Results by title
527 books match the query 'Feminism & Feminist Theory' and 15 start with h
Habeas Viscus
Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the HumanAlexander G. Weheliye
Duke University Press, 2014
Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.
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Heartbreak and Other Geographies
Collected Writings of Katherine McKittrickKatherine McKittrick
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
A uniquely structured collection of essays from one of today’s most esteemed scholars of black studies
A thoughtfully curated selection of texts by preeminent black feminist scholar Katherine McKittrick, Heartbreak and Other Geographies showcases the remarkable depth of inquiry she has generated over twenty years. Edited by Brittany Meché and Camilla Hawthorne, this collection highlights McKittrick’s enduring commitment to ideas around radical placemaking and the creative articulations of and within the black diaspora.
McKittrick’s work is marked by a recurring engagement with anticolonialism, practices of liberation, and radical methodologies of black cultural production. Through discussions of figures such as Toni Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Édouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, Nina Simone, and Sylvia Wynter, the writing in Heartbreak and Other Geographies spans the author’s investigations into scientific method, liberal modernity, the cycles that perpetuate racial violence, and the poetics and sonics of black livingness.
Bringing together recent texts, influential pieces, and lesser-known essays, the unconventional format of Heartbreak and Other Geographies includes an introductory conversation with McKittrick as well as a series of creative interludes from the editors throughout the book. Innovative in both form and content, this wide-ranging volume invites us to rethink the boundaries between disciplines and the ways that scholarship can embody a more collaborative form of worldmaking.
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Hersilia's Sisters
Jacques-Louis David, Women, and the Emergence of Civil Society in Post-Revolution FranceNorman Bryson
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0
Political and cultural history and the arts combine in this engaging account of 1790s France.
In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power.
Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art. With more than 150 illustrations, this book provides new and brilliant insight into this period that will captivate readers.
In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power.
Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art. With more than 150 illustrations, this book provides new and brilliant insight into this period that will captivate readers.
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Higher Ground
From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and TheorySally L. Kitch
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Many feminists love a utopia—the idea of restarting humanity from scratch or transforming human nature in order to achieve a prescribed future based on feminist visions. Some scholars argue that feminist utopian fiction can be used as a template for creating such a future. However, Sally L. Kitch argues that associating feminist thought with utopianism is a mistake.
Drawing on the history of utopian thought, as well as on her own research on utopian communities, Kitch defines utopian thinking, explores the pitfalls of pursuing social change based on utopian ideas, and argues for a "higher ground" —a contrasting approach she calls realism. Replacing utopianism with realism helps to eliminate self-defeating notions in feminist theory, such as false generalization, idealization, and unnecessary dichotomies. Realistic thought, however, allows feminist theory to respond to changing circumstances, acknowledge sameness as well as difference, value the past and the present, and respect ideological give-and-take.
An important critique of feminist thought, Kitch concludes with a clear, exciting vision for a feminist future without utopia.
Drawing on the history of utopian thought, as well as on her own research on utopian communities, Kitch defines utopian thinking, explores the pitfalls of pursuing social change based on utopian ideas, and argues for a "higher ground" —a contrasting approach she calls realism. Replacing utopianism with realism helps to eliminate self-defeating notions in feminist theory, such as false generalization, idealization, and unnecessary dichotomies. Realistic thought, however, allows feminist theory to respond to changing circumstances, acknowledge sameness as well as difference, value the past and the present, and respect ideological give-and-take.
An important critique of feminist thought, Kitch concludes with a clear, exciting vision for a feminist future without utopia.
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History and Theory
Feminist Research, Debates, ContestationsEdited by Barbara Laslett, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, Mary Jo Maynes, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
University of Chicago Press, 1997
This volume of recent Signs articles offers a number of significant contributions to feminist debates on history and theory. It illustrates the uses of theories in recent feminist historical research and the often contentious arguments that surround them. The readings are organized into three sections. The first draws on the tradition of political economy, and discusses the importance of class relations for understanding historical events and social relationships and the expansion of concepts of political economy to include race. The second section, on "The Body," demonstrates how feminist scholars have increasingly worked to re-place the body, to move it from its traditionally less valued position in the hierarchal Enlightenment mind/body split to an approach that emphasizes the body as both material and discursive, both "real" and "representational." The final section, "Discourse," focuses on an examination of the productive power of language in both reflecting and shaping experience and in the contestation of social relations of power.
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Holy Rebellion
Religious Feminism and the Transformation of Judaism and Women's Rights in IsraelRonit Irshai and Tanya Zion-Waldoks
Brandeis University Press, 2024
An in-depth study of Jewish religion and law in Israel from a gendered perspective.
