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He said: There was, in Medina, a shameless woman called Sallama al-Khadra (the Green). It happened that she was caught with an effeminate man while she was fucking him with a dildo; so she was hauled up before the governor, who punished her with a beating and had her paraded on a camel. A man who knew her looked at her and said: ‘What is this, oh Sallama?’ So she said: ‘By God, shut up! There is nothing in the world more oppressive than men. You have been fucking us since the beginning of all time, and when we've fucked you one single time you are killing us!’ – From Jahez, Rasa'il (Epistles) In the last chapter, I outlined the three most widely recognised approaches within feminist philosophy: liberal, Marxist and radical feminism. I warned against the reification of these categories, and stated my intention to focus on those places where real disagreements between feminists emerge most clearly and concretely. Among those places, there is no place like the home. Radical, liberal and Marxist feminisms are associated with quite different attitudes to what has traditionally been called the ‘private sphere’, clashing over issues such as the unpaid labour of women in the home, the rearing of children, and the institutions of marriage and the family. Radical feminists have accused Marxist feminists not so much of getting these issues wrong, but of treating them as unimportant – tending to privilege the role and perspective of the (male) waged industrial worker above all else. Some Marxist feminists have sought to remedy this by emphasising the role of unpaid ‘reproductive’ labour (mostly performed by women in the home) in sustaining capitalism and producing wealth. We briefly encountered, in the last chapter, the preferred solution of socialist feminist and economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman: the collectivisation of household labour. Meanwhile, those usually considered ‘radical feminists’ have produced a wide array of controversial suggestions, some of which will be mentioned in the course of this chapter. Liberal feminists, for their part, while stopping short of calling for the abolition of the family (a demand notoriously characteristic of some radical feminists), have been keen to advocate its reform – breaking with the traditional liberal view of the ‘private sphere’ as a realm of ‘individual choice’ into which politics should not intrude.

Brings together international law's most outspoken 'discontents' to expose international law's complicity in the ongoing economic and financial global crises.

Dialogue has become one of the most central and intensely debated issues in political and moral philosophy. The implications that these debates have for our understanding of gender and identity are particularly important, though they are neither clear nor uncontested. Feminist scholars have, indeed, been rather ambivalent about the role and nature of dialogue. Dialogue is generally seen as a crucial element of an emancipatory approach, for it can provide women with a voice and thus create the preconditions for engendering a more just social and political order. But many feminist scholars are, at the same time, sceptical about how prevailing approaches to dialogue are conceptualised. They are particularly worried about framing dialogue as an effort to reach a global consensus, for many previous modern attempts to establish universal norms have been based on explicit but linguistically masked value systems that define the male as norm and the female as deviant. To understand the importance of these linkages between dialogue, identity and gender it is necessary to take a step back and consider how dialogue became such a central philosophical issue in the first place. The history of philosophy is sometimes divided into three general periods: the ontological, the subjectivist, and the linguistic. The ancient philosophies and world religions provided comprehensive accounts of the cosmos in which humans were situated; modern philosophy was born with the ‘discovery’ of subjectivity by thinkers such as Descartes and Kant; while present-day philosophy is defined by ‘the linguistic turn’, a recognition that language practices set out what we can know about ourselves and the world. As with all such categorisations, this one is contentious, and closer examination of individual theorists and traditions reveals a complexity that confounds the threefold division. It does, however, help us understand why dialogue has become such a dominant concept in contemporary political theory.

Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1998 'for his contributions in welfare economics'. Although his primary academic appointments have been mostly in economics, Sen is also an important and influential social theorist and philosopher. His work on social choice theory is seminal, and his writings on poverty, famine, and development, as well his contributions to moral and political philosophy, are important and influential. Sen's views about the nature and primacy of liberty also make him a major contemporary liberal thinker. This volume of essays on aspects of Sen's work is aimed at a broad audience of readers interested in social theory, political philosophy, ethics, public policy, welfare economics, the theory of rational choice, poverty, and development. Written by a team of well-known experts, each chapter provides an overview of Sen's work in a particular area and a critical assessment of his contributions to the field.

