Kum-Kum Bhavnani

Tracing the contours: Feminist research and feminist objectivity

Abstract This paper discusses Donna Haraways 1988 arguments about feminist objectivity and situated knowledges. The author suggests that in order for feminist research to enhance feminist objectivity, as outlined by Haraway, it is necessary to delineate some principles or criteria according to which research could be evaluated. The author argues that the three elements which Haraway points to as being central to any discussion of feminist objectivity—accountability, positioning, and partiality—lead to three questions, which, in turn frame criteria and principles according to which research may be defined as implementing the goal of feminist objectivity. It is these three criteria—reinscription, micropolitics and difference—which are discussed and defined in this paper. The author uses the example of her recent research with young working class people in Britain to demonstrate how the criteria may be used to implement and enhance the projects for developing feminist objectivity.

Transforming Socialist-Feminism: The Challenge of Racism

Feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women: women of colour, working class women, poor women, disabled women, lesbians, old women – as well as white economically privileged, heterosexual women. (Smith, 1982:49)

Talking Racism and the Editing of Women’s Studies

Women’s Studies is starting to become established within further and higher education in many parts of the world. Often, however, it is rare to see Black women as students or teachers on such courses.2 The question is, ‘why?’ In this chapter, I will argue that the racism embedded within contemporary and prevailing concepts of feminism and Women’s Studies act as a powerful disincentive for Black women to participate in these courses. Racism is a system of domination and subordination based on spurious biological notions that human beings can be fixed into racially discrete groups. It is identified as a‘natural’ process, and is seen to be a logical consequence of the differentiation of human beings into ‘races’. Given that there is no sound evidence from the natural and biological sciences to justify the assumption that the human species can be divided up into separate ‘races’, both ‘race’ and racism come to be economic, political, ideological and social expressions. In other words, ‘race’ is not a social category which is empirically defined, rather it is created, reproduced and challenged through economic, political and ideological institutions.

Fighting for her Future: Reflections on Human Rights 1 and Women's Prisons in the Netherlands

Part of a larger study of race and gender politics in womens prisons within a transnational, comparative context, this paper is based on a series of interviews conducted with imprisoned women in the Netherlands. We argue that in relation to the US system, the relatively progressive character of the Dutch prison system emanates from its consistent deployment of human rights principles in structuring conditions of custody. We further suggest that such a human rights perspective, combined with strategies of prison reduction and eventual abolition can help to radicalise prison activism in the US.

Abstraction of contingency in concept learning

It is generally agreed that concept learning involves the abstraction of some general representation or schema. Just what is abstracted, however, and how it is used in the classification of sets of stimuli in the natural world or in the laboratory, remain outstanding questions. In this paper a hypothesis involving contingency abstraction is described as a possible solution to these questions. An experiment which manipulated measured contingency in a concept-learning task, and which offered empirical support for the hypothesis, is reported. The advantages of a contingency-abstraction theory of concept learning are briefly discussed.

Shifting Passions, Changing Genres

As I move across what is, at times, a rather bleak landscape in which scholarly efforts, political passion and intellectual commitments rarely collide, I reflect on what I have managed to achieve through my own commitments and passion to see change occur, not only through protest, organization and the creation of genuinely democratic structures, but also as a result of stories being told and ideas being debated. I have always hoped that my work will unsettle the reader by exposing prevailing myths – for example, about culture, biology, gender, ‘race’. For instance, in 1994, when I was an Associate Editor of Feminism & Psychology, I co-edited, with Ann Phoenix, a special issue of the journal called ‘Shifting Identities, Shifting Racisms’. In that volume, Donna Haraway and I had a conversation, ‘Shifting the Subject’ (Bhavnani and Haraway, 1994) in which we discussed how our personal biographies, alongside our political and academic commitments, had led us to work in the way we did. We spent some ink reflecting on psychology as a discipline and how the area of study we know as psychology could be shifted to live up to its promise of being the study of the soul, the mind and human behaviour. We also talked about how central culture is to human life, and what each of us had tried to do to develop our own understandings of culture as a dynamic process that is racialized, gendered and class based (Donna insists she is a ‘dogged Marxist’ – see Haraway, 1989; 1996: 8; 2003). Our desire to think about psychology as interdisciplinary or even antidisciplinary has stayed with me and my comparatively recent turn to documentary film-making (The Shape of Water, Bhavnani, 2006b) has been influenced

Racism and feminism: An analysis of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas hearings

Abstract In this article we look at the consequences of feminisms being viewed as racially, geographically and historically specific. We suggest that as feminist ideas become publicly well known and popularised, they are forged through a notion of ‘woman’ as a singular, and non‐racialised category, which can be seen by looking at, for example, discussions of sexual harassment in the public domain. The discussion we analyse is from the transcripts of the Opening Remarks of the October 1991 US Senate Haerings, in which allegations of sexual harassment were put forward by Anita Hill, a black woman Professor of Law, against Clarence Thomas, a black man who was nominated as a Justice for the Supreme Court in the United States. We refine our concept of ‘discursive configurations’ for understanding the shifting meanings of sexual harassment, and outline some implications for developing racially conscious popular feminisms.