Feminism and the Politics of 'Resilience'

Feminism and the Politics of 'Resilience' PDF Author: Angela McRobbie
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509525084
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
In this short and provocative book, cultural studies scholar Angela McRobbie develops a much-needed feminist account of neoliberalism. Highlighting the ways in which popular culture and the media actively produce and sustain the cultural imaginary for social polarization, she shows how there is substantial pressure on women not just to be employed, but to prioritize working life. She fiercely challenges the media gatekeepers who shape contemporary womanhood by means of exposure and public shaming, and pays particular attention to the endemic nature of anti-welfarism as it is addressed to women, thereby reducing the scope for feminist solidarity. In this theoretically rich and deep analysis of current cultural processes, McRobbie introduces a series of concepts including 'visual media governmentality' and the urging of women into work as 'contraceptive employment'. Foregrounding a triage of ideas as the 'perfect-imperfect-resilience' McRobbie conveys some of the key means by which consumer capitalism attempts to manage the threats posed by the new feminisms. She proposes that 'resilience' emerges as a compromise, as hard-edged neoliberalism proffers the option of a return to liberal feminism. A lively and devastating critique, Feminism and Neoliberalism offers a much-needed wake-up call. It is essential reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, media, sociology, and women's and gender studies.

Feminism and the Politics of 'Resilience'

Feminism and the Politics of 'Resilience' PDF Author: Angela McRobbie
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9781509525065
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
In this short and provocative book, cultural studies scholar Angela McRobbie develops a much-needed feminist account of neoliberalism. Highlighting the ways in which popular culture and the media actively produce and sustain the cultural imaginary for social polarization, she shows how there is substantial pressure on women not just to be employed, but to prioritize working life. She fiercely challenges the media gatekeepers who shape contemporary womanhood by means of exposure and public shaming, and pays particular attention to the endemic nature of anti-welfarism as it is addressed to women, thereby reducing the scope for feminist solidarity. In this theoretically rich and deep analysis of current cultural processes, McRobbie introduces a series of concepts including 'visual media governmentality' and the urging of women into work as 'contraceptive employment'. Foregrounding a triage of ideas as the 'perfect-imperfect-resilience' McRobbie conveys some of the key means by which consumer capitalism attempts to manage the threats posed by the new feminisms. She proposes that 'resilience' emerges as a compromise, as hard-edged neoliberalism proffers the option of a return to liberal feminism. A lively and devastating critique, Feminism and Neoliberalism offers a much-needed wake-up call. It is essential reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, media, sociology, and women's and gender studies.

Resilience & Melancholy

Resilience & Melancholy PDF Author: Robin James
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1782794611
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
When most people think that “little girls should be seen and not heard,” a noisy, riotous scream can be revolutionary. But that’s not the case anymore. (Cis/Het/White) Girls aren’t supposed to be virginal, passive objects, but Poly-Styrene-like sirens who scream back in spectacularly noisy and transgressive ways as they “Lean In.” Resilience is the new, neoliberal feminine ideal: real women overcome all the objectification and silencing that impeded their foremothers. Resilience discourse incites noisy damage, like screams, so that it can be recycled for a profit. It turns the crises posed by avant-garde noise, feminist critique, and black aesthetics into opportunities for strengthening the vitality of multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy (MRWaSP). Reading contemporary pop music – Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Calvin Harris – with and against political philosophers like Michel Foucault, feminists like Patricia Hill Collins, and media theorists like Steven Shaviro, /Resilience & Melancholy/ shows how resilience discourse manifests in both pop music and in feminist politics. In particular, it argues that resilient femininity is a post-feminist strategy for producing post-race white supremacy. Resilience discourse allows women to “Lean In” to MRWaSP privilege because their overcoming and leaning-in actively produce blackness as exception, as pathology, as death. The book also considers alternatives to resilience found in the work of Beyonce, Rihanna, and Atari Teenage Riot. Updating Freud, James calls these pathological, diseased iterations of resilience “melancholy.” Melancholy makes resilience unprofitable, that is, incapable of generating enough surplus value to keep MRWaSP capitalism healthy. Investing in the things that resilience discourse renders exceptional, melancholic siren songs like Rihanna’s “Diamonds” steer us off course, away from resilient “life” and into the death.

Badass Feminist Politics

Badass Feminist Politics PDF Author: Sarah Jane Blithe
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978826583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Badass Feminist Politics explores gender, difference, feminist methods, stigma, social movements, mediated communication, intersectional feminist theory and pedagogy. It is a testament to resilience, resistance, and forward thinking about what these themes mean for new feminist agendas.

Radiating Feminism

Radiating Feminism PDF Author: Beth Berila
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100009636X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
Radiating Feminism: Resilience Practices to Transform Our Inner and Outer Lives is a practical guide to embodying feminist principles not just in our politics, but also in our very ways of being. Bringing together intersectional feminism with mindful reflection and embodied practice, this book offers practical wisdom for living by feminist principles in our daily lives. Each chapter includes practices and interactive activities to help navigate common challenges along feminist journeys. The book also draws on wisdom from feminist leaders and contemporary conversations from social justice movements. Both inspiring and guiding, the book will provide readers with the skills to cultivate resilience to face the many barriers to feminist social transformation. Radiating Feminism will be of use to students of Gender Studies, Social Work, Psychology, Community Health, and the Social Sciences, as well as anyone with a longstanding or fresh commitment to feminism and social justice.

