TY - JOUR
AU - Anna, Watz,
AB - Abstract This chapter reviews a selection of books published in 2017 relevant to feminist critical and cultural theory. Although the studies reviewed are different in their focus, methods, and aims, they share a concern with the (feminist) ethics of the everyday. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Feminist Lives, which reviews Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life and bell hooks and Stuart Hall’s Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue; 3. Feminist Philosophy, which reviews Luce Irigaray’s To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being, Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, and Lori Jo Marso’s Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter; 4. Feminisms across the Globe, which reviews Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization, edited by Margaret A. McLaren; 5. Conclusion. 1. Introduction It is impossible to think of feminism in 2017 without thinking of the #MeToo movement, which swept across large parts of the globe in the autumn of that year. Starting as a hashtag on social media after allegations of sexual misconduct against film producer and entertainment mogul Harvey Weinstein, the movement quickly went viral and prompted women across a broad range of workplaces and occupational fields to share testimonies about their experiences of sexual harassment. The movement not only elicited the testimonies and support of ordinary people and high-profile celebrities alike; it also resulted in the removal of countless public figures from their positions (as well as their public shaming). In Sweden, where I am based, the ripple effects of the #MeToo movement reached all the way into the most prestigious cultural institution, the Swedish Academy, resulting in the cancellation of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. (See, for example, Brown, ‘The Ugly Scandal that Cancelled the Nobel Prize’.) While it is too early to evaluate the potential long-term and transformative effects of the #MeToo movement on feminism, we might note that it has at least provided women with a critical language to name sexism in situations where they might have previously stayed silent. As Toril Moi has argued, #MeToo has forced us to conceptualize sexuality and sexual harassment in new ways. For Moi, the #MeToo movement signifies nothing less than a new chapter in the history of women’s movements: ‘In the 1970s, feminists formed consciousness-raising groups, where women could meet and help each other find a language for their experiences. Thus, they began to formulate an analysis of women’s oppression that would transform the entire Western world. In the same way, #MeToo prompts women to articulate their own experiences’ (Moi, ‘Om alternativer till toleranse’; my translation). By comparing the #MeToo movement to the consciousness-raising feminism of the 1970s, Moi implicitly draws our attention to the familiar second-wave slogan ‘the personal is political’, which pointed up the way in which private experiences relate to larger-scale societal structures of oppression. Even though #MeToo happened too late in 2017 for any of the books reviewed in this chapter to address the phenomenon, there is nonetheless a marked insistence in many of the studies that feminism has to be lived; whether belonging to the discipline of feminist cultural studies, feminist philosophy, or postcolonial feminism, these studies posit a feminist ethics or politics as emerging in relation to how we live our everyday lives. Such a feminist ethics also crucially involves living a life that is environmentally sustainable and anti-racist. The year 2017 has in some ways seen an intensification of a reactionary spirit and backlash against feminism, as epitomized by Donald Trump’s rise to power despite the ‘pussy-grabbing’ scandal in 2016. But the year also witnessed an upsurge of feminist expressions in popular culture. While #MeToo is a case in point, it is also worth considering the huge success of Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s brilliant 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which transports us into a relentlessly patriarchal society where women have lost their rights to their intellectual and economic, as well as their bodily, freedom. Although Atwood’s dystopian novel was published more than thirty years ago (partly in response to the rise of the religious right in 1980s US), the themes, as they are translated and visualized in the series, have resonated profoundly with contemporary viewers and current political concerns. As Elizabeth Moss, who plays the protagonist Offred, declared in an interview: ‘This is happening in your real life. Wake up, people. Wake up’ (Mulkerrins, ‘Elizabeth Moss on The Handmaid’s Tale’). And people certainly seem to have woken up, at least when it comes to circulating memes and sporting T-shirts bearing the line ‘Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum’—an anti-patriarchal imperative (in pig Latin) from the novel/series, meaning ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’. For these performances of feminism to be more than merely skin-deep, we not only have to wake up and see the backlash against feminism endorsed by the growing populist right in the United States and Europe, but also the much less visible but deeply ingrained patterns that ‘direct’ (in Sara Ahmed’s use of the word) both the choices we make and the choices that are possible for us to make. Perhaps #MeToo constitutes such an awakening, which, as Moi claimed, makes us look at sexuality—and perhaps at gender—with fresh eyes. The books in the following sections have been chosen for their prominence in the field as well as in order to illustrate the scope and diversity of feminist publications in 2017. Albeit different in their focus, methods, and aims, they share, as mentioned above, a concern with living feminist, ethical, and environmentally aware lives in response to the many pressing concerns of the present. 