Mary Wollstonecraft’s divergent attitudes towards trust

ABSTRACT

Mary Wollstonecraft is increasingly being recognized as a philosopher who made a noteworthy contribution to moral and political philosophy. Her work not only encompassed political treatises, such as the now well-known A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but also fiction. This article demonstrates how Wollstonecraft’s work comprised three main ways of engaging with trust, namely distrust, virtuous trust, and open trust. It puts these three forms of trust into context with Wollstonecraft’s ambivalent relation to the 18^th-century culture of sensibility. Moreover, Wollstonecraft’s open form of trust is compared with the 20^th-century Danish theologian and philosopher K. E. Løgstrup’s conception of trust. Løgstrup regarded genuine trust as a spontaneous, basic phenomenon that was not rooted in moral reasoning. While there are some similarities between Wollstonecraft’s open trust and Løgstrup’s understanding of trust, Wollstonecraft ultimately reinforced the value of ‘an educated heart’, namely the idea that the feelings of the heart should be cultivated by reason. Accordingly, this article offers some insight into how we may perceive Wollstonecraft’s strong rejection of Edmund Burke’s ‘inbred sentiments’, that is, Burke’s belief in innate, benign moral instincts.     

An Aristotelian paradox: Wollstonecraft and the implications of marriage as friendship

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that Mary Wollstonecraft interprets marriage in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a relationship reminiscent of Aristotelian higher friendship. This position presents an Aristotelian paradox: Wollstonecraft shows how marriage – an institution Aristotle explicitly viewed as a husband ruling a wife – can be the basis of the Aristotelian fulfilment political society structurally provides to the best men. Overall, Wollstonecraft suggests that marriage should be recognized as a concrete contract of friendship between two individuals as opposed to a male-female complementarity that ends in the propagation of the species through childbirth. Her work enables us to challenge ideas of marriage – from Aristotle to Rousseau to the new natural law tradition – that overlook how the structure of marriage dominates possibilities for partnerships. By thus dignifying marriage, Wollstonecraft both critiques eighteenth century marriage practices and broadens the scope of gender expression today.

Abbreviation: VRW - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman     

urban spaces: gender,genre, mediation

After an initial period of feminist theorizing concerned with understanding patriarchy as a structure of male domination, many thinkers turned away from theorizing domination as such and focused instead on women's (constructed) subjectivity, identity, and agency. While this has fostered important insights into the formation of women's preferences, desires, and choices, this focus on subjectivity and subject formation has largely overshadowed deeper understandings of patriarchy as a structure of male domination while producing elisions between agency and freedom. In this article, I move to show how domination as a structural concept can help us to reclaim the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a source of women's systematic oppression while freedom as non-domination, derived from early republican conceptualizations of freedom, can help us to disambiguate freedom from agency by taking as central the relative positions of actors within social and political structures. Structural freedom as non-domination is thus useful for feminist thinkers in that it gives us critical purchase on the dynamics inherent in unequal social and political relationships and can be linked clearly to the institutions and ideologies that shape and justify interactions between more powerful and less powerful groups. Further, from this point of view intersecting structures of domination can be analysed rather than intersecting identity categories, allowing us to take intersectionality into account and avoiding the need to ground feminist action on a unitary ‘category woman’. Finally, this analysis points toward the radical democratic connexion between freedom and participation in the creation of the material and symbolic structures that frame our collective lives.     

Effeminate Edmund Burke and the masculine voice of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the gendered and nationalist rhetorical strategies Mary Wollstonecraft used in her work The Vindication of the Rights of Man which was written as an open letter of response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France . While a number of scholars note Wollstonecraft’s adoption of a masculine voice in her systematic feminizing of Burke, this article also pays attention to the ways in which Wollstonecraft impugns Burke with the taints of being crypto-Catholic, Irish, and quasi-French. We notice how Wollstonecraft’s masculine voice is rational, combative, righteously passionate, middle-class, patriotically English and critically Protestant. We compare the fashioning of Wollstonecraft’s voice with contemporary political caricatures of John Bull and the cartoon depictions of Edmund Burke that appeared as Wollstonecraft was composing her VRM. Wollstonecraft’s VRM gained her considered attention and her critique of Burke’s character, (and what this article claims is her misreading of his aesthetic treatise), have been remarkably influential even to the present day. The characteristics of the distinct voice created in Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication are also evident in her second and more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, the rhetorical commitments entailed in Wollstonecraft’s public voice created challenges for her arguments in the second Vindication that demand careful attention.     

Foreclosed Matter – On the Material Melancholy of Feminist New Materialism

In this article I investigate the need to provide feminism with a theory of matter. I argue that the attention to matter given by New Materialist Karen Barad is symptomatic of a refusal to accept the limits of matter and its constituting effects. I suggest that a critical definition of matter can be found in the works of Judith Butler and especially in her definition of melancholy in relation to performativity. I argue that melancholy is central for the understanding of not only gendered desire, but also matter. Matter is an intrinsic part of Butler’s theory on gender and desire which she presents in opposition to both social constructivism and biologism. I also read performativity as a concept introduced by Butler to point towards the foreclosure of matter as necessary for comprehensible bodies. I relate my reading of matter in Butler’s texts to Barad’s ‘matter as performative’. This ‘misconstruction’ I see as symptomatic of a ‘material melancholy’ in the works of Barad. My main intention is to show how we as feminist researchers need to see that matter can be defined and analysed in many different manners and that there is not one (old nor new) way to do this.     

Deconstructing the Boundaries: Gender and Genre in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden,Norway and Denmark

ABSTRACT

In her 1796 travelogue, Wollstonecraft combines the main elements of many different genres, blending together the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements. The journey through the Scandinavian countries turns out to be more than a business travel. It takes the shape of an inner route, a rediscovery of herself and of her experiences, including motherhood. The ability to dismantle the boundaries of the travel writing genre in such an innovative way is the same ability she shows when subverting the literary gender stereotypes that saw women marginalized inside the domestic sphere. What emerges from this extraordinary epistolary collection is a woman capable of the greatest sentimentality and, at the same time, of the smartest rationality, an active woman who does not deny her femininity but who strongly refuses the passivity society has always attributed to the female.     

Stevie Smith's Myth-Kitty

Abstract

Although Stevie Smith's poetry is in many ways very close to the laconic and less-deceived tone characteristic of Philip Larkin, there is one aspect of her work in which she differs strikingly from him and from the general features of Movement poetry: that is, in her use of what Larkin, in his 1956 ‘statement on poetry’, contemptuously called a ‘common myth-kitty’. In this chapter, I attempt to examine the treasures of Stevie's myth-kitty, not merely with the aim of distancing Smith from the Movement, but of reassessing her relationship with modernism and other poets of the generation which came to prominence in the 1930s, in particular, W. H. Auden. Smith's closest connection with modernism has often been seen to be her use of a stream-of-consciousness technique, as deployed in Novel on Yellow Paper—a technique which is inevitably compared to and dismissed as inferior to that of Virginia Woolf. Instead, I will put forward the claim that Smith's relationship to modernism should also be seen in her use of intertextuality, in the classical and other mythic fragments which, despite considerable differences of tone, place her work in the same tradition as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot. I attempt to demonstrate how she draws on this ‘myth-kitty’, especially ?n her poetry, focusing on her treatment of female mythical figures, and argue that the key figure in Smith's oeuvre—the counterpart and equivalent of Eliot's Tiresias—is the figure of Persephone on her journey to the underworld.     

Give Me One Good Reason to Marry a Japanese Man: Japanese Women Debating Ideal Lifestyles

This article explores how contemporary Japanese women, as they confront issues of marriage and employment, play with images of the liberated West, traditional Japan, and spoiled Japanese men. For this purpose, I investigate the works of popular non-fiction writer Matsubara Junko and recent online debates. I argue that Matsubara's writing is supported by women not because of her sometimes blatant idolization of the West, but because she exposes her own vulnerability. Like the online respondents, Matsubara struggles to come to terms with the realization that when a Japanese woman seeks a lifestyle beyond the role of homebound wife/mother, she inevitably enmeshes herself within the larger identity politics of modernity.     

Surveying the Survey Texts: Recent Works in American Labor History

In this paper I first detail some of the geographical concepts that help us make sense of capitalism's spatiality. I then provide several brief vignettes which illustrate how conflicts over how capitalism's geography is made can be central to disputes both between and within groups of workers and capitalists. The paper's purpose is to argue that understanding how social life is geographically structured can add important insights to explaining economic and political praxis.     

Does Feminist History have a future?

Abstract

Contemporary shifts in scholarship and institutional agendas, I argue, have created new sets of challenges for feminist history. While these do not undermine the paradigms of this scholarly endeavour, there has been an inevitable shift in how feminist history is now written, conceptualised and undertaken. A hallmark of dynamic and innovative scholarship is a capacity to evolve and respond to intellectual challenges and developments. There is much to be positive about in the future, as I believe feminist history at its best has not remained a passive or static body of knowledge, but continues to be reformulated and reconceptualised, but with this dynamism comes uncertainties which institutional change can bring. While I do not believe these are systemic enough to pose a challenge to the enterprise, I suggest they do create cause for wider discussion, especially about the place of the humanities more generally in the corporate university of the twenty-first century.     

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.     

Re-reading ELIZA: Human–machine Interaction as Cognitive Sense-ability

ABSTRACT

This article re-reads ELIZA, the famous computer program of early artificial intelligence created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 to test the possibility of intelligent interaction between humans and machines through language. Given newly emerging intelligent gadgets such as smart-home assistants that operate through natural language, I argue firstly for the timeliness of this program and explore the ways in which ELIZA stimulated debates concerning whether it could be considered an interlocutor for humans or a failure in exactly this regard. Secondly, I develop a feminist technoecological account of interaction at the ELIZA/user interface. In so doing, I seek to challenge the dualisms between body/mind, rationality/affectivity, and subject/object, thereby avoiding a reductionist perspective that calls into question the human subject as an autonomous agent.     

Vulnerability and Ontology

The question of the possibility of an anti-foundationalist approach to ethics has come to the forefront in recent discussions in the humanities. Two questions dominate these discussions. The first is how we can define agency, the necessary ground of ethical action apart from a transcendental subject. The second is how we can define a secure foundation for ethical judgements without universals. A relativistic ethics seems, by definition, futile. I take up both of these questions here with reference to the work of Judith Butler. I argue that in her post-Gender Trouble work Butler has defined an agent, an ‘I’, that is neither a social dupe nor a transcendental subject but, rather, both discursive and material. This ‘I’ provides the basis for Butler's turn to ontology as well as her analyses of vulnerability, precarity and cohabitation. These conceptions form the basis of her ethical position. I examine Butler's central argument that the material/ontological facts of human life necessitate the equal treatment of all human beings. In conclusion, I question whether Butler's position provides a sufficient basis for an antifoundational ethics. I argue that Butler is headed in the right direction but has not yet achieved her goal.     

A vindication of the rights of girls: surviving girlhood in the 21st century

ABSTRACT

Between 2014 to 2016 we conducted mixed-methods research exploring girls’ experiences of growing up in the UK in the 21st century. We spoke to girls and young women between the ages of 10 and 24 in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to gain a qualitative snapshot of what matters to girls. We also conducted the first quantitative study of a range of quality of life indicators disaggregated by age and gender in the UK to garner a statistical view of geographically-based experiences of growing up girl. The study was commissioned by Plan International UK and The State of Girls’ Rights report was launched in September 2016. What struck us at the time of writing the report was the resonance between challenges girls raised in 2016 and those proclaimed by Wollstonecraft in her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published over 200 years earlier. Here we bring together these voices from the 18th and 21st centuries to consider the continuing legacy and resonance of Wollstonecraft’s ideas in thinking about growing up girl in Britain.     

The chain of exploitation: intersectional inequalities,capital accumulation,and resistance in Burkina Faso's cotton sector

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how intersectional inequalities can facilitate the extraction of surplus value from agriculture. Through an ethnographic case study of the Burkina Faso cotton sector, I describe a ‘chain of exploitation’ wherein actors pass economic pressures on to less-powerful actors. People resist their own exploitation, yet justify exploiting others through discourses about intersectional inequalities – overlapping axes of social difference including class, gender, rural/urban status, and education level. I thus argue that intersectional social inequalities – exacerbated by economic pressures – can: (1) justify and thus facilitate the transfer of exploitation, and (2) fragment resistance efforts.     

The forgetting of Mary Wollstonecraft’s religiosity: teleological secularism within feminist historiography

ABSTRACT

Religious concepts and themes are central to many of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings, yet rarely feature within popular representations of her life, work and legacy today. This paper examines the forgetting of Wollstonecraft’s religiosity in light of the broader narratives that western feminism circulates about its past and present, focusing particularly on the historiographical practices and temporal tropes that construct feminism as a quintessentially secular project. It also considers the potentially transformative impact that unforgetting Wollstonecraft’s religiosity could have within feminist historiography and politics in the present, in terms of parochializing the political certitude of secular feminism and the politics of division conducted in its name.     

Slide-writing as Site-writing: A Performative Reading of the Women’s Art Library Slides

Abstract

The artist’s 35?mm slide consists of a photographic image framed by a slide mount she inscribes with writing and symbols that direct the slide’s future use. In this article, I consider how these artists’ writings that are held, suspended, in the WAL slide collection are a vibrant reading material that performs the slides as a feminist text. In my joint role as curator and researcher, I explore how I used photography to initiate a performative reading of the slide collection that politicizes the work of image reproductions.     

Ma Rainey’s phonograph

This essay engages a series of performance routines by the blues artist Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, as a way of critiquing the epistemological tenets of sound reproduction technology. Between 1923 and 1925 Gertrude “Ma” Rainey carried out an elaborate quasi-burlesque performance routine in which she sang while hidden inside a giant phonograph; this routine precisely references and troubles the legacy of black sounds and bodies and their conflicted forms of capture andembodiment through sonic technologies. I think about how black sounds and bodies have been rendered as documentary objects within sonic and visual performance contexts and how this history is both referenced and complicated in Ma Rainey’s performances. I argue further that Rainey’s performance illustrates how sonic technologies always require, what I term black documentary embodiment, through the sonic and the visual. To this end I illustrate how reducing black art to an evidentiary object was central to the phonograph’s material and epistemological construction. In addition to analyzing Rainey’s performance I briefly engage the contemporaneous visual culture of the blues as a means to trace the legacy of black documentary embodiment within a longer visual-sonic tradition.     

DAMNED IF YOU DO AND DAMNED IF YOU DON'T

In contemporary Western societies women are often thought to have overcome inequality, become autonomous and resistant to social pressures, and in so doing gained the freedoms to make their own choices. However, this ‘post-feminist sensibility’ can arguably be seen as a double-bind as some types of ‘choices’ cannot always be recognised as freely chosen if they are taken as an indication of failing to resist social (appearance) pressures. We argue that one such example is the ‘choice’ to have cosmetic breast surgery, a practice that has received both criticism and celebration from different feminist angles. In this paper we analyse how women who have had breast augmentation are constructed by readers of an internet blog in which they are largely vilified and pathologised for not valuing their ‘natural’ (yet ‘deficient’) breasts. We demonstrate how the same discursive constructions that appear to value women's ‘natural’ bodies simultaneously (re)produce the conditions in which women may feel the need to have breast augmentation.