Feminist Theory current issue

Intimate public practices: A methodological challenge

Cooper, D. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Researching the irrelevant and the invisible: Sexual diversity in the judiciary

Moran, L. J. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Early in the course of undertaking empirical research on the sexual diversity of the judiciary I had to address a particular challenge. Sexuality, I was repeatedly told, is not and ought not to be a difference that is taken into account. At best it ought to be disregarded or taken out of consideration. This generated a number of challenges for my research. How do you research and make sense of sexuality as a difference that key informants assert is absent or seek to make invisible and irrelevant? How do you research the operation and effects of that which is not to be spoken about? How do you research the sexual norm when its existence and operation is denied? This article explores one response. It is a project that may for some be surprising and unexpected. It is a study of judicial portraits. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and art historical scholarship on portraits I undertake a textual analysis of these images, focusing upon the aesthetic and artistic traditions used to make them. A small case study of portraits of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of New South Wales is used to explore how, if at all, sexuality figured in these portraits

Shifting horizons: Reflections on qualitative methods

Smart, C. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

This article addresses the challenges of developing methodologies which build on the insights of early feminist research and methods, but which also incorporate some of the new innovations in sociological, qualitative research. Feminist research has emphasized the need to capture the everyday lives of women (and others) but this is not so easy once it is realized how ‘messy’ everyday life may be and that we may also not have tools adequate to the art of listening and the task of ‘story telling’. In particular there is a need to incorporate a wide range of sensibilities into the creation of feminist/sociological accounts of everyday lives. These include accounting for emotions, memories, intersubjective meanings, and other intangibles. Finally, the article argues that debates over methodologies should not stop with questions of collecting and analysing data, but must also address the problems of how to write the lives of people differently.

Open secrets: The affective cultures of organizing on Mexico's northern border

Hennessy, R. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Taking sexuality and affect as its focus, this article leads us into the uncharted terrain of ‘outlawed affects’, those unspeakable sensations that do not fall easily into established categories and yet meddle with social relations. They are in this sense ‘open secrets’. The article explores some of the challenges for feminist methodology in representing the space where affective and other needs meet in the context of the cultures of labour organizing in the factory communities on Mexico’s northern border

Feminism after measure

Adkins, L. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

This article engages the crisis of measure currently being articulated within social and cultural theory and the associated claim that this crisis should compel an embrace of methods which seek to know the heterogeneous, the multiple, the complex and the vague. Taking the rise of immaterial forms of labour and value as paradigmatic of the crisis of measure, it questions the use of the figure of a domestically labouring woman who lacks ownership of her labour to illuminate this crisis, as well as the structural equivalence currently being forced between ‘women’s work’ (especially the work of social reproduction) and productive activities. It does so with reference to the changing relationship between women and social reproduction, a changing relationship which suggests that at the heart of the crisis of measure is a restructuring of time. This article therefore adds fuel to the view that the relations of temporality are now a key ground for feminist theory.

Melancholic politics and the politics of melancholia: The Indian women's movement

Roy, S. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism’s hard-won successes in achieving institutional power globally have brought exuberance over achievement, they have also come with an acute sense of despondency and loss; one that is not easily mourned or relinquished. The institutionalization of feminism in governmental, non-governmental and academic sites has precipitated this sense of loss in India, wherein the discussion of this article is located. In exploring the politics of loss in contemporary feminist discourse in India, feminist melancholia is seen to condition a fetishized attachment to the past, and to past modes of knowledge, action and consciousness in ways that demand the generational reproduction of feminism rather than its renewal in times of perceived crisis. Present-day anxieties over the ‘co-option’ and resultant depoliticization of the Indian women’s movement constitute a narrative of loss in which a politically more ‘authentic’ past functions as a normative standard for feminist politics in the present, and as a prescriptive model of feminism’s future. Advancements in Women’s Studies and activist (now ‘NGOized’) practice that are seen to be deviating from the redemption of such an idealized past are thus deemed apolitical. In interrogating contemporary anxieties about feminism’s present and impending future (that resonate beyond the bounds of India), the article demonstrates how melancholic loss can inform a potentially conservative politics that seeks to contain feminism in a once loved but now lost ‘home’.

Why do 'we' perform surgery on newborn intersexed children?: The phenomenology of the parental experience of having a child with intersex anatomies

Zeiler, K., Wickstrom, A. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Few parents-to-be consider that their child may be born with ambiguous sex. Still, parents of a newborn child with ambiguous sex are expected to make a far-reaching decision for the child: should the child be operated upon so that it has either female or male genitals? The aim of this article is to examine, phenomenologically, why parents decide to have their children undergo genital surgery when it is not necessary for the child’s physiological functions. Drawing on phenomenological work by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir and Sara Ahmed, we examine parents’ frustration when their child’s sex is ambiguous and their experiences of the practice of medical sex assignment. We also examine parental identity work when the child has been assigned a sex and the interaction between parents and medical professionals when parents make decisions regarding surgery on their child. Furthermore, we provide a critical perspective on the surgical practice.

Book review: Katerina Kolozova, The Real and 'I': On the Limit and the Self. Skopje: Euro-Balkan Press, 2006. 114 pp. ISBN 9989--136--48--3, 10

Cooper, J. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Book review: Margret Grebowicz, ed., Gender after Lyotard. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 238 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--0--7914--6956--9, US$24.95 (pbk)

Soriel, S. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Book review: Katie Gentile, Creating Bodies: Eating Disorders as Self-Destructive Survival. Hove: The Analytic Press/Routledge, 2007. 210 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0--88163--438--7, {pound}26.50 (pbk)

O'Brien, R. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Forthcoming special issue of Feminist Theory 'Nonhuman Feminisms'

Hird, M. J., Roberts, C. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST