Feminist Experiences develops and defends a distinctive understanding of feminist philosophy as social critique. Feminist philosophy is essentially a political endeavor, Johanna Oksala argues, aiming to expose, analyze, and ultimately change gendered power relations. However, such an understanding of feminist philosophy raises a host of theoretical problems and paradoxes. Oksala investigates the philosophical challenges and outlines the ontological presuppositions and methodological innovations the project requires. Drawing on conceptual tools from the thought of Michel Foucault, but also from the tradition of phenomenology, she explores the role of experience in feminist philosophy and its relationship to language and linguistic meaning. Oksala concludes by sketching a feminist ontology of the present through a critical investigation of neoliberalism and the challenges it presents to feminist theory and politics.

In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.

Feminist Political Ecology explores the gendered relations of ecologies, economies and politics in communities as diverse as the rubbertappers in the rainforests of Brazil to activist groups fighting racism in New York City. Women are often at the centre of these struggles, struggles which concern local knowledge, everyday practice, rights to resources, sustainable development, environmental quality, and social justice. The book bridges the gap between the academic and rural orientation of political ecology and the largely activist and urban focus of environmental justice movements.

Interviewing is one of the most common techniques used to conduct qualitative research in the social sciences and humanities. As a result of globalization, researchers increasingly conduct interviews cross-, inter- and intra-nationally. This raises important questions about how differences and sameness are understood and negotiated within the interview situation, as well as the power structures at play within qualitative research, and the role that reflexivity plays in mediating these. What does it mean to interview Black women as a Black woman? How is ethnicity negotiated across various qualitative research encounters? How are differences bridged or asserted in feminist interviewing? These are just some of the questions explored in the chapters in this volume. Drawing on their recent research, the contributors detail their experiences of engaging in qualitative interviewing and examine how they negotiated the various dilemmas they encountered. The contributions challenge some of the assumptions made in early feminist work on interviewing, providing nuanced accounts of actual research experiences. This volume explores the practice and implications of conducting cross-, inter- and intra-cultural interviewing, bringing together researchers from a range of disciplines and countries to describe and analyse both its vicissitudes and its advantages.

The Women's Movement is usually referred to as if it were a constant, global phenomenon. Susan Bassnett has lived and been involved in the struggles of the women's movement in the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom, and has had extensive contacts with feminists in the German Democratic Republic. On the basis of her personal experiences and study of women's history and literature in these countries she is able to present a striking picture of the variety of feminist aims, tactics and priorities in the four countries, and of the character of the women's movement in four very different cultures. Throughout, the author writes with a double commitment: first, to furthering our understanding of the diversity of aims of women's movements and their common ground - the no-man's land of female existence; second, to making her book as accessible as possible to all feminists, through drawing on her own personal experience of countries in which she has lived, worked, travelled, and made friends.

Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.

Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity that continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing. While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education.