feminism in politics essay

The future is female: How the growing political power of women will remake American politics

Subscribe to governance weekly, michael hais and michael hais former vice president for entertainment research - frank n. magid associates morley winograd morley winograd senior fellow - center on communication leadership and policy, annenberg school, university of southern california @mikeandmorley.

February 19, 2020

The most profound change in American politics today and in the years to come will result from a massive movement of women into the Democratic Party. As this realignment takes place Hillary Clinton may well go down in history as this century’s equivalent of Al Smith. Al Smith was the Democratic nominee for president in 1928 and the first Roman Catholic ever nominated by a major political party. Although he lost the election, his campaign presaged the movement of Catholics into the Democratic Party in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt won the Democratic nomination and the presidency. Smith’s race was initially considered a failure, as was Hillary Clinton’s. But her defeat has set off a chain reaction likely to lead to a realignment of party coalitions and relative political strength in 2020 as sweeping as FDR’s victory in 1932.

As far back as the Reagan presidency, there has been a gender gap in American partisanship with women tilting toward the Democratic Party and men toward the GOP. But the overwhelming change in political party demographics since Trump’s victory in 2016 is the culmination of a long-term movement in party identification and voting behavior among women. With the election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, what had been a modest gap of variable proportions has turned into a chasm so wide no Republican presidential candidate will be able to cross it for years to come.

In 2012, according to CNN exit polls , women preferred Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 11 percentage points (55% to 44%). In 2016, Clinton led Trump by 13 points (54% to 41%), but in the 2018 midterm elections women opted for Democratic rather than Republican congressional candidates by 19 points (59% to 40%). More important for the long term, the Democratic margin over the Republicans in party identification grew from six points in 1994 (48% to 42%) to nearly twenty in 2017 (56% to 37%).

Even though the trend toward the Democratic Party among women is most pronounced among college graduates, it is also visible both among those who went to college but didn’t graduate and those with only a high school education. Among voters of each and every racial background and ethnicity, women have increased their identification with the Democratic Party. The effect is most pronounced among America’s younger generations—Plurals (the best name for the generation after Millennials) and Millennials—but a rise in Democratic affiliation, albeit a smaller one, has also occurred among Gen X’ers, Boomers and even Silents, America’s oldest adult generation. The trend may be larger or smaller in each of these categories but always in the same direction.

This increasing attachment to the Democratic Party reflects a deep-seated belief by women that most Republican men don’t see the world the way they do. For example, a 2019 Pew Research survey indicated that 69% of all women and 83% of women who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party believe that “significant obstacles still make it harder for women to get ahead than men.” A solid majority (69%) of male Democratic identifiers concur. By contrast, 81% of men identifying with or leaning toward the GOP perceive that the “obstacles that once made it harder for women to get ahead are largely gone.” More recently, a January, 2020 poll found a 19-percentage-point gender gap in President Trump’s approval rating. Only 38% of women approved of the job Trump was doing, compared to 57% of men. This nineteen-point gap was 8 points higher than the 11-point gap as measured in 2016 general election exit polls.

The gender realignment of American politics is the biggest change in party affiliation since the movement by loyal Democratic voters to the GOP in the “solid South,” which realigned regional political coalitions into the partisan dynamics we are familiar with today. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won all of the former Confederate states except for Virginia as well as the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia. By 2000, Al Gore’s presidential campaign lost all of them, including his home state of Tennessee. It took a while for this transformation to occur in the South—emerging first in urban and suburban areas and only at the end becoming entrenched in the more rural parts of the region, where it is strongest today. But with the speed of news and information in an era dominated by social media and cable news, the trend is likely to spread further and faster this time, certainly soon enough to greatly influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

The shocking defeat of Hillary Clinton at the hands of the overtly misogynistic Donald Trump put the existing trend into hyper-drive. It broke upon the national scene in cities across the country with previously unseen numbers starting with the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration. Then it surprised almost everyone when it led to the election of a Democrat to the Senate in Alabama in a December 2017 special election. That result, which stemmed in significant degree from defections of Republican women in the state’s cities, suburbs and college campuses as well as a massive turnout of African-Americans, was quickly dismissed as an anomaly since the Republicans had nominated a sexual predator and pedophile as their candidate.

