Women's Studies

Everyday Feminist Objects

In tandem with the recent resurgence of interest in material culture, this special issue invites potential contributors to examine everyday feminist objects. Alison Bartlett and Margaret Henderson address the ongoing controversy surrounding how feminist objects are defined and delimited. On the one hand, “women’s objects are synonymous or semi-synonymous with feminist objects” (Bartlett and Henderson 161); on the other hand, feminist objects may be defined more narrowly as those with “a direct connection with the women’s movement: things made by proclaimed feminists for movement purposes” (162). These two categories reflect two divergent tendencies within feminism. The first is less activist and therefore more capacious: it opens space for material investigations of objects that structure women’s everyday lives, even if they are not explicitly tied to organized feminist action. The latter narrows the definition of feminism around activism, identifying feminist objects strictly as those associated with feminist movements, such as the protest objects (Bartlett and Henderson), activist commodities (Repo), or suffrage objects (Green).

Different from, instead of running against, the activist approach, this special issue seeks to understand feminism as something enacted and experienced through the everyday (Ahmed), and therefore to approach feminist objects as ones of the daily, the ordinary, and the mundane. Henri Lefebvre (9) regards the everyday as “a sole surviving common sense referent and point of reference.” Yet the everyday is also notoriously elusive. Maurice Blanchot (19) describes it as something that “escapes,” not because it is rare, but precisely because it is omnipresent and therefore lacks a stable “subject”—the everyday is diffuse, unclaimed, and repetitive. Because of this, the everyday tends to “weigh down into things” (Blanchot 19). And it is objects and things that absorb the anonymity and inertia of the everyday, thereby becoming repositories of habit, boredom, or comfort.

To grasp, and perhaps to unsettle, the taken-for-granted everydayness of feminist objects, this special issue invites contributors to adopt what Igor Kopytoff terms an object-biographical approach to feminism (68). Bill Brown quips that “thing theory sounds like an oxymoron” (5), precisely because the object is stubbornly material, concrete, and therefore resistant to abstraction. This oxymoronic tension also marks the study of feminist objects, though in a reversed form. Rather than objects resisting theory, it often seems that theory (e.g., Behar; Morton) has outpaced the objects themselves, leaving analyses of the material things comparatively sparse. Theoretical work is not without value; yet it may be premature, or overly anticipatory, in ways that miss the very theoretical contributions enabled by an object-oriented approach. Given this situation, the aim of this special issue is not merely to strike a balance between theory and object, but to return to the feminist object itself. By tracing the biographies, trajectories, and material encounters of objects in women’s lives, this special issue seeks to unpack how everyday engagements between women and things actively shape feminist practices. In doing so, we hope to foreground the mundane, affective, and embodied dimensions of feminism that become visible only when one attends carefully to objects as they circulate, wear down, break, get repaired, get passed on, or quietly persist in the background of daily life.

Suggested Topics

• Physical objects within the female body
• Women, food, and kitchen utensils
• Clothing, ornament, and fashion
• The play and interplay between women and toys
• Female voices, acoustic devices, and auditory technologies
• Memory and imagination of feminist objects
• Performativity and spatiality in feminist objects
• Intimacy, affect, and sensory engagement with objects
• Women, commodities, and (anti-)commodification
• Literary, theatrical, cultural representations of female objects
• Women’s design, production, and transformation of objects
• The global manufacturing, circulation, and consumption of female objects
• Tools and the gender division of labor
• Women’s appropriation of men’s objects and the counter-objectification of men

References

• Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.
• Behar, Katherine, editor. Object-Oriented Feminism. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
• Blanchot, Maurice. “Everyday Speech.” Yale French Studies, no. 73, 1987, pp. 12–20. Translated by Susan Hanson.
• Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22.
• Green, Barbara. “Feminist Things.” Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 66–79.
• Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 64–92.
• Lefebvre, Henri. “The Everyday and Everydayness.” Yale French Studies, no. 73, 1987, pp. 7–11. Translated by Christine Levich.
• Morton, Timothy. “Treating Objects Like Women: Feminist Ontology and the Question of Essence.” International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, edited by Greta Gaard, Simon Estok, and Serpil Oppermann, Routledge, 2013, pp. 56–69.
• Repo, Jemima. “Feminist Commodity Activism: The New Political Economy of Feminist Protest.” International Political Sociology, vol. 14, no. 2, 2020, pp. 215–32.