Feminist Theory

Feminist thought is often articulated as a series of categories such as liberal feminism, socialist feminism, Marxist feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, etc. These categories have aided the development of feminist thought, but their prevalence limits discussion to predictable parameters. Meanwhile, feminists often have notably divergent responses to the rise of the market economy. In particular, we differ about the liberating possibilities of participating in a capitalist market economy. Some feminists emphasise that the market economy provides an opportunity for women to free themselves from gender restrictions expressed in family and kinship traditions. But many other feminists are sceptical, from varying perspectives, that participation in the capitalist market results in freedom for women (or in other benefits to women, men or the world). This article draws on work by Linda Nicholson and Karl Polanyi to show that thinking through the historically changing relations between market, kinship, family and politics provides a different way of conceptualising feminist thought. Unlike the older alternative, this new approach has the advantage that it is grounded directly in thinking about women’s experiences around the world.

This article first introduces and reviews Nancy Fraser's latest book Cannibal Capitalism. Next, it discusses the book's its programme for critical theory in the framework of Fraser's previous scholarship. It focuses on two ingredients of ‘Fraserian' critical theory: the role of difference in social justice-driven research and the separation of ontological and normative parts of such research. It then applies these specifically to feminist radical theories and explains why current, ostensibly non-economic, care-, solidarity- and abolitionist resistance programmes cannot underwrite sufficiently radical political programmes for social change. While these programmes' alternative ontologies are resourceful for informing and fomenting resistance, their potential to radically change social structures hinges upon their ability to relate their programme to other socially dominated and economically oppressed groups on the Left. Because capitalism codes both social domination and economic oppression, radical programmes would integrate their ostensibly non-economic ontological resources with a critique of capitalism to illuminate the common struggles of socially dominated and economically oppressed. ‘System crises critique' articulated by Fraser in Cannibal Capitalism is an example of one such ‘radical’ programme, which mobilises the working class as well as other marginalised groups, which are simultaneously economically oppressed and socially dominated.

By addressing ableism through social media and other digital outlets, feminist disability activists share stories on what it means to be human from an intersectional perspective, and their storying is a way of understanding and theorising the world. However, the possibilities of digital disability activism to story ableism within broader feminist debates are underexplored. Storying as an anti-hegemonic approach to theorising ableism further from an intersectional perspective, implemented through an activist-academic working alliance, contributes to speaking otherwise about disability and draws attention to disability perspectives in feminist theory. In this article, I propose a feminist intersectional approach to storying ableism that exposes manifestations of ableism in its intersections with classism, racism and sexism at structural, identity and representational levels. I then argue for digital disability activism as a means of storying ableism, provide examples of such storying and describe the potentials and principles of digital activist storying. While the creation of further theory is central to the proposed approach, the connection of intersectionality theory with ableism and feminist disability theory serves as its foundation. I discuss how linking ableism with intersectionality strengthens the uncovering of ableism at different levels, why studies of ableism should be extended to fields beyond Disability Studies but remain closely connected to disability activism and how feminist disability theory has thus far shaped debates on the dis/ability binary in relation to the gendered body.

Menopause is currently a ‘hot’ topic in the UK. This article examines the Channel 4 television documentary Davina McCall: Sex, Myths and the Menopause as a key cultural text in the current UK ‘menopause moment’, demonstrating how the programme both reflects and contributes to the broader trend of menopause's growing visibility and the emerging menopause market. We begin by situating Davina within broader social, cultural and economic processes which provided a conducive context for the show's largely positive reception, and which constitute some of the key forces fuelling menopause's heightened public profile more broadly. We then move to investigate the discourses that Davina draws upon, mobilises and highlights. Our analysis shows how the programme invokes feminist terms, while discussing crucial structural conditions that underpin the continued stigma and shame around menopause. At the same time, we demonstrate that there is a striking disconnect between the structural inequalities that the documentary highlights and its consistent emphasis on individualised and privatised solutions. This disconnect, we argue, provides important insight into the dominant forces currently animating the current menopause moment in the UK. We conclude by underscoring how even the more recent critical renditions of menopause have thus far remained largely curtailed by biomedical and neoliberal logics.

