Inventive Feminist Theory: Representation,Materiality and Intensive Time

Abstract

This article examines key arguments on the relations between bodies and images developed in the context of the discursive turn to consider what light a feminist materialist approach might shed on them. Rather than set the discursive and materialist ‘turns’ in opposition to each other, the author tries to draw connections between different theories of the relations between bodies and images, and unpack how certain feminist concerns are approached from different angles in different historical and intellectual contexts. To do this, the author focuses on the prevalence of images of transformation in contemporary visual culture and analyses them in terms of how both ‘new materialist’ and feminist theories grapple with the worlds they engage with, where change and transformation are seen as key. The author takes up three specific and related points that are currently being debated in feminist materialisms: (1) the concept of representation and, more widely, representational thinking; (2) the concept of causation and an understanding of time as non-linear, intensive and inventive; and (3) the understanding of theory as immanent and inventive. Drawing on insights developed in both the discursive and materialist ‘turns’, the author focuses on how bodies and images are entangled together as material assemblages and, in Barad's terms, how theories are performative of the phenomena they seek to understand. The article concludes by suggesting that such an understanding of theory as inventive might be a way of continuing to ensure the animation of feminism's transformative nature.     

‘Situated Knowledges’ and New Materialism(s): Rethinking a Politics of Location

Abstract

Playing a pivotal role in foregrounding a feminist politics of difference, a politics of location embodies what can be termed second-wave concerns that continue to inform contemporary feminist modes of inquiry and research. However, the attention to material specificity that locatability performs has emphasized the identity of the speaking subject at the same time as it has acknowledged materiality's entangled engagements as suggestive of the complicated production of any identity. In her 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges’, Donna Haraway both raises and responds to the challenge of a feminist politics of location in a way that anticipates a convoluted politics of the subject, in particular where she is not satisfied to relinquish universality and objectivity, or the ‘non-local’, in her provocative thinking through of situated knowledge production. The partial perspective she uncovers insists that the capacity for identity is addressed as a political gesture, with a reminder that any appeal to perspective is a non-innocent participation in what it helps to produce. In taking up Haraway's essay, the author engages with the problematic nature of a politics of location that is confounded by the direction of its critical interventions, and in such a way anticipates and performs new (feminist) materialist concerns. Questioning the nature of non-locatability and its political imperatives, the author suggests an ‘annunciative politics’ through which to consider some of the implications of Haraway's figuring of the partial perspective, to ask after feminism's political impetus with the tensions raised in Haraway's argument kept alive.     

Politics Materialized: Rethinking the Materiality of Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics

The ‘new’ of new materialism should not be read as current feminism's distancing from or disavowal of the legacy of previous feminist movements. This past cannot be left behind as it is enfolded—both conceptually and materially—and reconfigured as feminism's current theorizing and political action. This article argues that this cultural inheritance is at the same time corporeally manifested in the biology of feminist bodies. Such a contention is inspired by Karen Barad's argument that concepts, ideas and other social phenomena are specific physical arrangements materialized through apparatuses. Barad insists that the relationships between the social, political and discursive and physical matter are not relations of externality. Instead, there is a complex entanglement where the differences between the cultural and the physical are matters of making separate rather than there being two radically separate realms. Barad's claims are supported by epigenetic research into the intergenerational health effects of the experience of social stigma. The results of this research suggest that an individual's environment, both physical and social, current and historical, manifests in biology at the molecular level. So politics, then, is a truly material practice which is at the same time constitutive of its practitioners. New materialism's history of feminist action and theorization can never be excluded from current practices of feminism but neither can it determine them in advance. Politics and feminism are particular, contingent, material histories, with each practitioner reconfiguring her or his specific biological and social materialization as their present-day political and feminist actions.     

Feminist legal theory and practice: rethinking the relationship

This article aims to contribute to the question of how to conceptualise the relationship between theory and practice in feminist scholarship in law. It looks in detail at the implications of different issues raised in a recent debate between Anne Bottomley and Ngaire Naffine on the existence of a “legal feminist orthodoxy”. I critique the dominance of ethics over politics and join Bottomley in her attack upon “the ethics of respect for the other”, albeit from a different position. I then look at the ways in which the problem of “essentialism” is being rethought from a feminist perspective.     

