1970s Feminisms—Christine Delphy, Shulamith Firestone, Nancy Fraser featured in the latest issue of SAQ journal
focusses on 1970s Feminisms and features Verso authors Shulamith Firestone, Nancy Fraser and Christine Delphy, and lots more.
Kathi Weeks: The Vanishing Dialectic: Shulamith Firestone and the Future of the Feminist 1970s
This essay explores the relation between the feminist present, its recent past, and its possible futures using Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970) as a point of reference. Rather than conceive 1970s feminism as either a dead relic of a superseded past or a living legacy, the analysis experiments with temporalities of feminist theory that might better account for both continuity and rupture, for our attractions and repulsions to different moments.
Nancy Fraser: Feminism's Two Legacies: A Tale of Ambivalence
This essay explores the possibility for twenty-first-century feminism to retrieve the insurrectionary spirit of women's liberation. It begins by charting the shift from a feminist imaginary focused on egalitarian redistribution to a feminist imaginary founded on recognition of cultural difference. I attribute this shift to the inherent ambivalence of feminism, its ability to articulate as easily with liberal individualism as with solidary egalitarianism.
Christine Delphy: Preface: Critique of Naturalizing Reason
This text, which is translated here for the first time in English, is taken from the “Preface” to The Main Enemy, Volume Two: Thinking Gender (2001). It is a companion piece to the 1993 essay “Rethinking Sex and Gender” (first published in French in 1991).
Lisa Disch: Christine Delphy's Constructivist Materialism: An Overlooked “French Feminism”
This essay revisits the work of Christine Delphy, a leading activist in the women's liberation movement in France and a leading materialist feminist theorist whom many US feminist scholars have written off as a “seventies feminist”: she not only published one of her most-read pieces in the 1970s but is also judged to typify that period by virtue of her (in)famous conceptualization of women as a class. This essay undertakes a close reading of Delphy's writings on gender together with her earlier work on women as social class to elaborate what I term her constructivist materialism: a materialist analysis of gender hierarchy premised on the conviction that sex difference is not the foundation of gender but is, rather, its effect.
