The Queer Turn in Feminism

The Queer Turn in Feminism
Author: Anne Emmanuelle Berger
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2013-12-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0823253872

More than any other area of late-twentieth-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. In this book, a leading Franco-American scholar traces differences and intersections in the development of gender and queer theories on both sides of the Atlantic. Looking at these theories through lenses that are both “American” and “French,” thus simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory, she tries to account for their alleged exhaustion and currency on the two sides of the Atlantic. The book is divided into four parts. In the first, the author examines two specifically “American” features of gender theories since their earliest formulations: on the one hand, an emphasis on the theatricality of gender (from John Money’s early characterization of gender as “role playing” to Judith Butler’s appropriation of Esther Newton’s work on drag queens); on the other, the early adoption of a “queer” perspective on gender issues. In the second part, the author reflects on a shift in the rhetoric concerning sexual minorities and politics that is prevalent today. Noting a shift from efforts by oppressed or marginalized segments of the population to make themselves “heard” to an emphasis on rendering themselves “visible,” she demonstrates the formative role of the American civil rights movement in this new drive to visibility. The third part deals with the travels back and forth across the Atlantic of “sexual difference,” ever since its elevation to the status of quasi-concept by psychoanalysis. Tracing the “queering” of sexual difference, the author reflects on both the modalities and the effects of this development. The last section addresses the vexing relationship between Western feminism and capitalism. Without trying either to commend or to decry this relationship, the author shows its long-lasting political and cultural effects on current feminist and postfeminist struggles and discourses. To that end, she focuses on one of the intense debates within feminist and postfeminist circles, the controversy over prostitution.

Feminism Meets Queer Theory

Feminism Meets Queer Theory
Author: Elizabeth Weed
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1997-07-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780253211187

". . . innovative and important thinking about the various relations between feminist theory, queer theory, and lesbian theory, as well as the possibility that liberation can be mutual rather than mutually exclusive." —Lambda Book Report When feminism meets queer theory, no introductions seem necessary. The two share common political interests—a concern for women's and gay and lesbian rights—and many of the same academic and intellectual roots. And yet, they can also seem like strangers, needing mediation, translation, clarification. This volume focuses on the encounters of feminist and queer theories, on the ways in which basic terms such as "male" and "female," "man" and "woman," "black," "white," "sex," "gender," and "sexuality" change meaning as they move from one body of theory to another. Along with essays by Judith Butler, Evelynn Hammonds, Biddy Martin, Kim Michasiw, Carole-Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Weed, there are interviews: Judith Butler engages Rosi Braidotti and Gayle Rubin in separate revealing discussions. And there are critical exchanges: Rosi Braidotti and Trevor Hope exchange comments on his reading of her work; and Teresa de Lauretis responds to Elizabeth Grosz's review of her recent book.

Feminism is Queer

Feminism is Queer
Author: Mimi Marinucci
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2012-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 178032023X

Feminism is Queer is an introduction to the intimately related disciplines of gender and queer theory. Whilst guiding the reader through complex theory, the author develops the original position of queer feminism, which presents queer theory as continuous with feminist theory. Whilst there have been significant conceptual tensions between second wave feminism and traditional lesbian and gay studies, queer theory offers a paradigm for understanding gender, sex and sexuality that avoids the conflict in order to develop solidarity among those interested in feminist theory and those interested in lesbian and gay rights. An essential guide to anyone with an interest in gender or sexuality, this accessible and comprehensive textbook carefully explains nuanced theoretical terminology and provides extensive suggested further reading to provide the reader with full and thorough understanding of both disciplines.

Gaga Feminism

Gaga Feminism
Author: J. Jack Halberstam
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2012-09-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807010995

Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new kind of feminism, this “provocative and pleasurable romp through contemporary gender politics . . . is as fun as it is illuminating” (Ariel Levy, New Yorker) Why are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies? Gaga Feminism answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos! With equal parts edge and wit, J. Jack Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage. Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new era, Halberstam deftly unpacks what the pop superstar symbolizes, to whom and why. The result is a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem—a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century—that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity. Part handbook, part guidebook, and part sex manual, Gaga Feminism is the first book to take seriously the collapse of heterosexuality and find signposts in the wreckage to a new and different way of doing sex and gender.

Feminist, Queer, Crip

Feminist, Queer, Crip
Author: Alison Kafer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2013-05-16
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0253009413

In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.