Into history through the back door: The ‘past historic’ in Nights at the Circus and Affinity

This article centres around three ways in which ‘new materialism’ or ‘neomaterialism’—terms coined by DeLanda and Braidotti in the second half of the 1990s—can be called ‘transversal’. New materialism is a cultural theory that does not privilege culture, but focuses on what Haraway would call ‘naturecultures’. It explores a monist perspective of the human being, disposed of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities until today, by giving special attention to matter, as it has been so much neglected by dualist thought. New materialism, a cultural theory inspired by the thoughts of Deleuze, that spurs a renewed interest in philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, shows how cultured humans are always already in nature, and how nature is necessarily cultured, how the mind is always already material, and how matter is necessarily something of the mind. New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions that are haunting a cultural theory that is standing on the brink of both the modern and the post-postmodern era. The transcendental and humanist traditions, which are manifold yet consistently predicated on dualist structures, continue to stir debates that have a stifling effect on the field (think of the feminist polemic concerning the failed materialism in the work of Butler, and of the Saussurian/Lacanian linguistic heritage in media and cultural studies). New materialism allows for the conceptualisation of the travelling of the fluxes of matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture, and opens up active theory formation. The three transversalities concern disciplinarity, paradigms and the spatiotemporality of theory.     

Feminist Materialism and Covid-19: The Agential Activation of Everyday Objects

ABSTRACT

This article takes up and make the case for the study of Covid-19 through the lens of feminist new materialism and asks how this approach might draw out perspectives and insights overlooked by other frameworks. I begin with a brief introduction to Covid-19 followed by an analysis of the virus through the lens of feminist new materialism by drawing on the work of Karan Barad (2003), Rosi Braidoitti (2011), and Jane Bennett (2004). I contend that the interconnected frameworks articulated by each of these theorists provides the basis for a more robust understanding of the viral non-human (Covid 19) and everyday objects (the toilet roll and medical masks) whose agentic power is embedded in larger assemblages of natureculture. This kind of analysis is urgent in light of our current media-saturated, interconnected, highly politicized, and expert-adverse environment.     

A Feminist Perspective on Contract Theories from Law and Economics

This article offers a feminist perspective on contract theories in law,economics and law-and-economics. It identifies masculine traits presentcontract theories in all three disciplines. It then describes andassesses some developments that appear to be feminising: Therecognition of the importance of social norms in contract theory andtheories of contract as relationship. The article's main claim is that amasculine model of decision-making persists even within the less overtlymasculine models of contract. The problem of sexually transmitted debtresulting from a surety contract is analysed in detail as a specificexample supporting the article's general argument. The article concludesthat the way forward is to be found in a recognition of other ways ofmaking decisions.     

群众路线是党的生命线

群众路线是我党的生命线 ,是马克思主义历史唯物主义世界观和科学方法论的体现 ,只有始终不渝地坚持群众路线 ,才能成为广大人民群众根本利益的忠实代表。     

The Personal Is Political Yet Again: Bringing Struggles between Gender Equality and Gendered Next of Kin onto the Feminist Agenda

In spite of feminist criticism of the welfare state, Norwegian society is frequently perceived as gender-equal. As a truism of public discourse, gender equality affirms a neoliberal understanding of individuals as able to act independently and to freely choose their course in life. This article disrupts that truism with an analysis of a transitional process that occurred to a seemingly free and gender-equal married woman whose everyday life took an unexpected turn at the age of 50 when her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Using an abductive method, we construct a narrative with this woman as the main character. We then use the narrative as an optical device for scrutinizing encounters between the notions “free and gender-equal woman” and “gendered next of kin”, analysing the situated becoming of gender and understanding the encounters’ potential for agency and resistance. The inquiry brings a pattern of gendered encounters into being, demonstrating how a seemingly free and gender-equal woman’s strength and independence become subordinating weaknesses in encounters with the welfare state. This paradox raises questions about the politics of everyday life in a presumably gender-equal society, brings new struggles onto the feminist agenda, and demands that the personal becomes political yet again.     

Black organs and optics: gazing at viscera in the work of Doreen Garner

Between Doreen Garner’s performance The Observatory and sculpture Black Ocean/Big Black, a significant divergence in gazes and spaces emerges. On the one hand, The Observatory arguably evokes a metaphorical nexus between body, flesh, organs, and land – a move that integrates archaeological and clinical gazes into a black female optic of pleasure wherein an oppositional gaze disidentifies the theatrical and scopophilic framing of black women’s bodies. The author argues that while Garner’s vitrine-enclosed performances, which elicit several gazes at once, signify a geological position and attempt to exhume the gory archives of black women’s bodies in art and science, her sculptural installation Black Ocean signals a queer liquidation and kinetics of black flesh.     

