Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Feminism & Feminist Theory

What is essentialism? What is anti-essentialism? The Essential Difference attempts to answer questions at the heart of current feminist theory and cultural study. The book deals with origins and contexts of the debate; relationships between essentialism, anti-essentialism, and the power of language; reasons for the demonization of essentialism within the academy; the relationship between essentialism and Third World studies.

The essays also speculate about whether there can be an anti-essentialist feminism, whether there can in fact be a feminist politics that dispenses with the...

From Mike Tyson to the Portland Trail Blazers to William Kennedy Smith, from Katie Roiphe's The Morning After to the Antioch College policy, the issue of acquaintance, or "date," rape has captured our national attention in recent years. In a major contribution to current debates over the meaning of date rape and how it should be criminally punished, this volume brings together lawyers, philosophers, and feminists to explore "communicative sexuality" as a model for the condemnation of date rape.

As a crime, rape is viewed more ambiguously than most other offenses. As a social...

Consisting almost entirely of new essays specially prepared for this volume, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt illuminates the diversity of contemporary feminisms while also generating new and suggestive readings of Hannah Arendt's political thought. The contributing authors' shared interest in Arendt provides a ground upon which to work out their disagreements regarding feminist theory and practice. At the same time, their shared commitment to some brand of feminism leads them to engage Arendt on an unusually wide array of issues, such as gender, sexuality, the body,...

Combining the liberalism of Locke and the "civic humanism" of Republicanism, Mary Wollstonecraft explored the need of women for coed and equal education with men, economic independence whether married or not, and representation as citizens in the halls of government. In doing so, she foreshadowed and surpassed her much better known successor, John Stuart Mill. Ten feminist scholars prominent in the fields of political philosophy, constitutional and international law, rhetoric, literature, and psychology argue here that Wollstonecraft, by reason of the scope and complexity of her thought,...

Much contemporary feminist theory continues to see itself as freeing women from patriarchal oppression so that they may realize their own inner truth. To be told by postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida that the very possibility of such a truth must be submitted to the process of deconstruction thus seems to present a serious challenge to the feminist project. From a postmodern perspective, on the other hand, most feminist discourse remains deeply rooted, if not in essentialism, at least in the logocentrism of traditional philosophical and political thought. Stepping beyond the usual...

In contrast to many previous feminist interpretations of Aristotle, which found much to disparage and little to salvage in his philosophy, the contributors to this volume enter into new, creative, and subtle dimensions of inquiry about Aristotle. They look more deeply into his influence and question the possibility of escape from it.

Feminists recognize that they too philosophize within the tradition founded by Plato and Aristotle and owe the Greeks a debt. Aristotle still influences our abstract thinking, search for principles, meditations on virtue, and reflections on nature,...

Nietzsche has the reputation of being a virulent misogynist, so why are feminists interested in his philosophy? The essays in this volume provide answers to this question from a variety of feminist perspectives.

The organization of the volume into two sets of essays, "Nietzsche's Use of Woman" and "Feminists' Use of Nietzsche," reflects the two general approaches taken to the issue of Nietzsche and woman. First, many debates have focused on how to interpret Nietzsche's remarks about women and femininity. Are all of Nietzsche's comments to be read literally, or is he being ironic,...

Nietzsche has the reputation of being a virulent misogynist, so why are feminists interested in his philosophy? The essays in this volume provide answers to this question from a variety of feminist perspectives.

The organization of the volume into two sets of essays, "Nietzsche's Use of Woman" and "Feminists' Use of Nietzsche," reflects the two general approaches taken to the issue of Nietzsche and woman. First, many debates have focused on how to interpret Nietzsche's remarks about women and femininity. Are all of Nietzsche's comments to be read literally, or is he being ironic,...

This landmark anthology is the first to engage critically the writings of Ayn Rand from feminist perspectives. The interdisciplinary feminist strategies of re-reading Rand range from the lightness of camp to the darkness of de Sade, from postandrogyny to poststructuralism. A highly charged dialogue on Rand's legacy provides the forum for a reexamination of feminism and its relationship to egoism, individualism, and capitalism. Rand's place in contemporary feminism is assessed through comparisons with other twentieth-century feminists, such as de Beauvoir, Wolf, Paglia, Eisler, and...