Butler Matters

Butler Matters
Author: Warren J. Blumenfeld
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351953982

Since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler has had a profound influence on how we understand gender and sexuality, corporeal politics, and political action both within and outside the academy. This collection, which considers not only Gender Trouble but also Bodies That Matter, Excitable Speech, and The Psychic Life of Power, attests to the enormous impact Butler's work has had across disciplines. In analyzing Butler's theories, the contributors demonstrate their relevance to a wide range of topics and fields, including activism, archaeology, film, literature, pedagogy, and theory. Included is a two-part interview with Judith Butler herself, in which she responds to questions about queer theory, the relationship between her work and that of other gender theorists, and the political impact of her ideas. In addition to the editors, contributors include Edwina Barvosa-Carter, Robert Alan Brookey, Kirsten Campbell, Angela Failler, Belinda Johnston, Rosemary A. Joyce, Vicki Kirby, Diane Helene Miller, Mena Mitrano, Elizabeth M. Perry, Frederick S. Roden, and Natalie Wilson.

The New Feminist Literary Studies

The New Feminist Literary Studies
Author: Jennifer Cooke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2020-12-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108673856

The New Feminist Literary Studies presents sixteen essays by leading and emerging scholars that examine contemporary feminism and the most pressing issues of today. The book is divided into three sections. This first section , 'Frontiers', contains essays on issues and phenomena that may be considered, if not new, then newly and sometimes uneasily prominent in the public eye: transfeminism, the sexual violence highlighted by #MeToo, Black motherhood, migration, sex worker rights, and celebrity feminism. Essays in the second section, 'Fields', specifically intervene into long-constituted or relatively new academic fields and areas of theory: disability studies, eco-theory, queer studies, and Marxist feminism. Finally, the third section, 'Forms', is dedicated to literary genres and tackles novels of domesticity, feminist dystopias, young adult fiction, feminist manuals and manifestos, memoir, and poetry. Together these essays provide new interventions into the thinking and theorising of contemporary feminism.

Are the Lips a Grave?

Are the Lips a Grave?
Author: Lynne Huffer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231535775

Lynne Huffer's ambitious inquiry redresses the rift between feminist and queer theory, traversing the space of a new, post-moral sexual ethics that includes pleasure, desire, connection, and betrayal. She begins by balancing queer theorists' politics of sexual freedoms with a moralizing feminist politics that views sexuality as harm. Drawing on the best insights from both traditions, she builds an ethics centered on eros, following Michel Foucault's ethics as a practice of freedom and Luce Irigaray's lyrical articulation of an ethics of sexual difference. Through this theoretical lens, Huffer examines everyday experiences of ethical connection and failure connected to sex, including queer sexual practices, sodomy laws, interracial love, pornography, and work-life balance. Her approach complicates sexual identities while challenging the epistemological foundations of subjectivity. She rethinks ethics "beyond good and evil" without underestimating, as some queer theorists have done, the persistence of what Foucault calls the "catastrophe" of morality. Elaborating a thinking-feeling ethics of the other, Huffer encourages contemporary intellectuals to reshape sexual morality from within, defining an ethical space that is both poetically suggestive and politically relevant, both conceptually daring and grounded in common sexual experience.

Feminist and Queer Legal Theory

Feminist and Queer Legal Theory
Author: Martha Albertson Fineman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317135733

Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations is a groundbreaking collection that brings together leading scholars in contemporary legal theory. The volume explores, at times contentiously, convergences and departures among a variety of feminist and queer political projects. These explorations - foregrounded by legal issues such as marriage equality, sexual harassment, workers' rights, and privacy - re-draw and re-imagine the alliances and antagonisms constituting feminist and queer theory. The essays cross a spectrum of disciplinary matrixes, including jurisprudence, political philosophy, literary theory, critical race theory, women's studies, and gay and lesbian studies. The authors occupy a variety of political positions vis-à-vis questions of identity, rights, the state, cultural normalization, and economic liberalism. The richness and vitality of feminist and queer theory, as well as their relevance to matters central to the law and politics of our time, are on full display in this volume.

Queering Femininity

Queering Femininity
Author: Hannah McCann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2017-12-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 135171726X

Queering Femininity focuses on femininity as a style of gender presentation and asks how (and whether) it can be refigured as a creative and queer style of the body. Drawing on a range of feminist texts and interviews with self-identifying queer femmes from the LGBTQ community, Hannah McCann argues that the tendency to evaluate femininity as only either oppressive or empowering limits our understanding of its possibilities. She considers the dynamic aspects of feminine embodiment that cannot simply be understood in terms of gender normativity and negotiates a path between understanding both the attachments people hold to particular gender identities and styles, and recognising the punitive realities of dominant gender norms and expectations. Topics covered range from second wave feminist critiques of beauty culture, to the importance of hair in queer femme presentation. This book offers students and researchers of Gender, Queer and Sexuality Studies a fresh new take on the often troubled relationship between feminism and femininity, a critical but generous reading that highlights the potential for an affirmative orientation that is not confined by the demands of identity politics.