Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"It is not only in their victories, or even their defeats, that the women in this book move between their immediate personal circumstances and their larger political contexts. Rather, it is in their on-going and often unresolved struggles to love well and to work well that Lori Marso articulates a powerful feminist energy. Women's struggles to 'get free' don't have to fully succeed in order to stimulate our imaginations. These 'feminist experiments in living' create space for multiple approaches to the task of inventing a satisfactory life in an unjust world."

Kathy Ferguson, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA, author of Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets

"Lori Marso's book is an essential exploration of the feminist intellectual. Marso traces how feminist thinkers have struggled against the normative demands of femininity to think boldly, to pose urgent questions, and to imagine freedom in their personal and political lives. This book is necessary reading in a time when radical thought feels more urgent than ever."

Jennifer Nash, Duke University, USA, author of How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory

"The first edition of Lori Marso's Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity was one of the books that made me want to become a feminist political theorist. Its vibrant appreciation of feminist foremothers in their human complexity invites our full and imperfect selves into a relation of collective feminist becoming. An intellectual and political genealogy that centers desire and intimacy as core to both lived constraints and liberatory strategies, it illuminates the corporeal and relational stakes that link distinct struggles within and against sexism, racism, class oppression, and state violence. Under conditions of increasing reproductive coercion and gender policing, this reissued invitation, grounded in a richly theorized account of femininity as political 'situation,' could not be timelier."

Annie Menzel, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, author of Fatal Denial: Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant Mortality

"Lori Marso's capacious book remains critically important, twenty years later. When the demands of femininity shift across time, space, and political context, questions about how to live a feminist life resist easy resolution. Marso vividly demonstrates how contemporary feminist thought may be enlivened by turning to foremothers' writing and lives as their lifework-or the ways their thought and material circumstances variously but inevitably intertwine in the feminist preoccupations that make and remake a life."

Isabelle Laurenzi, Yale University, USA