Cathrine Egeland

The “Will to Empower”: Managing the Complexity of the Others

Intersectionality is a concept that aims at handling the complexity of social life. It is often presented as a sensitive, and thus accountable, approach to the complexity of life lived in an age of globalization, migration, and displacements of identities, individuals, and groups. This notion of intersectionality presupposes that approaching complexity requires more than the mere adding up of categories like race, class, and gender; it requires an approach presupposing that these categories intersect in mutually constitutive ways in and through socio‐cultural hierarchies and power dimensions that produce complex relations of inclusion, exclusion, domination, and subordination. For feminists, this constructivist approach to identity categories seems promising; on the one hand, intersectionality rejects essentialism and reductionism, on the other hand, the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality maintains the possibility of feminist politics in a complex world, because politics no longer amounts to essentialist identity politics. In this article we want to ask, however, if the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality really is the solution to the problem of potential essentialism and reductionism in feminism. Or does intersectionality rather reproduce the problem of reductionism and the logic of identity in new, more sophisticated forms? Can feminism at all avoid essentialism and processes of othering? Is it possible to come to terms with the “will to power” inherent in all research by demonstrating a “will to empower”? The purpose of this article is not to evaluate whether different intersectionality studies are capable of accounting for complexity and thereby making it possible to avoid essentialism, reductionism, and othering. The purpose is, rather, to highlight and discuss some implications of the constructionism of intersectionality. As we will try to show, the constructionism that is claimed to form the basis of intersectionality, in opposition to additive approaches to social differences, is sometimes compromised for the sake of accountability.

Sexing-Up the Subject

The decisive epistemological and methodological moment of feminist analysis and critique is the moment of intervention. An intervention does not require a standpoint; instead, it displaces the locus of critique from the standpoint to the effects or consequences of critique. Intervention requires no new information or hitherto concealed facts about the object being interfered with. The critical effects of an intervention are the results of what is called a ‘sexing-up’ strategy. Different epistemological and methodological aspects of this strategy are discussed and a connection established between feminist interventions in science and politics, and the strategy of sexing-up.

Part-Time Work in the Nordic Region II : A research review on important reasons

Gender equality in the labour market is a key topic in the Nordic cooperation on gender equality. The Nordic Council of Ministers has asked NIKK, Nordic Information on Gender, to coordinate the pro ...

Interventions in a cat's cradle

What are feminist science studies? Feminist science studies have emerged as a monstrous transdisciplinary hybrid on the academic scene, mixing political concerns and objectives with scientific knowledge production. Within feminist science studies this monstrosity is often regarded as an epistemological and methodological as well as a political strength. At the same time the hybridity of feminist science studies represents a theoretical challenge itself: what is the epistemological and ideological glue that prevents feminist science studies from disintegrating into other kinds of critical science studies? Or, to be more precise: what is the discursive and, ultimately, the ideological function of the notion of feminism in specific knowledge producing contexts such as, for instance, feminist science studies? The article takes a closer look at the feminism in feminist science studies by discussing the notion of feminism as critique.

Interventionism as a union strategy? The strategies of the Norwegian Nurses Organisation in relation to temporary agency work

In this article it is argued that the strategy of the Norwegian Nurses Organisation in relation to temporary agency work represents a critical intervention. The strategy addresses the need to challenge hegemonic ideas about working women, especially professionals, including the association of unionism and militancy with men, masculinity and manliness, which might undermine any attempt at union revitalization. The article thus contributes to the gendering of the union renewal debate, while also adding to our understanding of professionals in the labour movement. The analysis is conducted in a ‘retroductive’ manner, posing the question of why an unexpected turn in the strategy of the NNO towards temporary work agencies came to pass.

