Bakhtinian Contributions for a Dialogic Feminism

Abstract

For over 170 years, feminists have questioned the concept of womanhood, noting how the definition of what it means to be a woman encompasses diverse and complex issues. The diversity of what the category “woman” represents has led to the creation of different concepts, theories, and methodologies within the feminist realm, such as intersectionality, standpoint theory, situated knowledges, Black feminism, decolonial feminism, dialogic feminism, and others. Lídia Puigvert and Márcia Tiburi have theorized about dialogic feminism, demonstrating it is possible to think of a feminism that considers social inequalities and fights against different forms of oppression by adopting ethical listening and speaking standpoints, dialogue, and solidarity between different voices. In this paper, we seek to collate ideas from Lídia Puigvert and Márcia Tiburi on dialogic feminism and concepts from Mikhail Bakhtin. Our goal is to verify how a Bakhtinian perspective contributes to dialogic feminism. With this analysis, we observe that several concepts proposed by Bakhtin, such as dialogue, dialogical relations, heteroglossia, axiology, ethic act, alterity, and surplus, may contribute to dialogic feminism, both in theory and in practice, as they may highlight aspects of a powerful heuristic approach that can encourage plural and democratic spaces.