. I would speculate that the phenomenal spread of deconstruction in American departments of English is in actuality a response to the growth of feminist criticism. At a moment when it was no longer possible to ignore feminist criticism’s challenge to the critical establishment, deconstruction appeared offering a perspective that was not in opposition to but rather beyond feminism, offering to sublate feminism into something supposedly “more radical.” Jane Gallop, professor of humanities at Rice University, is the author of Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski , The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis , and Reading Lacan . She wrote the present essay while awaiting the birth of her first child. (shrink)

Discourses of race, gender and religion have scripted the terms of engagement in the war on terror. As a result, Muslim feminists and activists must engage with the dual oppressions of Islamophobia that relies on re-vitalized Orientalist tropes and representations of backward, oppressed and politically immature Muslim women as well as religious extremism and puritan discourses that authorize equally limiting narratives of Islamic womanhood and compromise their human rights and liberty. The purpose of this discussion is to examine the (...) way Muslim women have been discursively scripted from these opposing and contradictory spaces, and to explore the negotiations and contestations made by both secular and faith-centred Muslim feminists in combating these oppressive arrangements. In the first part of the discussion, I will draw on post-colonial and anti-racist feminist analyses to map out the complex interactions of race, gender, sexuality and religion in earlier imperial practices of conquest and colonization and examine how the continuing legacies of these encounters implicate the current "war on terror". In the second part of the discussion, I will examine Muslim women's feminist political engagement with and resistance to the concomitant factors of imperial and fundamentalist domination and will craft a better understanding of how these factors variously shape and are shaped by Muslim women's responses to them. (shrink)

Abstract:Across public and intellectual audiences, postcolonial feminism is often understood to only apply to the “post-colony”. This assumption fails to capture the significant intellectual contributions of postcolonial feminist theory, whilst relegating postcolonial feminist scholars' insights to the margins of the academy and social theory. This move reproduces temporal and geographic logics that presume imperialism “happened” only in the past (and is complete/over) and only in territories counted as the properties of (former) empires (i.e. in the global South and (...) not the global North). In this essay, we write against this conceptualization by highlighting some vital interventions of postcolonial feminist theory and demonstrating how the books under review build new theoretical pathways. We argue for the contemporary relevance of postcolonial feminism as a diverse body of theory offering analytical insights that extend beyond ‘the postcolony’ or a singular application to ‘women's lives’. In particular, we chart the significance of postcolonial feminisms as a lens through which we might ‘unsettle the global south’. Engaging recent calls for critical attention to the global South as a site of theory (rather than merely data extraction), we insist upon dislocating ‘the south’ from an imposed geographic fixity, which too often simply reproduces place-based and racialized hierarchies of ‘civility’ or modernity inherited from colonial science. Postcolonial feminist theory suggests we might instead view ‘south’ as a flexible and mobile marker that draws our gaze to the operation of imperial power, manifest in complex inequalities articulated at local and global scales. In this sense, we argue that ‘theorizing from the south’ requires both a divestment from the usual business of intellectual extraction that positions the global South as source of unprocessed data or ethnographic case study, and a kind of counter-mapping that centralizes the insights and theories that emerge from positions of struggle and marginality. Three themes organize our analysis of the monographs reviewed here and construct our argument about the role of postcolonial feminism in ‘unsettling’ imperial geographic imaginaries that haunt invocations of ‘the global south’. These theories include: (1) the central role of gender and sexuality in racialized imperialist projects; (2) liberal modernity and colonial definitions of ‘the human’; and (3) alternative approaches to capitalism that highlight hegemonic white property regimes. (shrink)