2. Feminist Lives One of the most publicized feminist books of 2017 is doubtless Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, written in tandem with the author’s blog (feministkilljoys.com). This is a book about the navigation of everyday experiences as a feminist. To live a feminist life, according to Ahmed, does not mean to live by a dogma by ‘adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct’; instead, it means ‘asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world (in a not-feminist and antifeminist world)’. It means trying to ‘find ways to support those who are not supported or less supported by social systems’; it means questioning ‘histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls’ (p. 1). Ahmed’s definition of the term feminism is profoundly intersectional; quoting from bell hooks’s pivotal book Feminist Theory: From Margin to the Center (1984), Ahmed states that ‘“sexism, sexual exploitation, and sexual oppression” cannot be separated from racism, from how the present is shaped by colonial histories including slavery, as central to the exploitation of labor under capitalism. Intersectionality is a starting point, the point from which we must proceed if we are to offer an account of how power works’ (p. 5). Deeply grounded in feminist theory (analyses of works by bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Judith Butler stand out as particularly influential), Living a Feminist Life takes up second-wave feminism’s rallying cry ‘the personal is political’ and proposes that we make feminist theory part of our everyday lives—of how we interpret our worlds and of how we subsequently act. ‘The personal is theoretical’, Ahmed states (p. 10). Fundamental to Ahmed’s project of making feminist theory accessible and part of our everyday lives is her own citational politics: she does not ‘cite any white men’, but instead she cites ‘those who have contributed to the intellectual genealogy of feminism and antiracism’ (p. 15). This is itself a performative gesture; although Ahmed herself acknowledges that her citational policy might be ‘blunt’, she states that ‘perhaps you need to form a blunt policy in order to break a long-standing habit’ (p. 270). Moreover, her policy, she writes, ‘has given me more room to attend to those feminists who came before me. Citation is feminist memory’ (p. 15). In the first part of the book, ‘Becoming Feminist’, Ahmed invites us to follow her lived trajectory towards becoming a feminist, as she ‘began to realize what [she] already knew; that patriarchal reasoning goes all the way down, to the letter, to the bone’ (p. 4). As she eloquently explains, becoming feminist means having to revisit and reinterpret our pasts, because sexism and racism precede our acquisition of the tools with which to interpret them: ‘We become retrospective witnesses of our becoming. Sexism and racism: if they are problems we have given names, the names tend to lag behind the problems’ (p. 32). Feminist theory becomes concretely useful here, in the naming of sexism and racism. Drawing on Butler’s theories of gender formation, Ahmed aptly describes how our lives are shaped from the start by norms as if they were a traffic system; if we go in the same direction as everyone else we do not experience any friction—we are ‘carried by that flow’ (p. 45). But going along with the flow is performative; it is how gender comes into being. ‘To sustain a direction is to support a direction’, Ahmed points out: ‘The more people travel upon a path, the clearer the path becomes’ (p. 46). If we go against the direction of traffic we are experienced as difficult; as killjoys. The ‘feminist killjoy’ is by now likely Ahmed’s most well-known concept; introduced in The Promise of Happiness (2010), this concept is fundamental to both her eponymous blog, feministkilljoys.com, and Living a Feminist Life, which aptly concludes with a two-part ‘handbook’ on how to refuse to support sexist and racist norms: ‘A Killjoy Survival Kit’ and ‘A Killjoy Manifesto’. Ahmed’s feminist killjoy is a reappropriation—a ‘retooling’ as she herself calls it—of the misogynist caricature of the humourless and overly politicized feminist. By ‘retooling’ this figure for her own purposes, Ahmed’s killjoy is a feminist who, faced with oppression, refuses to stay silent; who dares to call sexism and racism by their names. Part II, titled ‘Diversity Work’, relates Ahmed’s experiences of trying to transform university environments as a feminist academic, as well as the work involved in not accepting or inhabiting norms in everyday life. Part III, ‘Living the Consequences’, explores the consequences of living a feminist life, ‘not only in terms of being worn out or worn down by what we come up against, but also in terms of how we find the energy and resources to keep going’ (p. 162). The chapter ‘Feminist Snap’ in this section stands out as particularly pertinent here. Dealing with breaking points (‘when she just can’t take it anymore’ [p. 190]), it can be read as a resonant parallel to the #MeToo ‘snap’ of 2017, which demands, as Moi suggests, that we view sexuality in a new way. This chapter also briefly touches upon Ahmed’s own ‘snap’, when she resigned from her post as director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths (University of London) in May 2016, as the manuscript of Living a Feminist Life was at the copyediting stage. The reason was the institution’s failure to address the problem of sexual harassment. She states, ‘[n]ot addressing the problem of sexual harassment is reproducing the problem of sexual harassment. By snapping you are saying: I will not reproduce a world I cannot bear, a world I do not think should be born[e]’ (p. 199). This third section ends with Ahmed’s account of her life as a feminist and a lesbian. Echoing Monique Wittig’s statement that lesbians are not women, Ahmed queers the category of woman by refusing to participate in the heterosexual norm and thus to be a woman for men, a ‘wife-man’. (Ahmed traces in the etymology of the word woman—from ‘wif [wife] and man [human being]’—‘a history of ownership’ [p. 224].) Readers familiar with Ahmed’s work will recognize many ideas, concepts, and even examples used in Living a Feminist Life. Its lasting impact as a piece of scholarship will likely be its performing of a feminist community; from the dedication, to ‘the many feminist killjoys out there’, which opens the book, to the ‘Killjoy Manifesto’ that concludes it, the book offers the reader (at least this reader) a sense of acute recognition, but, even more importantly, a sense that, as feminists who want to live feminist lives, we are part of a collective. Moreover, for students new to feminist theory this book offers a highly accessible and relevant introduction—not only to feminist theory itself, but to why it matters both inside and outside the university. Living a Feminist Life is likely not only to become required reading on all gender studies and feminist courses, but also to be a book that will have an unquestionable place on all feminist bookshelves. Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue dovetails with Ahmed’s concerns in Living a Feminist Life, both regarding its insistence on intersectional cultural analysis and the importance of lived politics. This book is a transcript of a conversation between feminist theorist bell hooks and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, both of whose bodies of works are crucially inflected through questions of race and racism. Meeting several times in the hot summer of 1996 ‘for traditional English afternoon tea at a grand hotel’, as hooks explains in her short preface (p. xv), the two thinkers move in and out of topics such as childhood, family, sexuality, love, death, play, and humour, as well as the political and educational potential of conversation itself. The format is clearly inspired by hooks’s earlier book of conversations with Cornel West, published originally in 1991 as Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Life. hooks’s preface does not explain the twenty-year delay from the time of these conversations to the publication of the book; a deferral that meant that Hall, who passed away in 2014, would never see it in print. Although Paul Gilroy’s poignant and poetic foreword does not offer an explanation either, it does situate the dialogue between hooks and Hall firmly in the cultural and political climate of 2017. As Gilroy aptly notes, the present exchange between hooks and Hall ‘can help to recover and sharpen the historical sensibility of today’s readers’ (p. x). Indeed, reading this book becomes a reflection on ‘how the language of black political culture has lately been impoverished’. Gilroy continues: ‘The insurgent poetry of social transformation has been flattened and the agenda of liberation curtailed. Today, they are being squeezed so that they can fit the minimal space provided by soundbites and hashtags, tweets and memes, likes and follows’ (p. ix). By contrast, the very form of the personal conversation, which is built upon a generous and slow listening to the other, becomes an antidote to what he calls the ‘disabling narcissism’ of our computer-mediated world (p. xvii). The dialogue between hooks and Hall is not organized around set questions, but rather follows the spontaneous logic of ordinary conversation. hooks aptly suggests the metaphor of jazz to characterize its organization, ‘in the sense that one of us says something and the other person responds, but it doesn’t have any kind of planned format’ (p. 120). A contemplation of the conversational form itself recurs in the dialogue, underscoring hooks’s and Hall’s commitment to questions of pedagogy (‘For me, conversation is a place of learning’, hooks states [p. 2]), as well as establishing the generosity and openness that permeate the exchanges. One of the topics hooks and Hall discuss is childhood and adolescence. hooks grew up in the racially segregated American South in the 1950s and early 1960s. Hall grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1930s and 1940s, where the complexities of race and patriarchy made him resolve to leave home as soon as he could; the same complexities ensured that his sister was unable to leave, and she was instead driven to a mental breakdown. The trauma of his sister’s fate haunts many of the conversations in this book. As hooks explains, ‘[t]here is the sense that the black man is able to move in the diaspora, and the black female is trapped, is caught’. ‘That is the guilt of my life’, Hall responds: ‘I got out, and she couldn’t’ (p. 20). Later in the conversation, Hall poignantly adds: ‘She was ill with colonialism. She was ill because of it, because of the way in which we live this larger structure inside the interior of our minds’ (p. 86). One particularly interesting aspect of the book is Hall’s reflection on his own lived feminism. He openly confesses that for a long time he failed to see his own patriarchal position, or what he calls an ‘unconscious resistance’ to feminism (p. 18). His real conversion to feminism happened at home, catalysed by his feminist wife (Catherine Hall, Professor of History at University College London). The realization that such an unconscious resistance was operating inside the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, of which he was director, prompted Hall eventually to leave his position in 1979: You have to appreciate that this was inside a Center that was trying to be more democratic, where against the grain, we had open discussions, had meetings and took votes that told teachers what to do. It was a very democratic place. Despite this, attempts were made within that democratization to reserve power by a certain kind of man, by a certain kind of masculine formation, and this tells you something about the level at which authority operates day by day which most people don’t talk about. […] This is the level at which it actually operates, unrolls from moment to moment, from one side to the other. (p. 19) Hall’s comment here underscores the importance of intersectional analysis—of a viewpoint that takes in questions of both race and gender (as well as class and sexuality). When he realized that he had been blind to what he calls masculine prioritization, he left his post: ‘I refused to be in the patriarchal position’ (p. 19). We might see a parallel here in Ahmed’s insistence on intersectionality as ‘the point from which we must proceed if we are to offer an account of how power works’ (p. 5). In 1996 hooks had not yet fully elaborated her astute critique of masculinity (in later books such as The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love [2004] and We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity [2004]); yet questions of race and masculinity clearly preoccupied hooks at the time of these conversations. As Hall insightfully points out, emasculation was ‘central to the whole slave, and post-slave cultures’, which has resulted in ‘the claiming of masculinity’ as an apparent site of subsequent empowerment (p. 25). hooks repeatedly comes back to the profound disappointment she has recently felt ‘in men [she] really respects, like Cornel West, around the way a certain kind of masculine anxiety blocks a vision that allows one to think in a more complex way about family, about community, and continues to return us again and again to a heterosexist vision of the nuclear family’ (p. 96). Her disappointment, which is expressed in some of the most personal passages in the book, seems to have been propelled by a resurgence in the mid-1990s of a patriarchal rhetoric in black cultural politics, and crystallized in the Million Man March (which West supported)—an all-male African American gathering in Washington DC in October 1995. As hooks laments, ‘I really felt that Cornel West’s support of The Million Man March was a tremendous political regression, because he has been so much the symbol of progressive masculinity. It was as though he was coming out in affirmation of the patriarchal, heterosexist family model. That was very distressing to me’ (p. 30). Although the conversations in Uncut Funk took place more than twenty years ago, many of them feel acutely relevant. This book will be of interest to all scholars interested in the intersections of race and gender, and its easily accessible format and tone also make it apt reading for students new to the field of intersectional feminism, and to the work of hooks and Hall. All in all, this short book offers a gentle and intimate reading experience, which educates its audience not only about what it meant to have ‘lived a feminist life’ from the 1960s and onwards, but also what it means to listen with generosity and hospitality across both gender and age divides. 