"The Politics of Love: Women's Liberation and Feeling Differently"

In the nineteenth century female writers were only able to conceive of and construct two types of narrative endings for their gender: heterosexual love and marriage, or death. In response to this dichotomy many feminist writers of the twentieth century attempted to construct stories that transcend the interaction and interconnection between gender, heterosexual love and narrative closure. Novels such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing separate the concepts of the female and heterosexual love, but ultimately end in madness or paralysis. These texts, which sever the narrative from formerly conventional structures of fiction, may momentarily imagine a world devoid from the patriarchal expectation of heterosexual love yet they ultimately leave their characters with feelings of futility, confusion and resignation. This paper argues that the narrative impact of separating female protagonists from heterosexual love is the creation of a new ‘madwoman in the attic’; what I term the ‘eternal madwoman’. Building on Rachel DuPlessis’ Writing Beyond the Ending, and the collection of writing Famous Last Words edited by Alison Booth, the paper aims to offer possible responses to Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s question, ‘How can the symbolic resolution of the madwoman in fictional texts contribute to the transformation of gender ideologies?’ Rather than reinforcing further ruptures in the female/love narrative, Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey is seen as a possible framework for a more hopeful narrative world where descent and ascent and, in turn, the concepts of love and the female can be reunited.

Critical Literary Studies, 2024

The present paper explores Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy in an attempt to highlight the importance of the establishment of a well-defined identity as the crucial step in the life of Tashi, a victim of genital mutilation. She becomes whole and healthy once she finds a voice and remakes her severed ties with the black community. Her individual acts of rebellion are complemented with collective political action against genital mutilation. Butler’s view, agency is a restorative energy which works against fragmentation and opens a new possibility for psychic healing as the essential path to the formation of an individual identity. The paper explores the path taken by the novel’s female protagonist to validate her right as an active agent and defy the objectifying assumptions which deprive women of the right to be treated as human subjects. The long-held womanist aspirations shared by Tashi and her fellow sufferers matched by the desire to restore the lost agency is the only hope given to black women to establish their own voice. The protagonist’s final healing is thus achieved through the healthy interaction between individual as well as collective acts of rebellion: individual agency accompanied by political and social transformation.

2018

To flesh out love's potential for transformative imaginaries and politics, it is important to explore earlier examples of Black feminist theorizing on love. In this spirit, I examine Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), an early Black feminist educator, intellectual, and activist whose work is generally overlooked in feminist and anti-racist thinking on love, affect, and social change. Contesting narrow readings of Cooper, I first explore how critics might engage in more “loving” approaches to reading her work. I then delineate some of her contributions to a Black feminist love-politics. In unmasking dominance enacted in love's name, Cooper analyzes romantic love, marriage, and gendered care-work in the domestic sphere. Using an intersectional lens, she contests gendered-raced hierarchies and links normative masculinity and femininity with white supremacy, xenophobia, and imperial rule. Cooper also extolls the possibilities of love rooted in nonhierarchical, intersubjective cooperation: such loving has the potential to transform interpersonal relations and foster broad collaborative action to eradicate inequality, locally and globally. Structural subjection, internalized oppression, and colonized imaginations have no part in Cooper's reciprocal, political love-force. Unfortunately, her ideas about transforming gender relations, contesting racism, challenging imperialism, seeking decolonized selves, and pursuing solidarity as a loving political orientation remain relatively unknown.

2002

Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice, 2019

This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late 1960s that foreground racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality. Rogers contributes to the development of a genealogy of affect theory that is attentive to these antecedents in Black feminist thought, exposing the under-acknowledged intellectual labor of Black feminists, and expanding the ways in which affect theory typically is situated in intellectual histories as growing out of late 1990s queer theory, on the one hand, and debates around poststructuralism, on the other. The discussion highlights works by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison, arguing that they not only offer compelling commentary on the function of affect as political labor, but also are themselves powerfully affecting, producing “affective flights” that structure the different realities in which subjects live.