But no one could ignore the size and national impact the same shift had on the outcome of the midterm elections in November 2018. Exit polls that year showed women favored the Democratic candidate for Congress by 19 percentage points (59% to 40%), while men favored the Republican candidate by four points (51% to 47%). The resulting gender gap of 23 points was the widest one in the last twenty years.

Still, most commentators point only to the suburbs as the place where the shift in the women’s vote is happening. There is certainly some validity to that perspective. For example, in suburban Bucks, Chester, and Delaware Counties, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, the Democrats took over the Boards of Commissioners in 2019—the latter two for the first time since before the Civil War. Nationally, the University of Chicago Harris/AP-NORC Poll in January 2019 showed that the suburban vote had shifted from an even split in party preference in 2016 to a 7-point Democratic advantage, 46-39, in just two years. And a January 2020 NBC-Wall Street Journal poll indicated that suburban women identify as Democrats over Republicans 47% to 34%, up from 43% to 40% in 2010.

The idea that educated suburban women have shifted their voting preferences from Republican to Democrat is not wrong, but it doesn’t reflect the full extent of the change that is happening in plain sight in American politics. In the past two years alone, women’s representation in state legislatures has increased from 25.4 percent to 28.9 percent of all state legislative seats. That year, Nevada, both of whose U.S. Senators are women, became the first majority female legislature. Colorado also came close to gender parity, with a legislature that is 47 percent female. The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) found that women state legislators introduced and enacted more legislation than men over the two most recent legislative sessions. Virginia became a thoroughly blue state in 2019 as women voters finished the state legislative revolution they had started in 2017. To complete the picture, a woman is now governor of mostly rural Kansas.

The shift is far from over. In other parts of society, most notably the famous #MeToo movement, women’s opposition to sexual harassment has been responsible for the downfall of many powerful men. Witnessing the type of change their numbers have brought in other parts of society in the last few years has only further whetted women’s appetite for using their political power to wipe out the remaining vestiges of male privilege and the type of behavior it condones. With organizations such as Emily’s List and The Women’s Campaign Fund providing a more robust infrastructure for female candidates, it won’t be long before the political preferences of women voters determine the winners and losers in American politics.

Democrats already enjoy a built-in advantage in the demographic trends that are continuing to make the American electorate more diverse, more educated, younger, and more urban. However, when a group that represents half or more of the electorate, as women do, shifts even slightly in party preference, it has a lot more impact than when a relatively smaller demographic group realigns by larger percentages. Since 1980 when men and women voted in about equal numbers, women have consistently outvoted men as the chart below indicates. Women turned out at greater rates than men in the 2018 midterms among every age group except those over 65. The trend continued in the first two Democratic nominating contests in 2020 with women making up 58% of Iowa caucus participants and 57% of voters in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire.

The full effect of gender realignment may not be fully felt in the rurally skewed electoral college in 2020, but it certainly increases the odds that this year whoever the Democrats nominate will win not only the popular vote but the presidency as well.

Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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Feminist Political Philosophy

This entry turns to how feminist philosophers have intervened in and, to a great extent, transformed the intellectual field known as political philosophy, which for millennia had largely ignored matters of sex and gender. Traditional political philosophy largely sidelined and excluded the private sphere and civil society from political theorizing, the very realms in which women were largely sequestered. It focused instead on matters of state and governance. The rise of liberalism since the seventeenth century abetted this tendency by drawing a sharp line between the public and the private realms. What happened in the household, it held, were not matters of political concern. Today, thanks largely to feminist interventions, political philosophy is a far richer field of philosophical inquiry. It understands power and governance much more broadly.

