Thinking Like an Activist—For Drucilla Cornell

Can liberalism continue to serve feminist purposes as the most practical vehicle for gaining the reforms needed for women to lead fuller and freer lives, or are feminism’s aspirations incompatible with the underlying premises of liberal theory? This book explores the troubled relationship between feminist theory and liberal political theory by examining the work of three contemporary feminists – Martha Nussbaum, Susan Moller Okin and Jean Hampton – who are unwilling to give up on liberalism. Abbey examines why, and in what ways, each of these theorists believe that liberalism offers the normative and political resources for the improvement of women’s situations. In doing this the book explores issues at the heart of recent debates in feminist and political theory, including the sexual contract, public/domestic separation, structures of power, intersectionality, care and dependency. The Return of Feminist Liberalism offers new insights into the tension between feminism and Rawlsian liberalism and will be welcomed by a wide range of readers in political theory, political philosophy, gender studies and feminist theory.

I once mentioned to a prominent feminist scholar that I was using one of her books in my course on feminism and political theory. She looked at me blankly for a moment and then replied, “Feminismandpolitical theory? I thought feminismispolitical theory.” She was right of course; in some sense, everything that is feminist theory is also political theory. Feminism illuminates gendered relations of power in politics and social life, after all, and it contributes (however indirectly) to the larger project of transforming them. Moreover, since the rise of “second wave” feminism in the 1970s, feminist theorists have significantly reshaped political theory as a discipline, moving crucial questions from the margins of the field to its center, questions about gender equity and justice, the constitution of the political subject, the demands of difference, the intersecting dynamics of domination, the differential effects of globalization, and the conditions of freedom, among other things. As a result, much of what we think of as “mainstream” political theory is now also feminist theory. This is often true even of work that does not make women or gender its sole subject matter, as the leading voices in the field increasingly are scholars whose work has been shaped by literatures central to feminism and who think about politics in ways that are informed by a critical consciousness of the gendered quality of power relations.

Frans de Waal has questioned the liberal notion that humans are primarily defined by selfishness. De Waal claims that primates are gregarious and guided by empathy. Hence, he argues we should return to Adam Smith's focus on empathy. We believe a return to pragmatism would be more appropriate. Pragmatism largely conforms to the view of human nature that De Waal's research now supports and can provide a more sophisticated framework to integrate recent insights about primate sociality into political and legal theory.The intelligent acknowledgment of the continuity of nature, and society will alone secure a growth of morals which will be serious without being fanatical, aspiring without sentimentality, adapted to reality without conventionality, sensible without taking the form of calculation of profits, idealistic without being romantic.-John Dewey, 1922 (1983, 13)1. IntroductionAt the core of much present-day, liberal, legal and political theory there is a notion of human nature defined in terms of individualism, rationality and selfinterest.1 This definition is central to most forms of contract theory. People are assumed to be calculating and self-regarding loners, reluctant to join the bonds of social union. An autonomous individual can only be asked to suffer the burdens of community, many legal and political theorists suggest, if certain preconditions are met and individual freedoms are guaranteed.Primatologist Frans de Waal has become increasingly vocal in his criticism of these presuppositions of modem liberal thought and the bleak view of human nature implicit in them. Liberal theory, De Waal believes, would benefit from a better understanding of the gregarious and intensely social nature of human beings. Nature has an undeserved bad name in political and legal theory. What is central in the life of our nearest cousins, the social primates, is not individualism and self interest, but sympathy and empathy. To accommodate this insight, De Waal suggests a return to Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments. Adam Smith intuited the central importance of sympathy and emotion for the development of morality, according to De Waal, and managed to construct a moral theory that is much more in tune with the embryonic morality that can be observed among primates.There is much to be said for this return to Smith. Smith is a highly original thinker who can still suggest new directions for legal and political theory.2 Yet, in this article we will argue that for the reconstruction of legal and political theory that De Waal proposes, pragmatism would be a more suitable framework than Smith's moral sentimentalism. For the project that De Waal wants to pursue, i.e. the reconnection of political and legal theory with their moral roots in primate sociality, there seems to be a great deal more overlap with the classical pragmatists than with Smith. Smith's theory of moral sentiments predates Darwin and eschews many of the central premises of evolutionary theory. In the end, it is a theory primarily inspired on classical virtue ethics, not on a naturalistic recognition of the mammalian origins of our morality. The pragmatists, on the other hand, fully integrated the implications of evolutionary theory into their philosophical thought and drew on the best scholarship of their day to ground their perspective on a scientifically mature understanding of man in nature.3 In an earlier work De Waal argued for the development of a Darwistotelian view; a view which fused the evolutionary insights of Darwin with the virtue ethics of Aristotle - in many ways a precursor of Adam Smith (2001, 81-82). Our suggestion would be to develop not a Darwistotelian, but a Darweyan perspective, which fuses Darwin's insights with the philosophical and moral theories of John Dewey and other pragmatists.There are a number of reasons why an association with philosophical pragmatism would be more fitting than a return to Smith and Aristotle. …