3. Feminist Philosophy The Belgian-born philosopher Luce Irigaray is widely considered as one of the three doyennes of French ‘difference’ feminism (the other two being Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva) and one of the originators of the mode of writing referred to as écriture féminine, which sought to express the female body and feminine experience without depending on phallocentric language. Although she is perhaps best known for her books Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One, published in 1974 and 1977 respectively, Irigaray has since then been an extraordinarily prolific writer, having published almost twenty books since the beginning of the 1980s. While previous texts by Irigaray have been translated into English from French (occasionally by Irigaray herself; for example Sharing the World [2008]), her new book, To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being, was originally written in English. In a 1995 interview with Elizabeth Hirsh and Gary A. Olson, Irigaray characterizes her oeuvre as being divided into three parts or phases. While ‘the first phase was the most critical one’, and ‘comprehended above all Speculum of the Other Woman, This Sex which Is Not One, and to some extent An Ethics of Sexual Difference [1984]’, Irigaray describes her second phase as ‘defin[ing] those mediations that could permit the existence of a feminine subjectivity’. The third phase corresponds to Irigaray’s ‘construction of an intersubjectivity respecting sexual difference’. ‘This is something, a task’, she adds, ‘that no one has yet done, I think, something that’s completely new’ (Hirsh and Olson, ‘“Je—Luce Irigaray”’, p. 145). In Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution (1994), Irigaray explains her intellectual trajectory thus: ‘In Speculum, I wrote that to re-establish a political ethics a dual ethics is necessary, one for the male subject and one for the female subject. […] Today, I would say that a triple dialectic is necessary; one for the male subject, one for the female subject, and one for their relationship as a couple or in a community’ (p. 39). A concern with such an intersubjective space continues to undergird Irigaray’s writing. In To Be Born, she employs the motif of a newborn baby’s entry into the world to imagine a new way of being as a relation between two different (and differently sexuate) subjects. Written in Irigaray’s characteristic style, To Be Born is simultaneously feminist philosophy and poetry (a form of écriture féminine). Although many of its key ideas will be recognizable to readers versed in Irigaray’s writing (especially her more recent work, such as The Way of Love [2002] and Sharing the World [2008]), the poetic register and imagery add to its importance—not only in terms of its intellectual content but also its affective impression on the reader. Judith Still aptly refers to Irigaray’s writing style as ‘philosophical poetry, or, better, poetic philosophy—both easy and hard to read’ (‘Sharing the World’, p. 40). This ‘both easy and hard’ is perhaps most keenly felt by the reader in the way in which To Be Born swiftly moves between the concrete (at one point, it straightforwardly suggests practising yoga as a means of ‘gathering oneself together’ [p. 17]) and the abstractly poetic. By using the idea of the baby as something born out of the love and desire between a man and a woman, Irigaray wishes to illustrate a way of being emerging from relational intimacy—a new way in which to be human. The union between a man and a woman, she argues, ‘is the place of a perpetual giving birth to human being from the meeting between two breaths, two desires, two fleshes, two words. Where nothing was between them, if not air, from their attraction and their ability to take on the negative of their difference, the germ of a new human and of a world in which we can really dwell springs up’ (p. 100). Irigaray’s writing has repeatedly received charges of both essentialism and heterosexism, and readers committed to a constructivist view of gender and sexuality will find a challenge in Irigaray’s insistence on the heterosexual union, and her recurrent invocation of what she calls ‘our respective sexuate belongings’ and ‘our different natural identities’ in To Be Born (p. 95). While I do not have enough space here to go into the debates regarding Irigaray’s perceived essentialism, we might note that many feminist critics understand Irigaray’s commitment to sexuate difference as not necessarily purely biologistic. (See, for example, Jones, Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy, and Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine.) And by replacing the term ‘sexual difference’ with ‘sexuate difference’ in her later writings, Irigaray indeed signals that, for her, difference is ‘simply neither biological or sociological’ (Irigaray, Key Writings, p. 35). As Abigail Rine explains, sexuate difference is relational, in that it ‘refers to distinct, relational identities’: ‘Sexuate difference, in Irigaray’s view, is irreducible difference: neither man nor woman can be reduced to the other; there exists a negativity, an irreducible mystery or transcendence between them’ (Rine, Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction, p. 16). It is this relational space in-between that is at stake in Irigaray’s figuration of the newborn baby in To Be Born. As in Irigaray’s previous writings, language plays a crucial part in her imagining of a new way of being. The language we currently use, she states, ‘claims to say the living without the living expressing itself through it’ (p. 44). Our current language has ‘worked towards a split subject-object, instead of being the possibility of relationships between