Vulnerability in Resistance

Vulnerability in Resistance is a collection of essays dedicated to a critical examination of precisely those two terms, vulnerability and resistance, and its implications for radical politics. As the Editors note in the introductory chapter, this collection aims to reverse the popular notion that vulnerability and resistance are opposites. Rather than understand vulnerability as a weakness, the authors ask, what ‘if vulnerability were imagined as one of the conditions of the very possibility of resistance?’ (p. 1). The chapters in the collection investigate this question by employing feminist theory and political philosophy. Rather than approach vulnerability as an innate feminine quality that requires protection as it is most popularly defined, the editors contend that ‘vulnerability is the effect of social power,’ and therefore must be situated within specific social relationships and historical contexts (p. 4). Furthermore, tethering vulnerability to the need to protect....