关于循环经济理论与实践的思考

随着经济快速增长和人口增加,资源不足的矛盾越来越突出。中央宏观调控的一个重要目标就是重塑一个资源消耗低、环境污染少、经济效益好的国民经济体系,为建设资源节约型社会奠定基础。因此,2004年的中央经济工作会议高举发展循环经济大旗,发展循环经济被提到一个前所未有的战略高度。     

Always More Than Two: Vibrations,the Foetus,and the Pregnant Person in Childbirth Singing Practices

The goal of this article is to expand the theoretical approaches in feminist research that have explored the relationship between the pregnant person and the foetus in terms of constitutive relationality. I examine new ways of understanding and conceptualizing such a relationship, which may be enabled by the concept of vibration, by focusing on a childbirth-singing method developed and taught by Finnish music educator Hilkka-Liisa Vuori. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork; I participated in a course on childbirth singing taught by Vuori and interviewed women who had used singing and vocalizing during pregnancy and labour. With the help of new feminist materialisms and feminisms inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s thinking, I suggest that sound and music as vibrations are agential matter that allow us to rethink the dyad between the pregnant person and the foetus. I argue that when the foetus–pregnant person dyad is approached as a constitutive relationality, more than two bodies are always involved.     

Turned on,Turned off: On Timely and Untimely Feminist Knowledge Production

Through cacophonic story-telling, emerging from ethnographic observations from academic scenes in Australia and elsewhere, the article seeks to explore the timeliness and untimeliness of feminist knowledge production. Rather than arguing a particular point or making a claim for a particular position, it attempts to sense into the lived experience of being subject to, and of, turns in social theory. As a whole the paper seeks to work with and allow for multiplicity in tone, focus, researcher positioning, reader positioning, and more, to see what knowledge that does not seek confident closure can be.     

工作时间质量对员工的影响 ：理论路径与实证检验

工作时间质量对于个人、企业和社会都具有重要意义。在明确了工作时间质量的3个评价维度(工作时长、工作时点和工作时间自主性)的基础上,本研究提出了"工作时间质量对员工影响的基础路径模型",揭示了工作时长、工作时点和工作时间自主性对员工产生影响时,三者的基础路径关系。该模型指出,工作时长、工作时点和工作时间自主性均能对员工个体层面的结果变量产生直接影响,同时,工作时间自主性能够显著调节工作时长、工作时点的影响程度。研究还利用"2018年中国工作环境研究"的数据,以"工作时间满意度"作为结果变量对理论模型进行实证检验,检验结果支持了理论模型的假设:(1)员工超时工作程度和工作时点非标准化程度越高,对工作时间感到满意的可能性越低;(2)工作时间自主性和工作时间满意度具有显著的正相关关系;(3)工作时间自主性负向调节超时工作和非标准化工作时点对员工工作时间满意度的影响。     

Mainstreaming: A case for optimism and cynicism

This paper seeks to evaluate the concept of mainstreaming against a range of feminist critiques of laws and legal systems and to examine the case for the pursuit of feminist politics through mainstreaming strategies. It begins, in section two, by identifying theme sin existing mainstreaming literature, and then in section three considers the potential of mainstreaming to tackle the causes o fine quality. In particular it questions whether mainstreaming can address the patriarchal nature of laws and legal systems and the essentialising tendencies of law, and whether mainstreaming can effectively tackle market-driven inequality. A final section considers the conditions under which feminists might consider engagement with mainstreaming and the limits of such strategies. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

实施就业优先战略的时代审视

就业是民生之本、安国之策,促进就业是全面建设小康社会的重大战略任务,是经济社会发展和经济结构调整的重要目标。化解就业矛盾、保障和改善民生、拉动内需和转变经济发展方式、实现宏观调控和经济社会发展、促进社会和谐五个方面表明,实施就业优先战略具有客观必然性和现实紧迫性;从国家发展战略的路径选择、就业优先战略的内生动力、主要渠道、体制机制、目标导向五个方面来把握就业优先战略的内涵;选择以就业优先为导向的经济社会发展战略、形成就业优先的综合性政策体系、加强公共就业管理和服务、实行就业工作目标责任制、构建和谐劳动关系,是实施就业优先战略的主要措施。     

关于新形势下推进企业工会理论与实践创新的思考

理论创新是工作创新的前提和基础。以理论创新为先导,推进工会工作思想理念、工作思路、工作机制、工作方法等方面的不断创新,发挥企业工会在促进企业发展、维护职工合法权益中的积极作用,为全面建设小康社会、构建社会主义和谐社会和实现“十一五”规划作出新贡献。     

Over the centuries: a history of Wollstonecraft reception

ABSTRACT

Both Wollstonecraft’s fame and infamy are attributable to her lived experience as the woman author of the only radical republican feminist text published in the pamphlet war of the 1790s. Yet, her radical republican politics were divorced from her gender politics in the early reception. This paper argues that this separation was subsequently sustained in part by interpretive practices that rest on the suppression of the original split. It shows that over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both outside and within academia, the dominant interpretive tendency of neglecting Wollstonecraft’s radical republican politics has deradicalized both her historical political thought and her iconic image. This conventional reception has both enabled and limited the resources made available through Wollstonecraft to feminists throughout history.