La fem ir shell

Answers

AT Perm

This perm is saying “we will free the shit out of you with our bombs” –

1. Grass-roots ecofem is radically opposed to the state – the perm will always fail to resolve the federal government as a pedagogical constituent which means it inevitable falls victim to patriarchy

2. Epistemology is the central pillar of oppression, which the permutation leaves unaddressed: tinges of orthodoxy cripple liberatory politics

Alcoff (Premier feminist philosopher and political activist) 4, Linda Martin, “Schutte's Nietzschean Postcolonial Politics”, Hypatia, Volume 19, Number 3, Summer 2004, pp. 144-156 (Article)

Schutte’s particular political-cum-philosophical contribution can be brought into focus by making reference to Sylvia Wynter, another theorist from the Caribbean. Wynter (2000) has argued that the liberatory discourse of both Marxism and liberalism, as these have been taken up in the spheres of anticolo- nialist thought and practice, have been waylaid by their inattention to epistemic and ontological forms of colonization. Marxism’s great weakness was that it neglected a suffi cient attention to the question of epistemology, which resulted in its replication of hierarchical and colonial forms of knowledge production and the distribution of epistemic authority. Marxism’s focus remained fi xed on political sovereignty and economic sovereignty, but because the epistemic violence of traditional modes of knowing were ignored, some of the greatest egalitarian movements were overturned, as the discourses of liberation fell short in their attempt to democratize their societies and reach beyond the concepts and categories of capitalism and colonialism. Wynter further claims that we need to conceptualize an “ontological sovereignty” which will require no less than moving “completely outside our present conception of what it is to be human [that is, in which European “Man” is the subject of progressive human- ism], and therefore outside the ground of the orthodox body of knowledge which institutes and reproduces such a conception” (Wynter 2000, 136). Thus, the aim of ontological sovereignty relies ultimately on achieving epistemic sovereignty: we cannot begin to think beyond colonial categories of human existence until we have made the epistemic turn, to move beyond the episteme, in Foucault’s sense, of the current regime. (For a great introduction to Wynter’s work, see Henry 2000). Schutte’s orientation to questions of emancipation, and the motivation behind her expansive use of Nietzsche, has been her own awareness of this need for an epistemic and ontological turn within the project of liberation. She says we must uproot “any pattern of thinking and acting that takes for granted the cultural and scientific hegemony of procedures and values established in the most powerful nations of the earth” (2000a, 9). To counter this pattern, she says we have an “ethical responsibility to listen to those others whose voices may clash with the sources of epistemic legitimation established in the cen- tral parts of the world” (2000a, 9). Thus, we must pay close attention to the “politics of citation” practiced by even those internal Western critics, such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Sartre, who have sought to deconstruct the Eurocentric historical project of global domination, even while “the scholarly sources [they] use tend to be European.” The epistemic break between these critics and the generation of postcolonial critics, she says, “involves in part the use of sources, and, in part, the political stance taken by philosophers in view of their life experiences” (2000a, 10). Thus, her Nietzschean inspired feminism and anticolonialism has been motivated by precisely the awareness of what Wynter has called the need for an epistemic and ontological, and not merely a political and economic, conceptualization of sovereignty and democracy. The resources that Schutte finds in a Nietzschean reevaluation of all value is precisely in its ability to free us from the structures of current thought, whether limited by political conservatism or left-wing dogmatisms, and thus to render operative the alternative rationalities and experiential perspectives from those outside, or on the underside, of the West. Schutte’s work on Nietzsche has not only been in what we might think of as “applied Nietzscheanism,” but also, and initially, in contributing substantially to the interpretive debate over Nietzsche’s corpus. Most originally, Schutte’s book Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks, was the fi rst study of Nietzsche to take up the political questions in a serious way, as neither a polemic against him or an apologia, and not so as to overpower Nietzsche’s entire corpus with the political but still to insist on its central relevance (Schutte 1984). I started using the book in my own course on Nietzsche when it fi rst came out because I was disturbed by the way that the recent Nietzsche revival at that time was eliding the serious political elitism in his work, in a manner not unlike the previous generation, where Kaufmann provided only apology without critical analysis of any sort of Nietzsche’s politics. Now, of course, a number of interest- ing analyses of Nietzsche’s politics have appeared, but Beyond Nihilism, coming out in 1984, was really the only book I could fi nd at the time to address the political issues squarely.

AT Coloniality

Feminist interrogation implicitly accesses subaltern history; their explicit criticism causes derision and coopts solvency. We concede that differentials exist, obviously, but defend essentialism as a necessary political strategy in lieu of an alternative, and as an inevitability in the struggle against phallocentricity

Klubock 1, Thomas Miller, “Writing the History of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Chile”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 81:3-4, August-November 2001, pp. 493-518 (Article)

The social-historical literature on women of the bajo pueblo in Chile introduces a number of questions drawn from feminist theory about the writ- ing of women’s history. The project of recovering “hidden” histories of women

and restoring the historical agency and subjectivity of subaltern women has been linked to the feminist political project of the second-wave 1970s. During the 1980s, feminist scholars, influenced by postmodernism and postcolonial studies, began to question some of the assumptions of the historiographical and political project of women’s history. As Kirkwood sought to rethink the conventional political narratives of modern Chilean history from the perspec- tive of gender, and to examine the historical process of patriarchy, feminist critics, most notably Joan W. Scott, argued for a move from compensatory “herstory” women’s history to the history of the role of gender as an organiz- ing principle.16 Feminist historians and critics demonstrated the complications in historical efforts to recover women’s “experience” and “agency.” The phrase “women’s history” masks the heterogeneity of women’s experiences and of women as a historical category, and artificially separates experience from the symbolic cultural and ideological systems and contexts that make historical experience meaningful and intelligible.17 Much of this work demonstrates that just as the category of the “subaltern” or “the popular” elides social distinc- tions and differences based on class, ethnicity, and gender, there is no unitary female experience or even homogeneous group of women, even among the bajo pueblo in the countryside and city. Feminist critics have insightfully argued that the very category of “women” is historically contingent and con- structed.18 Similarly, feminist critics have argued that experience separate from lan- guage, culture, and ideology does not exist; experiences are shaped by the ways

Butler argues that feminisms that rest on foundational claims to define a set of “values or dispositions” that define the subjectivity of women assert normativity, even if implicitly, and thus become necessarily exclusionary of a variety of subject positionings defined by class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Julia Kristeva have argued that for strategic political purposes some kind of essentialist rendering of the concept of “woman” is necessary in terms of feminist activism. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,

in which they are understood and represented discursively. Can we write social histories of subaltern women that ignore the ways in which experience and subjectivity are produced in interaction with forms of ideological and cultural production and social discipline generated by elites and the state? Recent fem- inist historical approaches demand that women’s history be analyzed in terms of the historical organization of gender relations and systems that determine both femininity and masculinity. The history of women of the bajo pueblo is defined by the process of state formation and by the disciplinary apparatuses that constitute both women and men as subjects, even as they regulate their labor and sexuality and cannot be taken as independent or autonomous. This raises the methodological problem of reading women’s experiences through the records of courts, prisons, upper-class charities and social reform agencies, and the church. How do working-class women make their voices heard in this documentation? Reading against the grain, can we get a sense of the social and cultural worlds of women or of counterhegemonic ideas and behavior in the arenas of gender and sexuality? One response to these feminist critical approaches to the writing of women’s history has been a turn to Michel Foucault’s radical constructionist understanding of gender and sexuality. Foucault’s argument, in works such as The History of Sexuality, that sexuality and subjectivity are “effects” rather than causes or foundations, the constructions of “epistemes” or “power/knowledge” systems, has inspired a number of historians to move from the historiographi- cal and political project of recovering the experiences of women of the bajo pueblo and establishing their changing social and economic roles during the process of economic modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a genealogy of the institutional and discursive systems that oper- ated to discipline women and impose order on their social and economic activ- ities.19 Feminist historians, drawing on the work of Foucault, have pointed to the ways in which the state, social reformers, the church, and industrial employers targeted single women who lived and worked in rural towns and urban suburbs in their moralizing campaigns for social reform. In addition, they have traced the emergence of new institutions like prisons, asylums, and orphanages and the development of professions like medicine, social work, and criminology in terms of a broader disciplinary project aimed at women of the popular sectors in the name of producing modernization and modernity.

In doing so, they have added a concern with the history of sexuality and repro- duction to the historical project of documenting women’s social and economic activities. In a study of prostitutes in the city of Antofogasta, for example, Leyla Flo- res examines the ways in which organizations like the Liga Chilena de Higiene Social and the medical profession sought to promote social reform by regulat- ing prostitution and imposing a “phallocratic ideology of female sexual passiv- ity” on working-class women.20 In another case, Soledad Zárate describes how the technification and professionalization of medicine during the late nine- teenth century led to the displacement and exclusion of female midwives who had played a major role in women’s healthcare, particularly in care for preg- nant women.21 A similar Foucauldian approach animates María Angélica Illanes’s pathbreaking history of healthcare and social reform in Chile.22 In addition, Zárate examines emergent criminological discourses implemented through institutions like the charity Sociedad de Beneficiencia and religious orders in hospitals, orphanages, asylums, poor houses, and prisons. Here, her work coincides with the work of historians like Lorena Godoy and Elizabeth Quay Hutchison on industrial education offered women in vocational schools23 Schools run by the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril and the Ministerio de Obras Públicas established a curriculum for working-class women, focused on their moral education and their preparation for domestic responsibilities. While they provided training for women as seamstresses for garment workshops, they also offered classes in domestic economy, hygiene, and manners in order to prepare women to be housewives who administered the family budget, raised their children, and cared for their husbands.24