Pushing Dualisms and Differences: From ‘Equality versus Difference’ to ‘Nonmimetic Sharing’ and ‘Staying with the Trouble’

Abstract

Critically revisiting the ‘equality versus difference’ dualism that is inscribed in the feminist canon of the last decades is an important task for feminist ethico-political discussions today. The theoretico-political tension between claims of equality and difference still troubles feminist discussions and thus needs to be addressed by contemporary research. Yet, moving beyond the persisting antagonism cannot be done by either moving outside the problematic relation or by choosing one term over the other. It is, as Joan W. Scott noted, impossible to choose between equality and difference, so that other ways of tackling the problem are needed. This article suggests a new line of flight for feminist politics in respect to this founding paradox from a feminist new materialist/posthuman(ist) perspective. Via an affirmative reading of Irigaray's cosmopolitical concern of Sharing the World (2008) and a critical investigation into the structuring ‘anthropological limit’ (Derrida) of her sexual difference thinking, the author pushes the dualistic framework of equality versus difference towards a thought of ‘nonmimetic sharing’ and ‘staying with the trouble’. In her argument, she turns to the differential worldings of Grosz's ‘differing’, Barad's ‘quantum’ and Haraway's ‘terran’ in order to open up ethico-political alternatives to engage difference(s) differently. The article ultimately argues that by affirming all multifaceted (im)material worlding entanglements, significant new insights can be gained for both theorizing differentiality as ethico-onto-epistemological ‘becoming-with’ and for practising this world of/as difference(s) in a more ‘response-able’ manner.     

The women’s liberation movement,activism and therapy at the grassroots, 1968–1985

The women’s liberation movement was the impetus for the founding of new institutions of psychological and mental health care for women in the late 1970s and 1980s. This article draws upon the archive of one such site, based in Islington, North London, to explore the ways that members of the movement interacted with local politics and were attentive to racial and economic oppression. It demonstrates that consciousness-raising groups and feminist magazines made women’s distress visible and that this visibility led to the development of feminist critiques of mainstream psychiatric care. The critiques of mainstream provision laid the ground for grassroots interventions into women’s mental healthcare in the community.     

Preventing ‘robotised women workers’: women,sport and the workplace in Scotland 1919–1939

This article examines a new area of women's leisure; women's participation in work-related sport. The growth and development of industrial welfare in Scotland in the interwar period will be discussed. Within broader studies, Stephen Jones, Helen Jones and Melling have all indicated that there was a growth in industrial welfarism in Britain from the turn of the twentieth century. This development of welfarism, which included provision of educational classes, pensions and medical support, increasingly also encompassed a variety of sports and physical activities. By looking at case studies, developments in provision across a range of industries will be examined. This discussion will draw on a wide range of sources from a variety of women's employment, from factories to clerical positions and from the retail sector to the civil service. This article will examine the types of sporting opportunities open to women through their workplaces, including organised welfare schemes and independent employee-led activities. Moreover, it will explore working women's experiences of these activities and the ways in which they chose to participate in sport.     

The forgotten ‘mateys’: women workers in Portsmouth Dockyard,England, 1939-45

Abstract

This paper is based on nearly 30 interviews with women who worked in Portsmouth Dockyard before and during the Second World War. Their testimonies show that women experienced their wartime work in different ways, with attitudes that were to impinge on employment relations, on calls for equal pay and on the provision of facilities to relieve their domestic responsibilities. Government response to these problems reveal the duality of policy decisions and the difficulties of balancing the need for labour with dominant ideals about the cultural position of women. Shifts in employment practices in wartime conditions highlight the debates around the impact of wartime work on gender divisions in the workplace and perceptions of female paid employment by both men and women at that time.     

Labour relations in the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors: Report of a case study in South Gujarat,India—Part I

The fate of peasants, agricultural labourers and others who leave the agrarian sector, either temporarily or permanently, to seek employment in towns and cities, must be of great interest to anyone concerned with the peasantry. Yet it is an area about which we are remarkably ignorant. Jan Breman's study of the ‘labour relations’ (or, one might say, the ‘poverty') of those who are, to a significant extent, first‐generation town‐dwellers, or who, indeed, although they seek employment in towns, have not yet severed their connections with the countryside, is extremely enlightening in this respect. Although it is not directly about peasants we publish it as an important contribution to our knowledge of this hitherto ‘dark’ area, in which rural origins or connections are of manifest significance. The author employs the ‘informal'/'formal’ sector dichotomy, with suitable scepticism, to examine in great detail the labour system outside agriculture in the Valsad district of South Gujarat.?     