In its own right, feminist political philosophy is a branch of both feminist philosophy and political philosophy. As a branch of feminist philosophy, it serves as a form of critique or a hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricœur 1970). That is, it serves as a way of opening up or looking at the political world as it is usually understood and uncovering ways in which women and their current and historical concerns are poorly depicted, represented, and addressed. As a branch of political philosophy, feminist political philosophy serves as a field for developing new ideals, practices, and justifications for how political institutions and practices should be organized and reconstructed. Indeed, the feminist refrain that “the personal is political” speaks to the fact that feminist political philosophy is not only concerned with concepts that have always been mainstays in political philosophy (e.g., justice, equality, freedom), but with redefining and expanding what is considered “political” in the first place (e.g., the family, the workplace, reproduction; Hirschmann 2007). In this sense, feminist political philosophy may be the paradigmatic branch of feminist philosophy.

While feminist philosophy has been instrumental in critiquing and reconstructing many branches of philosophy, from aesthetics to philosophy of science, feminist political philosophy is also paradigmatic because it best exemplifies the point of feminist theory, which is, to borrow a phrase from Marx, not only to understand the world but to change it (Marx 1845). And, though other fields have effects that may change the world, feminist political philosophy focuses most directly on understanding ways in which collective life can be improved. This project involves understanding the ways in which power emerges and is used or misused in public life (see the entry on feminist perspectives on power ). As with other kinds of feminist theory, common themes have emerged for discussion and critique, but there has been little in the way of consensus among feminist theorists on what is the best way to understand them. This introductory article lays out the areas of concern that have occupied this vibrant field of philosophy for the past forty years. It understands feminist philosophy broadly to include work conducted by feminist theorists doing this philosophical work from other disciplines, especially political science but also anthropology, comparative literature, law, and other programs in the humanities and social sciences.

1. Historical Context and Developments

2.1 feminist engagements with liberalism and neoliberalism, 2.2 radical feminism, 2.3 socialist, marxist, and materialist feminisms, 2.4 poststructuralist feminisms, 2.5 care, vulnerability, affect, 2.6 intersectional feminisms, 2.7 transnational, decolonial, and indigenous feminisms, 2.8 feminist democratic theory, 3. new directions in feminist political philosophy, other internet resources, related entries.

Historically, political philosophy focused on the state and various forms of governance. It largely ignored other realms as outside the scope of the political. In general, political thought presumed that political actors were necessarily male and that politics was a masculine enterprise (Okin 1979). It sharply distinguished the public realm of the state from the purportedly non-political realms of civil society and the household, hence forgoing any serious scrutiny of relations of domination in the private sphere. It presumed that women were naturally inferior to men and lacked the capacity to rule themselves. Hence traditional political thought deemed that it was appropriate for them to be ruled by their fathers or husbands, all in the sanctity of the home, immune from public scrutiny. These presuppositions went largely unremarked upon until some women began to demand the same “universal” human dignity that men were proclaiming in newly republican and democratic states of the eighteenth century (Gouges 1791). The first feminist theorists— avant la lettre of feminism—began questioning the tenets of political thought not as an abstract exercise but out of their very real, lived experience. As feminist activists and theorists entered the fray, they quickly pointed out how many of political theory’s presuppositions were thoroughly gendered. Over millennia, feminists noted, political thought coded the public realm as masculine and the private one as feminine; there was the public world of men’s work and the private domain of women’s labor. Political claims of universality were usually quite particular: for men alone.

As they did this work, drawing on their own experience, feminist political thinkers began creating new philosophical concepts. Early feminist thinkers pointed out how social conditions (such as the lack of education) diminished women’s capacities. Later, other theorists pointed to the ways that women and their concerns were excluded or sidelined. Already in the nineteenth century they were noticing how people are socially constituted. By the mid-twentieth century, again drawing from their experience and collective “consciousness-raising” groups, they began challenging norms that countenanced women being harassed on the street by catcalls and whistles. They created new concepts like “sexual harassment” and “objectification”. Over time feminist political philosophers began to notice deeper metaphysical presuppositions underlying gender divisions and to comment on how philosophy had long construed such fundamental concepts as reason, universality, and nature in thoroughly gendered and hence suspect ways. In doing this work, feminist philosophers began to transform the field of political philosophy itself, moving it from its narrow focus on governance to a broader focus on philosophical questions of identity, essence, equity, difference, justice, and the good life.

