Full Description
Contemporary feminist theory and postmodernism have left significant marks on how we think about practical matters, most notably the old and new forms of gender struggles that many women confront in their daily lives. The essays collected in Gender Struggles are designed to highlight those influences by addressing the following questions: What is practical feminism in a postmodern world? How does rethinking the nature and boundaries of philosophy affect the way we understand practical issues that we confront daily? What new forms of freedom, autonomy, subjectivity, social welfare, motherhood, public and private space, and political resistance have emerged from this new philosophical sense?
Together, the sixteen essays in this volume represent many different voices of feminists who boldly take up familiar, everyday concerns from unorthodox vantage points within new conceptual and theoretical frameworks. The essays in Gender Struggles address a wide range of issues in gender struggles, from the more familiar ones that, for the last thirty years, have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship, such as motherhood, beauty, and sexual violence, to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism, such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech, and queer politics, and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing, such as adoption, care work, and the home. Incorporating the latest, most "cutting-edge" material on feminism, this volume aims at reaching a broad spectrum of readers by connecting postmodern feminist theory with concrete issues that are practical and relevant to their daily lives and experiences.
Contents
Chapter 1 Doing without Knowing: Feminism's Politics of the Ordinary
Chapter 2 Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom
Chapter 3 After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment
Chapter 4 "Not My Way Sesha, Your Way, Slowly": "Maternal Thinking" in the Raising of a Child with Profound Intellectual Disabilities
Chapter 5 The Emergence of the Fetus
Chapter 6 Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity
Chapter 7 Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention
Chapter 8 Sovereign Performatives
Chapter 9 The Harm That Has No Name: Street Harassment, Embodiment, and African American Women
Chapter 10 The Sexual Harasser is a Bully, Not a Sex Fiend
Chapter 11 Suffering to be Beautiful
Chapter 12 Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality
Chapter 13 Time, Space, and Motherhoods
Chapter 14 Re-thinking Consciousness Raising: Citizenship and the Law and Politics of Adoption
Chapter 15 House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme
Chapter 16 Cyberfeminism with a Difference