‘In the case of a woman’ or ‘the headache’: married women’s nationality and Canada’s Citizenship Act at home and Europe, 1946–50

In addition to making Canadian nationality independent of British subjecthood, the 1946 Canadian Citizenship Act made women’s nationality independent of marriage, but did not repatriate women who married aliens before 1 January 1947, when the act became law. This article examines the lobby to repatriate the women, most of them married to European allied soldiers and living in Canada or Europe, and wider contexts involved. Scrutinizing the citizenship claims made by and for ‘ordinary’ but racially privileged white women in a dominion that was both a receiving nation on the cusp of renewed immigration and a neo-colonial state vis-a-vis Indigenous peoples, it acknowledges the woman’s heartfelt sentiments and assesses the lobby against the continuing disabilities imposed on status-Indian women who ‘married out.’ The delayed reform of 1950, which fell short of automatic repatriation, and the absence of feminists from a lobby related to a long-identified feminist issue, are also addressed, as are topics in need of further research.     

‘inebriates’, ‘heathens’, templars and suffragists: Scotland and imperial feminism c. 1870-1914

This article examines the extent to which the British Empire was central to the women's suffrage debate within the Scottish Christian Union. This analysis follows two trends in the historiography of Britain and of women's suffrage: an integration of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘imperial’ in the historiography of Britain; and a recognition of internationalism within women's suffrage. This discussion points to regional diversity within Great Britain and to the influence of imperialism and evangelicalism on women's activism in the so-called Celtic fringe. In so doing, this article aims to contribute to a more complex representation of middle-class women's participation in Britain's temperance and women's suffrage movements.     

Labour relations in the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors: Report of a case study in south Gujarat,India. Part 2.

The fate of peasants, agricultural labourers and others who leave the agrarian sector, either temporarily or permanently, to seek employment in towns and cities, must be of great interest to anyone concerned with the peasantry. Yet it is an area about which we are remarkably ignorant. Jan Breman's study of the ‘labour relations’ (or, one might say, the ‘poverty') of those who are, to a significant extent, first‐generation town‐dwellers, or who, indeed, although they seek employment in towns, have not yet severed their connections with the countryside, is extremely enlightening in this respect. Although it is not directly about peasants we publish it as an important contribution to our knowledge of this hitherto ‘dark’ area, in which rural origins or connections are of manifest significance. The author employs the ‘informal'/'formal’ sector dichotomy, with suitable scepticism, to examine in great detail the labour system outside agriculture in the Valsad district of South Gujarat.??     

Feminism,imperialism and orientalism: the challenge of the ‘Indian woman’

Abstract

This article examines the content and process of imperialist discourse on the ‘Indian woman’ in the writings of two North American women, one writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, the other a key exponent of the ‘second wave’ of the movement. By analysing these writings, it demonstrates how the content of the discourse was reproduced over time ith different but parallel effects in the changed political circumstances, in the first case producing the Western imperial powers as superior on the scale of civilisation, and in the second case producing Western women as the leaders of global feminism. It also identifies how the process of creating written images occurred within the context of each author's social relations with the subject, the reader and the other authors, showing how an orientalist discourse can be produced through the author's representation of the human subjects of whom she writes; how this discourse can be reproduced through the author's uncritical use of earlier writers; and how the discourse can be activated in the audience through the author's failure to challenge established cognitive structures in the reader.     

Globalization,Labor and the ‘Polanyi Problem’

As a consequence of the global economic crises of the 1970s, in Australia, micro-economic reform of the economy, and in particular the labour market, was seen as a key catalyst in providing a more competitive industrial base for the country. Underpinning this was a fundamental change in the conflictual industrial relations structure that had framed work patterns and practices since Federation. The Williamstown Naval Dockyard in Melbourne was the Australian Federal Government's premier dockyard. It had a long-standing reputation for poor productivity, inefficient work practices and industrial unrest and had been described as Australia's worst worksite. After several failed attempts to reform the dockyard, the Federal Government privatised this utility as a catalyst to reform the work culture. On 1 January 1988, the dockyard was transferred to the highly competitive private shipbuilding sector. As the first public utility sold by an Australian Federal Government and the first workplace to adopt micro-economic labour reforms, including enterprise bargaining, the dockyard provides an opportunity to examine the nature of workplace restructuring in the most radical time of change for labour and trade unions in Australia's history. The dockyard was seen at the time as at the vanguard of this change. This paper explores the reforms undertaken in the dockyard.     