In the European and U.S. context, earlier generations of feminist scholarship and activism, including the first wave of feminism in the English-speaking world from the 1840s to the 1920s, focused on improving the political, educational, and economic system primarily for middle-class white women. Its greatest achievements were to develop a language of equal rights for women and to garner women the right to vote. Beginning in the 1960s, second wave feminists made further interventions in political theory by drawing on the language of the civil rights movements (e.g., the language of liberation) and on a new feminist consciousness that emerged through women’s solidarity movements and new forms of reflection that uncovered sexist attitudes and impediments throughout the whole of society.

These advances opened up new questions, namely: is there anything that unites women across cultures, time, and contexts? Just as Marxist theory sought out a universal subject in the person of the worker, feminists theorists sought out a commonality that united women across cultures, someone for whom feminist theory could speak. No sooner had that question been posed than it got taken down, as in the title of a paper co-written by the Latina feminist philosopher María Lugones and the white philosopher Elizabeth Spelman: “Have We Got A Theory For You: Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice” (1986). This notion of a universal womanhood was also interrupted by other thinkers, such as bell hooks, saying that it excluded non-white and non-middle-class women’s experience and concerns. Hooks’ 1981 book titled Ain’t I a Woman? exposed mainstream feminism as a movement of a small group of middle- and upper-class white women whose experience was very particular, hardly universal. The work of Lugones, Spelman, hooks and also Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and others foregrounded the need to account for women’s multiple and complex identities and experiences. By the 1990s the debates about whether there was a coherent concept of woman that could underlie feminist politics was further challenged by non-Western women challenging the Western women’s movement as caught up in Eurocentric ideals that led to the colonization and domination of “Third World” people. What is now known as postcolonial and decolonial theories further heighten the debate between feminists who wanted to identify a universal feminist subject of woman (e.g., Okin, Nussbaum, and Ackerly) and those who call for recognizing multiplicity, diversity, and intersectionality (e.g., Spivak, Narayan, Mahmood, and Jaggar).

As a branch of political philosophy, feminist political philosophy has often mirrored the various divisions at work in political philosophy more broadly. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, political philosophy was usually divided into categories such as liberal, conservative, socialist, and Marxist. Except for conservatism, for each category there were often feminists working and critiquing alongside it. Hence, as Alison Jaggar’s classic text, Feminist Politics and Human Nature , spelled out, each ideological approach drew feminist scholars who would both take their cue from and borrow the language of a particular ideology (Jaggar 1983). Jaggar’s text grouped feminist political philosophy into four camps: liberal feminism, socialist feminism, Marxist feminism, and radical feminism. The first three groups followed the lines of Cold War global political divisions: American liberalism, European socialism, and a revolutionary communism (though few in the west would embrace Soviet-style communism). Radical feminism was the most rooted in specifically feminist approaches and activism, developing its own political vocabulary with its roots in the deep criticisms of patriarchy that feminist consciousness had produced in its first and second waves. Otherwise, feminist political philosophy largely followed the lines of traditional political philosophy. But this has never been an uncritical following. As a field bent on changing the world, even liberal feminist theorists tended to criticize liberalism as much or more than they embraced it, and to embrace socialism and other more radical points of view more than to reject them. Still, on the whole, these theorists generally operated within the language and framework of their chosen approach to political philosophy.

Political philosophy began to change enormously in the late 1980s, just before the end of the Cold War, with a new invocation of an old Hegelian category: civil society, an arena of political life intermediate between the state and the household. This was the arena of associations, churches, labor unions, book clubs, choral societies and manifold other nongovernmental yet still public organizations. In the 1980s political theorists began to turn their focus from the state to this intermediate realm, which suddenly took center stage in Eastern Europe in organizations that challenged the power of the state and ultimately led to the downfall of communist regimes. It also opened up more avenues, beyond the state, for feminist political theorizing.