subjects, as well as of a subjectivity resulting from them’ (p. 46). In Irigaray’s discussion of how this language (the language of Western rationalism and humanism) structures how we perceive our own place in the world, we see her implicit ecological ethics. ‘The technical-scientific rationalization that henceforth governs our world’, she states, is used as an argument that the structure of such culture is in accordance with that of reason itself. However, would it not be more rational to generate a world which can develop without exhausting our resources of life but by cultivating them, instead of putting our vital reserves at the disposal of the technical-scientific machinery that intends to subject all existence on a world scale? (p. 97) The new language that Irigaray advocates in To Be Born is instead one that seems to be in harmony with nature itself: Language ought to help us to succeed in carrying out what a tree can do without resorting to any word: achieving what it is by the transformation of its roots into flowers and fruits. Our lack of continuously taking root in a ground and an atmosphere which are appropriate to us requires us to resort to language in order to compensate for them, to feed us and accompany us, from the most physical to the most spiritual aspects of our existence. (p. 47) While Irigaray is clearly referring to the need for a so-called feminine language to balance that of phallocentrism, she simultaneously seems to argue for a bodily, phenomenological encounter with nature itself in her reconception of language. She writes: the matter is one of learning how to perceive again, including through our sensory perceptions, what we meet. For example, we have to learn again not to reduce a tree to a mere generic term, but to find time to perceive what it is in the present, a presence that is specific to each individual of its species, but also to each moment of the year, not to say of the day. Identifying, consequently, does not amount to acknowledging or re-cognizing by means of code but results from the attention that we pay to the presence of the tree here and now—for example, that of a cherry tree in flower in a specific environment—and from welcoming it with our entire being. The meeting with a cherry tree in flower will produce in us a state really different, including at the level of knowledge, from the one occurring after the mention of the word ‘cherry tree’, to say nothing about the mere word ‘tree’. (pp. 66–67)To Be Born is a highly engaging text, which continues Irigaray’s ongoing project of elaborating an ethics of encounter with the other. However, to those without a basic grounding in her earlier contributions on the topic of language and of feminine as well as relational subjectivity, this book might appear oblique and bewildering. Thus, I would recommend To Be Born primarily to scholars and readers who are already fairly familiar with Irigaray’s work. Having said this, admirers of Irigaray’s recent thought and writing will not be disappointed by this poetic and, at times, rather provocative text. One of the most thought-provoking and pioneering feminist books published in 2017 is Astrida Neimanis’s beautifully written Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, which draws significantly on Irigaray’s work. Neimanis sets out to ‘reimagine embodiment from the perspective of our bodies’ wet constitution, as inseparable from […] pressing ecological concerns’ (p. 1). Her aim is a distinctly feminist one: to think of humans (and other forms of life) as ‘bodies of water’ is, for the author, a ‘challenge to phallogocentrism, the masculinist logic of sharp-edged self-sufficiency’ (p. 3). The book also explicitly challenges humanist understandings of individuality and anthropocentrism. Drawing on posthuman, phenomenological, and feminist theories (especially those of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Irigaray), Bodies of Water considers our bodies’ watery constitution both as figurative concept and as material reality. As is made clear in the introduction, for Neimanis, such figurations, or ‘embodied concepts’, are a form of ‘feminist protest’, and have the ability to make ‘radical change possible’ (p. 5). In addition to declaring Neimanis’s allegiance to posthuman feminist theorists, such as Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Braidotti, the introduction also acknowledges her indebtedness to écriture féminine—and particularly to the writing of Luce Irigaray. It is clear that it is not merely the theoretical content of écriture féminine that has influenced Neimanis; indeed, Bodies of Water is in many ways itself a beautiful piece of such writing. This particular writing style is in fact crucial to the aim of the book; when Neimanis states that the écriture féminine of Irigaray and Cixous ‘literally write[s] a new kind of embodiment into being’, this is true of Neimanis’s prose as well (p. 7). Neimanis’s aim, to reimagine embodiment, is most fully realized when the book is read as a whole; the different chapters closely complement each other and together build a whole that is even greater than its different parts. Following a rich introduction, the first chapter is concerned with mapping out the usefulness of feminist posthumanism for thinking through our lived, bodily experiences, in order to ‘attune ourselves differently to a world in which we are implicated’. ‘Posthuman phenomenology’, Neimanis suggests, ‘can be a tool for thinking with environmental matters, such as water, in order to transform the contours and limits of humanist modes of inquiry’ (p. 64). Chapter 2 frames the writing of Irigaray in relation to posthuman phenomenology. This exercise generates a ‘rather queer reading of Irigaray’, which ‘begins to untangle some of the problematic ways in which her work has been received’ (pp. 69, 74), to which I pointed in my review of To Be Born above. Building on Irigaray’s understanding of sexuate difference, this chapter proposes to read the concept of gestationality in terms beyond the (amniotic) feminine. ‘Reading Irigaray attentively’, Neimanis notes, ‘we discover that thinking through the maternal-feminine is necessary in our current social, cultural, and political epoch, but there is nonetheless still a watery space for a deeper and less determinate understanding of gestationality’ (p. 94). The book’s third chapter, fittingly called ‘Fishy Beginnings’, traces the very beginnings of humanity in the liquid origins of life on earth. This exercise illustrates a form of gestationality; as Neimanis states, ‘we owe ourselves to others, and in various ways, we all eventually pass our watery