Part I of this Article explores possible definitions of feminist scholarship and the role of feminist theory in scholarship, using tax as an example. Part II examines the current usage of feminist tax articles and the effect of the feminist tax scholarship label. Part III discusses the value of feminist tax scholarship to tax and non-tax legal scholarship. The Article concludes that, despite confusion as to the exact definition, some tax articles are labeled “feminist tax scholarship.” This label can have both positive and negative effects on whether these articles are read and how they are perceived. Independent of the label, the true value of this scholarship lies in its ability to enrich both tax and non-tax scholarship. The feminist aspect deepens our understanding of tax by analyzing it from a nontraditional perspective; its tax aspect has the potential, little used as yet, to broaden other disciplines’ understanding of how tax issues affect their areas.

So when [Nel and Sula] met, first in those chocolate halls and next through the ropes of the swing, they felt the ease and comfort of old friends. Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. - Toni Morrison, Sula Let's face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God's “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented. - Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” In the penultimate paragraph of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), Jacobs confides, “reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.” Cherishing the freedom that she has secured for both herself and her children, Jacobs nevertheless laments the fact that “the dream of [her] life is not yet realized,” for she does “not sit with [her] children in a home of [her] own” (p. 664). Jacobs's narrative differs from both the autobiographical narratives of formerly enslaved African American men and the sentimental novels of Anglo- American and European women. Whereas Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1845) ends with him marrying and securing a home, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) culminates in an idealized bourgeois marriage in which happiness and prosperity are gained.

“Women's movement” is a term widely used by journalists, activists, politicians, scholars, and citizens alike; most people have a general idea of the concept's meaning. Despite the widespread attention to the term since the 1970s, social science is in the early stages of conceptualization (Beckwith 2005a). A quick glance at scholarly work on women's movements indicates there is agreement on neither a general definition nor how the concept should be used in empirical research. In fact, researchers seldom give an explicit definition of the term. Can we be sure that women's movement scholars are talking about the same thing? If not, studies and theories of women's movements risk being inaccurate and perhaps even unintentionally misleading. Our own research on women's movements and women's policy agencies reveals a debate among scholars that has left unanswered many questions about how to use women's movements as a concept for good research. The more notable ones include: How can movement characteristics be measured? How can movement impact be measured? What distinguishes women participants in government and politics from the movement? Can men be in women's movements? Is “women's movement” a singular or collective noun, or are there many movements? Are women's movements defined by their mobilization of women exclusively, or by their goals, or both? For example, are women's peace movements women's movements? The absence of a consensus about the conceptual use of “women's movement” is quite similar for the related concept “feminist movement/feminism,” but with a controversial twist.

Feminism has transformed the academic study of literature, fundamentally altering the canon of what is taught and setting new agendas for literary analysis. In this authoritative history of feminist literary criticism, leading scholars chart the development of the practice from the Middle Ages to the present. The first section of the book explores protofeminist thought from the Middle Ages onwards, and analyses the work of pioneers such as Wollstonecraft and Woolf. The second section examines the rise of second-wave feminism and maps its interventions across the twentieth century. A final section examines the impact of postmodernism on feminist thought and practice. This book offers a comprehensive guide to the history and development of feminist literary criticism and a lively reassessment of the main issues and authors in the field. It is essential reading for all students and scholars of feminist writing and literary criticism. • An up to date, authoritative overview of the state of the field • Coverage of feminist writing and theory since the middle ages • This was the first comprehensive history of feminist criticism by leading scholars

What is generally understood to be black feminist criticism is a body of critical and creative work written by women of African descent in the United States. While black feminisms have arisen in other sites of the African diaspora, for example, in Europe and Latin America, the United States has been the site of the most sustained black feminist critical discourse. Contemporary black feminist criticism came into being in the late 1960s and early 1970s, fostered by the Civil Rights Movement and developed in conjunction with the Second Wave of American feminism, which was dominated by white women, and the Black Power and Black Arts movements, which were dominated by black men. Late twentieth-century black feminist critics and writers, like their white counterparts, have been invested in the connections between their present-day analyses and those of their foremothers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in other words, establishing a sense of continuity between black women's struggles and critical approaches to literature and culture in previous eras and in the present has been a foundational concern. Furthermore, a major thematic and structural element of black feminist criticism, from its roots in the era of slavery to the present, has been its simultaneous attention to multiple oppressions and multiple categories of analysis. From Frances Beale's concept of ‘double jeopardy’ (1970) – the conjoined effects of racial and gender discrimination – to Kimberle Crenshaw's ‘intersectionality’ (1989/2000) – a more complex model of the ways in which black women function as a nexus at which several forms of discrimination work together – black feminist critics have articulated the layered effects of racism and sexism.