After the end of the Cold War, political philosophy along with political life radically realigned. New attention focused on civil society and the public sphere, especially with the timely translation of Jürgen Habermas’s early work, the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1962 [1989]). Volumes soon appeared on civil society and the public sphere, focusing on the ways that people organized themselves and developed public power rather than on the ways that the state garnered and exerted its power. In fact, there arose a sense that the public sphere ultimately might exert more power than the state, at least in the fundamental way in which public will is formed and serves to legitimate—or not—state power. In the latter respect, John Rawls’s work was influential by developing a theory of justice that tied the legitimacy of institutions to the normative judgments that a reflective and deliberative people might make (Rawls 1971). By the early 1990s, Marxists seemed to have disappeared or at least become very circumspect (though the downfall of communist regimes needn’t have had any effect on Marxist analysis proper, which never subscribed to Leninist or Maoist thought). Socialists also retreated or transformed themselves into “radical democrats” (Mouffe [ed.] 1992a, 1993, 2000).

Now the old schema of liberal, radical, socialist, and Marxist feminisms were much less relevant. There were fewer debates about what kind of state organization and economic structure would be better for women and more debates about the value of the private sphere of the household and the nongovernmental space of associations. Along with political philosophy more broadly, more feminist political philosophers began to turn to the meaning and interpretation of civil society, the public sphere, and democracy itself. At this point in the early 1990s new work in political theory turning to civil society converged with feminist political theory that was rendering “political” realms that heretofore had been excluded from mainstream political theory. A synergy arose between those studying communitarianisms and feminists working in an ethics-of-care tradition: both pointed to how particular care relations and communal ties were as or more important than abstract principles of justice. They also began to question the binary and hierarchical divisions of justice over care, universality over particularity, and the right over the good, all metaphysical suppositions that were hardly neutral.

2. Contemporary Approaches and Debates

Political philosophy today is significantly more interesting, complex, and capacious thanks to feminist interventions in the field. While the previous section traces these interventions in broad terms, showing how political philosophy has been transformed as a result, this section will provide more detailed descriptions of some of the major sites of concern, debate, and critique animating feminist political philosophy. Because feminist political philosophy is often distinguished by its attention to the concrete realities shaping the lives of women, differences among women (cultural, social, economic, experiential) drive the rich diversity of work being done in this field, and difference itself is a major topic for theorizing with respect to foundational concepts like justice, freedom, and equality. Thus, it is important to emphasize that there is no one feminist perspective shaping work in feminist political philosophy, but a rich variety of perspectives emerging from particular contexts, histories, and traditions. They are sometimes in tension with each other.

Now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, feminist theorists are doing an extraordinary variety of work on matters political and democratic that confront new and/or pressing challenges. Similar developments in the areas of global ethics, public policy, human rights, disabilities studies, bioethics, climate change, and international development blur the distinction between theory and practice in philosophically generative ways.

For example, in global ethics there is a debate over whether there are universal values of justice and freedom that should be intentionally cultivated for women in the developing world or whether cultural diversity should be prioritized. Feminist theorists have sought to answer this question in a number of different and compelling ways. (For some examples see Ackerly 2000; Ackerly & Okin 1999; Benhabib 2002 and 2006; Butler 2000; Gould 2004; Khader 2019; Abu-Lughod 2013; Nussbaum 1999a; and Zerilli 2009; see also the entry on feminist perspectives on globalization .)

Modern abolitionist feminism is driven by the contributions of Black feminist philosophers like Angela Davis (2003, 2005, 2016, and in Davis, Dent, Meiners, & Richie 2022), whose work on the racialized prison industrial complex has helped spur the social-political movement to abolish prisons and develop new theories of restorative justice. Contemporary feminist theories of abolitionism have also built on Michel Foucault ’s critique of the prison, generating new work on political resistance to social structures of incarceration, as well as new ways of exploring foundational political concepts like privacy, freedom, and justice (Pitts 2021b; Zurn & Dilts [ed.] 2016; Zurn 2021). (See also Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2007 and 2022; Davis, Dent, Meiners, & Richie 2022; Guenther 2013; Montford & Taylor [eds] 2022.)

