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Posts tagged ‘Feminism’

‘The money follows the mum’

Maternal power as consumer power
by / RP 199 (Sept/Oct 2016) / Commentary

In her 1984 article ‘Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation’, Iris Marion Young contended that ‘pregnancy does not belong to the woman herself’ within patriarchal Western institutions of modern medicine. ‘It is a state of the developing fetus, for which the woman is a container; or it is an objective, observable process coming under scientific scrutiny; …


Anti-Genderismus and right‑wing hegemony

by / RP 198 (Jul/Aug 2016) / Commentary

After incidents of pickpocketing and sexual harassment were reported to have taken place at the New Year’s Eve festivities in Cologne and Hamburg, and been associated with perpetrators of North African descent, public discourse in Germany turned blatantly racist. [1] This seemed to stand in stark contrast to the relatively broad …


Helen Macfarlane

Independent object
by and / RP 187 (Sept/Oct 2014) / Article

Talking of the destructive nature of egoistic desire, its satisfaction that the other is nothing, Hegel made room for further development, an empirical moment which might surprise those who think German Idealism only ever allowed for abstraction: ‘In this satisfaction, however, experience makes it [the simple ‘I’] aware that the object has its own independence.’ …


Gillian Howie, 1965-2013

by / RP 180 (July/Aug 2013) / Obituary

‘The Personal is the Philosophical’


Mary McIntosh, 1936–2013

A Founder of Feminist Review
by / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013) / Obituary

Mary McIntosh was an intellectual, a socialist and a feminist activist. She was a woman of strong principles, combined with an abundance of personal kindness. She occupied a pioneering role in many social movements of the late twentieth century, in particular the Gay Liberation Front and the second-wave feminist movements of the 1970s.

Mary …


She’s just not that into you

by / RP 177 (Jan/Feb 2013) / Review

Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines, Semiotext(e), Intervention series 12, Los Angeles, 2012. 144 pp., £9.95 pb., 978 1 58435 108 5.

How best to describe the colonization of the body at this particular juncture of capitalist life? Much recent theorizing has focused on a kind of war of …


Shulamith Firestone, 1945–2012

by / RP 176 (Nov/Dec 2012) / Obituary

Shulamith Firestone was perhaps the most infamous radical feminist theorist of the twentieth century. As a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, she became an early activist in the women’s movement, founding (with Jo Freeman) the Westside Group in 1967, in large part in response to the patronizing sexism of left politics …


Margaret Whitford, 1947–2011

by / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Obituary

‘It is difficult to convey the desert which faced women philosophers in Britain in the early 1980s’, Margaret Whitford once remarked. It was a desert that Margaret’s own work was pivotal in modifying. At a time when feminism was flourishing outside the academy, philosophy seemed especially immune from its influence; both in terms …


Sara Ruddick, 1935–2011

A Mother's Thought
by / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Obituary

‘I speak about a mother’s thought’ wrote Sara Ruddick, the feminist philosopher who has died in New York at the age of 76. Along with Adrienne Rich, Ruddick was probably the most important philosophical thinker to address the issue of mothering and motherhood since second-wave feminism, and in a similar …


Sex: a transdisciplinary concept

From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)
by / RP 165 (Jan/Feb 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought

What is sex? Some feminists have harboured suspicions about this form of question, given its philosophical (or ‘metaphysical’1) pedigree. But philosophy no longer has the disciplinary monopoly on it. Indeed, with regard to sex, the more interesting task today is to pose and to attempt to answer the question from within …


Feminism did not fail

by / RP 161 (May/Jun 2010) / Commentary

‘You nearly gave me a heart attack’, a friend told me, after my talk at the opening session of the event in London celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first national Women’s Liberation Conference in the UK, at Ruskin College, in February 1970. Appropriately enough, the feminist publisher and cultural entrepreneur Ursula Owen …


The absent philosopher-prince

Thinking political philosophy with Olympe de Gouges
by / RP 158 (Nov/Dec 2009) / Article

Since the publication of Olivier Blanc’s biography of Olympe de Gouges and the first collection of her texts, compiled and edited by Benoîte Groult,1 dozens of articles on various aspects of de Gouges’s work have been published. All of them share the assumption that the author of this work was a fascinating figure of the …


This is not my body

Dossier: Undoing the Aesthetic Image
by / RP 156 (Jul/Aug 2009) / Article, Dossier, Undoing the Aesthetic Image


‘All human beings are pregnant’

The bisexual imaginary in Plato’s Symposium
by / RP 150 (Jul/Aug 2008) / Article


The incomplete materialism of French materialist feminism

by / RP 145 (Sep/Oct 2007) / Article

According to one important and influential line of feminist interrogation of the category of sex, we only believe that there are two biological sexes because our thought and perception are constrained by the two-gender social system under which we currently live.(1) The French materialist feminists – Christine Delphy, Monique Wittig, Colette Guillaumin and Nicole-Claude Mathieu, …


Women’s Philosophy Review, 1997–2005

by / RP 135 (Jan/Feb 2006) / News


Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004

by , , , , and / RP 129 (Jan/Feb 2005) / Obituary

In an interview with Le Monde published a couple of months before his death at the age of 74 from pancreatic cancer on Friday 9 October 2004, Jacques Derrida confirmed what many already knew, that he was ʻdangerously illʼ, ʻat war against myselfʼ. If questions of ʻsurvivalʼ had always ʻhauntedʼ him, this, he said, took …


Monique Wittig, 1935–2003

by / RP 120 (Jul/Aug 2003) / Obituary


Micropolitics

Leo Bersani and conflicts in contemporary feminism
by / RP 110 (Nov/Dec 2001) / Article


De Beauvoir’s Hegelianism

Rethinking The Second Sex
by / RP 107 (May/Jun 2001) / Article

The Ethics of Ambiguity is well known as de Beauvoirʼs attempt to formulate an existentialist ethics; that is to say, an ethics premissed on the account of the lack at the heart of any human existence (ʻthe being whose being is not to beʼ) given by Sartre in Being and Nothingness.1 The ʻambiguityʼ of the …