selves on’ (p. 111). Unpacking problems of colonialism and pollution, among other things, the final chapter offers an analysis of water in relation to the Anthropocene and seeks to ‘tell a different story’—one which challenges our ‘contemporary aqueous imaginaries of water as discrete, contained, and exchangeable’ (p. 156). Écriture féminine and French difference feminism nowadays tend to be considered as obsolete, as their ostensible reliance on essentialist and biologist understandings of sex and gender appear to be in conflict with more currently fashionable theories of gender and sexuality (e.g., queer theory). Neimanis’s book redresses such rejections, brilliantly showing that écriture féminine can be used in the name of an uncompromisingly queer politics. Bodies of Water is an important contribution to feminist scholarship as well as to work in the environmental humanities. This book will be an invaluable resource to scholars and students across the fields of gender studies, queer studies, philosophy, and deep ecology. It is probably fair to say that no single text has been as important for feminism as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Despite the controversies, antagonisms, and splits that occurred in French feminist circles in the 1970s as to whether or not one was born or, rather, became woman, there is no doubt that Beauvoir’s analysis of the social construction of gender has had a profound impact on second- and third-wave feminist thinkers, from material and equality feminists, such as Shulamith Firestone and Monique Wittig, to queer feminists, such as Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed. Not unexpectedly, 2017 saw the publication of several books about this feminist existentialist philosopher (for example A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer; Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Individuation, by Laura Hengehold; and A New Dawn for the Second Sex, by Karen Vintges). Here, I will focus on one: the particularly interesting Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter, by Lori Jo Marso. Politics with Beauvoir sets out to read Beauvoir as ‘a theorist of encounter’ (p. 2). This means that for Beauvoir, Marso explains, freedom can only be experienced in relation to others; the concept of freedom is thus meaningless if one is alone. This encounter with the other is not merely ‘a fact of existence’ for Beauvoir, Marso argues, but ‘the only way to produce and experience freedom’ (p. 2). The move to read Beauvoir as a philosopher of the encounter dissociates her understanding of freedom from that of her partner and fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (who focuses to a greater extent on the freedom of the individual). The encounter with the other is often fraught and difficult; Marso underscores that, for Beauvoir, ‘the space of the encounter is one of “excruciation” (we cannot possess the other) but also of “joy” (we can and should take pleasure in the fact of this impossibility)’ (p. 7). How we act (or do not act) in these moments, says Marso, ‘generates our political orientation in the world’ (p. 7). Every encounter thus offers the potential of expanding—but also of limiting—freedom. To adopt Beauvoir’s politics of encounter is, for Marso, to ‘choose to affirm freedom for all within conditions we do not and have not chosen, wherein we carve out freedom from within tight spaces and impossible choices and make that freedom grow’ (p. 9). The Second Sex is crucial to both the structure and the content of Politics with Beauvoir. Following a tightly argued introduction, Marso offers a prefatory chapter on Beauvoir’s classic, in conversation with her less well-known essay ‘Right-Wing Thought Today’ (1955); moreover, the latter part of the book uses The Second Sex as its most important interlocutor. In addition to this, Marso explicitly borrows the very structure of the book—a division into three parts respectively entitled ‘Enemies’, ‘Allies’, and ‘Friends’—from the organization of The Second Sex. Marso develops her reading of the notion of the encounter with the other across Beauvoir’s writing as well as in her engagement and conversations with other thinkers; in addition to this, she also stages imagined encounters between Beauvoir and contemporary authors and filmmakers (or, rather, between their respective texts). Part I (‘Enemies) begins by putting Beauvoir’s essay ‘An Eye for an Eye’ (1946)—on the trial of the fascist journalist Robert Brasillach—in dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the banality of evil, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). In the second chapter in this first part of the book, Marso reads Beauvoir’s ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ (1952) in conjunction with Lars von Trier’s harrowing and controversial film Antichrist (2009). Instead of interpreting Trier’s monstrous and violent female protagonist in misogynistic terms (as previous feminist critics have tended to do), Marso reads this film and its (sexualized) violence as putting patriarchal patterns of oppression on display. By locking the film in dialogue with Beauvoir’s essay on the Marquis de Sade, the chapter further argues that the film shatters patriarchal myths of femininity. The second part of the book (‘Allies’) presents us with two chapters tracing the resonances between Beauvoir’s politics and the writing of Frantz Fanon (whom she met several times; Sartre famously wrote the preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth [1963]) and the novelist Richard Wright. A key issue explored in this section is violence, and whether it must always be condemned. (Marso shows that both Beauvoir and Fanon believed that it can be justified in certain cases.) Marso also demonstrates through the coupling of Beauvoir with Wright the limitations of identity categories, stating that ‘it is oppression—not race, gender, or any other form of identity—that links us in solidarity, across identities and across borders’ (p. 145). The first chapter of Part III brings The Second Sex to bear on three films: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014), and von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013). Albeit rather different from each other (one is a feminist classic, one is a blockbuster, and one is an art-house film), the three films all feature transgressive (and, indeed, murderous) female protagonists. Moreover, all three films pass Marso’s own interpretation of the feminist ‘Bechdel test’ (which requires films to feature at least two women, who talk to each other about something other than a man; Marso’s