Mencius and Augustine: A Feminine Face in the Personal, the Social, and the Political (original) (raw)

‘Gender in the History of Early Modern Political Thought’ in The Historical Journal (2017) online

A B S T R A C T . In the history of early modern political thought, gender is not well established as a subject. It seems that early modern politics and its philosophical underpinnings are characterized by an exclusion of women from the political sphere. This article shows that it is indeed possible to write a gendered history of early modern political thought that transcends questions of the structural exclusion of women from political participation. Through a nuanced reading of fifteenthand sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle's practical philosophy, it deconstructs notions on the public/political and private/apolitical divide and reconstructs that early modern thinkers saw the relationship of husband and wife as deeply political. The article argues that it is both necessary and possible to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms, and it showsas Joan Scott has suggestedthat gender is indeed a 'useful category' in the history of political thought.

Aristotelian and Cartesian Revolutions in the Philosophy of Man and Woman

Dialogue, 1987

Today a “new” field of philosophy has emerged which can be called simply “The Philosophy of Man and Woman”. Paradoxically, it is a field of study with a long and impressive history which began when the pre-Socratic philosophers first questioned their own identity in the midst of the world. Their questions fall into four broad areas:1. How is the male “opposite” to the female?2. What roles do male and female play in the generation and identity of offspring?3. Are women and men wise in the same or different ways?4. Are women and men good in the same or different ways?

Communitas and the Problem of Women.” Angelaki 18:3 (Sept. 2013)

Abstract From its earliest beginnings, political thought has grappled with the problem of those who both do and do not belong to the city, those who cannot be exactly included or excluded, that is to say, with the problem of difference. Most often this emerges first as the problem of what to do with women. Communitas is an intense engagement with central figures in the history of political thought – Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau – but also a remarkably efficient avoidance of women and difference. Even as he deals with Augustine, who cannot stop discussing begetting and desire, and Hobbes, who insists on the maternal right of nature, Esposito’s attention remains fixed on the fraternal violence rather than parental sex as the founding of community, and the result is a strangely phallic work.

Gender and Politics in World History from the Renaissance through the Age of Revolutions

This course explores the politics of gender, and the gender of politics in world history from the Renaissance through the Age of Revolutions. We will study formal politics-statecraft -and its relationship to the politics of family and everyday life (and vice versa). From Nicolo Machiavelli's The Prince (1513) through Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), gender constructions have shaped the everyday lives of men and women as well as the establishment of governments, empire, and commerce. We will analyze gender and sexuality as ways of signifying and structuring power and as significant factors in historical change. Like the rest of the core courses, this class aims to understand history in order to illuminate the processes that continue to influence our world. In addition to understanding the ways that past conceptions of gender and politics shaped the present, we will consider the contemporary concerns that shape our understandings of history.

Contemporary Feminist Body Theories and Mencius's Ideas of Body and Mind

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2000

eva kit wah man CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST BODY THEORIES AND MENCIUS'S IDEAS OF BODY AND MIND Contemporary Feminist Reading of the "Ontological" Body Most recently, feminist philosophers and biologists have been trying to destabilize the notion of "biological sex." Judith Butler is one of the former: Her famous argument is that the body positioned as prior to the sign is always "posited" or "signified" as "prior" and "precedes" its own action. If this is so, then there should not be a mimetic or representational status of language or signs that follow bodies, for the body is only signified as prior to signification. 1 The positing process also constitutes and conditions the "materiality" of the body. She states that what enables this positing is a problematic gendered matrix that ontologizes and fixes the "irreducible" materiality into a plethora of taken-forgranted discourses on sex and sexuality. 2 We can sketch at least a few ways these discourses are conducted. First, as Luce Irigaray argues, inasmuch as a distinction between form and matter is offered within phallogocentrism, there is an exclusion of the "female." Within the masculine-female (form-matter) binary, the masculine in fact occupies both poles, and the female is not an intelligible term. Irigaray further argues that the "female" is articulated through a further materiality acting as the impossible necessity that enables any ontology. 3 Second, aside from philosophy, the binding, forming, and deforming of gendered bodies through social prohibitions and the socalled cultural intelligibility criteria of sex also constitute and regulate the fields of bodies. According to Moira Gatens, the body politic uses the human body as its image, model, or metaphor. The body politic uses one type of body (male) to signify various items: diverse bodies; the opposition of the "self" to others; and many forms of oppressive ideologies. All human bodies are part of these systems of exchange, identification, and mimesis. 4 In addition, medical discourses have so far maintained the hegemony of heteropolarity by mapping differences onto bodies that illustrate gender, thereby eliding Foucault's suggestion of sociopolitical construction of bodies under particular kinds of needs and desires. 5