A Unifying Conception of Politics

Abstract

17. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 18. A noteworthy aspect of both Minow and Young's works is the attempt to move beyond oppositional modes of thinking about rights and relationships. Young puts it succinctly, I[Rights are relationships, not things; they are institutionally defined rules specifying what people can do in relation to one another (25). One early and important work to consider this dichotomy is Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1982). For a discussion of the political and ethical possibilities of Gilligan's book, see Joan Tronto, Beyond Difference to a Theory of Care, Signs, vol. 12, no. 4 (1987). 19. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 20. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 21. Okin's recent book follows from the insights of her fine study, Women in Western Political Thought, where she argued that the rights-bearing individual of liberal political theory is the male head of household, and that his unfettered exercise of his rights depends on a gendered division of labor between the household and the formal public realm. 22. Terry Winant narrates an interesting storyline moving from Hannah Arendt to Nancy Hartsock to Nancy Fraser, that also sees a feminist critical theory emerging in the work of contemporary feminist political thinkers. See, The Feminist Standpoint: A Matter of Language, Hypatia vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter, 1987). 23. For development of this argument, Scott, Gender ..., p. 39; Alcoff; and Susan Bordo, Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Skepticism, in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1989).