Women & Performance, 2019

In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-building of political activism. We reflect on a particular encounter between the artists and ACT UP activists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz by offering two readings of what we call the “counterprivate” relation between the two. In the first part of our argument, we contend that the counterprivate couple form (found in our case study of Leonard and Wojnarowicz) occasions a space of provisional leave from the normative affective, aesthetic, and identity-based impulses which tend to emerge in social movement group formation. Despite established critiques of the private, dyadic intimacy of the couple within social movement theory and queer and feminist cultural studies, we highlight the value of counterprivate couples – not in place of the collective world-building that is made possible by political organizing and collective identity, but as a necessary aesthetic complement to collective, participatory politics. In the second part of our argument, we read the intimacy between Leonard and Wojnarowicz as a private moment of expressed doubt that has subsequently been institutionalized into a public discourse through the context of art. Here the counterprivate couple form in turn becomes a counterpublic mode of collective world-making once more. This transformation from counterprivate relation to public discourse occasions a practice of collective subject formation (in the institutional terrain of art) that affirms doubt, curiosity, and poetic beauty as part of the reproductive labor involved in political participation.

Gender, Work & Organization, 2015

This paper engages with what it means to write love and poses the question: what does love do for feminine writing? I move beyond the concept of love as an ideology or condition of work (such as 'for the love of the job') and draw on a feminine poetics of organisation that highlights its disruptive potential. Love, in this sense, breaks the rationality and order of the 'masterful' text and alters gendered academic writing. The power of writing with love and effecting change in organisations is developed through a discussion of three feminist writers. The paper explores three significant texts: Kristeva's Tales of Love; Irigaray's The Way of Love; and hooks' All About Love in order to examine the problematic representation of love and to advocate a turn to an ethics of love as a basis for selfother relations that points us to defiant, activist and transformative forms of feminine writing. These writers bring to bear practical politics and possibilities through political interruption-namely through three modes: reconstruction, reclamation and activation and I discuss the implications of these modes for work and organisation, notably that writing and thinking the wisdom of love offers insight into how we creatively imagine socially just organisations of the future.

Springer eBooks, 2021

The second wave of feminist activism in the United States gave us the adage, "the personal is political." It allowed women to insist that the difficulties they were having were not caused by their personal qualities or individual choices, but were the product of a system that positioned them as women, and structured their lives and the horizon of possibilities for their material and emotional experiences accordingly (see Shaw & Lee, 2015). The core lesson was (and is) that a person's individual experience is not theirs alone. Their sense of self is formed within, in relation to, and by, external forces. Feminism began with the understanding that gender is one apparently personal quality that is in fact formed by social factors, and, under patriarchy, in relations of power and oppression. Naomi Alderman's feminist dystopian fiction, The Power (2016), explores the consequences of changing gender dynamics within a system of power. The book shows what happens when women are given superior physical power over men, and seize the reins of control accordingly. What begins as a satisfying ability to finally stand up to sexualized brutality becomes a reinscription of more of the same: patriarchal values, where might conveys right, remain in place, even as gender positions are

Feminist Theory 11, no. 1, pp. 57-78., 2010

This article analyses Mary Kelly's Love Songs, 2005-07, which was exhibited in 2007 at Documenta 12. The series of artworks addresses the political and ideological legacies of early Anglo-US feminism through the perspectives of two generations of women.

International Journal of English and Cultural Studies, 2018

Doris Lessing, an unrivaled novelist in the literary genres around the globe, portrays the fundamental problems of women as well as social system of her times. Lessing searches for new models to communicate the experiences of a blocked woman writer, who spends her early life in Africa, becomes an active and a disappointed communist, who is a politically committed writer, a mother, a wife, or a mistress sometimes a woman. With her very keen and subtle attitude, Lessing wants to present women’s psychological conflicts between marriage and love; motherhood and profession, unfairness of the double standard; alienation of a single career woman; hollowness of marriage in the traditional order and society. Lessing portrays her women in various social problems and with various perspectives of male against female. She tries to awaken women community to protest against the patriarchy through her feminist writings. For this purpose, this research paper would like to examine the psychological c...

… the most useful work … is likeliest to occur near the boundary of what a writer can't figure out how to say readily, never mind prescribe to others. (Kosofsky Sedgwick 2004: 2).

Tulsa studies in women's literature, 2020