Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique. Ellen E. Berry. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. Pp. 176.

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (4) ◽  
pp. E288-E291
Author(s):  
Ali Chetwynd
Author(s):  
Serene J. Khader

This chapter argues that independence individualism, a form of individualism that is the object of decolonial feminist critique, is conceptually unnecessary for feminism, and in fact undermines transnational feminist praxis. Opposition to sexist oppression does not logically entail individualism. Adopting the specific form of individualism called “independence individualism,” which holds that individuals should be economically self-sufficient and that only chosen relationships are valuable is likely to worsen the gender division of labor and obscure the transition costs of feminist change. The perceived relationship between independence individualism and feminism is traceable to ideological assumptions that associate capitalism with liberation from tradition, and tradition with patriarchy. The concept of independence individualism is arrived at by examining the justificatory discourses behind ostensibly feminist policies that proclaim the value of the individual person while harming “other” women.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146470012110090
Author(s):  
Romina Wainberg

Over the last two decades, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has developed the concept of ‘perspectival anthropology’ to think philosophically with and through Amerindian cosmology. In this article, I argue that the epistemological roundness of this concept is, in actuality, a by-product of philosophical reification of Amerindian cosmological dynamics. This reification stems from distortive abstractions of specific societal structures, which rely on the silencing of two key phenomena: the fact that the central or unmarked perspective assumed in ‘perspectivism’ is that of men, and the fact that the valorisation of men’s perspective is enabled by the exchange and accumulation of women. By unearthing this exchange system that lies behind the cyclical valuation of males’ gaze, I do not seek to denounce the role of actual women in Amerindian societies. My central aim is to demonstrate that both perspectival anthropology’s depiction of Amerindian cosmology and what Viveiros de Castro calls ‘Western objectivist epistemology’ are made possible by the erasure of women’s capacity for transcendence.


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