Kathy Davis

Geschlechterforschung und Biographieforschung: Intersektionalität als biographische Ressource am Beispiel einer außergewöhnlichen Frau

Die Frauen- oder Geschlechterforschung hat sich in der Bundesrepublik, ahnlich wie in anderen Landern, in den vergangenen zwanzig Jahren in rasantem Tempo entwickelt. Die ursprunglich gangige Unterdruckungs- oder Patriarchatsthese stand schnell zur Debatte, da an ihr zurecht kritisiert wurde, dass sie (1.) ontolo-gisiert, also bestimmte Eigenschaften als mannlich und weiblich festschreibt und dass sie (2.) dichotomisiert, also eine Zweigeteiltheit voraussetzt und reifiziert.

Ambiguities and dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHow Long and #WhereTo?

[...] we decided to use this editorial to explore some of our concerns about #MeToo and, more generally, feminist responses to the problem of sexual harassment and sexual violence. [...]

Should a feminist dance tango? Some reflections on the experience and politics of passion1

Tango, of all popular dances, would seem to be the most extreme embodiment of traditional notions of gender difference. It not only draws on hierarchical differences between the sexes, but also generates a ‘politics of passion’ which transforms Argentineans into the exotic ‘Other’ for consumption by Europeans and North Americans in search of the passion they are missing at home. In this article, I offer a modest provocation in the direction of scholarship that places politics before experience by questioning whether passion can be explained solely through the discourses of feminism or postcolonialism. Instead I will show why we, as critical feminist scholars, need to pay more attention to the experience of passion, whether we are analysing a passion for tango or any other bodily activity that is intensely pleasurable, addictively desired, but also unsettling, disruptive, and – last but not least – politically incorrect.

In Search of Heroines: Some Reflections on Normativity in Feminist Research

Feminist research is explicitly committed to validating (women) informants experiences, situating them in a context of gender and power relations, and explicating the researchers own social and cultural position. Such commitments may not be enough, however, when our negative and positive feelings about our informants get in the way of doing our research. In this article, we draw upon our research on women in care professions and our own desire to find feminist heroines within their ranks. After describing our respective experiences of glorifying or dismissing our informants, we explore three strategies for coming to terms with implicit or ‘gut-level’ normativity in feminist research.

EJWS retrospective on intersectionality

The EJWS has been at the forefront of debates about intersectionality in Europe. In the past two decades, the journal has published countless articles on intersectionality as theory, methodology, and political framework for doing critical feminist research. We have selected some of these articles that illustrate the rich and varied European contribution to intersectionality. We want to use this as an opportunity to think critically about the possibilities and pitfalls of one of feminism’s most important travelling theories. The selected articles can be accessed at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/ejw/collections/virtual-special-issues/intersectionality

On Generosity and Critique

Writing an editorial usually goes like this. After receiving a timely warning from our managing editor, I begin an – often – frantic search for something in the not-too-distant-past that upset or stimulated my feminist sensitivities enough to make me want to put pen to paper. In most cases, this takes the form of something aggravating in the media, a recent political event, a shift in feminist theorizing, or a women’s studies event. My search began this time in the wake of a conference which left me feeling slightly cranky. It was a fairly routine conference. The presentations had been reasonably interesting, and yet the discussions were unpleasant, with a large proportion of the participants engaging in arrogant displays of theoretical muscle-flexing and antagonistic battles over which position was ideologically correct. I was reminded of an incident at a similar conference which had taken place several years ago, but had never quite vanished from my memory. It was during a presentation which someone had given about the merits of a well-known feminist theorist. At the end of her presentation, someone in the audience raised her hand and remarked that the speaker had given far too much credit to the theorist and not nearly enough to her own ideas. She proceeded to chastise the speaker for being too modest. It was her take on the theorist which was, in fact, the most interesting thing about her talk and had, in actual fact, raised the most exciting issues. While I don’t remember the details of what she said, I will never forget how the speaker reacted. She looked completely gobsmacked and, after a moment of silence, exclaimed: ‘Why how extraordinarily generous!’ It was the speaker’s surprise at the generosity of the person in the audience that impressed me at the time. And it is this very same surprise that has come back to me years later, because, indeed, generosity is not something that one often encounters in the academy these days. There are all kinds of reasons for this. Academic competitiveness precludes a readiness to give others credit for their brilliant writing, innovative insights, or charismatic teaching. Many academics are – not to put too fine a point on it – stingy and small-minded when it comes to praising their colleagues. If one finds generosity at all, it has usually been transformed into something

