The repression of women by the Irish state has been exposed yet again by the case of a clinically dead woman being kept alive in order to continue a pregnancy. The responsibility of the state for this woman’s situation was summed up in the claim by doctors that they were unable to accede to her family’s request that life support be switched off for “constitutional reasons”. In this case the legal imperative to preserve the life of the unborn raised the prospect of a woman’s body being maintained for up to twenty weeks despite there being no possibility of a live, never mind healthy birth.
The state of reproductive rights in 2015
26 January 2015, byIn recognition of the 42nd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, we present this article summarizing the history of U.S. policy around reproductive rights from 1973 to present, with a special focus on new developments from the past couple of years.
Women’s liberation:? The Marxist tradition
15 August 2014, by“If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.”
—Russian revolutionary Inessa Armand
Women and the Early Years of Japanese Communism
15 July 2014Shomi Yoon gave this talk as part of Marxism 2014 in Melbourne.
The Fourth International and women’s liberation
24 November 2013, byThis article forms the Introduction to a collection of Fourth International resolutions published by the International Institute for Research and Education in collaboration with Resistance Books.
The feminist challenge to traditional political organisations
21 November 2013, byThis paper was presented at the Historical Materialism Conference in London, 10 November 2013, in the panel on “A comparative analysis of socialist/class struggle feminism in France and Britain in the 1970s and 1980s”.
Postmodernism and Feminism
10 September 2012, byThe term postmodernism has entered into common currency with a rapidity that modernism, “after” which it is named, never achieved: it has a trendy contemporaneity but is little understood. Partly through its description of reality as a series of images, or “simulacra” in Baudrillard’s word, it has attained popular cultural status in the media, especially television, as well as modish respectability in the academy, across Europe and North America.
Feminist practice in the 15-M movement
16 July 2012, byAs a protest space created by men and women, 15-M has repeated the mistake of its predecessors, fearing that feminism would divide the movement, instead of strengthening it. 15-M has not developed tools for recognising the patriarchal logic to be found at its heart, and transforming them from a feminist perspective. The result has been to render violence invisible and to silence women’s voices.
Marxism and Feminism
27 September 2010, byThe re-emergence of feminism in the 1970s, itself the product of a whole generation of militants imbued with Marxism - at least in Europe - contributed to the development of two types of currents: those advocating a pure and simple rejection of Marxism, others the surpassing of Marxism through some methodology supposed to be better suited to the new subject matter. This paradoxical phenomenon can be explained by factors both internal and external to Marxism.