This book is the first collection of feminist essays on one of the central figures in the history of English-speaking philosophy. Besides providing a rich variety of feminist viewpoints on a wide range of Hume's writings, the contributors introduce new themes into the scholarship on Hume, including gendered metaphors in his metaphysical texts, the role of society in the conception of the human mind, and his conception of human nature in relation to recent rejections of essentialism.

Hume scholarship as a whole still reflects the relative neglect in mainstream analytic philosophy of...

This open-ended anthology is a journey into the very canon that Mary Daly has argued to be patriarchal and demeaning to women. This volume deauthorizes the official canon of Western philosophy and disrupts a related story told by some feminists who claim that Daly's work is unworthy of re-reading because it contains fatal errors. The editors and contributors attempt to prove that Mary Daly is located in the Western intellectual tradition. Daly may be highly critical of conventional Western epistemological and theological traditions, but she nevertheless appropriates themes "out-of-context"...

This open-ended anthology is a journey into the very canon that Mary Daly has argued to be patriarchal and demeaning to women. This volume deauthorizes the official canon of Western philosophy and disrupts a related story told by some feminists who claim that Daly's work is unworthy of re-reading because it contains fatal errors. The editors and contributors attempt to prove that Mary Daly is located in the Western intellectual tradition. Daly may be highly critical of conventional Western epistemological and theological traditions, but she nevertheless appropriates themes "out-of-context"...

Grounded in the history of political thought, and illuminated by legal studies and feminist theory, this book offers a challenging new approach to thinking about liberty in the wake of decades of criticism of liberalism from feminists, communitarians, and conservatives alike. Fundamental to this approach is the author's argument that liberty and equality are not inconsistent values and that political theory would do well to abandon the dichotomy between "negative" and "positive" liberty.

The principles of liberty Jamieson proposes--identity, privacy, and agency--are not meant to be...

This is the first collection of essays to evaluate John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy from a feminist perspective. The variety of feminist interpretations offered here ranges from Jane Addams's praise for his collegial efforts to resolve the problems of the inner city to contemporary comparisons of his approach with Addams's own critique of capitalism as patriarchal. In between are essays assessing Dewey's contributions to feminist theory and practice both in his lifetime and in regard to contemporary feminist approaches to education, subjectivity, objectivity and truth, and social and...

Diplomat, bureaucrat, and practical politician, Niccolo Machiavelli served as Second Secretary to the Republic of Florence in the early sixteenth century and became the first major political thinker in the western tradition to make a complete break with the Aristotelian model of politics as a branch of ethics. While The Prince is his most famous work, grounding his reputation as the progenitor of "Realpolitik," his many other writings have contributed to a more complex and broader image of the man and his political thought. Thus in recent years Machiavelli has come to be seen as a...

Adorno is often left out of the "canon" of influences on contemporary feminist theory, but these essays show that his work can provide valuable material for feminist thinking about a wide range of issues.

Theodor Adorno was a leading scholar of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, otherwise known as the Frankfurt School. With Max Horkheimer he contributed to the advance of critical theorizing about Enlightenment philosophy and modernity. Inflected by Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, Adorno's thinking defies easy categorization. Ranging across the disciplines of...

In Is Philosophy Androcentric?, Iddo Landau contends that none of the arguments for viewing philosophy as pervasively androcentric ultimately stand up to rational scrutiny, while the ones that show it to be nonpervasively androcentric do not undermine it in the way that many critics have supposed. "Philosophy emerges, in almost all of its parts," he concludes, "as human rather than male, and most parts and aspects of it need not be rejected or rewritten."

Within the popular consciousness, Emma Goldman has become something of an icon, a symbol for rebellion and women's rights. But there has been surprisingly little substantive analysis of her influence on social, political, and feminist theory. In Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman, Weiss and Kensinger present essays that resist a simplistic understanding of Goldman and instead attempt to examine her thinking in its proper social, historical, and philosophical context. Only by considering the sources, influences, and specific significance of Goldman's ideas can her proper...

This volume presents an exploration of the intersection between the work of Michel Foucault and feminist theory, focusing on Foucault's theories of sex/body, identity/subject, and power/politics.

Like the other books in this series, this volume seeks to bring a feminist perspective to bear on the interpretation of a major figure in the philosophical canon. In the case of Michel Foucault, however, this aim is somewhat ironic because Foucault sees his work as disrupting that very canon. Since feminists see their work as similarly disruptive, Foucault and feminism would seem to find...