Editorial:`Black is Beautiful' in European Perspective

In 1992, the US feminist scholar bell hooks wrote the now-classic essay ‘Eating the Other’, in which she challenged the ways that differences are represented in cultural displays of ‘blackness’. In her view, white supremacy is not simply a matter of overtly racist practices, but often occurs through what, at first glance, appears to be the opposite – a celebration of the racial Other.White people are preoccupiedwith their admiration for the (body) of the Other, a fervent yearning for contact, and a fantasy of inclusion where all differences are reconciled. In hooks’ view, this fantasy is integral to progressive ideals of multiracial multiculturalism. However, far from being straightforwardly progressive, the celebration of differences can all too easily become the offering up of the Other to be ‘eaten, consumed, and forgotten’ (hooks, 1992: 39) Since its appearance, this essay has continued to be used as a critical tool for understanding representations of race in popular culture in the US. For example, US feminist scholars inspired by hooks have analysed this ‘eating of the Other’ in the commodification of black women’s bodies in advertising (black skin selling white clothes), in the supposedly unambiguous display of white teenagers with dreadlocks and, last but not least, the ubiquitous Hollywood ‘black buddy’ movies, which delight in their portrayals of ‘interracial friendship’ while keeping power hierarchies firmly intact. In the European context, these analyses may seem typically American with their references to the US legacy of slavery and racism. Indeed, I might have wondered whether hooks’ metaphor of ‘eating the Other’ was really appropriate for the European context. After all, Europe has had a different history and most contemporary European societies do not have a discourse of race as found in the US, or have subsumed it under discussions about ‘ethnicity’ or ‘culture’. However, I have had reason to revise my opinion recently when I visited an exhibition in Amsterdam on images of black people in Dutch culture, ranging from Rembrandt to popular contemporary culture – an exhibit that the reader may visit online at: www.blackisbeautifulamsterdam.nl/ The title of the exhibition, ‘Black is Beautiful’, is borrowed from the famous slogan of the Black Power movements of the 1960s in the US and South Africa, with their powerful critiques of the negative effects of racism on the

Women in Transit Between Tradition and Transformation

One of the standard discussions in our editorial board is how to ensure the ‘European-ness’ of the journal as a feminist forum for, by and about European women’s studies. At every editorial meeting, at least one of the agenda points concerns the geographical distribution of the contributions. As editors, we have wracked our brains about how to make the journal inclusive and sensitive to the interests and concerns of all European feminist scholars – not just from the North, but from Eastern and Southern Europe as well. We have been especially cautious about accepting too many contributions from the UK under the motto: ‘They already have an edge in the publishing market, so let’s give the rest of Europe a chance.’ And we have tended to reject articles from the rest of the world (in particular, the USA, Australia, New Zealand) unless they are demonstrably ‘about Europe’. While this policy may seem straightforward, in practice it has been anything but easy. Take, for example, the case of an author from New Zealand who sent in an article several years ago in which she drew upon discussions about migrant women in the French media. She received a note from us that while we were very interested in the article, she would – as a non-European – have to make the connection to Europe clear. She wrote back, understandably exasperated, that as the daughter of a Tunisian father and French mother, who had grown up in France and had just got her first academic position in New Zealand, she was beginning to wonder whether she would ever belong anywhere! This incident illustrates the theme of this special issue: ‘Women in Transit’. Europe is not simply a geographical continent or collection of nation-states with stable and non-permeable boundaries. It is rather an ‘imaginary community’ full of travellers – individuals moving around, crossing and, in many cases, transgressing borders, both within and outside Europe. Knowing names and places of residence is not sufficient