Sugar dating has gained extensive media coverage over the last couple of years, often being depicted as a veiled form of prostitution / sex work. While similar dating arrangements encompassing some sort of economic compensation are well researched in an African and Asian context, sugar dating has only garnered attention from researchers in the Global North during the last decade, in the wake of a proliferation of websites facilitating the practice. In light of the contested nature of the phenomenon, in this article we critically assess how knowledge about sugar dating is constructed in the emerging literature on the topic in the Global North, with a particular focus on the role attributed to sugar daters’ own experiential accounts. Alongside furthering the discourse on sugar dating by unravelling the epistemological underpinnings of existing research, we utilise the case of sugar-dating research to elaborate on the continued relevance of feminist debates on the epistemological status of experience. We call for a more comprehensive theoretical examination of experience in sugar-dating research and posit that some versions of feminist standpoint theory, as well as strands in feminist phenomenology, provide valuable theoretical tools for navigating between understanding experience as an ideological construct and/or as a privileged foundation of knowledge.

This article engages the contested question of feminist critique, suggesting that reflecting on how we ‘do’ critique as feminist scholars is integral to the work of examining the broader politics of feminist worldmaking and knowledge production. Building on the work of Rosalyn Diprose and Audre Lorde, I suggest that the concept of ‘epistemic generosity’ opens space for the development of a lexicon in which the nuances of an open and receptive attitude to feminist critique can be explored. As a stance of open receptivity, epistemic generosity is associated with waiting, slowness and listening, rather than pursuit, suspicion, vigilance and self-affirmation. Furthermore, as a non-directive mode of relating, epistemic generosity does not presume to know. Open to surprise, wonder and connection, it is fundamentally an orientation to thinking and knowing rooted in hopefulness. At the same time, epistemic generosity is not without risks. What thinking generously means, its risks and its costs, differs according to social positioning. For those located in privileged positions, epistemic generosity is only possible in conjunction with constant practices of self-critique that involve attending to friction, discomfort, difference and difficulty.

This article presents reflections on our pre-Covid-19 exhibition Care and Control, and our interdisciplinary collaboration between artist Alice Tatton Brown and social scientists Maud Perrier and Junko Yamashita. The reflections expand current feminist debates about self-care and collective care by centring the importance of public space, refusals and contracts. Care and Control was designed as both an exhibition and a meeting place, created through our ongoing collaboration. It took place in a shopping centre in Bristol (UK) in June 2019. The exhibition was a collage of feminist archival objects and print, contemporary installation and community engagement. Care and Control began broadly as an experiment to seek out alternatives to an individualist approach to self-care, by researching how Women's Liberation Activists practised self-care and collective care beyond the household, and within protest, friendship and public space. In this article, we make a methodological contribution to feminist discussions of collective care by showing how our strategy of a) making a public exhibition and b) writing a Contract of Care is a significant technique for enacting some of the promise of Audre Lorde’s ‘self-care as warfare’. We show how Care and Control, drawing from the legacy of the Women's Liberation Movement, generated resources for countering definitions of self-care that predominate. Reflecting on how the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated classed, racialised and gendered divisions in reproductive labour, our article suggests that self-care and collective care need to be conceptualised drawing on social reproduction.