The work of feminist legal theorists (see the entry on feminist philosophy of law ) has been transformative on both the theory and policy fronts. In her 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” Kimberlé Crenshaw critiqued “single-axis” legal frameworks for failing to address race- and gender-based discrimination occurring at the intersection of multiple identities (Crenshaw 1989). Instead, she promoted an intersectional framework and, along with many others, developed a theory of intersectionality as an analytic framework for understanding how compounded and intermeshed systems of privilege and oppression structure experience (see also section 2.6 below). Along with Crenshaw, Anita Allen (2011), Martha Fineman (2008 [2011]), Catherine MacKinnon (1987, 1989), Mari J. Matsuda (1986, 1996), and Patricia J. Williams (1991) are prominent legal scholars whose work has made significant contributions to debates in feminist political philosophy.

Feminists contributions in ethics and moral psychology that emphasize relations of care have also had a major impact on political philosophy. This intervention has challenged masculinist characterizations of political subjects as highly independent and rational, as well as core concepts within political philosophy (e.g., justice, freedom, rights, sovereignty, and autonomy) derived from that characterization (see also section 2.5 below).

Likewise, new philosophical work on disabilities, as the entry on feminist perspectives on disability explains, is informed by a great deal of feminist theory, from standpoint philosophy to feminist phenomenology and feminist care ethics, as well as political philosophical questions of identity, difference, and diversity (see also Kittay & Carlson [ed.] 2010). Feminist political philosophers like Martha Nussbaum (2006) have drawn on the insights of philosophers of disability to offer new conceptions of justice (i.e., the capabilities approach).

Ultimately, the number of approaches that can be taken on any of these issues are as many as the number of philosophers there are working on them. The remainder of this entry will outline a variety of approaches to central concerns in feminist political philosophy, noting general family resemblances among these approaches (i.e., liberal feminist, radical feminist, Marxist feminist, socialist feminist) and highlighting new constellations that have emerged (e.g., intersectional feminisms).

Liberal feminism remains a strong current in feminist political thought. Following liberalism’s focus on freedom and equality, liberal feminism’s primary concern is to protect and enhance women’s personal and political autonomy, the first being the freedom to live one’s life as one chooses and the second being the freedom to help decide the direction of the political community. This follows from Enlightenment liberalism’s core norm of equal respect for personhood, where personhood is tied to moral equality, or the equal worth of persons as moral choosers (Nussbaum 1999a). This approach was invigorated with the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) and subsequently his Political Liberalism (1993). Susan Moller Okin (1989, 1979, 1999), Eva Kittay (1999), Martha Nussbaum (2006), and Amy Baehr (2017) have used Rawls’s work productively to extend his theory to attend to women’s concerns.

Perhaps more than any other approach, liberal feminist theory parallels developments in liberal feminist activism. While feminist activists have waged legal and political battles to criminalize, as just one example, violence against women (which previously, in marital relations, hadn’t been considered a crime), feminist political philosophers who have engaged the liberal lexicon have shown how the distinction between private and public realms has served to uphold male domination of women by rendering power relations within the household as “natural” and immune from political regulation. Such political philosophy uncovers how seemingly innocuous and “commonsensical” categories have covert power agendas. For instance, Clare Chambers has critiqued the institution of marriage, arguing that it violates liberal political principles of equality and liberty (Chambers 2017a). Feminist critiques of the public/private split supported legal advances that finally led in the 1980s to the criminalization in the United States of spousal rape (Sigler & Haygood 1988). Efforts to politicize the private sphere have also challenged the capitalist economic system that relies on women’s unpaid labor. As the entry on feminist perspectives on class and work explains, scholars like Silvia Federici have argued that women’s unpaid housework and reproductive labor is essential to the social reproduction of capitalism that exploits women. The “wages for housework” movement led by scholar-activists like Federici is an attempt to demand remuneration for women’s unpaid work (Federici 2012, 2021; more on this Marxist feminist lineage in section 2.3 ). Reproductive justice, pornography, and sex work are yet more issues of convergence for feminist proponents and critics of liberalism alike (see the section on Reproductive Rights in the entry on feminist philosophy of law ; Altman & Watson 2019; Watson & Flanigan 2020). While the U.S. legal tradition has typically grounded abortion rights in the right to privacy, feminist political philosophers such as Shatema Threadcraft (2016) have understood reproductive justice as more fundamentally having to do with the freedom to choose one’s destiny. As such, it is connected to the history of other struggles for race and gender equality in earlier eras.