Since Erik Erikson's clinical and psychohistorical writings of the 1950s and 1960s, the notion of identity has served as a bridge between formulations of personality development and the psychosocial aspects of cultural cohesiveness. More recently, under the influence of a postmodern perspective, clinical writers have questioned the notion of a stable, integrative identity or self as an organizing agent in human behavior. In the area of gender identity, particularly, feminist theorists have criticized the construction of polarized gender identities both (...) for their psychological inadequacy and their cultural bias.A parallel line of criticism has developed at the cultural or historical level. Writers such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner have effectively contrasted the shallow ideological and historical roots of nationalism with the effort to base national identity on the appeal to tradition and continuity. Other writers have emphasized the heterogeneous condition of the contemporary nation in a postcolonial world. They contrast a static concept of cultural or national identity to a more fluid notion which incorporates the ongoing process of displacement that, they argue, characterizes national discourse. The identity structures that emerge from this critique, both within a clinical and a historical setting, are more ambiguous and unstable, and reflect the heterogeneous experience of contemporary culture.World historians such as William McNeill and Theodore von Laue have cited the boundedness of historians within their own cultural identities as a significant obstacle to the development of an intercultural approach to world history. These postmodern reformulations of identity theory challenge the notion of cultural boundedness by emphasizing the discontinuities endemic to modern life and the inescapably plural character of contemporary identity. (shrink)

This article is concerned with issues of solidarity and silencing within feminist practice, and with possibilities for responsible and respectful cross-cultural criticism. It analyzes claims about principles of feminist practice and democratic solidarity that were articulated as justifications for the conflicting positions taken by feminist organizations in Haïti and feminists elsewhere in the Caribbean with respect to the legitimacy of Haitian president Aristide’s removal from power in February 2004. The central, and contentious, issue that arises in this post-coup “war (...) of the press releases” is the extent to which outsiders can legitimately contest evaluations that a group makes of its own society’s political affairs. Any easy resolution of that issue in this particular case is complicated by questions of bad faith and self-interest, so I turn at the end of the article to Fuyuki Kurasawa’s account of global justice as “social labour” in defence of human rights to see what resources his “cosmopolitanism from below” can offer us. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid TimesPedro Mora-Ramírez, María Amo-Hernández, and Paula García-RodríguezAnswering the Knock at the Door, Welcoming Utopian Futures, The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times, May 21–24, 2023, University of Huelva, Spain, and University of Calgary, CanadaThe COVID-19 pandemic has fostered new adversities and vulnerabilities, prompting reflection on the economic, social, and political paradigms that endanger human (...) and nonhuman lives. For many, it was anxiety and uncertainty that “knock[ed] at the door”; for others, however, those same feelings of unease prompted one of hopefulness: reflecting on the possibilities for resilience and regeneration in the process of changing our vision of the world.1 The Knock at the Door conference brought contemporary utopianism to the forefront of thinking about how to respond to global crises while remaining attentive to other adversities of daily life. Scholars and artists answered the knock in an attempt to examine paths toward utopia, and to take advantage of the regenerative and resilient potential of the present.The conference was the culmination of author/activist Larissa Lai’s fellowship period at the University of Huelva. The 2022–23 María Zambrano Fellowship for the academic year2 allowed Lai to complete the project “Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times,” carried out in collaboration with the Huelva research group led by Professor Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, who hosted a number of online and in-person seminars on speculative fiction with Lai. The Knock at the Door conference, marking the end of Lai’s fellowship, created yet another space for scholars, artists, and critics to discuss the potential of utopian narratives. Lai asks: “What does our cultural moment require, and how can we get where we need to go from where we are? How can literature, especially speculative fiction literature, help us get from here to there?”3 [End Page 641] The intention of the conference was to encourage others to continue Lai’s work on how to imagine futures where human and posthuman beings need to remain vigilant to adversities. Utopian scholars, among others, might find the complications of “getting there from here” closely related to Lai’s conception of “insurgent utopias,” or “emergent insurgency.” They could find Lai’s concept of “insurgent utopianism” interesting as it lays the foundations of futurity in terms of crisis responses.The aim of the conference was to explore the imagination of better futures through utopian thinking and practice. In addition, it focused on “the knock at the door,” which is “a moment of contingent arrival... open to cooptation, destruction, bastardization, incorporation, death, or defusal.” Yet, it presents “the powerful possibility of critique—narratively or discursively, in its very materiality.”4 One way of doing this might be to look back at the past century of utopianism and ask who or what has been missing. The conference took up Lai’s idea of insurgent utopianism as a method of paving a path toward a multitude of dreams and actions, all shaped by the unique circumstances of one’s positionality.After the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for utopian thinking has become more pressing than ever. New horizons of hope must be created in the face of emerging anxieties. In a world where anthropocentrism is showing signs of its deadly potential, conference participants reflected on the relevance of the utopian imagination to political resistance and resilience building.Utopian Visions: Contesting Better Worlds in Neoliberal and Feminist UtopiasThe first two panels of the conference addressed the critique of two dominant theoretical (and interrelated) frameworks: capitalism and neoliberalism. Speakers reflected on both in light of theoretical interventions by theorists Rosi Braidotti and Francesca Ferrando. Panelists Benjamin Ghan and Marc Lynch reflected on how creative writers envision ideal worlds and temporalities. In Ghan’s view, utopian narratives create a symphony of voices historically excluded from the category of “the human”: women; LGBTQ+ people; Indigenous peoples. In a similar vein, Lynch described his own novel, A Wasp’s Waist, as highlighting the impossibility of imagining utopias within the capitalist paradigm—and thus the necessity of imagining futures beyond capitalism, and beyond... (shrink)

German Idealism is arguably the most influential force in philosophy over the past two hundred years. This major four-volume work is the first comprehensive survey of its impact on science, religion, sociology and the humanities, and brings together fifty-two leading scholars from across Europe and North America. Each essay discusses an idea or theme from Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, or another key figure, shows how this influenced a thinker or field of study in the subsequent two centuries, and how that (...) influence is felt in contemporary thought. Crossing established scholarly divides, the volumes deal with fields as varied as feminism, architectural history, psychoanalysis, Christology and museum curation, and subjects as diverse as love, evolution, the public sphere, the art of Andy Warhol, the music of Palestrina, the philosophy of Husserl, the literature of Jane Austen, the political thought of fascism and the foundations of international law. (shrink)

The democratic surprises of 2016—Brexit and the Trump phenomenon—fueled by “fake news”, both real and imagined, have come to constitute a centrifugal, nationalistic, even tribal moment in politics. Running counter to the shared postwar narrative of increasing internationalism, these events reignited embers of cultural and moral relativism in academia and public discourse dormant since the culture wars of the 1990s and ‘60s. This counternarrative casts doubt on the value of belief in universal human rights, which many in the humanities (...) and social sciences argue have of late been used as instruments of postcolonial oppression. This book essay introduces three texts written before the dawn of the latest “post-truth” era—The Sociology of Human Rights by Mark Frezzo, The Political Sociology of Human Rights by Kate Nash, and Keeping Faith with Human Rights by Linda Hogan—that address moral skepticism of human rights. Along with these authors, the essay briefly treats human rights’ past and prospects, analogizing it to the waves of feminist thought: in international politics, developing nations first desired a seat at the table and repeal of discriminatory laws and practices; when one-nation-one-vote did not result in equal treatment, the persistence of hierarchy helped developing nations awaken to their own evolving national identities and they wished to be recognized as not only equal, but different and unique. The essay recapitulates and amplifies these authors’ argument that the contemporary challenge for all nations, their citizens, and for the human rights community is to deliberatively decide what values unite these identities beyond simple self-determination and extend them toward the goal of a just global whole. The essay also makes an original contribution in summarizing the initial post-war debate in the United Nations that birthed the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, which has been subject to revisionism and perspectivism typical of cultural and moral relativism. It provides some social scientific, historical, and philosophic grounding for serious conversation of the ideas of truths in politics, and universal, transcultural goods and rights that underpin the authority of the international human rights regime in theory and practice. It does so while recognizing the serious epistemological challenges to this universalist conception, chiefly: how a social construct can be both time-bound human creation and continue to be morally binding across space, time, and the accelerated change global citizens of all corners are experiencing, simultaneously yet in their own way. (shrink)

