What is a Woman?: And Other Essays (review)

Journal of International Women S Studies, 2009

Perspectives, 2004

2012

NWSA Journal, 2001

2005

This article will attempt to illuminate what 'being feminist' means by addressing three, tightly interwoven, issues. First, and most fundamental, is the question: what is the 'woman' who is the subject of feminism? The second concerns the nature of feminism in its various guises. The third considers more explicitly feminism's uneasy relationship with identity politics. Beforehand, though, some groundclearing is necessary. My starting point is to make explicit the feminist identity from which I write. This is necessary for two, related, reasons. One is that it is common for feminist writers deliberately to weave personal experience into academic texts so as to situate their own knowledge and to challenge 'masculine myths of neutrality that have characterised [theory's] truth claims'. 3 In addition, feminist authors tread a fine line between, on the one hand, speaking 'for' feminism and women as if they were undifferentiated categories to be represented as 'we' and, on the other, collapsing into a solipsistic 'I' that speaks only from personal experience. While this article is not about my personal experience, my interpretation of feminism inevitably reflects my own position as a woman and a feminist. I write as a white, heterosexual, middle-class British woman whose feminism was forged during the 1970s. My feminist activism was channelled mainly through the Women's Liberation Campaign for Legal

American Studies International, 2001

This essay is a survey of some issues that have invigorated theoretical contests among American feminists, especially in the last two decades. I review these debates and suggest that American feminist writers are contemplating deep and important matters that have arisen, or can emerge, in contemporary American society. Counter-arguments to the project of contesting and the general feminist engagement with postmodernism, presented by both feminists and non-feminists in America, are also surveyed. One can note, on the whole, that for many American feminists, the so-called "theory-wars" have been worth fighting for they are being perceived as contributing to an evolving feminist culture and politics.

Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2019

Narrative-works are the lifeblood of femme scholarship. Through this medium, femmes write themselves into existence. In this article, I begin with my own story of femme and examine the backdrop of patriarchal femininity that positions pieces of me as being at odds, disjointed, and something needing to be reconciled. Indeed, many current frameworks and dominant framings for understanding femininity create disjunctures needing to be reconciled and fail to include diverse feminine perspectives in ways that constitute epistemic and hermeneutical injustices. Using my own femme becoming as a guide, I offer this process of femme reconcilement as a framework that can be applied to dislodge feminine normativity and challenge the assumptions researchers make about femininity within their work. In this article I highlight the importance of femme epistemologies; the importance of valuing feminine knowledge, and how the absented femme highlights the continued god-trick of objectivity. Here, I discuss how femme narratives can be used to bolster femme as theory and critical analytic. This situated knowledge holds the possibility to inform novel methodological frameworks and to substantially shift the way researchers think about femininity and feminine people.

Canadian Woman Studies Journal: Feminist Gift Economy, A Materialist Alternative to Patriarchy and Capitalism, 2019

Review of the book Feminism: A brief introduction to the ideas, debates, and politics of the movement, by D. Cameron