‘Bless the Gods for my pencils and paper’: Katie Gliddon's prison diary,Percy Bysshe Shelley and the suffragettes at Holloway

This article discusses the life and imprisonment of the largely unknown middle-class artist and British suffrage activist Katie Gliddon and analyzes her extensive prison diary, secretly written and drawn in her copy of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley at London's Holloway Prison in March and April 1912. By creating a platform for the voices of ‘ordinary’ prisoners and by opening up a space for a transgressive gaze between suffragettes, ‘ordinary’ prisoners and female officers, Gliddon's writings allow us to complicate our understanding of cross-class relations within the women's suffrage campaign and in women's prisons more generally speaking.     

‘That's not philosophy’: feminism,academia and the double bind

In this paper I explore the situation of feminist academics, positing a tension between the demands of feminist research and the norms of academia. Feminist research, I suggest, may be subject to de-legitimisation on the grounds of supposed lack of objectivity, to marginalisation from the main body of a discipline and to conceptual hostility when operating within the main body of a discipline. I then show that the situation of feminist academics can be conceptualised as a double bind: a set of circumstances in which an agent is given a set of competing demands, with no possibility of receiving clarification as to which demands to pursue. I argue that this interpretation of the situation of feminist academics is helpful because it prompts constructive ways of thinking. It encourages feminist academics to adopt a non-judgemental attitude towards ourselves and towards others, and it reminds us to fix our sights on long-term strategies. These suggestions in turn lead me to urge a renewed solidarity between feminists in academia. The form of solidarity I advocate is action based and inclusive, spanning disciplines, genders and research specialisms. Such solidarity can enable positive responses to the double bind facing feminist academics.     

Visualising the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’: emotion work and the representation of orgasm in pornography and everyday sexual interactions

Visual representations of orgasm – whether in the flesh or mediated through a screen – are produced in a context of intense uncertainty about whether what is being seen represents an authentically experienced bodily event. Despite detailed scientific scrutiny and close attention to bodily signs, the authenticity of women's orgasm remains a site of cultural anxiety and contested gender politics. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the construction of female orgasm as inherently invisible or un-see-able, and ‘faking’ orgasm as a prevalent social practice. Drawing on existing literature from psychology, sociology and porn studies, this theoretical paper explores the problem of visually representing orgasm in the context of these uncertainties, and examines how the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ is structured by discourses of authenticity. Pornography and everyday sexual interactions provide ideal contexts for exploring the practices of producing and consuming visual representations of embodied experience because both necessitate a see-able orgasm which consumers/lovers can read as ‘real’. This paper demonstrates that considerable interpretative work is necessary to read the female body as authentically orgasmic in the context of cultural uncertainty, and that distinctions between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ are continually reworked. Drawing on the contrast between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ acting (Hochschild, 1983), I argue that the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ cannot be established by recourse to unmediated bodily experience, and instead, researchers should consider how and when this distinction has traction in the world and the implications of this for gendered power relations, subjectivities and practices.     

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.     

Gender,Culture and ‘the Spiritual Empire’: the Irish Protestant female missionary experience

This article offers an exploration of the intellectual woman worker in the inter-war years through reference to Rosamond Lehmann's novel, Dusty Answer, and Virginia Woolf's essays, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. These texts are read in relation to a number of theorists of the intellectual – Joan Riviere, Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said. The article recognises the validity of Sonya Andermahr, Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz's claim that ‘a systematic working through of theories of intellectuals in relation to gender has yet to be written’. As an initial response to that neglect, it investigates the multiple difficulties for the woman in constructing herself as ‘an intellectual’ and relates these problems to issues of class, gender and the cultural history of the intellectual. The article is framed by reference to two of David Lodge's novels of intellectual life, Nice Work and Thinks, in which the story of feminist literary critic, Robyn Penrose, indicates how problematic the position of the woman intellectual continues to be.     

The Women's Movement and ‘Class Struggle’: gender,class formation and political identity in women's strikes, 1968–78.

ABSTRACT

Women workers’ industrial disputes were of fundamental importance to the WLM, reflected in the deeds of activists and early participant-histories. These disputes were sites of worker-employer conflict and conflict between feminists and the wider Labour Movement. This article considers how these differing interpretations related to the striking women themselves. It focuses on four key disputes and analyses contemporary reports and the accounts of those involved. It argues women strikers' particular experiences of trade unionism, class politics and feminism resulted in gendered, but still fundamentally class-based, identities, and concludes by considering the position of women workers' industrial actions in feminist histories.