Queer, post-colonial and Black feminist scholars and activists have long cautioned against the dangerous exclusions and complicities entailed in even the best-intentioned efforts to counter sexual violence. The rhetoric of protecting women from sexual violence is frequently and effectively invoked in order to rehabilitate old colonial projects and justify new ones that persecute sexual dissidents, police gender, sexual and caste transgressions and re-inscribe neoliberal and neo-conservative rationalities across the globe. This article argues that many of the exclusionary, violent and coercive consequences of efforts to protect women from sexual violence are rooted in mischaracterisations or mis-descriptions of the subject of sexual violence, and enabled by particular (mis)orientations towards this subject. Specifically, I suggest that the imagination and representation of the subject of sexual violence is subtended by a politically dangerous and conceptually untenable victim/agent binary. Mediated by rationalities of caste, race, class and religion, women are imagined either as vulnerable victims in need of protection, or as capable (even culpable) agents, but never simultaneously both. The failure to reconcile victimhood and agency within discourses of sexual violence is precisely the condition of possibility for a range of violent, exclusionary and regulatory outcomes. This article tracks the effects of the victim/agent binary in dominant responses to sexual violence, before assembling the foundations from which to rethink victimhood and agency away from their binary orthodoxy, drawing centrally on the radical subjectivity of pain.

Resilience is the trailblazing saviour of contemporary social and political life. Politicians, scientists, self-help experts, public school administrators, military officials, and psychologists increasingly tout resilience-building as the only rational solution to a twenty-first-century world of unprecedented uncertainty. The underlying (pessimistic) promise of resilience is that people, and by extension global systems, can not only survive but flourish through crisis. In order to underscore the material, ideological and political danger that this logic poses, I examine NASA/SpaceX's plans for interplanetary colonisation – a project explicitly intended to promote a resilient human species – as promising pessimism's devastating finale. Despite this dire trajectory, I conclude by considering the cost for left feminist thinkers and activists of reducing the concept of resilience to a neoliberal technology of power. To this end, I contend that Octavia Butler's prophetic diptych Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) counters the colonising project of promising pessimism and recovers a liberatory account of resilience: one which refuses to exchange utopian surety for acquiescence to power, but which recuperates the present as a practice ground for transformation. Ultimately, this article insists that to engage in political struggle over how to govern ourselves and our world, in a shared context of escalating crises, requires sustained critical investment in the ethical and political implications of valorising certain kinds of resilient life.

Drawing on thirty qualitative in-depth interviews with a diverse group of feminist activists who are mainly active online, this article analyses how research participants construct and portray ‘activists’ and ‘influencers’. One theme that emerged from the data is the commercial orientation of influencers, the monetisation of their activities online and how this differs from activist pursuits. Activism, by contrast, was constructed as focused on making social change, and not driven by commercial interests. This article argues that the research participants’ discussion of the differences between ‘influencer’ and ‘activist’, and the attribution of monetisation to influencers, underplays the ways in which market logics help to structure contemporary forms of activism that take place in the digital economy. Second, the article places the investment in forms of activism that are uncompromised by commercial pursuits in the wider context of feminised and exclusionary cultures of perfection. Lastly, the article reflects on common constructions of influencing as a feminised as well as trivial pursuit and cautions against accounts that uncritically present influencing as trivial in contrast to activism, which is considered more serious.

This article draws on feminist cultural studies, media and cultural theory, and engages with feminist law and criminology, to argue for a newly invigorated conceptualisation of consent in feminist theory. Rather than advance a particular feminist theory of consent, the article argues for a feminist cultural media theory of commonsense consent that is both sensory and representational. This theory acknowledges that there is no concept of consent reserved for sexual encounters. Rather, a more universal, commonsense theory, shaped as much by twentieth-century media as eighteenth-century political philosophy, informs how consent shows up to social experience. The article offers a revision of feminist discussions about consent in law, political philosophy and cultural studies, proposing that accounts such as Laura Kipnis’ Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus can be read as descriptions of consent's affective structure. Feminist accounts have underestimated the implications of the involvement of media, from early cinema through to contemporary social media, in co-locating consent with deception. This article shows how the media concept of consent-deception plays a role in suspicion and betrayal, both of which act as consent's structures of feeling. To further probe an enquiry into how personalised media are transforming commonsense consent, the article discusses the TV programme The Tinder Swindler. Various production techniques encourage a view of social media as a complete encapsulation of the social life and affectivity of consent-deception, suggesting a number of implications for a feminist cultural media theory of commonsense consent. In particular, the programme asks us to problematise the evidentiary status of informational social media linked to the changing perceptibility of consent-deception.