In Holy Rebellion, Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion-Waldoks examine social change in Israel through a rigorous analysis of the shifting entanglements of religion, gender, and law in times of cultural transformation. They explore theological, halakhic, political, and sociological processes and show how they interact with one another in ways that advance women’s rights, as well as how they are met with a conservative backlash in the discourses and actions of the rabbinic establishment. Irshai and Zion-Waldoks build on legal philosopher Robert Cover’s 1982 paper “Nomos and Narrative,” which explained how cultural narratives and legal norms are reciprocally enforced or transformed. Expanding on this notion, Irshai and Zion-Waldoks propose a “narrative ripeness test,” an analytic tool that evaluates the relationship between culture and law to assess how and when change within a minority cultural community may be accelerated or hindered by state intervention.
Religious feminisms are emerging around the world, not solely in Israel, and this book helps elucidate how they create enduring and radical change. Many liberal states are also confronting an illiberal backlash and question the multicultural framework’s ability to serve the needs of minorities within minorities. Therefore, the theoretical framework offered by Irshai and Zion-Waldoks is applicable beyond the Israeli case, even as it offers deeper insights into an Israeli society in turmoil.
In Holy Rebellion, Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion-Waldoks examine social change in Israel through a rigorous analysis of the shifting entanglements of religion, gender, and law in times of cultural transformation. They explore theological, halakhic, political, and sociological processes and show how they interact with one another in ways that advance women’s rights, as well as how they are met with a conservative backlash in the discourses and actions of the rabbinic establishment. Irshai and Zion-Waldoks build on legal philosopher Robert Cover’s 1982 paper “Nomos and Narrative,” which explained how cultural narratives and legal norms are reciprocally enforced or transformed. Expanding on this notion, Irshai and Zion-Waldoks propose a “narrative ripeness test,” an analytic tool that evaluates the relationship between culture and law to assess how and when change within a minority cultural community may be accelerated or hindered by state intervention.
Religious feminisms are emerging around the world, not solely in Israel, and this book helps elucidate how they create enduring and radical change. Many liberal states are also confronting an illiberal backlash and question the multicultural framework’s ability to serve the needs of minorities within minorities. Therefore, the theoretical framework offered by Irshai and Zion-Waldoks is applicable beyond the Israeli case, even as it offers deeper insights into an Israeli society in turmoil.
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Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition
A Black Feminist AnthologyBarbara Smith
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminism's foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package.
Contributors: Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willi (Willie) M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Spears Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita J. Weems.
Contributors: Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willi (Willie) M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Spears Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita J. Weems.
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Home and Harem
Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of TravelInderpal Grewal
Duke University Press, 1996
Moving across academic disciplines, geographical boundaries, and literary genres, Home and Harem examines how travel shaped ideas about culture and nation in nineteenth-century imperialist England and colonial India. Inderpal Grewal’s study of the narratives and discourses of travel reveals the ways in which the colonial encounter created linked yet distinct constructs of nation and gender and explores the impact of this encounter on both English and Indian men and women. Reworking colonial discourse studies to include both sides of the colonial divide, this work is also the first to discuss Indian women traveling West as well as English women touring the East.
In her look at England, Grewal draws on nineteenth-century aesthetics, landscape art, and debates about women’s suffrage and working-class education to show how all social classes, not only the privileged, were educated and influenced by imperialist travel narratives. By examining diverse forms of Indian travel to the West and its colonies and focusing on forms of modernity offered by colonial notions of travel, she explores how Indian men and women adopted and appropriated aspects of European travel discourse, particularly the set of oppositions between self and other, East and West, home and abroad.
Rather than being simply comparative, Home and Harem is a transnational cultural study of the interaction of ideas between two cultures. Addressing theoretical and methodological developments across a wide range of fields, this highly interdisciplinary work will interest scholars in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies, feminist studies, English literature, South Asian studies, and comparative literature.
In her look at England, Grewal draws on nineteenth-century aesthetics, landscape art, and debates about women’s suffrage and working-class education to show how all social classes, not only the privileged, were educated and influenced by imperialist travel narratives. By examining diverse forms of Indian travel to the West and its colonies and focusing on forms of modernity offered by colonial notions of travel, she explores how Indian men and women adopted and appropriated aspects of European travel discourse, particularly the set of oppositions between self and other, East and West, home and abroad.
Rather than being simply comparative, Home and Harem is a transnational cultural study of the interaction of ideas between two cultures. Addressing theoretical and methodological developments across a wide range of fields, this highly interdisciplinary work will interest scholars in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies, feminist studies, English literature, South Asian studies, and comparative literature.
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Horizon, Sea, Sound
Caribbean and African Women's Cultural Critiques of NationAndrea A. Davis
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies’ Best Book Prize
In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family.
Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.
In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family.
Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.
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How Do We Look?
