Anarchafeminism

Description

How can we be sure the oppressed do not become oppressors in their turn? How can we create a feminism that doesn't turn into yet another tool for oppression? It has become commonplace to argue that, in order to fight the subjugation of women, we have to unpack the ways different forms of oppression intersect with one another: class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and ecology, to name only a few. By arguing that there is no single factor, or arche, explaining the oppression of women, Chiara Bottici proposes a radical anarchafeminist philosophy inspired by two major claims: that there is something specific to the oppression of women, and that, in order to fight that, we need to untangle all other forms of oppression and the anthropocentrism they inhabit. Anarchism needs feminism to address the continued subordination of all femina, but feminism needs anarchism if it does not want to become the privilege of a few. Anarchafeminism calls for a decolonial and deimperial position and for a renewed awareness of the somatic communism connecting all different life forms on the planet. In this new revolutionary vision, feminism does not mean the liberation of the lucky few, but liberation for all living creatures from both capitalist exploitation and an androcentric politics of domination. Either all or none of us will be free.

Chiara Bottici is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, USA. She is the author of Men and States (2009), A Philosophy of Political Myth (2010), The Myth of the Clash of Civilization (2010), Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, and Identity (2013) and Imaginal Politics: Images beyond the Imagination and beyond the Imaginary (2014). She is also editor of The Politics of Imagination, co-edited with Benoit Challand (2011) and The Anarchist Turn, co-edited with Jacob Blumenfeld and Simon Critchley (2013)

This book takes anarchist feminism in a fresh direction by relocating it within an ontological framework developed from Baruch Spinoza's seventeenth-century efforts ... Bottici makes a strong case for anarchism as a method and for Spinoza as a useful voice for building anarchist-feminist process-philosophy. * Contemporary Political Theory * Bottici has eruditely crafted an anarchafeminist political philosophy. * CHOICE * This is a capacious, clear, and revolutionary text that will bring readers who are just starting to learn about feminist philosophy as well as those who have been around a long time. This book does an excellent job in communicating the value of the anarchic, especially in its resistance to the leader, and its thoroughgoing affirmation of the value of freedom. This freedom is not a narrow idea of personal liberty, but an entire mode of transforming the world. We learn as well about a 'transindividualism' which allows us a way to rethink global solidarity for our times. * Judith Butler, author of "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" *