Envisioning a Democratic Culture of Difference: Feminist Ethics and the Politics of Dissent in Social Movements (original) (raw)
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WHEN feminists have challenged the proclaimed gender neutrality of 'malestream' political thought, they have frequently lighted on the abstract individualism of supposedly ungendered citizens as a target for their critique. In Zillah Eisenstein's The Female Body and The Law, this provides the starting point for a new theory of equality that no longer relies on us being treated the same; in Carole Pateman's The Sexual C'oritrtrct it underpins a critique of contractual models as necessarily premised on a masculine notion of the body as separable from.the self; in Susan Moller Okin's /u.sfice, Gender, und the Family it is developed into a vision of a genderless society as the precondition for fully just relations.' My concern here is with the further implications for democracy, and more specifically, with the arguments that subsequently open up over group identities and group representation. The feminist challenge to the abstract, degendered individual has combined with the earlier critique of those who took class as the only or only interesting social divide, to usher in a new politics based around heterogeneity and difference. Not just 'the' sexual difference: the most innovative of contemporary feminist writing moves beyond a binary opposition between male and female towards a theory of multiple differences. The myth of homogeneity is then seen as sustaining a complex of unequal and oppressive relations; and group identities and group specificities are increasingly regarded as part of what must be represented or expressed. The argument shares some common ground with issues long familiar to theorists of democracy, where group affiliation and group organisation is frequently presented as a counterweight to the hierarchy of advantages that otherwise attach to citizens as individuals. In their Purricipafion und Political Equalify, for example, Sidney Verba, Norman Nie and Jae-on Kim suggest that systematic inequalities in individual political influence can be at least partially offset by the power of organisation. In particular, * Anne Phillips is Professor of Politics at City of London Polytechnic. She is the author of Engendering 1)eniorruc.y.
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This article critically examines a 21st century online, social movement, the Everyday Sexism Project (referred to as the ESP), to analyse resistance against sexism that is systemic, entrenched and institutionalized in society, including organizations. Our motivating questions are: what new forms of feminist organizing are developing to resist sexism and what are the implications of thinking ethico-politically about feminist resistance that has the goals of social justice, equality and fairness? Reading the ESP in this way leads to a conceptualization of how infrapolitical feminist resistance emerges at grassroots level and between individuals in the form of affective solidarity, which become necessary in challenging neoliberal threats to women’s opportunity and equality. Our contribution conceptualizes affective solidarity as central to this feminist resistance against sexism and involves two modes of feminist organizing: the politics of experience and empathy. By addressing the eth...
Refiguring Rights Through the Political Practice of Sexual Difference
differences, vol 15, no.2, 2004
"It is more important to have authoritative female interlocutors than to have recognized rights. An authoritative interlocutor is necessary if one wants to articulate one’s life according to the project of freedom and thus make sense of one’s being a woman. [. . .] The politics of claiming one’s rights, no matter how just or deeply felt it is, is a subordinate kind of politics." —Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective This remarkable claim appears in Non credere di avere dei diritti: la generazione della libertà femminile nell’idea e nelle vicende di un grupppo di donne [Don’t Think You Have Any Rights: The Engendering of Female Freedom in the Thought and Vicissitudes of a Women’s Group], a text that was collectively written in 1987 by the Libreria delle Donne di Milano [Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective] and published in English under the title Sexual Difference in 1990. Now out of print, Sexual Difference is a deeply challenging work that never found much of an audience among American feminists—it is virtually missing in the so-called category of “women” debates of the 1990s.1 This absence is significant. As the text’s cotranslator and editor, Teresa de Lauretis, succinctly puts it: “A freedom that, paradoxically, demands no vindication of the rights of women, no equal rights under the law, but only a full, political and personal accountability to women, is as startlingly radical a notion as any that has emerged in Western thought.” What does it mean for freedom to consist not in claiming equal rights, but in developing a political and personal accountability to women? And, if such a practice is indeed as radical as anything we might find in the history of Western thought, why was Sexual Difference more or less ignored by American feminist theorists? Reflecting on these questions, feminists might consider their own entanglement in the conception of freedom, inherited from the Western tradition, as a phenomenon of the will, a property of the subject, and a means to an end whose name is sovereignty.On this account, dominant in liberal democracies like our own, freedom is defined in highly individualistic terms, housed in constitutionally guaranteed rights, and experienced as something that begins where politics ends. For the Milan Collective, however, freedom is something quite different: it is a creative and collective practice of world-building, fundamentally inaugural in character, that establishes irreducibly contingent, politically significant relationships among women as sexed beings who otherwise have none, apart from their place in the masculine economy of exchange.
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