Communitas and the Problem of Women.” Angelaki 18:3 (Sept. 2013) (original) (raw)
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Biopolitics and its paradoxes: an approach to life and politics in Roberto Esposito
Rivista Lo Sguardo
In this paper, I discuss some of Esposito's reflections on biopolitics in order to contribute to a better understanding of this matter. In my view, Roberto Esposito's theorization on this subject cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration his view on modern political philosophy, the need to deconstruct the hegemonic immunitary paradigm that negates life in order to protect it, and the persistence of theologico-political apparatuses that separate life in zones of different value. Therefore, Esposito will deconstruct political philosophy and develop a genealogical research on modern biopolitics that has immunization as hermeneutic key. Furthermore, theologico-political dispositives like personhood imply a form of violent immunization. Now, if life has to be immunized in order to be preserved, it is also on this ground that a new philosophy of the common can emerge. In this sense, Esposito elaborates a philosophy of the third person or the Impersonal, both within Life and Thought, as a way out from the Immunitarian stance that sacrifices Life to its own preservation. The reach of this proposal will be discussed in the last part of the paper. ***
Sharers in the Divine Image: Francisco Suárez and the Justification of Female Political Authority
Political Theology, 2018
Unlike the perceived stance of many of his scholastic predecessors and contemporaries, Suárez denies the claim that women are mentally inferior to men, and therefore argues that they enjoy full political authority. In this paper, I explore how scholastic theological resources and canon law sources, as well as his own conception of communal political power, enabled Suarez to make this argument. I also consider how his theologically-grounded support of full political power for women proves an exception to some current critical views of scholastic approaches to women’s political power.
Mencius and Augustine: A Feminine Face in the Personal, the Social, and the Political
Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Mencius (Springer), 2023
Although Mencius (4th century BCE) and Augustine (356-430 CE) were centuries apart with very different philosophical vocabulary and metaphysical outlook, both thinkers were progressive in their positive assessment of feminism characteristics. They brought the hidden feminine element in their respective traditions to the foreground. Both thinkers emphasize the affective dimension of morality and propose a political philosophy built on love and the family model. Contrary to accepted cultural norms, they repudiated the viewpoint that regards the female body and female gender as merely a means to an end. Strongly opposing the stance of social contractarianism and political realism, they espoused a social-political theory based on a developmental and relational account of human being and embraced a complementary model of cooperation, care, and governance rooted in humaneness and rightness, love and justice. For published version, please visit: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-27620-0\_30#citeas
2017
RESUMEN: En este trabajo se muestran las ficciones identitarias de las mujeres de la Roma republicana a través de la exposición de las rupturas y subversiones extraídas de los comportamientos que quedaron reflejados en las fuentes grecorromanas. La perspectiva de la identidad permite la redefinición del concepto de “mujer”, una imposición destinada al control social de un grupo específico de la población ejercida por parte de la oligarquía masculina romana. El género como método de análisis histórico es asimismo revisado y convenientemente reubicado aquí como una característica específica en la composición de identidades, ya que gracias a la implicación de otros atributos se produce la eclosión de otras realidades dentro del conjunto mismo de aquellas mujeres que durante este periodo permanecieron próximas a la política o con conocimiento y posibilidades de hacer uso de la misma. Este es un trabajo reflexivo que puede ayudarnos con la comprensión de nuestra propia realidad social. En este sentido, la sociedad actual ha contribuido a la perpetuación de una imagen exclusiva y distorsionada que se ha dilatado a lo largo del tiempo, un mensaje lanzado por hombres poderosos de las sociedades antiguas: la idealización, y no la realidad, de las mujeres. Un paso más hacia el descubrimiento de contextos sociales más auténticas, hacia la relegación del espejismo que es la mujer romana ideal e idealizada, revelando posibilidades verosímiles, acordes con unas mujeres romanas plurales, heterogéneas y que albergaron intereses personales, pasiones políticas y otros retos intelectuales. ABSTRACT: This dissertation focuses on the identity fictions suffered by women during the Roman Republic and how these fabrications are exposed as such through the ruptures and subversions unraveled from their own actions and manners, procedures reflected in the Greco-Roman sources. The use of identity as a methodological approach, allows us to broaden our definition of “women” in ancient history, a deliberate imposition created by the Roman male oligarchy in order to perform social control over women. Gender as a research approach is also reconsidered and properly redefined as a mere piece in the composition of identities’ course of action, since the consequence of adding several attributes to build up an identity will allow us to perceive several realities within women, seen collaboratively as a social community. This research unravels not only the real women living in the Roman Republic, but also will help us understand our own society and how women have been restrained since ancient times. Due to an inaccurate and unrealistic depiction shaped by ancient powerful men, an idealization has been perpetuated a fantasy over time, rather than the truth beneath real women. The aim of this study is to reveal more authentic social realities in opposition to the idealized Roman women, placing them in reasonable scenarios according to the plural, heterogeneous women who required actual political and intellectual allures.
Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics
Susanne DeCrane offers a Christian feminist ethical retrieval of Thomas Aquinas's notion of the common good, so that she can wield this moral principle in a struggle to identify and change social structures and policies that discriminate against women. Her practical focus, in a brief concluding chapter, is on health care in the United States and the need to attend to the fact that women as a group, especially poor black women, suffer disproportionately from the inadequate social provision of health care. DeCrane begins with a brief summary of the biblical hermeneutics of Sandra Schneider and the theological ethical method of Rosemary Radford Ruether. Schneider and Ruether suggest to DeCrane that it is possible for Christians to read biblical and other traditional texts that express derogatory attitudes toward women in such a way that those texts can nonetheless speak a "fundamental liberating truth" to oppressed women (p. 19). DeCrane refers to the idea of an objective moral order and to the moral anthropology of Martha Nussbaum to insist further that, despite postmodern and postliberal objections, Christians and others can and must hold that there is a basis for distinguishing liberating truths from oppressive falsehoods. It is (universally) morally bad, in DeCrane's view, for human beings and women in particular to be deprived of fair opportunities to pursue decent lives. DeCrane offers little argument for her hermeneutical approach and for her basic moral convictions. She is content to summarize, combine, and extend a few points of the scholarship of Schneider, Ruether, and Nussbaum. Hence, this work will appeal mainly to other feminists who resonate with DeCrane's methodology. Specifically, it will appeal to readers who believe that the Bible and at least some traditional Christian writings contain a liberating word that cries out for retrieval, namely, a word that corresponds to an idea of justice as equal access to the basic goods needed to exercise a mature moral and religious agency. For feminists who already share this view of God and morality, the primary contribution of DeCrane's work is the provision of guidance in digging for-and learning to apply with increased feminist sensitivity-supportive resources from within the Christian tradition. ^s
Beyond Exemplarity: Women’s Wiles from the Disciplina Clericalis to the Decameron.
The novelle of Day VII, dedicated to the tricks that women play on their husbands, draw extensively on earlier collections of anti-feminist or anti-matrimonial anecdotes, including the Disciplina clericalis by Petrus Alfonsi, a popular medieval Latin compendium of moralizing tales. Boccaccio takes a number of plots from this collection, but implicitly switches the characters’ roles around, transforming the women in the tales from villains into heroes, and the husbands from victims into villains. This essay examines the details of how this transformation is accomplished in the cases of Decameron VII 4 and VII 6, which derive closely from Disciplina clericalis 14 and 11, but are rewritten so that they no longer seem to condemn women’s cunning or adulterous desires. Boccaccio also reproduces a version of Alfonsi’s tale 15, «The Good Woman» (De bona femina) in Decameron VIII 10, but here revises an example of an old woman using her ingenium to do good so as to recount the chastisement of feminine duplicity instead. Boccaccio’s message thus is neither women’s general worthiness nor worthlessness ⎯ indeed, the stories act as a rejoinder to the reductive didacticism of their sources. In reworking old tales in new ways that make them exemplary of different ethical meanings than in earlier contexts, Boccaccio’s point seems to be, rather, the worthlessness of generalizations.
Some'Latin'Women Activists' Accounts: Reflections on Political Research
Feminism & Psychology, 2006
The aim of this article is to briefly examine the socially constructed meanings of politics and their effects on ‘women’s’ agency. In doing this, I consider the need for a collective feminist redefinition of politics. Initially I present the, sometimes controversial but always interesting, suggestions from ‘Latin’ women activists who spoke with me while I conducted my PhD research. Following on from this, I suggest possible approaches to the practice of a feminist political psychology.