Advanced search

Eros and Psyche

Laura Kipnis on JoAnn Wypijewski, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo. What do recent sexual alarms reveal, or occlude, about America’s structural violence and unravelling social fabric?

Beating the Beadles

Susan Watkins on Kate Manne, Down Girl. A moral-philosophical argument for a feminism of the privileged, as first in line for misogynist policing.

Deeds and Misdeeds

Stories of land and gender struggles from the uplands of Tanzania, where the CCM government is bent on pushing through a land-titling programme, backed by the World Bank and Hernando de Soto, with the promise of women’s empowerment.

An Eco-Feminist Proposal

Continuing the debate in recent numbers of NLR, insights from feminist economics brought to bear on the most pressing questions of green strategy.

Notes for a Feminist Manifesto

Opposed to ‘lean in’ liberal iterations, three activist-scholars premise a militant feminism for the many, inspired by La huelga feminista of 8 March. The politics of social reproduction and the imperative of wider solidarities: the women’s struggle retooled for the multiple crises of late capitalism.

Spain’s Feminist Strike

What led millions to participate in Spain’s nationwide women’s strike—a stoppage of care work as well as wage labour? Assessment of the forces at play—movement organizing, the media, unions, parties—and the potential of 8M to tilt the political balance of forces.

Which Feminisms?

The American anti-discrimination paradigm, generated in the 1960s to neutralize the threat of radical black protests, has provided the palimpsest for global feminism for the past twenty years. How will it be challenged by the eruption of new gender protests, from Buenos Aires to Warsaw, Washington to Rome?

Contradictions of Capital and Care

Nancy Fraser tracks the reconfiguration of the relations of social reproduction under successive regimes of accumulation—‘separate spheres’, male breadwinner, dual-income household. Are the exactions of financialized capitalism now serving to undermine its lifeworld?

Gendered Violence and India’s Body Politic

Falling demand for female labour and rising dowry thresholds as factors behind mounting attacks on women; gang-rape as an instrument of caste-oppression; a culture of impunity in conflict zones; son-preference, girl-aversion and the missing. Manali Desai surveys the modalities of violence against women since Independence.

Feminism and Neoliberalism in Latin America

Verónica Schild tests Nancy Fraser’s hypothesis of an elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism against the material and cultural realities of Latin America. Shifting meanings of liberationist strategies for women’s autonomy and popular pedagogy in an epoch of free-market economics and NGOization.

Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History

Do feminism and neoliberalism share a secret affinity? Nancy Fraser on the co-option of gender politics by the ‘new spirit’ of post-Fordist capitalism, and subordination of its radical critique to a World Bank agenda. Might a neo-Keynesian shift offer prospects for socialist-feminist renewal?

Against Diversity

Tears and triumphs for race and gender have dominated discussion of the 2008 US election. Walter Benn Michaels argues that the Obama and Clinton campaigns are victories for neoliberalism, not over it—serving only to camouflage inequality.

A Liberal Provoked?

Is patriarchy a structure of power in the family or something wider? Is it largely a pre-capitalist phenomenon? What have been the principal forces dissolving it—commodity relations, liberal ideas, or radical political action? Where are negative rates of reproduction in advanced societies likely to lead? A sharp exchange of ideas beween Nicky Hart and Göran Therborn.

Of Procreation and Power

Is patriarchy a structure of power in the family or something wider? Is it largely a pre-capitalist phenomenon? What have been the principal forces dissolving it—commodity relations, liberal ideas, or radical political action? Where are negative rates of reproduction in advanced societies likely to lead? A sharp exchange of ideas beween Nicky Hart and Göran Therborn.

Feminism at a Standstill

Christine Delphy on Lynne Segal, Why Feminism? A critical look at the relations between psychoanalytic culture and women’s freedom, gender and nature—what is the fit?

Surrealism’s Feminine Side

“What is surrealism? As this anthology superbly documents, it is not a ‘French literary school from the 1920s’, but a vast and ambitious poetic, cultural and political revolutionary movement, a subversive protest, in the name of desire and imagination, against bourgeois civilization. International in its scope, historically open-ended, . . .” read more

From the Naked to the Nude

“The representation of the unadorned human body by artists—the transformation of the naked into the nude—was reckoned among the highest goals of European art from the Renaissance until well into the present century. But preconceptions of what such images should look like have changed radically during that period. . . .” read more

An Allegory from Atlantis

“Christa Wolf, Medea. A Novel in Voices, Virago Press, London 1998, HB £16.99.” read more

Fosterites and Feminists, Or 1950s Ultra-Leftists and the Invention of AmeriKKKa

“‘It suffices but to mention the chauvinist ideology which still penetrates the core and culture of our national life, rendering many people susceptible to infliction from this social disease.’—Claudia Jones” read more

Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler

“Judith Butler’s essay is welcome on several counts. It returns us to deep and important questions in social theory that have gone undiscussed for some time. And it links a reflection on such questions to a diagnosis of the troubled state of the Left in the current political . . .” read more

Biology and Gay Identity

“The last two decades have seen accelerated progress in the life sciences, especially molecular biology. On the back of this advance in knowledge, a wave of ideologists have hitched a free ride, claiming that social phenomena from alcoholism to homelessness can be explained in biological, even genetic, terms. . . .” read more

Merely Cultural

“I propose to consider two different kinds of claims that have circulated recently, representing a culmination of sentiment that has been building for some time. One has to do with an explicitly Marxist objection to the reduction of Marxist scholarship and activism to the study of culture, sometimes . . .” read more

Sterilization and Propaganda

“Late in August this year, a message was widely broadcast by the international media. Filing their reports out of Stockholm, journalists from around the world presented their readers and viewers with the news that between 1934 and 1976, tens of thousands of people—more than 90 per cent of . . .” read more

'La Querelle des Femmes' in the Late Twentieth Century

“Although this essay is about feminist challenges to certain ideas of universal citizenship, it was provoked by anger: the intense anger being expressed by some Parisian intellectuals and journalists from across the political spectrum about American politics in general and American feminism in particular. And also my own . . .” read more

From Inequality to Difference: A Severe Case of Displacement?

“When considering the shifts in left thinking over the past fifteen years, it is hard to avoid some notion of displacement: the cultural displacing the material; identity politics displacing class; the politics of constitutional reform displacing the economics of equality. Difference, in particular, seems to have displaced inequality . . .” read more

The War against Feminism in the Name of the Almighty: Making Sense of Gender and Muslim Fundamentalism

“A version of this article was presented at the 1997 annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York. I am grateful for many helpful comments and suggestions by Kevin Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Sondra Hale, Valentine Moghadam, Claire Moses, Rayna Rapp, and especially Nikki Keddie on various . . .” read more

A Rejoinder to Iris Young

“Iris Young and I seem to inhabit different worlds. In her world, there are no divisions between the social Left and the cultural Left. Proponents of cultural politics work cooperatively with proponents of social politics, linking claims for the recognition of difference with claims for the redistribution of . . .” read more

Siren/Hyphen; Or, the Maid Beguiled

“‘This female savage’, noted the missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat, in his Nouveau voyage aux îles de l’Amérique, ‘was, I believe, one of the oldest creatures in the world. It is said she was very beautiful at one time. . .’ He was describing a Carib known as Madame Ouvernard, . . .” read more

Bisexuality, Capitalism and the Ambivalent Legacy of Psychoanalysis

“By the time Freud died in London in 1939, he was already a legend. By the 1950s, he exerted a grip on many imaginations comparable to that of the great figures—Moses, Leonard, Goth, Dostoyevsky—about whom he wrote. Equally important, Frankfurt School theorists placed his work at the centre . . .” read more

Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory

“Have theorists of justice forgotten about political economy? Have we traced the most important injustices to cultural roots? Is it time for critical social theory to reassert a basic distinction between the material processes of political economy and the symbolic processes of culture? In two recent essays, Nancy . . .” read more

Meaning What We Say: Feminist Ethics and the Critique of Humanism

“This article will consider a split within current feminist theory which appears to require some declaration of loyalties. The split I have in mind is not altogether easy to describe in terms of the standard academic classification of feminist positions that prevailed in the 1970s and early 1980s—the . . .” read more

Women, Class and Family

“The problems with the study of the family by Europeanists are two-fold. Firstly the terms they use like ‘family’ are often vague and unsatisfactory for analytic purposes—though they may serve as general signposts. Secondly, there is little comparative perspective. Yet this is needed not only to define terms . . .” read more

'In the Tropics There is No Sin': Sexuality and Gay-Lesbian Movements in the Third World

“Same-sex erotic behaviour is virtually universal in human societies. Few societies that have been carefully studied have been found to yield no evidence of same-sex eroticism. One survey found that in forty-nine out of the seventy-six societies it examined, some form of same-sex sexual behaviour was socially acceptable. . . .” read more

Still Stirred by the Promise of Modernity

“Ariel Salleh’s comment is revealingly angry and abusive; she challenges my environmental credentials and my gender reflexivity; I am sexist, racist, masculinist and massaging ‘a defensive old-school socialist demeanour’. Unfortunately this leads her to a perverse reading of my paper, for example my statement that that not all . . .” read more

An Ecofeminist Bio-ethic and What Post-Humanism Really Means

“A holocaust goes on among us: tomorrow at dawn, another ancient plant or bird will be extinct; nine-hundred million people starve; dammed-up rivers run sour and parched soils crack open; continents swarm with environmental refugees; man-made viruses are unleashed; silently, an ozone hole and electro-magnetic radiation cull new . . .” read more

