Normativity, Feminism, and Politics

Abstract

In this chapter I explore normativity in politics. I focus especially on feminism because I think that second wave feminist movements illustrate the production of normativity by political action. Feminism, though, does not illuminate this aspect of itself because feminists tend to describe feminist political action with a moral rather than political vocabulary. Such a vocabulary succeeds in capturing just one aspect of feminism – the centering of the transformation of everyday practices by feminists in feminist groups and in personal relationships. What remains outside is feminist political action, which centers the generation and influence of public opinion and participation in the public political contestation of ideas, sub-state institutions, policies, and laws that frame collective life in a polity. The distinction I draw between the ethical and political separates the ethical from the political but does not draw hard boundaries between them. While accepting the partition of morality and politics that took place in modernity, it refuses the standard emptying of politics from normativity along realist lines and its refilling with normativity along moralist lines, which necessarily presuppose the realist lines while claiming priority for ethics. It also requires rejecting a unified idea of power and thinking of people’s political power along Arendtian lines, as involving collective action and self-authorization, and also being an emergent quality of people coming together to act politically.