Within the past 40 years, feminist studies/women’s studies/gender studies/studies in gender and sexuality has effectively grown into a globally practised academic discipline while simultaneously resisting the notion of disciplinarity and strongly advocating multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. In this article, I argue that gaining identity through refusing an identity can be viewed as being a constitutive paradox of gender studies. Through exploring gender studies as a transdisciplinary intellectual discipline, which came into existence in very particular multidisciplinary historical conditions of the feminist (...) movement, I suggest that transdisciplinarity within gender studies takes on a meaning which results in a radical problematization of the academic goal of ‘knowledge production’. Instead of such ‘knowledge production’, transdisciplinarity in gender studies promotes intervention which reaches beyond the concepts of accountability, innovation and corporate management. I argue that Jacques Derrida’s promotion of the Collège International de Philosophie in 1982 in its particular relationship to the tradition of philosophy provides a parallel example of such an attitude. Adding to Joan Scott’s and Clare Hemmings’s insights on gender studies in terms of critique and transformation, I argue that transdisciplinarity as practice of ‘intervention’ is crucial for the construction of gender studies disciplinary identity, based upon apparent non-identity. (shrink)

In this book the author confronts the transcendental subject-assumptions of modern political theory in both its liberal and Hegelian-Marxian form. She argues that both traditions are bound by subject-philosophy which the postmodern thought needs to question in order to fight the modern universalism and in order to address difference.

In this article on Elizabeth Grosz's philosophy and its implications for discussions about feminist theory, I first suggest that Charles Darwin plays a particular role in Grosz's recent ontological thought. This role is to provide help in joining together two incompatible sources in her work: Gilles Deleuze's monistic ontology of a constant flow of new differentiations, on the one hand, and Luce Irigaray's thought of sexual difference as the primary ontological difference, on the other. I argue that Grosz's intellectual project (...) has developed into a grand general theory of change in which both Darwin and Irigaray are turned into ontologists in a Deleuzian vein. I then point out that Grosz's ontology also includes a political aspect, which manifests in the fact that Grosz redescribes Darwin through interpreting him primarily as a theorist of “event” and the unexpected. However, through an analysis of the discussion on Grosz between Luciana Parisi and Jami Weinstein, I speculate whether Grosz's ambition to provide a total and complete explanation of change encourages the tone of feminist discussion toward one of explanation rather than intervention. (shrink)

Although Hegel and feminism seem an unlikely couple, Hegelian philosophy played a prominent part in the thinking of groundbreaking feminist philosophers from Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray. This book offers a new generation of feminist readings of Hegel from leading scholars in the both fields. Through close readings and innovative arguments, this book makes a significant contribution to the debate on gender and provides insight into philosophical method.