Body Politics in Development. Critical Debates in Gender and Development

Wendy Harcourt has been one of the prominent voices within gender and development debates for over 20 years now and her book Body Politics in Development both sums up and critically reflects on her experiences in this field by exploring it through the lenses of body politics. According to Harcourt, the body plays an invisible and yet also contested role in development discourse, even if most people working in the development field would ask what the body and even gender have to do with the ‘hard-core’ development issues of trade, security and economics (p. 25). Harcourt’s answer is that development politics and policies – no matter how well intended – have impact on the lives and embodied experiences of women and men and that this needs to be addressed in debates on gender and development. Harcourt’s contribution to this debate is not to criticize the efforts to establish public health systems, provide education and medical services or support fair trade and sustainable environmental solutions around the world, but to ‘. . . examine the modern development apparatus through which they are meant to be delivered’ (p. 14). In order to do this, Harcourt sets out to understand and reflect on the tensions and contradictions inherent in the political struggles around the body in gender and development discourse. In this endeavor, she approaches the work of those ‘. . . who have the time to think through the concepts of the body and embodiment’ (p. 6). After spending over 20 years as a feminist activist, researcher and editor, Harcourt finds – somewhat to her surprise, she adds – that the body has moved into the very heart of feminist philosophy, sociology, anthropology and geography. This gives her the opportunity to enter the work of scholars such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Elizabeth Grosz and Donna Haraway in order to see how their conceptualizations of the body and embodiment might be fruitful in reflections on the tensions and contradictions in the body politics saturating gender and development debates. The question then gives itself: does Harcourt succeed in her endeavor? Does Body Politics in Development give the reader answers or even access to some of the crucial questions Harcourt raises in it?

‘There are no specific women questions’: Some considerations on feminist genealogy

The article probes into tensions following in the wake of feminism’s (re)mappings of itself as a landscape that ‘is not there’, so to speak, but which is constituted and reconstituted discursively and affectively. The author discusses these tensions in relation to the notion of feminist genealogy. The discussion is elaborated with reference to a concrete, past and perhaps disturbing political and theoretical landscape: the official, state-sanctioned ‘women’s studies’ in the GDR during the Cold War. The author argues that efforts at (re)mappings and fillings of historical gaps in the production of women’s studies knowledge with reference to inclusion and recognition of ‘women’s experiences’ and ‘women’s voices’ (voices that have been silenced or ignored) may render feminists unable to trace and question the political operations that have produced and reproduce ‘woman’ and ‘women’ as the significant subject of feminism. The first part of the article illustrates the challenging complexity of feminist projects of inclusion and recognition by discussing some of the feminist critiques of the so-called ‘women’s studies’ in the GDR during the Cold War. The second part locates this complexity within feminist political and theoretical landscapes and cartographies by discussing it in relation to feminist genealogy.

Comments on MarÌa Puig’s Comment

I have enjoyed reading María Puig’s comment on my article. Her description of feminism as an open and open-ended, complex, contested, transformatory political project historically intersecting with other projects like anti-racism, anti-capitalism, anti-militarism, animal welfare and environmental concern is undoubtedly sympathetic. I have a few comments, though. Comments that might clarify certain similarities and differences in our approaches to feminism and to ‘our world’. Puig finds it important, if not necessary to fight capitalism, racism, exploitation of and cruelty against human and other beings produced in our ‘naturecultures’. I agree with this. I also agree with Puig that what is feminist in feminist theory could mean to position in its history and that a description of what feminism means today should take into account the conflictive and rich history embodied by this term. If we take a look at the history of feminism it becomes apparent that the intersection between feminism and other political projects like anti-racism, anti-capitalism, anti-militarism, animal welfare and environmental concern – an intersection that we today celebrate as both historically and politically ‘correct’ and ‘natural’ – is neither historically nor politically ‘correct’ or ‘natural’; the bourgeois origins of feminism and, as in Scandinavia for instance, the awkward historical alliances between feminism and different moral regulation projects involved in the development of modern, liberal-democratic societies are an instructive example of how the dynamic relation between power and resistance that Foucault has suggested actually works. Feminism is not in an exterior position to the processes that have produced and that keep reproducing the cultural, social and political logics of capitalism; logics that maintain and quietly sanction human trafficking for instance. At the same time this challenging lack of innocent positions exempted from relations of power seems to create a certain uneasiness present in