The history of women has been defined by a world enmeshed in woes, frustration, oppression, maltreatment and inequalities. Feminism as a philosophy of change sought to fight, end and change this woeful scenario of women that denied their self respect, dignity and led to a loss of self confidence. Fundamentally, feminist philosophy sought for explanations and justifications why women were denied a voice and why they were historically not treated as coequals of men. The basis of inequality is historically (...) rooted in cultural and philosophical falsities that were not evidenced based but were used to justify oppression against women. The Universal Declaration of human rights gave women and the world the platform that empowered them with rights and led to fresh processes that sought to end oppression and their underdevelopment inspired by inequality, iniquities, denial of opportunities for growth and empowerment. The millennium development goal of ending inequality and oppression against women should achieve equality and women’s empowerment in Africa. Since the declaration of the MDGS, considerable gains had been made inAfricabut challenges and problems are still identified in the areas of cultural inequality complicated by the weakness of the major governance institutions and corruption. Other challenges centre on women’s lack of genuine empowerment, violence against women, trafficking in women, denial of human rights, lack of participation in policy and governance. Since empowerment is the key to achieving mainstreaming and gender equality, this paper seeks to redefine the concept of empowering women as the platform to ending inequality, social injustice and achieving equality in the context of the unique challenges of underdevelopment facingAfrica. It will identify the policy implications of establishing empowerment structures that address multiple challenges facing gender inequality and how these structures will assist in building the necessary feminine human resources that will make women as partners of sustainable growth and development after 2015. (shrink)

In this paper, I engage with the motif of “the pluriverse” such as it has increasingly been used in the past few years in several strands of critical humanities pertaining to the so-called “ontological turn”: science and technology studies (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers), critical geography and political ontology (Mario Blaser), cultural anthropology (Marisol de la Cadena, Arturo Escobar, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), decolonial thought (Walter Mignolo), or posthuman feminism (Donna Haraway). These various iterations of the figure of the pluriverse (...) constitute a loose network of textual traces, a supposedly new scene for ‘humanities’, organized around what is understood as a pluralistic ontology. In political terms, the discourse of the pluriverse presents itself as a strategic response to the violence of universalism. It advocates for a multiversal ethics, a pluriversal cosmopolitics based on interspecies and multi-natural kinships, and more aware of the multiplicity of worlds and world-making practices that make up the post-globalization scene. Based on readings of Bruno Latour, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Arturo Escobar and Marisol de la Cadena among others, I argue that the notion of pluriversality remains self-contradictory and self-defeating as long as it relies on an ontological representation of world/worlds in the form of copresence. Drawing on Derrida’s deconstruction of the concept of world (cosmos, mundus) in his late writings, I propose to think an exorbitant plurality, before the pluriverse and before being. Beyond ontological pluralism, Derrida’s “infinity of untranslatable worlds” also signifies an irreducible interruption, the end of the world, of any “world-in-common”, thus raising the stakes for the ethical demand towards the other. (shrink)

Humanism is in a state of crisis, for which there are three principle reasons. The first results from theoretical criticisms from post-structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism and environmental thinking. The second flows from scientific and technological developments (biogenetics, evolutionary theory, robotics and artificial intelligence) and the third from scientific and technological capitalism. We are in a post-human time of transition that invites us to seek alternative conceptions of the human being. I introduce here an approach elaborated by (...) Rosi Braidotti, which belongs to neo-materialist posthumanism. I acquaint the reader with Claire Colebrook’s argument that posthumanism has preserved a bias about the value of life. It is necessary to overcome it and accept the perspective of extinction. I then show the conceptual problems and ideological contradictions of these theories and propose the development of a different alternative: hyperhumanism. (shrink)