Carole Pateman and Charles Mills have worked within the liberal tradition to show the limits and faults of social contract theory, and Enlightenment liberalism more broadly, for women and people of color. Their jointly authored book, Contract & Domination , levels a devastating critique against systems of sexual and racial domination. This work engages and critiques some of the most dominant strains of political philosophy. Martha Nussbaum has defended liberalism from some of its critics, arguing that the most appealing versions of liberalism successfully avoid feminist criticisms that liberalism is overly individualistic, abstract, and rationalist (Nussbaum 1999a). She does however take seriously two deep and unresolved problems within liberalism “exposed by feminist thinkers”: (1) the fact of dependency and the need for care and (2) gender inequality and the family (Nussbaum 2004). With respect to dependency—the reality of human dependency and thus the need for care throughout the course of life—Asha Bhandary (2020) has developed a Rawlsian social contract framework to expose and address systemic inequalities in who receives and provides care (see also Bhandary & Baehr [eds] 2021 and section 2.5 below). With respect to the second issue, which deals with the social institution of the family as a site of gender hierarchy and oppression, Marxist, socialist, and materialist feminists have analyzed the material conditions under which these social arrangements (the family and gender hierarchy) have developed. These feminists typically critique liberalism for entrenching social arrangements (such as the public/private split and the system of wage labor) that arise with capitalism and marginalize and disempower women as a social group (see section 2.3 below).

As other feminist critics have argued, many of the central categories of liberalism occlude women’s lived concerns. For example, the right to privacy coveted by classical liberals is a major source of contention for feminists: the private realm, understood as a domain free from state intervention, has historically been the domain where women and children have experienced the bulk of everyday forms of oppression. The liberal private/public distinction sequesters the private sphere, and any harm that may occur there to women, away from political scrutiny (Pateman 1988). Other feminist critics note that liberalism continues to treat as unproblematic concepts that theorists in the 1990s and since have problematized, such as “woman” as a stable and identifiable category and the univocity of the self underlying self-rule or autonomy. Decolonial feminists like María Lugones have exposed the Eurocentric foundations of this view of the self (Lugones 2003; see also section 2.7 ). While Mari Matsuda develops a feminist critique of the methodological abstraction in liberal theories such as Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (Matsuda 1986), others (such as Zerilli 2009) have argued that the universal values that liberal feminists such as Okin invoked were really expanded particulars, with liberal theorists mistaking their ethnocentrically derived values as universal ones. In this vein, Falguni Sheth, focusing on the treatment of Muslim women in the contemporary United States, argues that despite liberal claims to secular neutrality, liberal states actively exclude and discriminate against racialized and marginalized populations (Sheth 2022).

Beyond liberal feminism, contemporary feminist philosophers have led the way in theorizing and critiquing what is known as neoliberalism, especially the ways that neoliberal social and economic forces impact the lives of women. On Wendy Brown’s account (2015), neoliberalism refers to a set of relations between state, society, and subjects that mimics and reinforces radical free-market ideals in the economy. These forces, Brown argues, undermine liberal democratic citizenship, public institutions, and popular sovereignty. Nancy Fraser (2013), Jodi Dean (2009), Bonnie Honig (2017) and Judith Butler (2015) join Brown in asking whether democracy—or “the demos”—can be sustained under neoliberal conditions of rapidly increasing economic precariousness and diminishing social and political resources for resistance. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Anderson asks how putatively positive values like “work ethic” have become central to the moral and physical exploitation of workers under neoliberalism.

While feminist liberalism continues to flourish, the historical developments and emerging debates described in the previous sections have eclipsed or deeply transformed Jaggar’s other three categories of radical, Marxist, and socialist feminism (Jaggar 1983). The “grand narratives” that underlay the latter two have become less credible (Snyder 2008). Among theorists, radical feminism has always been somewhat of a niche approach, likely because its stance is rather exacting. As the name “radical” suggests, radical feminists share the belief that existing structures and institutions need to be overhauled—rather than reformed , as liberalism would have it—in order to get at the “root” of women’s oppression.

