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Many Global North contexts are experiencing conflict in feminist discourses between supporters of trans and gender diverse self-identification and self-proclaimed 'gender critical' feminists who consider this to undermine feminist goals. We argue that the channelling of contemporary feminist discourse into defensive and oppositional channels has foreclosed the space for more nuanced and future-oriented, utopian thought around freedom from sex/gender, limiting the prospect of developing a coalition of actors focused not on difference, but rather on commonality. Putting classic feminist works by Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray into dialogue, we consider an alternative approach to freedom premised on an ontology of potentiality combined with acceptance of the materiality of the binary gender hierarchy, that nonetheless remains utopian and open-ended, demonstrating the capacity to transcend these impasses and potentially overcome these divides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dominant strand of second wave feminism, represented in this essay by Firestone, is tied to a belief in technology to achieve reproductive justice, echoing Western somatophobic rationality. As such, it has difficulty formulating a critique of institutionalized reproductive technologies that have the capacity to perpetuate systemic racializing and misogynous violence, and envisioning a philosophy of reproductive justice where care for the body takes central stage. In this essay, we offer a perspective on achieving reproductive justice from an age-old position largely neglected by feminism: that of midwifery. Midwifery has always been wary of technology in the field of reproduction, having first-hand experience with its consequences in birth and pregnancy, and has developed a field of scholarship critiquing its misuse. Simultaneously, midwifery negotiates technology from a position that prioritizes experiential, embodied, and tacit knowledge. Midwifery’s epistemological standpoint is that of a somatophilic rationality of thinking with the body, guarding women and birthing people’s reproductive autonomy through a specific technē that uses both technology and nature. A certain tendency in midwifery is, however, developing more and more towards an anti-technological essentialism. This essay therefore brings into dialogue Firestone’s Marxist women’s liberation through the elimination of biological sex with the help of technology, and midwifery’s somatophilic epistemic standpoint, to develop a feminist rational engagement with nature that can achieve reproductive justice, on the basis of their shared biological materialism.

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Este artículo tiene como objetivo presentar una reflexión crítica sobre la subjetividad jurídica, centrándose en el impacto de la tecnología en los problemas jurídicos del feminismo. En particular, después de una descripción general acerca de las mujeres en la tecnología y de mujeres y tecnología, se examinan las perspectivas de Shulamith Firestone y Donna Haraway. La primera lleva a la “construcción” del sujeto jurídico, sobre la base de un acto voluntario y racional (individual); la segunda, en cambio, conduce a la “deconstrucción” de la subjetividad jurídica en sí misma. Algunas consideraciones finales enfatizan las implicaciones que las reflexiones críticas sobre cuerpos, tecnologías y subjetividad tienen sobre la teoría del derecho y su finalidad.

In the essay 'Sexual Differing' from their book New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin develop their new materialist take on sexual difference through their rereading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. I propose to read this essay as deploying the 'analytical tool' of 'jumping generations' articulated in the homonymous paper by van der Tuin as signature of the 'new materialist' 'third wave' of feminist theory. By pointing to the immediate textual context of the passages from The Second Sex quoted in 'Sexual Differing', to the philosophical underpinning of Beauvoir's work, and to the historical context of its reception, I argue that while the tool of 'jumping generations', as put to use in 'Sexual Differing', might produce unexpected outcomes, it also risks confining to dusty feminist archives segments of feminist philosophy that might still be relevant for thinking gendered oppression and liberation today: Beauvoir's understanding of the social ontogenesis of freedom, the collective and egalitarian nature of political transformation and the genealogy of materialist feminist thought theoretically and historically linked to Beauvoir and The Second Sex. The issue is not merely one of historical and theoretical accuracy, but of enabling a capacious materialist analysis of gendered oppression and liberation. I conclude by pointing at how Dolphijn and van der Tuin's approach expressly discards understandings of history and scholarship that it nevertheless necessarily performs, and propose that this can be taken as a starting point to rethink sexual differing in terms of a political and ethical commitment beyond its originary metaphysical new materialist articulation. This is where, I propose, the above-mentioned conceptual resources linked to The Second Sex and muted by 'Sexual Differing' could prove fruitful, and timely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En la Sociología clásica permean sesgos liberales por los que la atención analítica se centra exclusivamente en el espacio público y se deja al de lo privado como una caja negra llena de misterios que no competen al análisis de la Sociología. Esto implica la ausencia de diagnóstico sobre el ámbito privado y, en consecuencia, carencias explicativas sobre las relaciones en las sociedades modernas. Es por eso que proponemos el acercamiento al pensamiento feminista en el que siempre ha estado presente un cuestionamiento a la separación liberal público/privado y que ha puesto, en el centro de su atención, temáticas enmarcadas en la esfera de lo privado. Específicamente, proponemos por un lado la recuperación de la sociología feminista de Marianne Schnitger, contemporánea de Weber y de Simmel, y por el otro de las feministas radicales de la década de los setenta, Kate Millet y Shulamith Firestone, entre quienes es posible establecer fecundos diálogos.

Copyright of Anthropology Magazine is the property of University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recent iterations of feminist theory and activism, especially intersectional, 'third-wave' feminism, have cast much second-wave feminism as politically unacceptable in failing to centre the experiences of less privileged subjects than the often white, often middle-class names with which the second wave is usually associated. While bearing those critiques in mind, this article argues that some second-wave writers, exemplified by Shulamith Firestone and Monique Wittig, may still offer valuable feminist perspectives if viewed through the anti-normative lens of queer theory. Queer resists the reification of identity categories. It focuses on resistance to hegemonic norms, rather than on group identity. By viewing Wittig's and Firestone's critique of the institutions of the family, reproduction, maternity, and work as proto-queer — and specifically proto-antisocial queer — it argues for a feminism that refuses to shore up identity, that rejects groupthink, and that articulates meaningfully the crucial place of the individual in the collective project of feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shulamith Firestone was a foundational second-wave feminist thinker. Firestone's radical feminism argued for a future where technology was used to eliminate sexism by freeing women from childbirth and liberating both men and women from the patriarchal nuclear family. In many important ways, Firestone's work is the precursor for contemporary cyberfeminist writing, especially the work of Donna Haraway. This paper examines Shulamith Firestone and her contribution to the information age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]