Throughout most of the past decade, the syllabus for a political science course in feminist theory would have included texts by feminist historians, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics, but very few political theories by feminists.1 In the last two years, however, a distinctive new direction in feminist analysis has emerged with the publication of several books that introduce a feminist critical theory of politics. Early feminist social science studied gender roles and gender identity, describing gender as if it were a personal characteristic or attribute. Today the limitations of this work are evident in feminists' questioning of the validity of gender as an analytic concept,2 as well as of the possibility of specifying the identity of the group women that is to be liberated by the feminist movement.3 Feminist critical theory shifts the study of gender from individuals' roles and identities to the study of the interplay between gender relations and the institutional contexts within which they take shape.4 It moves beyond thinking about sexual inequality in terms of the opposition between male and female roles to examining the way it is constituted by the structures of various social institutions that gender knits into intricately patterned domination. Feminist critical theory argues that feminist politics takes shape not around women's collective identity, but rather around the public problems of a pervasively gender-structured society. This shift from identity to public problems brings a new story-line to teaching feminist and democratic theory, a story that forges a strong connection between the two that is usually only implicit in works by theorists of both.5 Michelle Rosaldo anticipated the shift I describe in an article that reconsiders early gender scholarship, including her own.6 The principal objective of early feminist social science was to differentiate between sex and gender. Feminists used object relations theory,7 and purportedly universal social structures like the distinction between public and private, and the separation of nature from culture,9 to argue that women's

During the Fall 2009 semester, ‘Gender and Political Theory’ was offered for only the second time on the Sam Houston State University campus. The goal of the course was to elaborate the linkages between the canon of political philosophy, feminist theory and contemporary practice. Because there are no ‘Introduction to Women’s Studies’ courses at Sam Houston State University, this iteration of the course contained more introductory material than would be typical in a similar upper-level elective, and was specifically introduced to the students with a strong emphasis on practical contemporary applications. In the second week of classes, unprompted, a student emailed in a link to the Dove film called ‘Evolution’. This both proved that application as a way of thinking was taking place and illustrated both the need for, and success of, courses and assignments that challenge students to elaborate applications.This project focuses on setting the tone and designing assignments for an undergraduate class in a manner that will foster practical applications regardless of requirements. While it has long been the ambition of feminist courses to change the way students exist in the world, this particular course contributes to that endeavor in a peculiar way: it invites students to find practical applications of the political philosophy – feminist theory relationship. The specific points of focus in this invitation and in this course were: Use of introductory material at the start of the course; Assignment design (open-ended paper assignments, elaboration of original research questions, progression of assignments, workshops); Practical applications (this area involved students as contributors and also stretched beyond the course).

