This article reflects on the worlds that María Lugones has made and has transformed, particularly for the doing of feminist theory. Thus this article will be more exploratory than argumentative: to explore the lessons that Lugones's work holds, especially her work on pluralist feminism, world-traveling, the uses of anger, boomerang perception, and the multiplicitousness of both our selves and our communities, for our twenty-first-century challenges. This article argues that Lugones's work addresses how to negotiate conflicts that arise within social movements (...) of liberation, within coalitions or spaces of shared commitments. (shrink)

The paper functions as a contribution to feminist analyses that are methodologically based on Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of political economy and her understanding of capital accumulation, but also as a contribution to contemporary social-reproduction theory which aims to integrate Luxemburg’s legacy alongside that of Marx. The essay offers a sketch for a ‘Luxemburgian feminism’ consisting of an overview of Luxemburg’s critique of bourgeois feminism and a preliminary application of Luxemburg’s ‘dialectics of spatiality’ to contemporary social-reproduction theory. With Luxemburg’sThe Accumulation of (...) Capitalin mind and her several essays on the so-called ‘women’s question’, we shall attempt to relate Luxemburg’s explanation of the dynamic link between capitalist and non-capitalist spatialities with the commodification of women’s reproductive labour. (shrink)

The article argues that feminist emancipation, understood as practices and discourses of self-development and of solidarity as empowerment, has become entangled with the neoliberal project. Indeed, emancipation as self-improvement has become synonymous with moral regulation projects that seek to adapt women to global capitalism. The article explores the relation between emancipation and neoliberal regulation from a situated approach by addressing the experience of Latin American feminisms, with a particular focus on Chile. This approach recognizes by implication that Latin American feminisms (...) are co-extensive, or coeval, with North American and European ones, and are not merely derivative forms. (shrink)

Neoliberalism, we are told, has “seduced” feminism. What is meant is that the libertarian and democratic hopes that have scoped this radical social movement have been reconfigured and re-energised by neoliberal project that models all our freedoms upon the market. Misgivings about “seductions” and “betrayals” require that feminist theory adopts the role of the arbiter on goals and meanings and this puts strains upon its deep commitment to democratic epistemologies. The following paper finds that the leading theorist of feminism as (...) critique in a neoliberal age has failed to fully grasp the normative tension that is involved. Nancy Fraser fails to rethink the tasks of critique in terms that is sufficient to its role as arbiter on meanings. I suggest that this rethinking might be done without betraying the demands of a democratic epistemology if we reconstruct the emancipatory idealisations that underpin Fraser’s account of a democratic epistemology. While this rendering of feminism as critique retrieves a representation of feminist ideals that might unmask neoliberal distortions, it does so without betraying the responsiveness to self-interpreted needs that is also claimed by a critical and democratic feminist theory. (shrink)

This article engages with the work of Scotland-based artist Kate Davis (b.1977). The discussion begins to articulate a framework for understanding Davis's work within a feminist logic of re-visioning and re-citing, strategies that are explicated and suggested as paradigmatic to feminist art production since 1970. Fundamentally, the article explores Davis's complex strategies for adopting and adapting motifs from within the archives of art history, arguing that her work constitutes a mode of visual research and historiography.

A growing number of infertile couples and other individuals desiring children are seeking to fulfill their desire for parenthood transnationally through the use of donor gametes and a surrogate. The number of “fertility tourists” from developed countries to low-income countries is growing phenomenally. Indian women, too, are participating as producers in these “biocrossings,” turning India into the surrogacy outsourcing capital of the world in the globalized bioeconomy of assisted reproduction. I argue for a ban on commercial egg donation and surrogacy (...) and a social-justice approach that would hold the state responsible for providing basic social goods to low-income households. I also argue for a gender-justice approach so that women would not be compelled to adopt surrogacy as a strategy for survival and upward social mobility. (shrink)

This article is a critical examination of Nancy Fraser's contrast of early second-wave feminism and contemporary global feminism in “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” (Fraser ). Fraser contrasts emancipatory early second-wave feminism, strongly critical of capitalism, with feminism in the age of neoliberalism as being in a “dangerous liaison” with neoliberalism. I argue that Fraser's historical account of 1970s mainstream second-wave feminism is inaccurate, that it was not generally anti-capitalist, critical of the welfare system, or challenging the priority (...) of paid labor. I claim Fraser mistakenly takes a minority feminist position as mainstream. I further argue that Fraser's account of feminism today echoes arguments from James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (2001) to Hester Eisenstein (), but such arguments ignore contemporary feminist minority positions. I challenge Fraser's arguments that feminism legitimates neoliberalism to women, that women's NGOs are simply service-providers enabling the state to withdraw services, and that criticisms of microcredit lending programs can be generalized into criticisms of women's feminism and women's NGOs today. I argue that these claims are vast over-generalizations and ignore countertrends. I give empirical evidence to support my objections by considering women's activities in post-communist European countries, which Fraser discusses. (shrink)