Feminist Challenges

In Feminist Challenges, new and established scholars demonstrate the application of feminism in a range of academic disciplines including history, philosophy, politics, and sociology. As Carole Pateman notes in her introduction, ‘all the contributors raise some extremely far-reaching questions about the conventional assumptions and methods of contemporary social and political inquiry.’

This book explores the rich, diverse opportunities and challenges afforded by research that analyses the stories told by, for and about women. Bringing together feminist scholarship and narrative approaches, it draws on empirical material, social theory and methodological insights to provide examples of feminist narrative studies that make explicit the links between theory and practice. Examining the story as told and using examples of narratives told about childhood sexual abuse, domestic/relationship abuse, motherhood, and seeking asylum, it raises wider issues regarding the role of storytelling for understanding and making sense of women’s lives. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of women’s studies, feminist and narrative researchers, social policy and practice, sociology, and research methods.

This book tells the story of new Yugoslav feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, reassessing the effects of state socialism on women’s emancipation through the lens of the feminist critique. This volume explores the history of the ideas defining a social movement, analysing the major debates and arguments this milieu engaged in from the perspective of the history of political thought, intellectual history and cultural history. Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, societies in and scholars of East Central Europe still struggle to sort out the effects of state socialism on gender relations in the region. What could tell us more about the subject than the ideas set out by the only organised and explicitly feminist opposition in the region, who, as academics, artists, writers and activists, criticised the regime and demanded change?

In Feminist Challenges, new and established scholars demonstrate the application of feminism in a range of academic disciplines including history, philosophy, politics, and sociology. As Carole Pateman notes in her introduction, ‘all the contributors raise some extremely far-reaching questions about the conventional assumptions and methods of contemporary social and political inquiry.’

`An accessible, clearly explained review of difficult concepts within this arena as well as relevant debates. Its strengths are in outlining possible considerations that need to be taken into account when making methodological choices. It also clearly explains how these choices impact knowledge production. This book would undoubtedly be of considerable use to anyone seeking to understand and get to grips with feminist methodological issues′ - Feminism and Psychology Who would be a feminist now? Contemporary ′political realism′ suggests that the essentials of the battle have already been won, and the current generation of women entering University is used to seeing feminism presented as ′old fashioned′, ′extreme′ and ′unrealistic′. Challenging such assumptions, this important new book argues for the value of empirical investigations of gendered life, and brings together the theoretical, political and practical aspects of feminist methodology. Feminist Methodology - demonstrates how feminist approaches to methodology engage with debates in western philosophy to raise critical questions about knowledge production - shows that feminist methodology has a distinctive place in social research - guides the reader through the terrain of feminist methodology and clarifies how feminists can claim knowledge of gendered social existence - connects abstract issues of theory with issues in fieldwork practice. This timely and accessible book will be an essential resource for students in women′s studies, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, social anthropology and feminist psychology.

This is a collection of eleven chapters and an introduction that develop key arguments in decolonial feminism, particularly, the coloniality of gender, the critique of white and Eurocentric feminisms, the imbrication between gender, race, and colonialism, feminicides, and the coloniality of democracy and public institutions. The introduction addresses the path of decolonial feminism: from a new approach to understanding the relationship between gender as a category, race, and colonialism that combined U.S. Third World feminism and scholarship on coloniality and decoloniality to its exponential growth in the hands of activists and engaged scholars from Latin America and the Caribbean. Today, much of the literature on decolonial feminism in Latin America and the Caribbean remains unknown in the U.S. This anthology seeks to start remedying this problem with seven translations of work originally written in Spanish, and three essays originally written in English that address the fundamental concepts of decolonial feminism as well as its contributions to important contemporary political and intellectual debates.

A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.

Although women and men have different relationships to language and to each other, traditional theories of rhetoric do not foreground such gender differences. Krista Ratcliffe argues that because feminists generally have not conceptualized their language theories from the perspective of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric and composition scholars must construct feminist theories of rhetoric by employing a variety of interwoven strategies: recovering lost or marginalized texts; rereading traditional rhetoric texts; extrapolating rhetorical theories from such nonrhetoric texts as letters, diaries, essays, cookbooks, and other sources; and constructing their own theories of rhetoric. Focusing on the third option, Ratcliffe explores ways in which the rhetorical theories of Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich may be extrapolated from their Anglo-American feminist texts through examination of the interrelationship between what these authors write and how they write. In other words, she extrapolates feminist theories of rhetoric from interwoven claims and textual strategies. By inviting Woolf, Daly, and Rich into the rhetorical traditions and by modeling the extrapolation strategy/methodology on their writings, Ratcliffe shows how feminist texts about women, language, and culture may be reread from the vantage point of rhetoric to construct feminist theories of rhetoric. She also outlines the pedagogical implications of these three feminist theories of rhetoric, thus contributing to ongoing discussions of feminist pedagogies. Traditional rhetorical theories are gender-blind, ignoring the reality that women and men occupy different cultural spaces and that these spaces are further complicated by race and class, Ratcliffe explains. Arguing that issues such as who can talk, where one can talk, and how one can talk emerge in daily life but are often disregarded in rhetorical theories, Ratcliffe rereads Roland Barthes’ "The Old Rhetoric" to show the limitations of classical rhetorical theories for women and feminists. Discovering spaces for feminist theories of rhetoric in the rhetorical traditions, Ratcliffe invites readers not only to question how women have been located as a part of— and apart from—these traditions but also to explore the implications for rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy.

`An accessible, clearly explained review of difficult concepts within this arena as well as relevant debates. Its strengths are in outlining possible considerations that need to be taken into account when making methodological choices. It also clearly explains how these choices impact knowledge production. This book would undoubtedly be of considerable use to anyone seeking to understand and get to grips with feminist methodological issues' - Feminism and Psychology Who would be a feminist now? Contemporary 'political realism' suggests that the essentials of the battle have already been won, and the current generation of women entering University is used to seeing feminism presented as 'old fashioned', 'extreme' and 'unrealistic'. Challenging such assumptions, this important new book argues for the value of empirical investigations of gendered life, and brings together the theoretical, political and practical aspects of feminist methodology. Feminist Methodology - demonstrates how feminist approaches to methodology engage with debates in western philosophy to raise critical questions about knowledge production - shows that feminist methodology has a distinctive place in social research - guides the reader through the terrain of feminist methodology and clarifies how feminists can claim knowledge of gendered social existence - connects abstract issues of theory with issues in fieldwork practice. This timely and accessible book will be an essential resource for students in women's studies, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, social anthropology and feminist psychology.

Das englischsprachige Buch stellt Ergebnisse der Internationalen Frauenuniversität, Projektbereich Information vor. The book analyses the interdependence of knowledge, culture and information from a feminist perspective in a world of globalisation.