Liberalism, Disfigured

Feminism

More women than men are interested in gender. Thus, what it took to get gender studies into sociology was mundane and demographic: It took letting women into the discipline. In the 1970s, more doors opened to women, and more women walked through. Since then, writing on gender has increased exponentially in all the social sciences and humanities, and gender has become a subfield with substantial legitimacy in sociology. Credit the second wave of the women's movement for the fact that the typical female assistant professor of the 1970s and early '80s was a feminist. Feminists were drawn particularly to studying gender, but the legitimacy of gender as a specialization was in question. Most of us entered departments that had few other women. Many of us sought out women in other departments out of a desire for women friends and for moral support for our interest in feminism and gender. In the 1980s, whenever I visited a university to give a talk, I found women forming informal feminist reading groups that spanned disciplines; I was in such a group. What had started as a way to make friends and get support often led to interdisciplinary feminist dialogue. The bridging of disciplinary boundaries was also fostered by the fact that sociologists studying gender in the 1970s were literally inventing a new literature. It may be hard for younger readers to believe that when I started my dissertation on the sex gap in pay in 1974, I could locate only about 10 decent articles on the topic. Because most of us could find little written in our own discipline, we poached, sometimes reading feminist theory. The feminist theory being developed inside the academy in the 1960s and '70s was mainly by philosophers and political theorists. One tension for sociologists importing ideas from feminist theory was that sociology was developing as a science with methods that speak to positive but not normative questions (i.e., to questions about what is, not about what ought to be). The philosophical traditions that spawned feminist theory combine positive and normative argumentation. Since many sociologists have a hunger for addressing moral issues, the normative thrust of feminist theory was also part of its appeal. U fortunately, on gender as on other topics, the desire to bring a moral voice into our field has sometimes meant that normative claims masquerade as empirical claims. It would be better to discuss explicitly whether and why we want to rule moral reasoning out of sociology, but we seldom get around to that discussion. Well into the 1980s feminist theory was often divided into liberal, socialist, and radical feminist theory. (For overviews using these categories, see Sagger 1988; Tong 1998. ) Complicating developments such as the influence of postmodernism have since rendered the categories outdated. Further complexity came in the 1980s and l990s from critiques by women of color, pointing out that the sources and particulars of women's oppression and male privilege differ by race and nation (Spelman 1988; Collins 1990; hooks 1990). It seems that there is neither a universal patriarch nor a universal woman. What has been the effect of feminist theory on sociology? To explore this, I discuss three themes that cross-cut feminist theory and sociolgy. I will point out parallels between discussions in sociology and interdisciplinary feminist thought. My sense is that, early on, the sociology of gender was a net importer of ideas from feminist literatures outside sociology. In more recent years, as gender has become an established field within sociology, more of sociologists' debates have occurred within our discipline.

Apolitical scientist working at the intersection of political theory and the critical humanities, Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media, and Political Science, at Brown University. She was previously assistant and associate professor at the Department of Government, Harvard University, and Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor at Northwestern University. She is also Affiliate Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Professor Honig's work has been influential in the fields of democratic theory, legal studies, feminist theory, immigration studies, and literary and cultural theory, among others. She has published in prestigious journals across the social sciences and the humanities such as American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Arethusa, New Literary History, Social Text, and diacritics, among many others. An internationally renowned scholar, her work has been translated into Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Korean and Rumanian.Trained at Concordia University (B.A.), in Montreal, The London School of Economics (M.Sc.), and The Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D.), where she worked under the supervision of Richard E. Flathman and William E. Connolly, Professor Honig is a leading proponent of agonistic democracy. Her first book Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993) was awarded the Scripps Prize for best first book in political theory. In the book Honig discusses liberal, communitarian and republican attempts to insulate politics from conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on Nietzsche, Arendt, Machiavelli, and Derrida, among others, Honig explores an alternative approach in political theory that tracks the disruptive remainders of political closure or settlement and recasts them as potential sites of democratic freedom or engagement. Her second monograph, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton University Press, 2001), established her as an influential voice in the politics of immigration. Here Honig mobilizes readings of the Biblical book of Ruth as well as of popular movies such as The Wizard of Oz, Shane, and Strictly Ballroom to interrogate the myth of an immigrant America where the foreigner is often seen not just as a threat, but also as a supplement or source of renewal for democracies whose energies are depleted. Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton University Press 2009), her third monograph, was the co-winner of the David Easton Prize and discusses sites of potential democratic emergences in a time of sovereign exception and emergency politics. Her fourth monograph, Antigone Interrupted (Cambridge University Press, 2013), offers an original interpretation of Sophocles's Antigone that explores previously neglected resources for thinking agonistic sorority in the play. The book has already been the subject of critical exchanges with the author in journals such as Philosophy Today, International Journal of the Classical Tradition and PhiloSOPHIA. In a recent essay in boundary 2, called Three Models of Emergency Politics, Honig develops and extends her thoughts on emergency politics drawing on material from Emergency Politics and Antigone, Interrupted, to engage critically with Elaine Scarry's Thinking in an Emergency.Professor Honig has also been a prolific editor of influential academic volumes. She edited Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Penn State, 1995) and co-edited Skepticism, Individuality and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman (Minnesota, 2002) and the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (Oxford, 2006). She is also co-editor of a symposium in the journal Theory & Event dedicated to the films of the Danish cinematographer Lars von Trier, scheduled to appear, in revised form, as a book with Oxford University Press . In 2013, Professor Honig delivered the Sydney Lectures as part of the Thinking Out Loud Series, and in 2014, she performed for the second time as a respondent to the Tanner Lectures, these delivered by Eric Santner at the University of California, Berkeley. …