U.K. regulation of sexual identity within a marriage context has traditionally been linked to biological sex. In response to the European Court of Human Rights decisions in Goodwin and I.,2 and in order to address the question of whether a transsexual person can be treated as a “real” member of their adoptive sex, the U.K. has recently passed the Gender Recognition Act 2004. While the Act appears to signal a move away from biology and towards a conception of sexual (...) identity based on gender rather than sex, questions of sexual identity remain rooted in medico-legal assessments of the individual transsexual body/mind. In contrast, because transsexual people in some parts of Canada have been able to marry in their post-operative sex since 1990, contemporary debates on the sexual identity of transsexual people in British Columbia and Ontario do not focus on the validity of marriage, and more frequently centre upon the provision of goods and services, in human rights contexts where sex is said to matter. Currently in Canada this is prompting questions of what it means to be a woman in society, how the law should interpret sex and gender, and how, if at all, the parameters of sexual identity should be established in law. This article seeks to compare recent U.K. legal conceptualisations of transsexuality with Canadian law in this area. As human rights discourse begins to grow in the U.K., the question remains as to whether or not gender will become an adequate substitute for sex. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionAnthropocene Feminisms: Rethinking the UnthinkableClaire Colebrook and Jami WeinsteinIn her recent lecture on the Anthropocene (to which she adds the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene), Donna Haraway expresses some alarm that after two major insights into what counts as thinkable, it was “anthropos” that became the term for the post-Holocene (Haraway 2014). Haraway declares, with emphasis, that it is “literally unthinkable” to work with the individual unit of “man” (...) if one is to do good intellectual work. For Haraway, the two knowledge events that ought to have precluded the use of the figure of the “anthropos” are: first, the acceptance that any seeming individual is the outcome of a series of complex relations and must be studied as such (so there would be no epoch with anything, let alone “man,” as its first cause), and, second, intellectual inquiry has acknowledged a general becoming-with, such that in order to be anything at all, “one” must be in a dynamic relation. Haraway’s work is exemplary of post-liberal feminist resistance to the figure of man—as subject, agent, and center of knowing. Terms like “Woman” or “the feminine” do not extend the field occupied by man; they instead create a different intensity. So when Haraway questions the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene she neither asks that women, too, be included in those who have scarred the planet, nor does she claim that “Woman” would occupy some innocent outside. Instead, she proposes that one think of the “anthropos” as untimely, as out of sync with an intellectual milieu that theorizes the death of the subject and the eclipse of the human, and has even begun to renounce the notion of life in itself. It is odd that in the face of this destruction of any possibility of thinking by [End Page 167] way of individualism, the epic gesture of the present deploys the figure of the “anthropos,” as it should be unthinkable today to return to the figure of man.When Haraway invokes what is literally unthinkable, and then gestures to the Anthropocene, she suggests that perhaps the figure of the Anthropocene is a form of unthinking, and that it is precisely when complexities, timescales, predictions, manageability, and any form of sustainability ought to disturb and trouble our logics that we cease to think and ask for a single cause for an entire epoch. If this is so, and the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene is a reaction formation, then we might see the skirmishes and turf wars that surround the golden spike1 as diversions. If we spend our time disputing just when it was that man started to change the planet, then we allow a contested point in time to pass itself off as thinking, all the while allowing the intensive multiplicity of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene to remain unthought. By asking when the Anthropocene began, we revive a modified version of the time of man; once again, man is placed as the agent of history, albeit unwittingly, and he can look back upon and assess the past of his own making. Haraway is not alone in suggesting that such conceptions of a single line of time, and a conception of first cause, are highly gendered and racialized. The figure of “man” who creates his own history and recognizes himself as having come into being through a time that is readable is bound up with hegemonic conceptions of modernity, and has long been the target of feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critique (e.g., Foucault 1970; Amin 1989; Grosz 2004). If it is literally unthinkable to do good work from the premises of a methodological individualism, then asking who or what caused the Anthropocene, or when it began, would amount to a form of un-thinking or not-thinking. At the same time, perhaps the Anthropocene is literally unthinkable in a sense that marks a more positive and profound absurdity. Let us accept, following Haraway, that all “good work” both acknowledges the impossibility of accounting for the complexity of life by way of bounded, individual singularity, and dispenses with the exceptional man of reason as its foundation. If we do, what the Anthropocene... (shrink)

The article considers the issue of chnging the main anthropic characteristics of a human under the influence of the rapid development of the latest technologies. Such changes cause the need to revise the usual interpretation of the concept of ‘human’, which is gradually being substituted by the currently popular concepts of ‘trans-’ and ‘post-human’. These concepts are favourably perceived by the techno-optimists, who believe that the latest technologies will allow us to create people who will be (...) physically, intellectually and spiritually superior to the people of today, although they admit that this may lead to greater social inequality. The article states that the post-human potential is too ambiguous to clearly outline it. On the one hand, it opens up unprecedented possibilities, which can be considered the highest manifestation of human freedom, i.e. the ability to model a person according to one’s vision. On the other – there is a real threat to human existence itself, namely, the danger of technological capture of the potential for human improvement. Therefore, the task of the article is to outline the possible prospects for the formation and improvement of modern human identity under the conditions of its combination with the other, non-human species and the latest technologies. This is possible under the condition of acceptance of new possibilities for the post-human as the liberating force that overcomes the negativity and limitations of human nature. The comparative method and the method of analysis were used in the article. (shrink)