Rethinking Feminist Identification

Is it possible to be a de facto feminist? This question is explored and debated in this book about the phenomenon of people who support feminist positions but do not call themselves feminists. The author examines the implications of de facto feminism on both the level of feminist theory as well as that of practical politics in the U.S. In a theoretical manner, the author considers how the problem of abstraction in many of the behavioral approaches to feminist identity have the unintended consequence of reinforcing elite depictions of social change. At the level of practical politics in the U.S., this has left feminism open to the many polemical attacks that have risen in recent years. The author asks whether the attempt to bring about beneficial policy can be rendered ineffective if women do not identify with the feminist organizations working on their behalf.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s Collaborative Book Prize 2017 Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies is a volume of essays by leading scholars in the field of early modern studies on the history, present state, and future possibilities of feminist criticism and theory. It responds to current anxieties that feminist criticism is in a state of decline by attending to debates and differences that have emerged in light of ongoing scholarly discussions of race, affect, sexuality, and transnationalism-work that compels us continually to reassess our definitions of ’women’ and gender. Rethinking Feminism demonstrates how studies of early modern literature, history, and culture can contribute to a reimagination of feminist aims, methods, and objects of study at this historical juncture. While the scholars contributing to Rethinking Feminism have very different interests and methods, they are united in their conviction that early modern studies must be in dialogue with, and indeed contribute to, larger theoretical and political debates about gender, race, and sexuality, and to the relationship between these areas. To this end, the essays not only analyze literary texts and cultural practices to shed light on early modern ideology and politics, but also address metacritical questions of methodology and theory. Taken together, they show how a consciousness of the complexity of the past allows us to rethink the genealogies and historical stakes of current scholarly norms and debates.

In Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban, Linda Peake and Martina Rieker embark on an ambitious project to explore the extent to which a feminist re-imagining of the twenty-first century city can form the core of a new emerging analytic of women and the neoliberal urban. In a world in which the majority of the population now live in urban centres, they take as their starting point the need to examine the production of knowledge about the city through the problematic divide of the global north and south, asking what might a feminist intervention, a position itself fraught with possibilities and problems, into this dominant geographical imaginary look like. Providing a meaningful discussion of the ways in which feminism, gender and women have been understood in relation to the city and urban studies, they ask probing and insightful questions that indicate new directions for theory and research, illustrating the necessity of a re-formulation of the north-south divide as a critical and urgent project for feminist urban studies. Working through platforms as diverse as policy formulations and telling stories, the contributors to the book come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and geographic locations ranging through the Caribbean, North America, Western Europe, South, East and South East Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. They identify a range of issues (such as care, work, violence, the household, mobility, intimacy and poverty) that they analytically address to make sense of and reanimate resistance to the contemporary urban through articulations of new grammars of gendered geographies of justice.

Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies re-examines the field’s foundational assumptions by identifying and critically analyzing eighteen of its key terms. Each essay investigates a single term (e.g., feminism, interdisciplinarity, intersectionality) by asking how it has come to be understood and mobilized in Women’s and Gender Studies and then explicates the roles it plays in both producing and shutting down possible versions of the field. The goal of the book is to trace and expose critical paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the language of Women’s and Gender Studies—from its high theory to its casual conversations—that relies on these key terms. Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies offers a fresh approach to structuring Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses in Women’s and Gender Studies.

The question of whether there can be a distinctively female ethics is one of the most important and controversial debates in gender studies, philosophy and psychology today. Rethinking Feminist Ethics; Care, Trust and Empathy marks a bold intervention in these debates and bridges the ground between women theorists disenchanted with aspects of traditional ethics and traditional theories that insist upon the need for some ethical principles.

Labels traditionally ascribed to women—mother, angel of the house, whore, or bitch—suggest character traits that do not encompass the complexities of women’s identities or empower women’s public speaking. Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric redefines the concept of ethos—classically thought of as character or credibility—as ecological and feminist, negotiated and renegotiated, and implicated in shifting power dynamics. Building on previous feminist and rhetorical scholarship, this essay collection presents a sustained discussion of the unique methods by which women’s ethos is constructed and transformed. Editors Kathleen J. Ryan, Nancy Myers, and Rebecca Jones identify three rhetorical maneuvers that characterize ethos in the feminist ecological imaginary: ethe as interruption/interrupting, ethe as advocacy/advocating, and ethe as relation/relating. Each section of the book explores one of these rhetorical maneuvers. An afterword gathers contributors’ thoughts on the collection’s potential impact and influence, possibilities for future scholarship, and the future of feminist rhetorical studies. With its rich mix of historical examples and contemporary case studies, Rethinking Ethos offers a range of new perspectives, including queer theory, transnational approaches, radical feminism, Chicana feminism, and indigenous points of view, from which to consider a feminist approach to ethos.

Is it possible to be a de facto feminist? This question is explored and debated in this book about the phenomenon of people who support feminist positions but do not call themselves feminists. The author examines the implications of de facto feminism on both the level of feminist theory as well as that of practical politics in the U.S. In a theoretical manner, the author considers how the problem of abstraction in many of the behavioral approaches to feminist identity have the unintended consequence of reinforcing elite depictions of social change. At the level of practical politics in the U.S., this has left feminism open to the many polemical attacks that have risen in recent years. The author asks whether the attempt to bring about beneficial policy can be rendered ineffective if women do not identify with the feminist organizations working on their behalf.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s Collaborative Book Prize 2017 Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies is a volume of essays by leading scholars in the field of early modern studies on the history, present state, and future possibilities of feminist criticism and theory. It responds to current anxieties that feminist criticism is in a state of decline by attending to debates and differences that have emerged in light of ongoing scholarly discussions of race, affect, sexuality, and transnationalism-work that compels us continually to reassess our definitions of ’women’ and gender. Rethinking Feminism demonstrates how studies of early modern literature, history, and culture can contribute to a reimagination of feminist aims, methods, and objects of study at this historical juncture. While the scholars contributing to Rethinking Feminism have very different interests and methods, they are united in their conviction that early modern studies must be in dialogue with, and indeed contribute to, larger theoretical and political debates about gender, race, and sexuality, and to the relationship between these areas. To this end, the essays not only analyze literary texts and cultural practices to shed light on early modern ideology and politics, but also address metacritical questions of methodology and theory. Taken together, they show how a consciousness of the complexity of the past allows us to rethink the genealogies and historical stakes of current scholarly norms and debates.

This book demonstrates the discussions of leading feminist thinkers on the concept of self and personal identity. It addresses issues in moral social psychology. The book is useful for students of feminist theory, ethics, and social and political philosophy.

Twenty-six original essays look at contemporary feminist organizations.