Abstract
Introduction
This special section of Feminist Theory emerged out of a UK Economic and Social Sciences Research Council-funded seminar series, ‘Feminism and Futurity: New Times, New Spaces’, that was held at the University of Bristol, UK during 2010 and 2011. The impetus for this seminar series was in part to respond to the claims, common in the UK when the series began, that feminism is ‘yesterday’s politics’ (Coote, 2000; Segal, 1999, 2004) and that young women are part of a ‘post-feminist’ generation (McRobbie, 2008). Debates over the status of feminism more generally tended to narrate its malaise through an account of ‘waves’ of feminist politics that culminated in the condition of ‘postfeminism’ (Adkins, 2004; Aronson, 2003; Brooks, 1997). Underwritten by notions of linear progress and generational transmission that have been roundly critiqued in the feminist theoretical literature, invocations of postfeminism suggested that feminism was no longer relevant to the conditions of contemporary life. One consequence of this narrative is that feminism has been described as the politics either of another time or of other places (see Mohanty, 2001; Peters and Wolper, 1994, amongst others).
The recent resurgence of activism by young women in the UK and beyond demonstrates the limitations of this narrative, and the dangers of moving too quickly, perhaps, to classify and categorise the lively and creative energies of a movement that encompasses and seeks to transform all domains of life. We signal, for example, the renewed visibility of feminist groups and feminist activism on university campuses as well as the work of younger women in the UK like Malala Yousafzai to highlight young women’s efforts to access education despite the threat of political violence. We also recognise of the work of Fahma Mohamed, whose campaign with a local youth charity, Integrate Bristol, to eliminate female genital mutilation in the UK targeted primary and secondary schools as sites for developing awareness of the practice, both within and outside of the UK, and garnered national and international attention.
Without wanting to conflate feminist activism and feminist theory, we point to the diversity and liveliness of feminist and gender-sensitive scholarship across the social sciences and humanities, which we argue belies the suggestion that feminism is no longer relevant for analysing political, economic, and social transformations. Our own experiences reflect this diversity: we are all trained as social scientists, but were educated in different parts of the world (China, New Zealand, Canada, the US and the UK), in different institutions, and in different ways. Yet we share the experience of working in the same discipline and the same department in the UK, and a sense of optimism in relationship to our experience of feminist politics and feminist scholarship, despite the pessimistic readings of feminism today.
Yet we do agree that there has been a qualitative shift in how feminist scholarship approaches its subjects of inquiry. What we have learned from the work presented in the seminars on ‘Feminism and Futurity’ is that feminist scholarship no longer continues to focus in the main on documenting patterns of exploitation and oppression, but is also actively engaged with creatively and imaginatively developing new ways of being in the world. The seminar series thus sought to explore how the recent call to situate feminism within a particular time (the past) and place (outside the West) spoke more to a situated historical and geographical context, and that the feminist scholarship we encountered is better understood as a transformation within feminism, rather than a symptom of its demise.
The four articles in this special section on ‘Work, Life, Bodies’ address what is perhaps one of the most lively and compelling moments in contemporary feminist theory: a ‘return’ to the body, life, nature, and ecology as resources for feminist theory. They revisit and rework what some commentators have argued is the reluctance or wariness of feminist theory to confront the ‘problem’ of nature – our own natures as humans, our relationship to ‘more-than-’ or ‘non-human’ natures, and to the disciplines, institutions, and practices that offer contemporary accounts of ‘nature’: biology, medicine, environmentalism, the physical sciences, public health, and so on. These articles suggest that rather than a break with previous feminist work, what is new is a reflection on and reworking of concepts and terms that were long taken-for-granted. For example, calls to attend to the corporeal and biological dimensions of experience further challenge the fiction of the disembodied individual (Longhurst, 2001) and situate temporal and spatial concepts of generation, transformation, and change developed in the natural and biological sciences as resources for feminist politics (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Grosz, 2005; Parisi, 2004). Renewed interest in the life sciences reworks conventional feminist conceptions of the sites and relations of production and reproduction within the domains of biotechnology and its application within and beyond reproductive medicine (Cooper and Waldby, 2014; Thompson, 2007; Waldby and Cooper, 2010).
During the seminar series, we were interested to note how feminist scholars engaged with ecological, biological, and scientific invocations of crisis and transformation in open-ended and non-totalising ways. The papers in the two sessions from which this special section are drawn (‘Material Feminisms’ and ‘Ecological Futures’) are attentive to what we view as process-oriented approaches, open to the situatedness of both academic or analytical enquiry as well as the sites and spaces of thinking life, bodies, nature, work, time, and space itself. We observe here, as we do elsewhere (Larner et al., 2013), that feminist theorising in the work of those involved in the seminar series was much more about imagining and enacting new possibilities and new ways of being in the world than about predetermined ideological positions. This openness to new possibilities and alternative ways of living, as well as incisive critiques of dominant modes of thinking, suggests the continuing richness of feminist theoretical work. The articles in this special section venture into new terrains for imagining future possibilities and speak to ongoing debates over approaches to the natural world, the sciences of biology and immunology, the practices and ethics of maternal/child relations, and the need to consider the affective and embodied nature of work. Conceptually, they are in conversation with other feminist theorists and philosophers on the ethics, practices, and politics of work, life, and bodies, including the scholarship of Val Plumwood, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Nancy Fraser, to name just a few.
