Juliet Mitchell

Held on Saturday April 2, 2016. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Marilyn Nissim-Sabat (Lewis University) Christine Riddiough (Chicago Women’s Liberation Union) Judith Gardiner (University of Illinois at Chicago) Description Named after Juliet Mitchell’s 1966 essay, this panel will explore the long history of the struggle for women’s liberation from the vantage point of the Left today. Mitchell critiques bourgeois feminist demands such as the right to work and equal pay to posit the need instead for equal work. [Read More]

ON NOVEMBER 7, 2015, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion at its 2nd European Conference in Frankfurt entitled “Women: The Longest Revolution?” The panelists were Cornelia Möser, who earned her PhD in gender studies and political science and is a researcher for the CNRS at the CRESPPA-GTM in Paris; Lucy Parker, a member of Platypus based in London; Joy McReady, a journalist and revolutionary social activist who writes a monthly column on women’s liberation for Workers’ Power, the British section of the League for the Fifth International; and Ursula Jensen, a founding member of the International Bolshevik Tendency and a longterm member of the works council within the IG Metall. [Read More]

ON NOVEMBER 4, 2015, the Loyola University Chicago chapter of the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion entitled “Women: The Longest Revolution?” The panelists were Margaret Power, professor of History at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the author or editor of several books on Latin American history and the political right; Brit Schulte, a grassroots organizer, founding editor of Red Wedge magazine, and current graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Yasmin Nair, a Chicago-based writer, academic, and activist in Chicago, co-founder of the Against Equality editorial collective, and volunteer policy director of Gender JUST. [Read More]

Panel event held at Loyola University, Chicago, on November 4 2015. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Margaret Power Yasmin Nair Brit Schulte Description Named for Juliet Mitchell’s 1966 essay, this panel will explore the long history of the struggle for women’s liberation from the vantage point of the Left today. Mitchell critiques bourgeois feminist demands such as the right to work and equal pay to posit the need instead for equal work. [Read More]

A Panel Discussion at the Second Platypus European Conference in Frankfurt, November 7 2015. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Cornelia Möser (HU Berlin) Joy McReady (LFI) Lucy Parker (Platypus Affiliated Society) Ursula Jensen (IBT) Moderated by Hannah Schroeder. Description A namesake of Juliet Mitchell’s 1966 essay, this panel will explore the long history of the struggle for women’s liberation from the vantage point of the Left today. [Read More]

ON NOVEMBER 23, 2010, Sunit Singh conducted an interview with psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell at Jesus College in Cambridge. Although Professor Mitchell’s rehabilitation of Freud is well chronicled, the attempt in “Women: The Longest Revolution” (1966)1 to rescue the core content of the Marxist tradition – its emphasis on emancipation – remains unexplored. What follows is an edited version of the interview. Sunit Singh: The sociologist C. Wright Mills, in an open letter to the editors of New Left Review in 1960, exhorted the still inchoate “New Left” to reclaim an ideological space for socialism over the chorus of liberal commentators proclaiming “the end of ideology” – the idea that there are no more antagonistic contradictions within capitalist society. [Read More]

Juliet Mitchell: “I don’t think anti-psychiatrists such as Laing and Cooper saw the schizophrenic as the madman telling the truth. What we had were two sets of rigidity, we had the pathological dimension of psychosis in paranoia, schizophrenia: delusions – which are delusions, let’s face it. But then we had the normative delusions of an acceptable psychotic status quo, which is what our political world very often is. For me, the question is whether the person who is suffering from the extreme pathological dimension of psychosis can find sufficient freedom to not need that refuge, whether he or she is able to come with a critique of the normative psychosis of the political social world. [Read More]