Myths and Realities: A Reply to Cecile Jackson

“The myths that Cecile Jackson identifies in her article in nlr 210 are that self-determination and freedom are better achieved through identification with ‘nature’ rather than separation from it; the utopian assertion of the superiority of subsistence economies and communal life; the rejection of scientific knowledge in . . .” read more

Man Bad, Woman Good? Essentialisms and Ecofeminisms

“Can socialists, radical environmentalists and feminists from other traditions safely dismiss ecofeminism? In this paper I offer both a critique of ecofeminism and a modified defence. On the one hand, I argue, ecofeminism is riddled with essentialism, and open to all the philosophical critiques levelled at any position . . .” read more

Sympathy for the Devils: Notes on Some White Guys in the Ridiculous Class War

“It seems like another era, though it was less than five years ago, when I was sitting around the Men’s Wisdom Council, grunting Ho with the guys, and studying their hodgepodge, Shake-and-Bake ‘traditions’ for a book I was writing on changing conceptions of white straight men. But now, . . .” read more

From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a 'Post-Socialist' Age

“The ‘struggle for recognition’ is fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conflict in the late twentieth century. Demands for ‘recognition of difference’ fuel struggles of groups mobilized under the banners of nationality, ethnicity, ‘race’, gender, and sexuality. In these ‘post-socialist’ conflicts, group identity supplants class interest as . . .” read more

Gender, Experience and Subjectivity: The Tilly-Scott Disagreement

“From the viewpoint of women’s history in France, Louise Tilly’s article appears to arise from a specifically ‘Anglo-American’ debate. But it does raise questions which are very relevant and current. The Anglo-American connection is not just apparent in the references, most of which are taken from works written . . .” read more

Radical Environmental Myths: A Gender Perpective

“Environmental activism has reached high levels of public visibility since late 1994 when protests over the transport of live animals at Coventry, Shoreham and Brightlingsea attracted new supporters to the animal-rights movement, revealing the growth of Green politics in unexpected social corners and the changing content of Green . . .” read more

The Quota Demand and Feminist Politics

“There is not much of a women’s movement in Germany today, in either West or East. A strong backlash can be felt from the relatively united male sector of the population against the achievements of the women’s movement over the past twenty years, and also against the hopes . . .” read more

Feminism and the 'Crisis of Rationality'

“There is a measure of consensus within feminist theory that rationalist values are in crisis—that the very arrival of women on the scene of intellectual activity necessitates a reappraisal of those values. Sometimes the claim is that conventional scientific research procedure reflects an objectifying, control-seeking attitude to its . . .” read more

Antipodean Feminism

“In the early years of this century, when thoughtful people anywhere discussed ‘the woman question’, Australia constituted the central case, the country where a progressive electorate and an engaged state were facing questions of gender equality head on. In 1902, Australia became the second country in the world . . .” read more

What Women Demand of Technology

“Looking back, my interest in technology must have begun somewhere around 1947—it started in my mother’s kitchen where, I still remember, she used to resort to ingenious fuel-saving devices in order to stretch the small sum of money that she had for feeding her six children, elderly parent-in-law . . .” read more

The Modern Women’s Movement in Italy

“Modern Italian feminism established itself in the early 1970s, expanding with remarkable strength and radicalism from its middle-class base to become a popular mobilization with an extensive network of activists throughout the organized labour movement. By the end of the decade, however, feminism was in decline; and the . . .” read more

Representing Solidarity: Class, Gender and the Crisis in Social-Democratic Sweden

“The 1991 Swedish election produced the victory of a coalition of four bourgeois parties dedicated to bringing about a ‘system shift’. Their preparedness to break with the Swedish social-democratic model stands in marked contrast to the bourgeois governments of 1976–82. The change can be understood only in relation . . .” read more

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: US Feminism Today

“Here is one picture of feminism and women’s experience in the contemporary United States: women advancing up the ladder in professions, public administration and management; making steady inroads into political office; changing attitudes and cultural images; winning legislation against discriminatory practices in education and employment; feminist scholarship transforming . . .” read more

Harsh Times

“Waves of male chauvinism roll along in history, one after the other, sometimes they resemble one another, sometimes not. The most insidious of these at the moment is in the form of what I have called the denial of mixity: the adoption of a language that symbolically ignores . . .” read more

The Rise of Masculinism in Eastern Europe

“In the recent literature on gender relations in Eastern Europe, it is quite often said that democratization has ‘opened up a space’ within which women can now seek to identify their interests and organize. That is undoubtedly the case. At the same time, however, as offering a space . . .” read more