A Manifesto for a Genderless Feminist Critique

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION, 2014

The paper explored how in feminism, the sexes will co-exist to determine mutuality in the overheated sexual polity. Series of sexual rift between the sexes have been the attention of extensive debate; and the debate still rages on as to whether taking series of the imagined aspects of feminism would still widely be viewed as working outside, or in this instance against feminism. With the emergence of recoded feminism (Nego-feminism), there is a significant shift from other previously coded feminisms because there are observable defective dichotomies. Based on the findings, therefore, the authors recommend that in sanitising the sexist world, it is important for both sexes to bury their egos and simply, in a round table discussion, negotiate their mutual existence. The authors synthesised that as an answer to all sexual challenges, if concerted efforts are not made by feminists, critics, and teachers of literature towards Nego-feminism, the world may continue to be beclouded by visions of disharmony between the sexes.

Journal of the Odisha Association for English Studies, 2016

Operationalizing feminism has been a challenging tribulation despite the various efforts of previous feminist and critical scholars. Previous Feminist conceptualizations fail to acknowledge the politicized process of feminism and have focused too much on gender mainstreaming, which can limit the scholars' ability to ask critical questions about the process of feminism. While a plethora of definitions of Feminism exist, this paper aims to redefine the existing theory and to examine the process of the intersection of sex-gender oppression on the one hand and the sex-positive women's rights on the other. The paper discusses the background of feminism that situates movement for women's liberation in the existing literature. It also analyses the early phase of Feminism, including early activists who sought to advance women's suffrage; the later phase of women's fight for their rights focusing on their politicized inequalities, and the sex-positive feminism that strongly campaigns for sexual freedom to enjoy sexual pleasure and promiscuity at par with the men to liberate women from sex-gender oppression. After analyzing each phase, this paper argues that redefining Feminism provides important implications for post-modern Feminist scholars on how we can conceptualize this theory to ask critical questions for inquiry purposes and to discuss the process of understanding Feminism's political, sociological, economical, and historical roots.

First Amendment Studies, 2015

Kristan Poirot's A Question of Sex is a work of rhetorical scholarship that investigates how feminist advocates have challenged, altered, and/or perpetuated various systems of sex differentiation. 1 She approaches feminism as both a social movement that seeks direct political change and a constellation of ideas that construct understanding and interpretation of women's experience. Her approach to matters of sex is nuanced and multilayered, arguing that sex systems (for instance, the presumed facticity of the male/female binary) are historically situated and ever-changing, and involve both material bodies and discursive conceptualizations. Poirot focuses on the rhetorical aspects of these topics, exploring how US-based feminism has perpetually questioned the nature, function, and political consequences of "sex." For Poirot, this questioning is not only a rhetorical endeavor worthy of discussion among communication scholars, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a political commitment to unsettling reified hegemonies. Perpetually questioning sex and other identities and differentiations (of gender, race, and class, for instance) creates the possibility for reconstructing our lives in more open and even liberatory ways. Poirot's theoretical framework begins with the 1990s scholarly debates concerning the sex/gender divide. Those debates revolved around the works of post-structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler who argued, in brief, that the sexed body and the performativity of gender are not mutually exclusive-the latter does not simply map onto the former. Poirot does not necessarily subscribe wholesale to a post-structuralist paradigm, but she does borrow key ideas. She argues, for instance, that the materiality of the sexed body and discursive conceptualizations of gender co-exist as productive tensions; neither reduces to, nor fully eludes, the other. As she states:

New Woman Fiction, 2000

The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality 117 [I]t must never be forgotten that the differences which nature has fixed between the sexes are insuperable. .. The protectors of 'true womanhood' insist on these differences; but the insurgents ought to insist on them too. It is not only useless, it is suicidal to deny them. .. The perpetual. .. unassailable differences, organic and functional, biological and psychological, between men and women are just the safeguard which may enable men without scruple and apprehension to make women their political peers. Women may safely be relieved from political disabilities simply because they can never become men. J. B. Bury, 'The Insurrection of Women' (1892) 1 At a time when even those sympathetic to the women's movement asserted rigid notions of sexual difference, if only to deflate conservative fears about the sexual anarchy that would follow in the wake of women's political emancipation, feminists challenged the biological and psychological premise on which the sex/gender equation was based. While in the motto to this chapter women's claim to citizenship is linked to their inalterable difference from men, New Woman writers, arguing for women's rights on the grounds of their essential sameness, suggested in their cross-dressing narratives that women could, in fact, become men. The last chapter explored the degree to which masculinity became the target of feminist anger. By seeking to incriminate virtually all contemporary men of inherent immorality, and by contrasting male sexual violence with the caring ethic of many women, writers mobilized gendered stereotypes about intrinsically 'male' and 'female' traits. At the same

The exploitation of sex and sexuality as an instrument of commerce has long been blamed for silencing women’s desire via visual representations of women as passive objects for male pleasure and consumption (Gill, Figuring Female Sexual Agency, 38). Though, in recent years, visual advertising has moved away from such straightforward depictions of women as objects under the male gaze, instead emphasizing feminine empowerment and sexual agency, dominant discourses of contemporary heterosexuality has nevertheless maintained a narrowing definition of appropriate femininity. Informed by postfeminist and neoliberal rhetoric, society continues to prescribe successful femininity as a commodity for male consumption as a consequence of manufactured hyper-feminine symbols such as, “the Midriff” and “the vengeful sexy woman” (Gill, Figuring Female Sexual Agency, 46), used to promote false notions of empowerment. They achieve this by positioning acceptable femininity as a bodily property that one may only be achieved through self-surveillance and discipline in favour of this model.

Women's Studies International Forum, 1983

It is an honour to be part of the 20 th anniversary celebrations for Sexualities and to have the opportunity to express appreciation for the space the journal has opened up. It has become a key site for interesting, critical and challenging work; indeed, it is hard to imagine what sexuality studies, queer theory, examinations of sex in the media and popular culture, and studies of intimate life would look like without the journal. We would like to express our gratitude to the editors over the last two decades – and to staff and assistants – for all their work in developing this vibrant and crucial space. In this short article we will aim to do three things. First, we want to use this opportunity to reflect on some of the changes we have seen in the scholarly field of gender, sexuality, and intimacy over this period, and on new emerging directions. Second, we want to discuss the move away from discussions of 'sexualization' to a more critical and political register interested in a variety of ways in which sex and power intersect. Thirdly, we will discuss MeToo as an example of this shifted form of engagement, and raise some questions about its possibilities and limitations.

This article has been written as a response to a talk by Gloria Steinem in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, earlier this year. While the immense provocation of some of the political assumptions of the talk inform the tone of this piece, it also is an attempt to grapple with what is one of the least addressed areas of mainstream feminist theorising - the relationship between sex and work. This preliminary reflection is an attempt to rescue labour from modernist imperialist frames for instance, the rights discourse. It seeks to address frontally the ‘problem’ of sex most often theorised in the context of sexuality, family, or even ' love'. What happens then if we shift the ground and make sex the site for understanding labour? While the labouring body has been studied in many different contexts such as factories, fields etc., it is striking that there is a tremendous anxiety doing the same in the context of sex. It is this anxiety that this brief paper wishes to draw attention to, as indeed to the implications it has for messy terrain of what is seen as 'feminist' politics.

Women's Studies International Forum, 1984