This special section thus extends Feminist Theory’s inclusion of innovative, cross-disciplinary work on the relationship between feminism and the biological, non-human or natural world, illustrated by the journal’s publication of works by Anne Scott (2001), Celia Roberts (2002), Momin Rahman and Anne Witz (2003), and Myra J. Hird (2004a, 2004b), for example. It also complements the recently published special issue on ‘Nonhuman Feminisms’ (2011) co-edited by Roberts and Hird, extending the focus on technology, objects, and non-human agency to the material, affective, and embodied dimensions of care work, ‘everyday utopias’, corporeal relations, and feminist readings of the biological body.
Relational spaces: Work, life, and bodies
Taken together, the articles in this special section aim to revisit the spaces of work, life, and bodies, and to propose new ways to direct ‘new materialist’ feminist accounts of nature and the body to the sites and spaces of public health policy, allotment gardening, the biological and immunological sciences, and accounts of relational ethics. In the first article, Kate Boyer explores the qualitative shifts in working women’s lives in the contemporary United States and the new ways in which combining wage work and care work emerge in tandem with technological and biopolitical transformations of maternity. She describes how a confluence of social, technological, and political economic shifts combines to reconfigure practices of maternity within neoliberal forms of governance and government. While much has been written about the shaping of women’s maternal subjectivities through discourses of empowerment, self-care, and reproductive choice, Boyer’s article focuses attention on the bodily practices of breastfeeding and the need for a conceptual vocabulary to consider how new configurations of embodied care intersect with imperatives on breastfeeding mothers in the US to remain active participants in waged work. She considers the implications of the inclusion in the 2011 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of a provision, ‘Reasonable Break Time’, requiring employers to provide dedicated space and (unpaid) work time for breastfeeding employees to pump milk. One of the implications of this provision, she argues, is that the very material differences between fresh and refrigerated or frozen milk are obscured, despite the underlying presumption that breastfeeding and breast milk are valuable for their primarily nutritive function. Furthermore, the exhortation for breastfeeding mothers to combine wage and care work obscures the emotional and social aspects of breastfeeding, its relational and affective dimensions that are less easily captured by what Boyer deems neoliberal imperatives to promote both active participation in work and the maintenance of health. Her article underscores how forms of economic rationality seek to encompass even the most intimate forms of embodied practice through oblique or indirect means: the Act does not coerce women into pumping breast milk at work, but posits milk expression at work as a newfound ‘freedom’, albeit one that is still less accessible to women with fewer economic resources.
Boyer persuasively argues that the 2011 provision, while viewed as a small step in the direction of providing greater recognition of US women’s caring responsibilities as mothers, neglects the relational and material dimensions of breastfeeding, short-circuiting at least in the present moment the possibility of imagining other configurations of wage and care work in the US. Her article also lucidly illustrates how socio-technical support for breastfeeding women’s wage labour participation via the breast pump is experienced ambivalently by women, even as it is promoted as a means to ensure breastfeeding mothers retain their place in the workforce. Her article thus makes a timely and valuable contribution to reconceptualising feminist theories of the relationship between care work and wage work, and provides a nuanced rejoinder to Nancy Fraser’s (1997) breadwinner/caregiver model.
Turning to accounts of maternity during pregnancy, Maria Fannin’s article engages with the recent work of philosophers Luce Irigaray and Kelly Oliver to revisit calls for a ‘placental ethics’ founded on a non-competitive relation of difference between mother and fetus. She reads Luce Irigaray’s work here in light of new materialist feminist efforts (further developed in the article by Samantha Frost in this special section) to approach the biological or scientific accounts of maternal–fetal relations. In the feminist theoretical literature on maternal–fetal relations, contemporary immunological science has been a key site for examining how antagonistic notions of mother and fetus are discursively produced and materialised as antagonistic or at best, ‘tolerant’. Yet these accounts tend to overlook, as critic Moira Howes highlights, the role of generosity, hospitality, and the active role of the maternal body in maintaining pregnancy.
Drawing on feminist theoretical readings of Luce Irigaray’s dialogue with biologist Hélène Rouch in the early 1990s, Fannin suggests that the ‘placental ethics’ towards which Irigaray seems to gesture in this dialogue is not only a metaphorical relationship. The bodies of the mother and fetus are not simply presented as metaphorical spaces or symbolic representations but as material instantiations of a relationship that is mediated by a third, the placenta. Reading this material/metaphoric space in Irigaray’s more recent works, Fannin suggests that the placenta in this later work is figured as an enveloping space of connection but also enclosure. Given Irigaray’s attentiveness to the ‘morpho-logics’ of the body, the placental space remains one of relation, but also of development. This account of the developmental nature of the placental relation thus reflects a more fundamental aspect of Irigaray’s philosophical work to emphasise the cultivation and growth, rather than the static essence, of embodied subjectivity.
