Political theory and feminist social criticism (original) (raw)

Feminist Engagements in Democratic Theory

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2007

For all its variety, feminist theory can be understood as a kind of "hermeneutic of suspicion," and hence it largely operates as a critique of existing theories and practices, including political theory and practice. This special issue is aimed at showing the kinds of contributions-not just critiques-that feminist theory brings to political thought, especially now that political philosophy is well past the realpolitik thinking of much of the twentieth century. Until about twenty years ago, most political thinkers reduced politics to a practice of individuals' maximizing their own self-interest through rational calculations, or as a province of warring parties trying to take hold of the reins of official government. In contrast, over the past two decades, there has been a resurgence of theorizing about democratic theory, the public sphere, and civic engagement.

Reclaiming Third World Feminism: Or Why Transnational Feminism Needs Third World Feminism.

2014

Third World and transnational feminisms have emerged in opposition to white second-wave feminists’ single-pronged analyses of gender oppression that elided Third World women’s multiple and complex oppressions in their various social locations. Consequently, these feminisms share two “Third World feminist” mandates: First, feminist analyses of Third World women’s oppression and resistance should be historically situated; and second, Third World women’s agency and voices should be respected. Despite these shared mandates, they have diverged in their proper domains of investigation, with transnational feminism concentrating on the transnational level and Third World feminism focusing on local and national contexts. Further, their respective positions regarding nation-states and nationalism have been antithetical, as leading transnational feminists have categorically rejected nation-states and nationalism as detrimental to feminism. In recent decades, transnational feminism has become the dominant feminist position on Third World women, overshadowing Third World feminism, and the dismissal of nation-states and nationalism as irrelevant to feminism has become fashionable. Against this current trend, this article argues for the relevance of nation-states and nationalism for transnational feminism and the urgency of reclaiming Third World feminism.

Voicing Demands: Feminist Activism in Transitional Contexts

This collection begins with the premise that while there is more and more literature on gender and politics and feminist activism in the Global South there is little as yet which effectively links voice, feminist activism and transitional contexts. As editors we believe that addressing this gap will help us interrogate our assumptions about the relationships we envisage between voice and agency, constituency building, and renegotiation of citizenship/rights. There is a pressing need to unpack our assumptions about these relationships for the following reasons. First, voice which is a 'metaphor for powerful speech and is associated with acts and arguments that influence public decision making' (Goetz and Nyamu Musembi, 2007: 4) is identified as a key pathway [for women] to achieve greater citizenship, rights and empowerment in both liberal discourse and development policy literature. This is because the ability to exercise and organize voice by a group [women] is mostly associated with political acts such as public engagement, collective action and influence on public decisions by that group [women]. Though feminists writings on women/gender in formal politics have conceptually and empirically questioned this linear assumption made about 'voice-to-representation of gender equity concerns-to-accountability to women/for gender equity' (Htun); this has been the prescription used by international policy makers, states and even by women's /feminist organizations for strengthening women's voice within the policy circles and the state machinery. In this volume, we depart from this focus on women's public and political engagement in formal institutions and move towards an analysis of feminist activism for building and sustaining constituencies through raising, negotiating, legitimizing feminist voice under transitional contexts and their impact on women's citizenship.

‘Marginalization’ in Third World Feminism: Its Problematics and Theoretical Re-configuration

With the imposition of certain notions of agency and marginalization prescribed by first world feminist discourses, global feminism has cumulatively remained mired within a binaristic closure. This closure is based on the idea of an agentive Western feminist center and a passive third world feminism at the margin. This article endeavours to go beyond this closure to initiate debates regarding the operational praxis of a third world woman's marginal placement as articulated in third world feminist discourses. It problematizes the idea of "disempowerment" that stems from a patriarchal model depicting man as the nucleus and a woman as a peripheral and centripetal entity, drawn within the mise en abyme of selfconsolidating representations. Therefore, the argument presented here revisits the notion of the marginalization of third world women by subjecting the theoretical approaches regarding female marginalization and agency-as articulated by Spivak, Irigaray and Kristeva, et al.-to a deconstructive mode of analysis to explore the theoretical reconfiguration of a third world woman's marginal placement. This article reconsiders the margin as discursively "limitrophic" so that the binaries between the margin/center, agency/disempowerment and third world feminism/first world feminism are re-scrutinized. The margin, thus, becomes an agentive plane for a third world woman as she uses it to direct her gaze away from any discursive center. In this way, a third world woman undermines the West-centric centripetal force despite being englobed within what Kristeva calls "supranational sociocultural ensembles" and sees her "self" as independent of any fixed center so that she redefines herself as an autonomous thinking woman able to dismantle the notion of a congealed subalternity. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on gender studies.

Book Reviews:Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism;Inclusion and Democracy

Signs, 2005

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