Resisting Visual BiopoliticsFatimah Tobing Rony
Duke University Press, 2022
In How Do We Look? Fatimah Tobing Rony draws on transnational images of Indonesian women as a way to theorize what she calls visual biopolitics—the ways visual representation determines which lives are made to matter more than others. Rony outlines the mechanisms of visual biopolitics by examining Paul Gauguin’s 1893 portrait of Annah la Javanaise—a trafficked thirteen-year-old girl found wandering the streets of Paris—as well as US ethnographic and documentary films. In each instance, the figure of the Indonesian woman is inextricably tied to discourses of primitivism, savagery, colonialism, exoticism, and genocide. Rony also focuses on acts of resistance to visual biopolitics in film, writing, and photography. These works, such as Rachmi Diyah Larasati’s The Dance that Makes You Vanish, Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao (1995), and the collaborative films of Nia Dinata, challenge the naturalized methods of seeing that justify exploitation, dehumanization, and early death of people of color. By theorizing the mechanisms of visual biopolitics, Rony elucidates both its violence and its vulnerability.
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How We Write Now
Living with Black Feminist TheoryJennifer C. Nash
Duke University Press, 2024
In How We Write Now Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and preoccupation: loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and theorists such as Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, and Natasha Trethewey mobilize their prose to ask readers to feel, undo, and reassemble themselves. These intimate invitations are more than a set of tools for decoding the social world; Black feminist prose becomes a mode of living and feeling, dreaming and being, and a distinctly affective project that treats loss as not only paradigmatic of Black life but also an aesthetic question. Through her own beautiful writing, Nash shows how Black feminism offers itself as a companion to readers to chart their own lives with and in loss, from devastating personal losses to organizing around the movement for Black lives. Charting her own losses, Nash reminds us that even as Black feminist writers get as close to loss as possible, it remains a slippery object that troubles memory and eludes capture.
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How Women Saved The City
Daphne Spain
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
Reclaims the lost history of women’s contributions to the development of American cities
In the days between the Civil War and World War I, women rarely worked outside the home, rarely went to college, and, if our histories are to be believed, rarely put their mark on the urban spaces unfolding around them. And yet, as this book clearly demonstrates, women did play a key role in shaping the American urban landscape.
To uncover the contribution of women to urban development during this period, Daphne Spain looks at the places where women participated most actively in public life—voluntary organizations like the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Salvation Army, the College Settlements Association, and the National Association of Colored Women. In the extensive building projects of these associations—boarding houses, vocational schools, settlement houses, public baths, and playgrounds—she finds clear evidence of a built environment created by women. Exploring this environment, Spain reconstructs the story of the "redemptive places" that addressed the real needs of city dwellers—especially single women, African-Americans, immigrants, and the poor—and established an environment in which newcomers could learn to become urban Americans.[more]
How to Make Art at the End of the World
A Manifesto for Research-CreationNatalie Loveless
Duke University Press, 2019
In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices as research methods in their own right—has emerged from the organic convergences of the arts and interdisciplinary humanities, and it has been fostered by universities wishing to enhance their public profiles. In How to Make Art at the End of the World Natalie Loveless draws on diverse perspectives—from feminist science studies to psychoanalytic theory, as well as her own experience advising undergraduate and graduate students—to argue for research-creation as both a means to produce innovative scholarship and a way to transform pedagogy and research within the contemporary neoliberal university. Championing experimental, artistically driven methods of teaching, researching, and publication, research-creation works to render daily life in the academy more pedagogically, politically, and affectively sustainable, as well as more responsive to issues of social and ecological justice.
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Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú
Sylvanna M. Falcón
University of Illinois Press, 2024
In 2003, Perú’s Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR) issued its groundbreaking final report on the human rights abuses perpetuated by two revolutionary groups and the country’s armed forces and police from 1980 to 2000. Sylvanna M. Falcón examines how local communities in Lima have formed oppositional spaces, movements, and communities to challenge a status quo that erases Perú’s history of internal violence. These counterpublics focus on human rights-oriented memory that acknowledges the legacies of racism and misogyny underlying the violence. Falcón’s decolonial feminist analysis challenges the rise of authoritarianism in democratic societies while exploring the limits of liberalism to counteract it. As she shows, projects shaped by counterpublic memory best equip Perúvians to enact real, liberatory, and transformative justice for human rights violations both past and present.
Engaging and intimate, Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú illuminates the power of human rights and memory work.
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Hunger So Wide And So Deep
A Multiracial View of Women’s Eating ProblemsBecky Thompson
University of Minnesota Press, 1996
A new feminist classic--now in paper!
Based on in-depth life history interviews with African-American, Latina, and white women-both lesbian and heterosexual-this book chronicles the effects of racism, sexism, acculturation, and sexual abuse on women’s bodies and eating patterns.
“A wonderful book: gripping, creative and profoundly humane. In lucid prose Thompson offers an original explanation for women’s eating problems. She argues that many women turn to food-bingeing, dieting, purging, or starving- as a sensible means of coping with physical and psychic ‘atrocities’ deriving from ‘racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, the stress of acculturation, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.’” Women’s Review of Books“Surprising and alarming. . . . Thompson urges a second look at our national obsession with weight and proffers theories and practices that could save the lives of women of all colors and sexual orientations.” Lambda Book Report“Thompson breaks new ground and offers hope for the multitudes of women who have swallowed their pain.” Evelyn C. White, Editor, The Black Women's Health Book[more]