In her article, Samantha Frost engages with the conceptual debates over feminist theoretical approaches to biology and the biological sciences. In her careful reading of the work of feminist scholars of technology and science, Frost draws on materialist feminist concerns for the biological as a resource for thinking. Counter to much of the feminist discourse on scientific instrumentality (in which the discourse and practices of biology as a science relegate women and women’s bodies to the denigrated place of subservience to the imperatives of species-being), Frost considers how feminist theorists work to transform understandings of life into resources for political possibility. But is this simply a move by which feminist scholars appropriate and objectify the natural world, much as masculinist scientific forms of knowledge and thought have long carried out? Frost argues counter to this, and points to the ways in which attention to a wider ecology of bodies and habitats offers new means of thinking about biological life. Hers is not, of course, a naïve proposal to affirm scientific or biological determinism, but rather a call to implicate feminist approaches with ‘biocultural’ perspectives, and to offer a new ‘figure of the thinkable’ for feminist theory.
Frost suggests these new figures of the thinkable make it possible to suspend what she terms the ‘sceptical problematic’ of feminist readings of science. This position entails working to denaturalise, historicise, and render science a thoroughly social enterprise. In her close reading of how feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling address the figure of the biological in their own work, Frost identifies the need for a different approach to the ‘body as organism’ that shifts thinking away from the sceptical and towards new concepts and ways of thinking the body, biology, sex, and environment. She helpfully signals how conceptions of space as both physical and symbolic could open up possibilities for thinking anew about bodily and social phenomena as processual and dynamic. Frost attempts to shift emphasis from what she identifies as the persistent dualism of nature and culture – and the risks and theoretical cul-de-sacs this dualism entails – by suggesting other arrangements. These new figures of the thinkable include the body as a permeable space of biocultural responsiveness. Frost is careful, however, to caution that drawing on scientific understandings to refigure new ways of relating phenomena should in no way be conceived as normative, but rather offers new resources for feminist theory and politics.
A close attention to the processual and dynamic in social and embodied relations with nature is also evident in the final article by Niamh Moore, Andrew Church, Jacqui Gabb, Claire Holmes, Amelia Lee and Neil Ravenscroft. Their article reflects on the spaces of belonging for young queer women involved with an allotment in Manchester, UK. Moore and her co-authors’ account of the Young Women’s Group’s allotment project draws attention to the in-between spaces of allotment gardening: the allotment’s status as both public and private, often hidden from public view but not-quite-private, not quite an extension of the domestic space of suburban home gardens insofar as most allotments in the UK, including the Young Women’s Group allotment which is the focus of the article, are rented from a city council. The provision of land for city residents to cultivate is a public obligation recognised in modern UK law and often identified as a response to the enclosures of common land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The authors suggest in their often lyrically written article that the allotment garden they examine offers a place of both refuge and unimaginable possibility for the young women and others who cultivate it. They signal this seemingly paradoxical status through neologisms (drawing from the work of Donna Haraway) of ‘privatepublic naturecultures’. The allotment is a space for envisioning new kinds of queer publics and for considering ‘how allotments undo neat distinctions between public and private, nature and culture, rural and urban’. Their reading of the allotment also challenges the presumed heteronormativity of allotment spaces, a trope they argue characterises much of the existing academic literature on allotment gardening.
Moore and her co-authors thus offer ways to think about intimacy, new forms of connection, and the quasi-public spaces of the allotment alongside feminist theoretical work on environmental ethics and utopia. They cite the work of Val Plumwood and her critical reading of the exclusionary configurations of place and relation in environmentalist discourse. For Plumwood, loving a place, or a child, should not come at the expense of others, and Moore and her co-authors illustrate this point in their account of the possibilities of a queer ethics of place and home beyond essentialist understandings of nature and kinship. Davina Cooper’s recent work on ‘everyday utopias’ offers another configuration of space and time in which materialising the allotment, making and working together through the labour of digging, weeding, and transforming the earth creates possibilities for new worlds and new futures. Moore and her co-authors’ account is careful, however, to not categorise or classify what these worlds and futures might be. As in the other articles in this special section, there is no prescriptive moment in which what is created is defined as ‘community’ or ‘identity’. Rather, their account evokes the processual coming-into-being of something connective, shared, and in-between public and private, nature and culture.
Realising feminist futures
The articles here reflect new and exciting engagements with contemporary feminist theoretical currents. Each asks in its own way for a renewed attentiveness to dualisms that have long been the focus of feminist critique: nature/culture, self/other, care/work, public/private. They also consider how new networks of care and new political possibilities might emerge from an emphasis on the processual rather than the essential and the static, and from a recognition of the mutually constitutive material and affective interdependencies between humans and others. These articles thus gesture towards what might be gained from a different kind of engagement with the fluid materialities of the body and with more ecological understandings of embodied subjectivity. They provoke us to consider how feminist theoretical engagements with reworked conceptualisations of time and space could approach the natural and life sciences and the worlds of policy-making and community-building in new and exciting ways. Given the current interest of feminist theorists in revisiting concepts of matter and materiality that traverse the biological and the ecological, the articles in this special section speak to an ongoing and lively debate about feminist approaches to ‘work, life, bodies’.