affective politics,debility and hearing voices: towards a feminist politics of ordinary suffering

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich’s recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice.     

sex,work, meat: the feminist politics of veganism

Since the publication of The Sexual Politics of Meat in 1990, activist and writer Carol J. Adams (2000 [1990]) has put forth a feminist defence of veganism based on the argument that meat consumption and violence against animals are structurally related to violence against women, and especially to pornography and prostitution. Adams’ work has been influential in the growing fields of animal studies and posthumanism, where her research is frequently cited as the prime example of vegan feminism. However, her particular radical feminist framework, including her anti-pornography and anti-prostitution arguments, are rarely acknowledged or critiqued. This article challenges the premises of Adams’ argument, demonstrating that her version of vegan feminism is based upon an unsubstantiated comparison between violence against women and violence against other-than-human animals, and on the silencing and exclusion of sex workers as subjects. The article contests the limited reading of Adams, and of feminism, offered in some key works in animal studies and posthumanism, at the same time that it recognises the need to challenge the anthropocentrism evident in much feminist theory. By way of alternative approaches to the sexual politics of veganism, the article highlights the interventions of artist and activist Mirha-Soleil Ross, proposing that her situated and embodied commitment to animal rights brings sex worker agency into the story, while resisting simple comparisons among different forms of violence. The concerns raised by Ross overlap in compelling ways with recent research in performance studies and labour history, bringing the question of work and workers, animal and human, to the fore. These studies point towards a potentially more useful framework than that of Adams for understanding the human violence suffered by different species, including those destined to be eaten by people.     

The making of Nordic "women-friendlyness" and the language of emancipatory politics: A feminist genealogy

What made it possible to develop thinking about Nordic "women-friendlyness"* during the 1980s? What does Nordic "women-friendlyness" have to offer feminist theory today? This study examines and interprets the foundations of Nordic "women-friendlyness" using a feminist genealogical discursive analysis designed as a set of interrelated and overlapping stories. The aim of the study is to analyse the official textual academic formulations of Nordic "women-friendlyness", as well as to interpret the cultural, historical and institutional contexts of Nordic "women-friendlyness" that lie behind these formulations and how these constitute its present formulation.     

Emma Brooke: Fabian,feminist and writer

Largely overlooked in Fabian historiography and absent from major works of biographical reference, Emma Brooke (c1844-1926) was an early Fabian and successful novelist whose analysis of ‘the woman question’, and especially the sex question, significantly predates the better known critique by H. G. Wells. This posthumously published article examines Brooke's thinking over time, drawing on personal correspondence and literary representations, and offers further insights into the relationship between feminism and socialism in the 1880s and 1890s.     

paradise,built in hell: decolonising feminist utopias in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Top of the Lake</Emphasis> (2013)

Jane Campion and Gerard Lee’s miniseries Top of the Lake (2013) marked New Zealand-born but Australian resident Campion’s return to New Zealand for the first time since The Piano (1993). The show’s central subject of child sexual abuse by state officials echoes the different yet resonating political situations in twenty-first century Australia and New Zealand, a state of emergency that allows for the emergence of what Rebecca Solnit (2009) calls a ‘disaster community’. Implicitly addressing critiques of her colonialist gaze in the earlier film, the miniseries both decolonises the idea of the utopian no-place and offers an alternate, emplaced vision of relational, anti-colonial provisional utopia through the main, mirroring female characters, Detective Robin Griffin and her half-sister Tui Mitcham. In contrast to contemporaneous police procedurals focussed on lone female officers, Top of the Lake rejects the authority of the police state and offers a resolution aslant that critiques generic expectations of individual heroism and resolution within a legal framework. Looking specifically at how the show knows its place—Lake Wakatipu on South Island, New Zealand—the article offers a close reading of Top of the Lake’s formal critique of the male colonial gaze and its adoption of a feminist soundscape in relation to Campion’s oeuvre; and considers its politics through indigenous media theory, to argue that it marks an initial step towards a decolonisation of viewing practices in relation to feminist conceptions of utopia.     

Toward a holistic paradigm for Asian American Women's Studies: A synthesis of feminist scholarship and women of color's feminist politics

In this paper I propose a Women's Studies method for an Asian American Studies curriculum by incorporating a women-centred feminist historical approach and a holistic feminist anthropological approach with American women of color's feminist politics with an emphasis on the interconnectedness of sexism, racism, classism and homophobia in the American social systems and cultural ideologies.My work is based on the belief that an Asian American Women's Studies method must be founded on a feminist politics which is specifically derived from their own definition of themselves and feminism which are based on multiple consciousness raising and multiple identities of gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality.     

crisis,austerity and gendered governance: a feminist perspective

Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege.     

Depoliticising the personal : A feminist slogan in feminist therapy

One of the great insights of second wave feminism was the recognition that “the personal is political.” Many feminist psychologists (both practitioners and researchers) claim a strong commitment to this slogan and attempt to implement it through their theory and practice. This article explores four interpretations of “the personal is political” in feminist psychological writing. It is argued that far from achieving radical feminist goals, psychological interpretations serve: (1) to personalise the political, translating social, economic, and ecological concerns into individual psychological matters; (2) to foster revolution “from within” at the expense of political change in the outside world; (3) that insofar as it aims uncritically to “validate women's experience,” it ignores the social and political factors which shape experience; and (4) that the concept of “empowerment” depends upon a radical split between the “personal” and the “political”. In sum, it is concluded that femenist acknowledgement that the personal really is political means rejecting psychology.     

Liberty, equality, sorority: Contradiction and integrity in feminist thought and practice

This paper provides an analysis of the inherent contradictions in and the essential integrity of feminist thought and practice. It is argued that three of the central concepts in feminist thought are liberty, equality, and sorority. By their very nature, these concepts conflict with each other and it is argued that the divisions within feminist thought and practice have specific roots in the inherent contradictions of these three concepts. It is also argued, paradoxically, that while these concepts tend to contradict each other, they are each necessary for the definition and integrity of the others. They act as limits towards each other. It is suggested that it is the balanced juxtaposition of these three concepts which maintains the integrity of feminism. Finally, it is suggested that the balancing of these three concepts provides the framework for a feminist ethic.