adaptation of the rule instead asks us to ‘consider narrative and formal features of women’s lives as having an impact on how we see and talk about the collective, competing stories of women’s lives, the stories of feminism, and our ability to see anew how freedom is grasped or missed in encounters’ [p. 152]). By reading the three cinematic protagonists through the prism of The Second Sex, Marso argues that they all embody a protest against patriarchal oppression, however compromised the results of their refusals might seem. The final chapter of the book turns to the promise of freedom held out by feminist friendship and collectivity. Politics with Beauvoir offers a compelling and original account of Beauvoir’s thought. By bringing Beauvoir into conversation with a wide range of different texts, Marso provides new, sophisticated insights into the philosopher’s extensive oeuvre, as well as demonstrating its continued relevance. Politics with Beauvoir will be highly relevant for scholars versed in Beauvoir’s writing, as well as for students and scholars interested in feminist philosophy and ethics, as well as postcolonial studies and feminist film studies. 4. Feminisms across the Globe Responding to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s call for an inclusive and decolonial feminist politics (see, for example, Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, and Mohanty and Alexander, ‘Cartographies of Knowledge and Power’), the essays in Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization, edited by Margaret A. McLaren, provide a timely comment on what is at stake in the project of a decolonial and transnational feminism in a neoliberal and globalized age. In her insightful preface, Mohanty herself comments on the increased urgency of this project in 2017—a moment characterized by geopolitical climate destruction; militarized national borders; massive displacement of peoples (war, climate, and economic refugees); proliferation of corporatist, racist, misogynist cultures; lean-in and glass ceiling (liberal) feminisms; the decimation of labor movements, and the rise of right-wing, proto-fascist governments around the world (Modi in India, Erdovan [sic] in Turkey, Trump in the United States). (p. vii) The volume sets out to answer a set of questions formulated in McLaren’s eloquent and theoretically rich introduction, such as ‘Which methodologies promote a decolonized transnational feminism?’, ‘What strategies of resistance work against the force of neoliberal globalization?’, and ‘How do we (feminists) create networks of solidarity transnationally?’ (p. 1). The book consists of ten chapters organized into four sections exploring perspectives ranging from philosophy and human rights to citizenship and solidarity. All in all, these chapters successfully map and address the most imperative tasks involved in the decolonization of feminism in the contemporary moment. Linda Martín Alcoff, in her chapter ‘Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy’, frames feminist philosophy as a necessarily decolonializing practice. Taking issue not only with singular understandings of gender, but also with blanket dismantling or erasures of gendered identity, Alcoff states that ‘a uniform take on gender deconstruction needs a decolonial critique’. She continues, ‘[i]f gender identities are in every case mediated by other vectors of identity categories and communities—changing their form and their degree of intensity—then we need to think through what the intersectional mediations of gender mean for our universal deconstructive politics’ (p. 23). A commitment to decolonizing feminist philosophy means, for Alcoff, to ‘do philosophy differently’ (p. 34): to challenge static conceptualizations pertaining both to deconstruction and gender universalism. McLaren, in her chapter ‘Decolonizing Rights: Transnational Feminism and “Women’s Rights as Human Rights”’, argues that human rights discourse has tended to focus on legal and political rights, thus marginalizing the often more crucial concerns of economic and social inequality. Demonstrating how rights discourse emerges from Eurocentric, liberal, and individualist notions, McLaren points out that a human rights approach to women’s equality can only ‘make changes within the existing system, rather than changing the system’, and as such ‘fails to challenge deeply embedded theoretical and conceptual assumptions, including the legacies of colonialism, which privilege individuals and abstract them from social systems and political and economic concerns’ (p. 87). McLaren concludes by warning that if feminists are to adopt a human rights discourse, it must be done both ‘critically and ambivalently’ (p. 96). Kelly Oliver’s pertinent contribution adds to McLaren’s analysis of the rights discourse in focusing on a social group that is effectively cut off from rights or local support systems: refugee women. Drawing on the ethical philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben, Oliver shows that ‘[t]he special plight of women refugees across the globe presents various challenges to any universal conception of human rights or access to rights, along with challenges to any concept of universal feminism or essentialist notion of gender identity’ (p. 193). In an illuminating discussion of transnational dialogue and solidarity, Barbara Fultner argues for a conception of cultures as ‘open systems’ (p. 203). Employing Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic notion of horizon, Fultner suggests that, as open systems, cultures can enter into dialogue with each other, thus producing a shared understanding that transforms both interlocutors. ‘Transnational feminist dialogue’, Fultner states, ‘should not only be sensitive to interlocutors’ backgrounds (i.e. their histories and genealogies) but also articulate how these differ from or interlink with one’s own (i.e. develop a language of perspicuous contrast). Thus it should be transformative—not only of individual identities but of collective ones as well’ (p. 215). The articles in this volume together epitomize the imperative not to define feminism in the singular, but rather to think in terms of a plurality of feminisms. With its wide and interdisciplinary scope and unflinching attention to contemporary social and political matters, Decolonizing Feminism will become required reading for students and scholars of transnational and postcolonial feminism as well as a key reference work for scholars of feminist theory more broadly. 