A collection of work by leading feminist scholars, engaging with the question of the political status of poststructuralism within feminism, and affirming the contemporary debate over theory as politically rich and consequential.

Where is feminist state theory today? This book offers novel insights into social science debates by analyzing feminist theories of the state. The themes are developed within a comparative perspective. Focusing on devolution in Scotland and the European Union, the book further explores how feminist state theories conceive multi-level governance.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides a rich overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts that feminist theorists have developed to analyze the known world. Featuring leading feminist theorists from diverse regions of the globe, this collection delves into forty-nine subject areas, demonstrating the complexity of feminist challenges to established knowledge, while also engaging areas of contestation within feminist theory. Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory, the chapters offer innovative analyses of topics central to social and political science, cultural studies and humanities, discourses associated with medicine and science, and issues in contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization. The handbook identifies limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women's and men's lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.

Publisher Description

In Feminism in Coalition Liza Taylor examines how US women of color feminists’ coalitional politics provides an indispensable resource to contemporary political theory, feminist studies, and intersectional social justice activism. Taylor charts the theorization of coalition in the work of Bernice Johnson Reagon, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, the Combahee River Collective, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and others. For these activist-scholars, coalition is a dangerous struggle that emerges from a shared political commitment to undermining oppression and an emphasis on self-transformation. Taylor shows how their coalitional understandings of group politics, identity, consciousness, and scholarship have transformed how activists and theorists build alliances across race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, and ethnicity to tackle systems of domination. Their coalitional politics enrich current discussions surrounding the impetus and longevity of effective activism, present robust theoretical accounts of political subject formation and political consciousness, and demonstrate the promise of collective modes of scholarship. In this way, women of color feminists have been formulating solutions to long-standing problems in political theory. By illustrating coalition’s vitality to a variety of practical and philosophical interdisciplinary discussions, Taylor encourages us to rethink feminist and political theory.

Calling for inclusion and dialogue, these essays by an international group of feminist scholars and activists stress the need to put into relation seemingly discrepant approaches to reality and to scholarship in order to build coalitions across the usual North/South and East/West divides. This diverse group of authors, who spent fourteen weeks working collaboratively, dispense with unity and seek instead to use dialogue and difference in their production of knowledge about effective political action. The dialogues materialized here among women's movements that have emerged within different contexts and cosmologies take feminisms' challenges to contemporary corporate globalization in new empirical and theoretical directions.

A powerful critique of the stories that feminists tell about the past four decades of Western feminist theory.

With intellectual reference points that include Foucault and Freud, Wittig, Kristeva and Irigaray, this is one of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years and is perhaps the essential work of contemporary feminist thought.

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.

Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes features the work of feminist scholars who are centrally engaged with Hobbes’s ideas and texts and who view Hobbes as an important touchstone in modern political thought. Bringing together scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, history, political theory, and English literature who embrace diverse theoretical and philosophical approaches and a range of feminist perspectives, this interdisciplinary collection aims to appeal to an audience of Hobbes scholars and nonspecialists alike. As a theorist whose trademark is a compelling argument for absolute sovereignty, Hobbes may seem initially to have little to offer twenty-first-century feminist thought. Yet, as the contributors to this collection demonstrate, Hobbesian political thought provides fertile ground for feminist inquiry. Indeed, in engaging Hobbes, feminist theory engages with what is perhaps the clearest and most influential articulation of the foundational concepts and ideas associated with modernity: freedom, equality, human nature, authority, consent, coercion, political obligation, and citizenship. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Joanne Boucher, Karen Detlefsen, Karen Green, Wendy Gunther-Canada, Jane S. Jaquette, S. A. Lloyd, Su Fang Ng, Carole Pateman, Gordon Schochet, Quentin Skinner, and Susanne Sreedhar.