Those who work in radical feminism continue to take issue with many of the central tenets of liberal feminism, especially its focus on the individual and the supposedly free choices that individuals can make. Where the liberal sees the potential for freedom, the radical feminist sees structures of domination that are bigger than any individual. The idea that domination and oppression affect social groups in ways that are structural and systemic , though they may be experienced differently by members of different social groups, is a major contribution of feminist political philosophy (Frye 1983; Young 1990). Radical feminists remain committed to getting at the root of male domination by understanding the source of power differentials, which some radical feminists, including Catharine MacKinnon, trace back to sexuality and the notion that heterosexual intercourse enacts male domination over women.

Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the requirements of its dominant form, heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. If this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality. (MacKinnon 1989: 113)

Patriarchy itself, according to this view, dominates women by positioning them as objects of men’s desire (Welch 2015). Radical feminists of the 1980s tended to see power as running one-way, from those with power over those who are being oppressed. As Amy Allen puts it,

Unlike liberal feminists, who view power as a positive social resource that ought to be fairly distributed, and feminist phenomenologists, who understand domination in terms of a tension between transcendence and immanence, radical feminists tend to understand power in terms of dyadic relations of dominance/subordination, often understood on analogy with the relationship between master and slave. (2005: §3.2)

Radical feminists of the 1970s and 1980s sought to reject the prevailing order in various ways, sometimes advocating separatism (Daly 1973 [1985], 1978 [1990]), the technologization of procreation (and thus freeing women from their oppressive role in biological reproduction; Firestone 1970), or, as MacKinnon would have it, rejecting normative sexuality as rooted in male domination (MacKinnon 1989). As Nancy Hirschmann notes, many radical feminists take biology as a “fundamental starting point” for theorizing (Hirschmann 2007: 146). This approach is generally recognized to be retrograde.

A new generation of radical feminist theorists are renewing the tradition, showing how it has respected concerns such as intersectionality (Whisnant 2016) and shares some of the commitments of the postmodern feminists discussed below, e.g., skepticism about any fixed gender identity or gender binaries and a more fluid and performative approach to sexuality and politics (Snyder 2008), as well as the ways that power and privilege continue to hold women back (Chambers 2017b: 656).

Throughout the twentieth century, many political theorists in Europe, the United States, and Latin America drew on socialist and Marxist texts to develop theories of social change attentive to issues of class relations and exploitation in modern capitalist economies. By and large, Marxist feminists focus on how modes of production, along with changing relations of production and reproduction shape the social arrangements (e.g., the gender division of labor, gender hierarchy) and institutions (e.g., marriage, motherhood, the family) that contribute to women’s oppression. After learning of the horrors of Stalinism, most Western Marxists and socialists, feminists included, were extremely critical of the communist systems in the Soviet Union and later in China. Western, mostly anti-communist, Marxist thought flourished in Italy (with Antonio Gramsci’s work), England (with Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams’ work), France (with the Socialisme ou Barbarie group), and the United States (less so there after McCarthyism, yet renewed somewhat in the 1960s with the New Left). Jaggar’s 1983 book summed up well the way feminists were using socialist and Marxist ideas to understand the way women were exploited and their laboring and reproductive work devalued and unpaid though necessary for capitalism to function. Drawing on Frederick Engels’ emphasis on the “reproduction of immediate life”, Marxist and socialist feminists were able to move beyond more orthodox readings of Marx that restrict focus to modes of “production” that privilege the experience of men as wage-laborers (Engels 1884: Preface). Social reproduction theorists instead analyze forms of labor, most often women’s unpaid labor, that contribute to the maintenance of life at the individual, family, and species level (see Bhattacharya [ed.] 2017; Federici 2004 and 2021; S. Ferguson 2019). In the entry on feminist perspectives on class and work , the authors point to much of the work that was going on in this field up through the mid-1990s. Since then, the authors note, various postmodern, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and deconstructive theories have criticized the bases for socialist and Marxist thought, including the “grand narrative” of economic determinism and the reduction of everything to economic and material relations. Despite this, