How are we to understand hunger strikes and episodes of lip-sewing in immigration detention? Are they simply cases of self-destruction or bare life, as is often claimed, or is there scope to view ...these embodied acts of self-harm as having a political dimension and to see those engaged in them as resistant subjects exercising political agency? To explore these issues, I draw on recent feminist theoretical work on vulnerability. Received wisdom suggests that vulnerability is an impediment to political action. Rejecting the idea that vulnerability equates exclusively to injurability and passivity, I contend, by contrast, that corporeal vulnerability can potentially prompt action, serve as a resource for collective acts of resistance, and enable the politicization of certain spaces. Since context matters to how vulnerability and resistance intersect, I illustrate my argument by exploring, in particular, the protests that took place at Woomera immigration detention centre in Australia in 2002.
Recent debates in contemporary feminist theory have been dominated by the relation between identity and politics. Beyond Identity Politics examines the implications of recent theorizing on ...difference, identity and subjectivity for theories of patriarchy and feminist politics. Organised around the three central themes of subjectivity, power and politics, this book focuses on a question which feminists struggled with and were divided by throughout the last decade, that is: how to theorize the relation between the subject and politics. In this thoughtful engagement with these debates Moya Lloyd argues that the turn to the subject in process does not entail the demise of feminist politics as many feminists have argued. She demonstrates how key ideas such as agency, power and domination take on a new shape as a consequence of this radical rethinking of the subject-politics relation and how the role of feminist political theory becomes centred upon critique. A resource for feminist theorists, women?s and gender studies students, as well as political and social theorists, this is a carefully composed and wide- ranging text, which provides important insights into one of contemporary feminism?s most central concerns.
Butler and Ethics Lloyd, Moya; Lloyd, Professor of Political Theory Moya
06/2015
eBook
Bringing together a group of internationally renowned theorists, the volume asks: has there been an 'ethical turn' in Butlers work or are we seeing the culmination of ethical ideas in her earlier ...work? How do her ethics relate to her politics, and how do they connect to her increasing concern with violence, war and conflict? Breaking new ground in Butler scholarship, Butler and Ethics advances ongoing debates about materiality and the body, biopolitics, affect theory, precariousness and subjectification.
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.
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