Feminist Rhetorical Resilience

Feminist Rhetorical Resilience PDF Author: Elizabeth A Flynn
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 0874218799
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Although it is well known in other fields, the concept of “resilience” has not been addressed explicitly by feminist rhetoricians. This collection develops it in readings of rhetorical situations across a range of social contexts and national cultures. Contributors demonstrate that resilience offers an important new conceptual frame for feminist rhetoric, with emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals disempowered by social or material forces. Collectively, these chapters create a robust conception of resilience as a complex rhetorical process, redeeming it from its popular association with individual heroism through an important focus on relationality, community, and an ethics of connection. Resilience, in this volume, is a specifically rhetorical response to complicated forces in individual lives. Through it, Feminist Rhetorical Resilience widens the interpretive space within which rhetoricians can work.

Women in Exile

Women in Exile PDF Author: Mahnaz Afkhami
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813915432
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
If, as has been said, exiles, refugees, and emigrants are the defining figures for the twentieth century, the thirteen women of Women in Exile give unforgettable life to the metaphor. Their stories offer a rare and special opportunity to witness the harrowing experience of flight and dislocation and to marvel at the resilience of the human spirit.

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption PDF Author: Rafia Zakaria
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324006625
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights. Upper-middle-class white women have long been heralded as “experts” on feminism. They have presided over multinational feminist organizations and written much of what we consider the feminist canon, espousing sexual liberation and satisfaction, LGBTQ inclusion, and racial solidarity, all while branding the language of the movement itself in whiteness and speaking over Black and Brown women in an effort to uphold privilege and perceived cultural superiority. An American Muslim woman, attorney, and political philosopher, Rafia Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism in Against White Feminism, centering women of color in this transformative overview and counter-manifesto to white feminism’s global, long-standing affinity with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals. Covering such ground as the legacy of the British feminist imperialist savior complex and “the colonial thesis that all reform comes from the West” to the condescension of the white feminist–led “aid industrial complex” and the conflation of sexual liberation as the “sum total of empowerment,” Zakaria follows in the tradition of intersectional feminist forebears Kimberlé Crenshaw, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Zakaria ultimately refutes and reimagines the apolitical aspirations of white feminist empowerment in this staggering, radical critique, with Black and Brown feminist thought at the forefront.

The Future of Difference

The Future of Difference PDF Author: Sabine Hark
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788738020
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
How feminism is used to attack immigration in Europe In recent years, opponents of 'political correctness' have surged to prominence from both left and right, shaping a discourse in which perpetrators are 'defiantly' imagined as Muslim refugees, i.e. outsiders/others, while victims are identified as 'our women'. This poisonous and regressive situation grounds Hark and Villa's theorisation of contemporary regimes of power as engaged primarily in the violent production of difference. In this moment, they argue, the logic of 'differentiate and rule' thoroughly permeates the social; our entire 'way of life' is premised on endless subtle hierarchical distinctions, which determine whole populations' attitudes, feelings and actions. How can learn to value difference, sabotaging all attempts to enlist difference in the service of domination? Hark and Villa make a compelling case for the urgent necessity for a detoxification of feminism as a matter of urgency; and for an ethical mode of living-with the world, that is, living with alterity.

Critical Condition

Critical Condition PDF Author: Susan Gubar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231502580
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
Is feminism dead, as has been claimed by notable members of the media and the academy? Has feminist knowledge, with its proliferation of methodologies and fields, been purchased at the price of power? Are the conflicts among feminists evidence of self-destructive infighting or do they herald the emergence of innovative modes of inquiry? Given a feminism now ensconced within higher education as specialized or fractious scholarship, Susan Gubar's Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century demonstrates that an invigorated concentration on activism and artistry can accentuate not the clinical or disparaging meaning of "critical" but its sense of compelling urgency and irreverent vitality. As a pioneer of feminist studies—and the object of some of the more rancorous criticism lodged against early feminist scholars—Gubar stands in a unique position to comment on current dilemmas. Moving beyond defensiveness produced by generational rivalry, the impasse propagated by smug deployments of identity politics, and the obscurity of poststructuralist theory, she claims that the very controversies that undermine feminism's unity also prove its resilience. Gubar begins by considering the volatile impact of gender on recent redefinitions of race, sexuality, religion, and class proposed by four important groups in contemporary feminism: African-American performance and visual artists, lesbian creative writers, Jewish-American women, and newly institutionalized female academics. She then addresses major divisions—including the rifts between various area studies and women's studies, as well as strains between generations—that both threaten and invigorate feminist inquiry. Gubar's forays into art and activism, politics, and the profession provide a sometimes distressing, sometimes comical, sometimes optimistic view of feminism emerging from a time of contention into a lively period of pluralized perspectives and disciplines.