Feminist political economy is concerned with the ways that capitalism naturalizes male bias in social institutions, such as the communications media. Those who engage in feminist political economy research of media seek to reveal how that bias occurs, how it is naturalized, and how it operates in marginalizing the voices of women and sexual minorities. This entry considers an analytical approach for examining gender relations within the media industries that enables social change. The discussion covers the fundamentals of political economy theory, as it is more generally understood, how it evolved, and how feminist media scholars have reinterpreted that theory to incorporate concerns about women's relationship to media in order to situate gender within the broader political economy analysis. The discussion will be primarily concerned with women, whose interests feminist scholars have been particularly concerned in addressing; also acknowledged, however, is information on sexual minorities who have also experienced marginalization by media industries controlled by a wealthy male‐dominant class. The entry ends with specific examples of how feminist scholars have employed political economy theory in research on media.

Thanks to decreasing concerns that its episodic plot contains stale, moldy relic, Pericles has been lately rehabilitated. Its design now seems right for play that prioritizes politics and political theory over psychological and dramatic consistency, as in nondramatic romances. (1) However, questions of politics and power remind us that theology framed early modern discussions of political theory. (2) Feminist analyses and studies of specific female characters also bring us to theological matters. (3) Marina's speech marks her as saintly figure of eloquentia derived not just from Senecan Controversiae but also from Christian hagiography. (4) The recent surge of speculation about Shakespeare's Catholic roots has made readers sensitive to latent Catholic discourses in the plays. (5) Indeed, with sources in medieval (Catholic) chivalric romance, similarity to saints' plays, possible Marian references, and depictions of effective rituals by Cerimon, some tones in Pericles sound like the old religion. (6) However, more than one kind of theology circulates throughout the play, most likely because the sixteenth century nurtured imprecise, mixed belief systems. Perhaps because, as literary scholars turned to cultural history, Eamon Duffy showed that ongoing Catholic practices persisted after the Reformation, we have focused more on material than on theological continuities. (7) In fact, Protestant anxieties about the relationship between word, image, and meaning derive from Christian traditions as old as Augustinian thought. (8) The pre-Reformation cult of the Holy Name becomes the Protestant emphasis on one's personal relationship with the savior; medieval traditions that see the crucifix as the central Christian truth become the Reformation focus on direct communication with the Word. (9) In Alexandra Walsham's words, both articulations of Christianity reinforce the idea of sacramental and moralized universe. (10) And both draw extensively on Paul's writings. For example, although doctor of the Church, Augustine's conversion in book 8 of Confessions explicitly follows the narrative of Paul's experience in Acts 9, fact made clear by Augustine's praise of Paul and extended engagement with Romans. (His ultimate conversion comes after he hears child's voice, rushes into his house, and reads that epistle from his Bible.) Continuities also exist because the consequences of Catholic and Protestant positions do not always diverge widely, especially if we see Paul and many early modern Protestants influenced by him less as dualists than as universalists (rhetorically bridging texts from multiple faiths to envision the fulfillment of God's all-inclusive design), as Gregory Kneidel does. (11) In general, Shakespeare's romances engage rhetorically with more than one theological design. (12) Although comparing parts of Pericles to medieval saints' plays, Howard Felperin could be describing Protestant saints like those in John Foxe when he says that unlike tragic heroes, who try until the end to redeem themselves, heroes in romance stripped of all hope or illusion of redeeming themselves ... and this is essential to their redemption. (13) If Felperin's statement is indeed true of romance heroes, then that essentially medieval, Catholic form shows surprising compatibility with Reformation arguments that individuals can do little to shape their fate. As he does for other issues, such as power, in Pericles Shakespeare often uses perspectives like those of the old religion to critique the new. (14) It is not just overlap between medieval and early modern theology that makes the theology of Pericles difficult to categorize. Among Reformation theologians there was considerable variation on issues that concerned Paul. Even an emphasis on providence need not be specific marker for Calvinism; as Walsham says, it was not a monopoly of the hotter sort of Protestants. (15) There are variations, too, within individual writers, even one as consistent as Calvin. …

his is an interesting historical moment to reflect on feminist state theory. Both the response to the global financial meltdown and the widely celebrated U.S. presidential election signal a faith in the role and promise of state- based politics. Yet it is also true that currents of recent scholarship in a variety of settings have decentered the state. Political theorists of violence, law, and biopolitics have expanded the concept of sovereignty to address distinctly non- state- based contexts, while transnational feminist studies of citizenship have critically dismantled the logic of state sovereignty. The field of development studies has elabo rated the need to broaden notions of security beyond military understandings to include the fulfillment of basic needs, and feminist analyses of violence against women have creatively recast our understanding of security. Feminist scholars have also scrutinized the internally contradictory and disciplinary apparatuses of welfare policies. Across various regions, feminists are contesting both the paring down of the state’s welfare responsibilities and the intensification of security functions in post- 9 /11 geopolitical alliances. When taken together, this historical conjuncture and these various critiques of sovereignty, security, and welfare call for more complex modes of engagement with states. Within feminist theory, states occupy a vexed space. Whereas states have often supported feminist goals, states are also the locus of many of the problems that occupy feminists, such as militarism, moral regulation, and the cheapening of women’s labor. This special section of the journal explores this central, and old, tension within feminist state theory, offering a perspective that foregrounds geographic location. This emphasis on location emerges from a philosophical suspicion of the universalizing gestures of state theory. Despite the feminist normative opposition to views from nowhere in particular that purport to be relevant everywhere, feminist state theory has staged its key debates with little specification of state contexts. Geographic coordinates and national histories remain largely undescribed in classics within the field of feminist state theory. 1 What do we mean when we speak of “the state,” and how does location inflect our understandings? The articles in this section presume that feminists in different locations vary in their relationship to states and that these differences potentially affect the orientation of their theoretical scholarship on the state.

In recent decades political theory has been an area of undoubted strength in Australian political studies. Across fields such as deliberative democracy, republicanism, feminist theory, and environmental political theory, the Australian contribution to international debates has been considerable. Yet telling the story of the development of Australian political theory involves grappling with certain definitional challenges, which stem both from the nature of political theory as an intellectual endeavour as well as its ambiguous location within the academy. First, although the identity of political theory as a distinct academic sub-field is closely related to the development of political science it in fact draws on a range of intellectual disciplines including philosophy, history, sociology and law, and political theorists can be found in university departments in all of these disciplines. The second point concerns the political philosophy versus political science divide (with the corresponding division between ‘normative’ and ‘empirical’ theory) which has not been as sharply drawn in Australia as it has been, especially, in the United States, with its strong behaviouralist and positivist traditions. The dominance of a behaviouralist conception of political science — ‘the American Science of Politics’ in Bernard Crick’s phrase — gave rise to the oft-repeated story of the death of classical or normative political theory in the 1950s and 1960s, only to be revived by Rawls and Nozick in the early 1970s.KeywordsPolitical SciencePolitical TheoryAustralian StudyPolitical TheoriseDeliberative DemocracyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Oppositional Imagination: Feminism, Critique, and Political Theory. Joan Cocks Beyond Oppression: Feminist Theory and Political Strategy. M. E. Hawkesworth Justice, Gender, and the Family. Susan Moller Okin Joan B. LandesJoan B. Landes Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 17, Number 1Autumn, 1991 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/494721 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 1991 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, first published in 2000, Brooke Ackerly demonstrates the shortcomings of contemporary deliberative democratic theory, relativism and essentialism for guiding the practice of social criticism in the real, imperfect world. Drawing theoretical implications from the activism of Third World feminists who help bring to public audiences the voices of women silenced by coercion, Brooke Ackerly provides a practicable model of social criticism. She argues that feminist critics have managed to achieve in practice what other theorists do only incompletely in theory. Complemented by Third World feminist social criticism, deliberative democratic theory becomes critical theory - actionable, coherent, and self-reflective. While a complement to democratic theory, Third World feminist social criticism also addresses the problem in feminist theory associated with attempts to deal with identity politics. Third World feminist social criticism thus takes feminist theory beyond the critical impasse of the tension between anti-relativist and anti-essentialist feminist theory.