English abstracts #83:

MARTIN FOG LANTZ ARNDAL: THE NATURAL AND AESTHETIC GENDER. GENDER AND THE BODY IN MARY WOLLENSTONECRAFT

Since the 1970s, there has been an increased focus on gender in the research literature concerning British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, which most likely is caused by the increasing interest in the social aspects of gender inspired by poststructuralist thinking. Although such readings have been illuminative and fruitful, focusing on the social and the interconnections between Wollstonecraft and modernity seems to have brought with them a neglect of two interesting aspects of Wollstonecraft’s notion about gender. On the one hand, her thoughts on the body seem somewhat underexposed, while her impact on the subsequent British romanticists is equally neglected. The article focuses on these two aspects. Here the analyses are based on Wollstonecraft’s discussions with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke about the relations gender has to nature, bodies, and aesthetics; discussions which inform a conception of gender that the later romantics would take inspiration from.

Keywords: gender, body, Wollstonecraft, Burke, Rousseau.

JOHANNA SJÖSTEDT: FUTURE OR REPETITION? HEIDEGGER AND THE AUGENBLICK IN SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR’S 1940S ESSAYS 

This article analyses Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of temporality in the essays Pyrrhus and Cinéas (1944) and Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and situates it in relation to the tradition of phenomenology with particular focus on the thought of Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time, Heidegger develops an “ek-static” description of time, a lived experience of time where the past, the future, and the present are united in the authentically grasped moment or Augenblick. The article demonstrates that this notion of temporality is also present in Beauvoir’s essays, and it reinterprets her understanding of the concepts of future and repetition in light of this reading. The article suggests that Beauvoir makes a distinction between authentic and inauthentic attitudes towards the future. It is also suggested that Beauvoir’s accounts of women in terms of immanence or of a repetition of the present that underpins her analysis in The Second Sex should not be taken as ontological, but rather as descriptions of the ways in which time is experienced under oppression.

Keywords: Augenblick, Beauvoir, Heidegger, repetition, temporality

ANNA CORNELIA PLOUG: HEGEL IN PARIS. BEAUVOIR AND THE DIALECTICAL LEGACY OF FEMINIST CRITIQUE

While it is well-known that the intense albeit short-lived Hegel renaissance of the 1930s’ and 1940s’ France had a huge influence on later intellectual currents of the 20th century, its importance to Simone de Beauvoir is often left unnoticed or reduced to her appropriation of the master/slave dialectic. This paper argues that Beauvoir – who came to know Hegel through the work of Alexandre Kojève as well as her own studies during the war – in fact, makes recourse to Hegelian dialectics in her conceptual composition of the ‘woman problem’ in The Second Sex. The paper identifies four figures of femininity, from the abstract mystique of the ‘Sphinx’ to the internal conflict of ‘The Little Mermaid’, and shows how the negative determinations culminate in a figure of contradiction, which implies that we may interpret The Second Sex as a work of critical thought. This means that the Hegelian legacy of feminist critique has as its objective an emancipatory project rather than equality.

Keywords: Beauvoir, contradiction, critique, feminist philosophy, French Hegelianism

ØYSTEIN SKUNDBERG: “BODILY AND SPIRITUALLY INTERTWINED”: THE GENDERED NATURE OF CHILDREN IN THE CHILD-REARING HANDBOOK FORÆLDRE OG BØRN (1902)

In the voluminous Norwegian child-rearing handbook Forældre og Børn (Parents and Children) (1902), the authors perceived the non-corporeal characteristics of boys and girls, such as their interests, abilities, spirit, personality, and emotional life as an effect of their gendered ‘nature’ or ‘being’. The ‘nature’ of boys and girls from infancy until adulthood was understood as an inevitable law of nature by almost all of the writers addressing gendered topics despite the differences in their academic or political positions. This article attempts to present and analyse how these vaguely defined concepts are expressed, and it suggests that Parents and Children reflects the intersection of traditional ideas about the innate traits and limitations of the genders, with novel ideas about the complementary roles and obligations of boys and girls.

Keywords: child-rearing, gender, sexuality, children, nature

DANIELA DAHL: ON THE MODERN TIME REGIME AND LYDIA WAHLSTRÖM’S CATEGORIES OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

This article examines a historical work which depicts the history of women and the women’s movement in Sweden, written in 1933 by Swedish historian Lydia Wahlström. Through the theoretical concept of the modern time regime, this article reveals how modern time-structures were integral to Wahlström’s conception of women’s history and the manner in which she constructed the historical development of women’s collective identity. In Wahlström’s work, women as a category for historical analysis harboured facets which shifted during the course of time at multiple durations. However, the category itself acquired a fixed or eternal status, by which it was placed beyond or outside historical time and modern development. In this sense, the time-structure of Wahlström’s category exhibits similarities with the sex/gender distinction that emerges within feminist historiography in 1970. Through the exposition of this finding, the article seeks to demonstrate how theories of temporality can serve to enforce a critical analysis of feminist historiography. In the specific case of Wahlström’s text, this particular finding also subscribes to the historisation of the sex/gender distinction within feminist historiography.

Keywords: The modern time regime, Lydia Wahlström, temporality, categories of historical analysis, feminist historiography

JOACHIM AAGAARD FRIIS: QUEER TEMPORALITY: THEORETICAL TENDENCIES

This article explores the concept of queer temporality in the works of queer theorists Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and José Muñoz and establishes a connection between a Marxist critique of abstract capitalist time and queer theory’s critique of the notion of future-oriented social value. Thereby, it shows how economic and social reproduction are both processes that involve a linear and progress-oriented temporality. Edelman uses the concept of reproductive futurism to criticize society’s focus on the child as the ultimate future-oriented goal and argues that queer communities must completely abandon a concept of the future because it is always already embedded in the idea of reproduction. Halberstam examines queer countercultures to find an alternative to Edelman’s anti-social stance, and Muñoz creates a concept of a queer utopia as a future of potentiality that offers hope in the present. The article points out the lack of a sense of history in these theorists’ works on queer temporality and suggests an understanding of the concept that actively incorporates the past as a relevant strengthening of queer communities.

Keywords: queer theory, temporality, social reproduction, capitalist time, performativity

NIELS NYEGAARD: WRITING QUEER HISTORY

The article examines how queer theory has affected research on Danish gender and sexuality history from the year 2000 and up until today. The article does so by pursuing two analytical objectives. First, the article identifies a series of significant elements within queer theory as a theoretical framework. The article categorises the elements as: 1) an anti-essentialist point of departure, 2) a critical view on the normal, and 3) an opposition against proper objects. Second, the article examines how researchers with an interest in Danish gender and sexuality history have deployed these elements in their own studies in recent decades. The article makes a broad examination of historical research in academia and includes studies from disciplines like history, literary scholarship, sociology, and gender studies. Its argument is that queer theory has affected research on Danish gender and sexuality history by building on existing historical studies of homosexuality and by taking these studies in new directions.

Keywords: gender, sexuality, history, queer theory, Denmark.