scholarly journals postmodern Post-feminism without Women

2021 ◽  
pp. 204-241
Author(s):  
Alison Assiter ◽  
María J. Binetti

This article aims at showing the way in which the discursive constructivism and ethical relativism characteristic of postmodern feminism and post-feminism leads to a neo-liberal and conservative political agenda that threatens women’s sex-based rights. The article will especially focus on the thought of Paul-B Preciado as a post-feminist activist. It draws a comparison also with the work of Saba Mahmood.  In such a context, we will point out the necessity of a neo-material and realist framework able to account for the ontological reality of women, and their irreducibility to social hetero-norms. Keywords: Constructivism, nominalism, embodiment, sexual difference, human rights, materialism.

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-337
Author(s):  
Sheila Liming

Sheila Liming, “Romancing the Interstitial: Howe, Balzac, and Nineteenth-Century Legacies of Sexual Indeterminacy” (pp. 311–337) This essay links Julia Ward Howe’s infamous “lost” text, The Hermphrodite (first published in 2004), with Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), arguing that Howe rewrites Balzac’s figure of the “tragic hermaphrodite” with the intention of protesting nineteenth-century American assumptions regarding innate sexual difference. The Hermaphrodite tells the story of Laurence, a deeply contemplative, intelligent person whose sexual identity is disputed, but Howe never employs the term “hermaphrodite” outright. This situation encourages readers to judge Laurence’s hermaphroditism by his behavior and actions in the novel, not his biology, and this is furthermore consistent with the way the term “hermaphrodite” was used and understood by mid-nineteenth-century Americans. As such, this essay examines the claims that Howe makes about the social machinery of gender in The Hermaphrodite, arguing that while Laurence has much in common with Balzac’s Sarrasine, Howe uses her protagonist as a means of revising outdated arguments about biological “truth.” Howe’s Laurence revisits and updates nineteenth-century considerations of the aesthetic androgyne in the service of a modern, political agenda concerning sexual demarcation and difference.


Labyrinth ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Philippe Lauria

Woman's Destiny according Edith SteinThe following essay aims to show that Edith Stein's conception of women was a feminist and a traditionalist one. This could be interpreted by some philosophers as a sort of contradiction. Thus the author presents the different arguments detecting such a conflict between feminism and traditionalism. These arguments are based in fact on the opposition between nature or essence, on the one hand, and freedom, on the other hand. The thesis of the author is that there is not necessarily a conflict between essence and freedom, and that essence is not a fiction but an ontological reality which, interpreted in the way of Edith Stein, makes it possible to conceive sexual difference in a perfect synthesis between the Christian tradition and gender equality.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burcu Togral Koca

Turkey has followed an “open door” policy towards refugees from Syria since the March 2011 outbreak of the devastating civil war in Syria. This “liberal” policy has been accompanied by a “humanitarian discourse” regarding the admission and accommodation of the refugees. In such a context, it is widely claimed that Turkey has not adopted a securitization strategy in its dealings with the refugees. However, this article argues that the stated “open door” approach and its limitations have gone largely unexamined. The assertion is, here, refugees fleeing Syria have been integrated into a security framework embedding exclusionary, militarized and technologized border practices. Drawing on the critical border studies, the article deconstructs these practices and the way they are violating the principle of non-refoulement in particular and human rights of refugees in general. 


Author(s):  
Richard Caplan

States – Western ones, at least – have given increased weight to human rights and humanitarian norms as matters of international concern, with the authorization of legally binding enforcement measures to tackle humanitarian crises under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. These concerns were also developed outside the UN Security Council framework, following Tony Blair’s Chicago speech and the contemporaneous NATO action over Kosovo. This gave rise to international commissions and resulted, among other things, in the emergence of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine. The adoption of this doctrine coincided with a period in which there appeared to be a general decline in mass atrocities. Yet R2P had little real effect – it cannot be shown to have caused the fall in mass atrocities, only to have echoed it. Thus, the promise of R2P and an age of humanitarianism failed to emerge, even if the way was paved for future development.


Author(s):  
Shai Dothan

There is a consensus about the existence of an international right to vote in democratic elections. Yet states disagree about the limits of this right when it comes to the case of prisoners’ disenfranchisement. Some states allow all prisoners to vote, some disenfranchise all prisoners, and others allow only some prisoners to vote. This chapter argues that national courts view the international right to vote in three fundamentally different ways: some view it as an inalienable right that cannot be taken away, some view it merely as a privilege that doesn’t belong to the citizens, and others view it as a revocable right that can be taken away under certain conditions. The differences in the way states conceive the right to vote imply that attempts by the European Court of Human Rights to follow the policies of the majority of European states by using the Emerging Consensus doctrine are problematic.


Author(s):  
Lisa Rodgers

‘Ordinary’ employment contracts—including those of domestic servants—have been deemed to attract diplomatic immunity because they fall within the scope of diplomatic functions. This chapter highlights the potential for conflict between these forms of immunity and the rights of the employees, and reflects on cases in which personal servants of diplomatic agents have challenged both the existence of immunity and the scope of its application. The chapter examines claims that the exercise of diplomatic immunity might violate the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the way in which courts have dealt with these issues. The chapter analyses diplomats’ own employment claims and notes that they are usually blocked by the assertion of immunity, but also reflects on more recent developments in which claims had been considered which were incidental to diplomatic employment (eg Nigeria v Ogbonna [2012]).


2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-129
Author(s):  
Damaris Seleina Parsitau

AbstractIn Kenya, debates about sexual orientation have assumed center stage at several points in recent years, but particularly before and after the promulgation of the Constitution of Kenya in 2010. These debates have been fueled by religious clergy and by politicians who want to align themselves with religious organizations for respectability and legitimation, particularly by seeking to influence the nation's legal norms around sexuality. I argue that through their responses and attempts to influence legal norms, the religious and political leaders are not only responsible for the nonacceptance of same-sex relationships in Africa, but have also ensured that sexuality and embodiment have become a cultural and religious battleground. These same clergy and politicians seek to frame homosexuality as un-African, unacceptable, a threat to African moral and cultural sensibilities and sensitivities, and an affront to African moral and family values. Consequently, the perception is that homosexuals do not belong in Africa—that they cannot be entertained, accommodated, tolerated, or even understood. Ultimately, I argue that the politicization and religionization of same-sex relationships in Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, has masked human rights debates and stifled serious academic and pragmatic engagements with important issues around sexual difference and sexual orientation while fueling negative attitudes toward people with different sexual orientations.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon John-Stewart

Abstract Universal human rights and particular cultural identities, which are relativistic by nature, seem to stand in conflict with each other. It is commonly suggested that the relativistic natures of cultural identities undermine universal human rights and that human rights might compromise particular cultural identities in a globalised world. This article examines this supposed clash and suggests that it is possible to frame a human rights approach in such a way that it becomes the starting point and constraining framework for all non-deficient cultural identities. In other words, it is possible to depict human rights in a culturally sensitive way so that universal human rights can meet the demands of a moderate version of meta-ethical relativism which acknowledges a small universal core of objectively true or false moral statements and avers that, beyond that small core, all other moral statements are neither objectively true nor false.


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