5. Conclusion The books reviewed in this chapter demonstrate that feminist critical and cultural theory in 2017 was a richly diverse, dynamic, and reinvigorating field. Addressing pressing social, environmental, and ethical matters, the books in focus here open up new, refreshing ways of thinking about our place in relation both to our human and our non-human others. Moreover, many of these books stress the importance of a lived feminist politics. As such we might see them as part of a resurgent feminist spirit, germinating in everyday experiences both inside and outside academia. Books Reviewed Ahmed Sara , Living a Feminist Life ( Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7808 2236 3194. hooks bell , Hall Stuart , Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue ( London : Routledge , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7811 3810 2101. Irigaray Luce , To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being ( Basingstoke : Palgrave , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7833 1939 2226. Marso Lori Jo , Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter ( Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7808 2236 9707. McLaren Margaret A. , ed., Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization ( London : Rowman & Littlefield International , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7817 8660 25 96. Neimanis Astrida , Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology ( London : Bloomsbury Academic , 2017 ). ISBN 9 7814 7427 5392. References Ahmed Sara , The Promise of Happiness ( Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2010 ). Arendt Hannah , Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil ( New York : Viking , 1963 ). Atwood Margaret , The Handmaid’s Tale ( Toronto : McClelland and Stewart , 1985 ). Beauvoir Simone de , ‘An Eye for an Eye’, in Philosophical Writings , ed. by Simons Margaret A. ( Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 2004 ), pp. 245 – 60 . Beauvoir Simone de , ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, in Philosophical Writings , ed. by Simons Margaret A. ( Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 2004 ), pp. 44 – 101 . Beauvoir Simone de , ‘Right-Wing Thought Today’, in Philosophical Writings , ed. by Simons Margaret A. ( Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 2004 ), pp. 113 – 93 . Beauvoir Simone de , The Second Sex, trans. by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier ( New York : Vintage , 2011 ). Brown Andrew ‘The Ugly Scandal that Cancelled the Nobel Prize’, The Guardian, 17 July 2018, <https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/17/the-ugly-scandal-that-cancelled-the-nobel-prize-in-literature> [accessed 21 Aug. 2018]. Fanon Frantz , The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington ( London : Penguin , 1990 ). Hengehold Laura , Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Individuation: The Problem of the Second Sex ( Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press , 2017 ). Hengehold Laura , Bauer Nancy , eds, A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir ( Oxford : Wiley-Blackwell , 2017 ). Hirsh Elizabeth , Olson Gary A. , ‘“Je—Luce Irigaray”: A Meeting with Luce Irigaray’, in Women Writing Culture , ed. by Hirsh Elizabeth , Olson Gary A. ( Albany, NY : State University of New York Press , 1995 ), pp. 141 – 68 . hooks bell , West Cornel , Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Life ( Boston : South End Press , 1991 ). hooks bell , Feminist Theory: From Margin to the Center ( Boston : South End Press , 1984 ). hooks bell , We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity ( New York and London : Routledge , 2004 ). hooks bell , The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love ( New York : Atria Books , 2004 ). Irigaray Luce , Key Writings , ed. by Irigaray Luce ( London : Continuum , 2004 ). Irigaray Luce , Sharing the World ( London : Continuum , 2008 ). Irigaray Luce , Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. by Gill Gillian C. ( Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press , 1985 ). Irigaray Luce , Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, trans . by Montin Karin ( London : Routledge , 1994 ). Irigaray Luce , This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. by Porter Catherine , Burke Carolyn ( Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press , 1985 ). Irigaray Luce , The Way of Love , trans. by Bostic Heidi , Pluháček Stephen ( London : Continuum , 2002 ). Jones Rachel , Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy ( Cambridge : Polity Press , 2011 ). Mohanty Chandra Talpade , Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity ( Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2003 ). Mohanty Chandra Talpade , Jacqui Alexander M. , ‘Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Racial Praxis’, in Critical Transnational Feminist Practice , ed. by Lock Swarr Amanda , Nagar Richa ( Albany, NY : SUNY Press , 2010 ), pp. 23 – 45 . Moi Toril , ‘Om alternativer till toleranse’, Morgenbladet, 1 June 2018, <https://morgenbladet.no/ideer/2018/06/om-alternativer-til-toleranse> [accessed 21 Aug. 2018]. Mulkerrins Jane , ‘Elizabeth Moss on The Handmaid’s Tale: “This is happening in real life. Wake up, people”’, The Guardian, 5 May 2018, <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/may/05/elisabeth-moss-handmaids-tale-this-is-happening-in-real-life-wake-up-people> [accessed 21 Aug. 2018]. Rine Abigail , Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction ( London : Bloomsbury , 2013 ). Still Judith , ‘Sharing the World: Luce Irigaray and the Hospitality of Difference’ , L’Ésprit Créateur , 52.3 ( 2012 ), 40 – 51 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Vintges Karen , A New Dawn for the Second Sex: Women’s Freedom Practices in World Perspective ( Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press , 2017 ). Whitford Margaret , Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine ( London : Routledge , 1991 ). Films and Television Series Cited Antichrist, dir. by Lars von Trier (Rémi Burah et al., 2009 ). Gone Girl, dir. by David Fincher (Ceán Chaffin et al., 2014 ). The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017– ). Jeanne Dielman, dir. by Chantal Akerman (Guy Cavagnac et al., 1975 ). Nymphomaniac, dir. by Lars von Trier (Louise Vesth, 2013 ). © The English Association (2018) All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - 19Feminisms
JO - The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
DO - 10.1093/ywcct/mby019
DA - 2018-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/19feminisms-gnd2UQqk7z
SP - 368
VL - 26
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -