Speaking ‘unspeakable things’: documenting digital feminist responses to rape culture

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which girls and women are using digital media platforms to challenge the rape culture they experience in their everyday lives; including street harassment, sexual assault, and the policing of the body and clothing in school settings. Focusing on three international cases, including the anti-street harassment site Hollaback!, the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported, and interviews with teenage Twitter activists, the paper asks: What experiences of harassment, misogyny and rape culture are girls and women responding to? How are girls and women using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? And, why are girls and women choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in such a way? Employing an approach that includes ethnographic methods such as semi-structured interviews, content analysis, discursive textual analysis, and affect theories, we detail a range of ways that women and girls are using social media platforms to speak about, and thus make visible, experiences of rape culture. We argue that this digital mediation enables new connections previously unavailable to girls and women, allowing them to redraw the boundaries between themselves and others.     

Feminism as Critique in a Neoliberal Age: Debating Nancy Fraser

Neoliberalism, we are told, has “seduced” feminism. What is meant is that the libertarian and democratic hopes that have scoped this radical social movement have been reconfigured and re-energised by neoliberal project that models all our freedoms upon the market. Misgivings about “seductions” and “betrayals” require that feminist theory adopts the role of the arbiter on goals and meanings and this puts strains upon its deep commitment to democratic epistemologies. The following paper finds that the leading theorist of feminism as critique in a neoliberal age has failed to fully grasp the normative tension that is involved. Nancy Fraser fails to rethink the tasks of critique in terms that is sufficient to its role as arbiter on meanings. I suggest that this rethinking might be done without betraying the demands of a democratic epistemology if we reconstruct the emancipatory idealisations that underpin Fraser’s account of a democratic epistemology. While this rendering of feminism as critique retrieves a representation of feminist ideals that might unmask neoliberal distortions, it does so without betraying the responsiveness to self-interpreted needs that is also claimed by a critical and democratic feminist theory.     

试论西方女权主义理论走向

西方女权主义运动经历了三次高潮 :第一次以争取妇女参政权、受教育权和就业权等基本人权为重心 ;第二次在有关性别歧视的起源、性质及解决方式等问题上 ,出现了以自由女权主义、社会主义女权主义和激进女权主义为代表的三家之说 ;第三次高潮中 ,由于后现代主义话语理论影响 ,女权主义理论更强调女性经验的复杂性及建立女性话语的必要性。本文在此基础上预测了新世纪女权主义的基本走向     

希望与迷惘--女权主义与当代中国大陆女性写作

参照西方女权主义的接纳理论和发展情况,可以比较、概括、分析当代中国大陆女性作家不同阶段的写作实践.在中国当代社会文化发展进程中,虽然不具备像西方社会那样的女权主义产生与发展的社会、哲学和文化基础,也没有形成女权主义的运动和明确的理论,但是在女性作家们的写作中却包含有浓厚的女权主义的话语意识.20世纪80年代以后,在不同阶段的写作中还形成了鲜明的女权主义的文化话语.     

"文革"叙事的女性主义书写——论徐坤的《招安,招安,招甚鸟安》

在《招安,招安,招甚鸟安》中,徐坤以超越父权制中心化价值体系压抑的书写策略,来实现作为主人公的徐小红艰难的自我指认和建构作为叙述者的徐小红"本真"的女性声音.小说中恣情凸显的女性主义姿态不仅仅具有女性独有的性别意识、生命体验和叙事欲望,更富有一种"性政治"的理论自觉与女性自审意识、自省意识所带来的反思的力量,这就使得徐坤在对"文革"进行书写时独具特色.     

后女权主义哥特式之辨

后女权主义和哥特式原本是两个颇具争议的概念,但随着当代后女权主义的出现和哥特式的复兴,这两个概念结合成一个新的概念“后女权主义哥特式”.本文追溯了“后女权主义哥特式”的根源,考察和辨析了前缀（后-）与女权主义一词、女权主义与后女权主义、后女权主义与哥特式之间的关系和含义,进而指出,正是由于回避二元性逻辑和渴求“释意”,后女权主义和哥特式两者被结合在一起.“后女权主义哥特式”超越了女性哥特式,同过去第二波女权主义和女性遭受压制有着内在联系.它为批评划定了一个新的空间,重新探讨了性别、代理和压抑等概念.通过对“后女权主义哥特式”的辨析,实际上追溯和梳理了从哥特式、女权主义、女性哥特式、后女权主义到后女权主义哥特式的发展轨迹.     

'Deeds and Words': The Woman's Press and the Politics of Print

The political and constitutional impact of the early twentieth-century British women's suffrage movement has been the subject of extensive research since the advent of second-wave feminism, yet the broader cultural impact of the movement remains a developing scholarly area. Murray examines the role of the Woman's Press, the publishing house established in 1907 as a strategic component of the Pankhursts' influential Women's Social and Political Union. The press is located within multiple and interpenetrative analytical contexts: examined in turn are its role in the various power struggles of the WSPU and the broader British suffrage movement; its significance as an independent means of cultural production around the contested site of the suffragette; and its ambiguity as a feminist publishing house run by male pro-suffragist and lobbyist, Frederick Pethick Lawrence. The Woman's Press and its central London retail outlet figured prominently in WSPU administration as a material concern-as literature packing department, revenue raiser and recruiting centre. Yet, symbolically, the Woman's Press was also integral to the campaigning of the WSPU to an extent that has generally remained under-examined. As an independent publishing house the press constituted a vital conduit guaranteeing the entry of suffrage arguments into public discourse, and a crucial tool for appropriating and refashioning the contested image of the suffragette in the wider politico-cultural landscape of the day. Acknowledging the significance of the Woman's Press provides both a necessary historical context for the post-1970 feminist press boom, as well as a counterpoint to the ongoing political-financial conundrums that beset its modern descendents.     

Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium

The role of the intellectual is traditionally gendered masculine, and women are excluded from consideration. Contemporary discussions of the 'death of the intellectual' noticeably make no reference to feminist intellectuals. On the other hand, women in academia have been reluctant to adopt the role of public intellectual as conventionally defined. There is an anxiety about the contemporary place of the intellectual, and about the necessity for the distinction made by some feminists between theory and practice, the intellectual and the activist, and where this might lead. In exploring the role of feminist intellectuals over the last two centuries, three paradigms of the feminist intellectual are proposed for consideration: Cassandra (the prophetess cursed with disbelief), for example Florence Nightingale; the feminist Messiah (the exceptional female saviour who would sacrifice herself to change women's lives), for whom the exemplar is Margaret Fuller; and the Dark Lady (the token woman in a community of men), such as de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag. Indeed, Camille Paglia's rivalry with Sontag lends itself to being interpreted as evidence of her current desire to occupy this 'dark lady' role. In conclusion, after discussing contemporary, late twentieth-century feminism (Natasha Walter, Elizabeth Wurtzel, gurrl power, 'women behaving badly'), the role of Margaret Thatcher in changing perceptions of women's capacity for political power is proposed for celebration. Finally, there is Cixous's image of the feminist intellectual as the laughing Medusa, who turns men to stone, but turns laughter on herself.