Moya Lloyd

Foucault’s Ethics and Politics: A Strategy for Feminism?

As Foucault showed us in his last books and in his life, there is a kind of ethical and intellectual integrity which, while vigorously opposing justifications of one’s actions in terms of religion, law, science or philosophical grounding, nonetheless seeks to produce a new ethical form of life which foregrounds imagination, lucidity, humour, disciplined thought and practical wisdom. (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1986: 121)

Mourning as Becoming

As delegates to the 15th annual Women’s Studies Network (UK) conference, we were asked to ponder the question: ‘Beyond Sex and Gender: the Future of Women’s Studies?’ But how to think the links between sex, gender and women’s studies, not to mention the temporality of the ‘beyond’ and the ‘future’, posed in interrogative mode as they are in the conference title? ‘Beyond’ is a preposition meaning on the farther side of; farther on in comparison with; out of reach of; above; superior to; better than; apart from, in addition to. So is this ‘beyond’ a time – after sex/gender – what Wendy Brown referred to in her plenary as a kind of post-lapsarian future, after the fall of sex and gender from their constitutive place within women’s studies? Or is it a place; a different institutional venue for theorizing sex and gender, say gender or queer studies? Or, could this ‘beyond’ signal a limitation on the object of women’s studies; the need for something ‘in addition to’ sex and gender, if women are to be studied adequately? In attempting to think the future of women’s studies, we are, of course, being asked not just to think its past and present but also to decide or define what ‘it’ is (and, by implication, where and how it’s done, who can do it and who is qualified to speak of it). Has women’s studies ever successfully limited itself constitutively to considerations of sex and gender and what is being willed in making such a connection? Diane Thompson’s recent book Radical Feminism Today (2001) proclaims that the central object of feminist inquiry (and by implication, that of women’s studies) is male domination, not the more nebulous sex and gender. ‘Gender’, on her reading, is a mere blind for the power relations that are made manifest in male supremacy. The attention paid to gender in recent work serves only, in her view, to secure male dominance by obfuscating its operations and perniciousness. Of course, sex, gender and male domination are not the only candidates for constituting the objects of women’s studies. There is that most contested of entities: women. I could go on. What, then, if anything do these plural contestations around the proper object of women’s studies tell us about its future? I want to suggest that what they reveal is a vibrant, though profoundly challenging process, to do with the politically contested, even ‘impossible’1 nature 343

Naming the dead and the politics of the ‘human’

The summer of 2014 saw several campaigns to name the dead of Gaza. This article aims to explore these initiatives through the idea of the ‘human’; understood both in terms of grievability, as a life that matters, and as a ‘litigious name’ employed by subaltern groups to make political demands. My argument in this article is that politically not all attempts at nomination are equivalent and that a distinction needs to be drawn between those carried out on behalf of the ‘ungrievable’ and those engaged in by them. Only the latter enables a critical politics of the human potentially capable of transforming the prevailing order of grievability in order to make their lives count. After exploring the interventions that occurred in Gaza in 2014, I turn to how the Western (and Israeli) media represent international deaths to consider what that reveals about the differential valuation of human life. To help make my case I elaborate the idea of an order of grievability. I then explore various attempts by others to name Gaza’s dead, and the limitations of their ensuing politics, before finally examining the activities of Humanize Palestine as an example of a more radical, critical politics of the human.

Reply to Assiter

In this paper I reply to Alison Assiters discussion of my book Beyond Identity Politics. Against the contention that performativity negates real material difference, I explain how those differences are produced in the complex intersection of norms, power discourse, institutions and practices. Furthermore, I show how in order to contest both global inequality and human rights abuses (Assiters two examples) it is necessary to examine that production precisely in order to challenge it.

Introduction: Strategies of Transgression

In attempting to uncover the deepest strata of Western culture, I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once more stirring under our feet. (Foucault, 1970, xxiv)

Antigone, Interrupted. By Bonnie Honig. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 321p.

This review was published in the journal, The Perspectives on Politics [© CUP] and the definitive version is available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S153759271400348X