Formulating implicity: contemporary feminist activism and critique in a neoliberal context

Academic discussion of contemporary UK-based feminist activism has noted its widespread adoption of the concept of ‘intersectionality’ to address how different modes of oppression (e.g. sexism, racism, class, homophobia) interact. These discourses of intersectionality have enabled groups such as sex workers, working-class women, Muslim women, and practitioners of BDSM to challenge and rework feminist critiques that have constructed them as problems or objects requiring intervention. Simultaneously, it has been argued that much recent feminist discourse has been framed by neoliberal imperatives regarding individual responsibilities for freedom, self-improvement and triumphing over victimhood, as well as explanations that emphasise individual traits, attitudes, phobias and motivations (Phipps, 2014). With the spread of neoliberal values, feminist critique, it is suggested, has been deprived of the conceptual tools with which to critique structural, systematic and institutional relations of power.

In these contexts, this research project will consider how contemporary feminist activisms formulate the political problems they seek to address. How do these formulations respond to and incorporate academic thinking about the conceptualisation of difference, and how do these formulations both respond to and become shaped by neoliberalism and its geographies?

Project aims

The project will ran between March and July 2015 and will considered how contemporary feminist activisms formulate the political problems they seek to address. Specifically, it will examined how these formulations express struggles within feminist activism regarding:

1. who are the subjects who can speak as feminists

2. who or what become the objects of feminist critique, and

3. what kinds of explanations can be offered within such critiques.

The project will considered the implicit assumptions made about spaces, bodies, affects, relations, institutions, social action and political change within feminist activists’ formulation of problems. The research will was conducted through focus groups and workshops in Brighton and London with a diverse range of feminist activists.

Project findings and impact

The project is designed to enable participants to develop a series of outputs that will benefit their activism. While these outputs will be determined by participants, the knowledge produced by this project will provide critical frameworks and approaches for activists to be able to analyse how their constitution of political problems might exclude, marginalise or objectify certain feminist subjects, and might reproduce power relations and injustices associated with individualisation and the generalisation of market relations.

Research team

Dr Jason Lim

Dr Kath Browne

Dr Erin Sanders-McDonagh (Middlesex University)

Output

One article for submission to a high-quality peer-reviewed journal is planned: the paper will set out both the theoretical framing of the project and the empirical findings regarding the production of subjects and objects of feminist discourse. To be submitted to Gender, Place and Culture by end of July 2015

The project report will also be completed in July 2015

Partners

Dr Erin Sanders-McDonagh (Middlesex University)

Research participants to be confirmed