Editorial: The Body

the ever-expanding interest in the body. (Male) social scientists seem to regard the recent body ’craze’ as selfevident, an artefact of the Zeitgeist of late modernity. In modern society, the body is the vehicle par excellence for self-expression. The collapse of industrial capitalism with its Calvinist work ethic has made way for consumer culture with its incessant affirmation of sexuality and desire. A glimmering array of techniques and technologies for renewing, refashioning and reshaping the body provide myriad opportunities for realizing one’s ’identity project’ for becoming who one would most like to be. At another level, social scientists do not regard the upsurge of interest in the body as just a sign of the times. On the contrary, the ’new’ theory on the body is presented as an explicitly critical intervention in contemporary social theory. Mainstream social science has traditionally neglected the body in favour of the dominant rationalist models of cognitive behaviour (’mind over matter’) or abstract theories about society and social change. The implication is that by bringing the body back in, a critique will be launched against the rational project of science and new avenues will be opened for a more contextualized social theory one which is grounded in individuals’ everyday practices. For feminist scholars, this sudden interest in the body among male academics may evoke some irritation. After all, the body is hardly a new issue for feminists. Like critical social scientists, feminist scholars have identified the neglect of the body as a product of the dualisms of Cartesian thought and the centrality of rationality in modernist science. Feminists

Editorial: Swan Song

This is my last editorial. I’ve been writing editorials for this journal since I became coeditor with Mary Evans in 2003, so it seems appropriate to make this something of a swan song. A swan song as an ode to the pleasures, but also the responsibilities of contributing to an academic journal through the venerable and, in my opinion, often underrated, institution of The Editorial. Many of you have probably found yourselves routinely skipping over the editorial part of the journals you read because you expect them to be boring and, as obligatory, pro forma introductions to the articles in the current issue, not offering much of interest. As the editors of the European Journal of Women’s Studies, we have made an effort to change this. We wanted our editorials to do some work for our journal: to be a vehicle for expressing our vision as editors on what is going on in the field of gender studies, to address the current dilemmas of doing research in the academy, and to comment on relevant social and political developments. We also wanted the editorials to provide a space for us to give vent to our personal concerns – something one former editor referred to as ‘having a good moan’. In this way, we hoped to provoke our readers into thinking about issues we believed were important and to spark discussion and debate. Writing editorials is like no other kind of writing. It can be spontaneous and relatively painless, yet also harrowing and sometimes even scary. Let me explain what writing an editorial has meant for me. The managing editor would gently remind me that my turn had come. Panic would invariably set in as I never seemed to have a topic ready beforehand. I would spend a few days of mulling and stewing and then – suddenly – there it was: the topic, the idea, the thing I absolutely knew I had to write about. There is nothing like an editorial for being allowed to make a case for something you feel passionate about. No holds barred, no beating around the bush. Strong statements, preferably in the first person, argumentative discourse without footnotes or references, and everything having to be said in 2000 words or less. It can be exhilarating and even liberating to write that way, but also frightening, because there is your most heart-felt rant, out in the world – as the Dutch say, with a bared bum – for people to see, to like, dislike, agree or disagree with, to applaud or attack. What did I feel passionate about in the last decade and a half? In which directions did I hope to see the field of gender studies move? To answer these questions, I reread my editorials – all 21 of them. It was a trip down memory lane. I had forgotten many of the issues that had so angered me in the past (sometimes something as incidental as an art exhibition in Amsterdam or a random comment at a gender studies conference). But many of them, surprisingly, resonated with my present concerns. Rereading my editorial rants, I discovered three issues that continue to bother me: the lack of a transnational 691724 EJW0010.1177/1350506817691724European Journal of Women’s StudiesEditorial research-article2017