Kay Daniels as feminist historian

Abstract

While spending the better part of two academic years out of her home country, the USA, the author became increasingly perplexed by the current emphasis on poststructural theory in the writing of women's history. She says this because such theory may not only isolate this highly successful new subfield from the ongoing Second Women's Movement in the United States and from history teachers trying to integrate material on women into their classes, but most sadly, isolate American historians of women from their counterparts in Eastern European and Third World countries who are only beginning to write about their past.     

Rethinking the political: Ottoman women as feminist subjects

This article examines late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Muslim Ottoman women’s journals. Drawing attention to the historical and social phenomenon of Ottoman Muslim women’s print culture, the author argues that women’s writings and activism around these journals functioned as a significant feminist public sphere that built a community of women’s discourse. Women’s journals established a real community of intellectual women writers and readers who overtly promoted a feminist agenda in the public sphere. Thus, they envisioned and created alternative roles for upper middle class and middle class Ottoman women. Contrary to the conventional narrative of Turkish feminism that identifies its origin with the Republican period, it was Ottoman women’s periodicals and associations that laid the groundwork for future feminists in the Republican period. In providing an analysis of these magazines, the author explores a class of now nearly forgotten publications that, she argues, created a feminist discourse in their time.     

resistance at the limits: feminist activism and conscientious objection in Israel

This article investigates the relationship between feminism and conscientious objection in Israel, evaluating the efficacy of feminist resistance in the organised refusal movement. While recent feminist scholarship on peace, anti-occupation and anti-militarism activism in Israel largely highlights women's collective action, it does so at the risk of eliding the relations of power within these groups. Expanding the scope of consideration, I look to the experiences of individual feminist conscientious objectors who make visible significant tensions through their accounts of military refusal and participation in the organised conscientious objection movement. Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article problematises feminist activism in the organised Israeli refusal movement through three primary issues: political voice; privilege; and the realisation of gender agendas. Using Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of power as it has been critiqued and qualified by feminist scholars, I consider the ways in which resistance may be both multiple and a diagnostic of power, allowing activists and academics not only to envision new avenues for social change, but also to recognise their constraints. Critically, feminist theories of intersectionality enrich and complicate this Foucauldian approach to power, providing further modes of critique and strategy in the context of feminist activism in Israel. Ultimately, I argue not only for engagement with the limits of power, but also attention to their function, as in theory and praxis these boundaries critically inform our theorising on gender and resistance.     

vulnerable writing as a feminist methodological practice

This article discusses the possibility for vulnerable writing within feminist methodological approaches to research. Drawing upon a project that involved difficulties and tensions in conducting transnational research, including the documenting and telling of a partial narrative of an individual who set herself on fire, the article discusses what it might mean to focus more explicitly on explicating and recognising vulnerability in writing. In providing examples from working with a situated, localised analysis that engages feminist, postcolonial and queer theoretical approaches to attend to the particular and everyday, I address some of the hesitations and uncertainties in undertaking research and producing knowledge, and concerns with forms of reflexive practice. At the heart of the discussion is the question of a vulnerable ethics, of how it is possible for feminist methods to represent the lives of others, especially when stories fail in the telling, both in providing adequate explanations and in the ways that trauma and suffering can remain incommunicable. Included in this are concerns as to how we as researchers are affected within the production of research. As a form of receptivity and wounding, the article argues for vulnerable writing that challenges feminist methods to remain open and receptive to what will always resist sense-making, while continuing to respond to the demand that we do justice to the lives of others.     

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.     

Listening to color: a set of propositions on pain as feminist aesthetic

This performative text asks whether it is possible to imagine an antisocial feminist aesthetic that does not invoke the wounded body. Its form – numbered propositions that engage with critical theory, literature, and memoir – riffs on that of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a key interlocutor for this question of aestheticizing embodied pain. How does Nelson’s genealogy of blue model a methodology for a “queer genealogy of femininity,” to borrow Jack Halberstam’s term? How does looking at color in this way offer an approach to narrating trauma, one that displaces the primacy of the visual? Turning to the work of Christina Crosby, Toni Morrison, Fred Moten, and José Esteban Muñoz, as well as drawing upon the author’s experience as a volunteer for a peer listening hotline, this essay considers the implications of “listening to color” for minoritarian knowledge formations and feminist praxis.     

Citizenship: Towards a feminist synthesis

A synthesis of rights and participatory approaches to citizenship, linked through the notion of human agency, is proposed as the basis for a feminist theory of citizenship. Such a theory has to address citizenship's exclusionary power in relation to both nation-state ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’. With regard to the former, the article argues that a feminist theory and politics of citizenship must embrace an internationalist agenda. With regard to the latter, it offers the concept of a ‘differentiated universalism’ as an attempt to reconcile the universalism which lies at the heart of citizenship with the demands of a politics of difference. Embracing also the reconstruction of the public-private dichotomy, citizenship, reconceptualized in this way, can, it is argued, provide us with an important theoretical and political tool.     

The Subversive Stitch: Female craft,culture, and ecriture

By making an embroiderer her central narrative voice and embroidery both the structural and the thematic focus of her most recent novel (Le Passé empiété [The Back Stitch]), Marie Cardinal complements Rozsika Parker's efforts (The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine) to trace the parallel histories of embroidery and femininity through the novel. For both Parker and Cardinal, embroidery figures the creative tension between conformity and subversion that Cardinal posits as common to all women and that results in Le Passe empiete in a complex reevaluation not only of the female artist herself but of both the traditional and the feminist critical context within which she currently creates. In particular, Cardinal explores the relationship between women's traditional domestic tasks and their artistic production, and she uses the specific qualities of embroidery to rethink common assumptions about literary influence and authority, the writing process, and the mythic tradition.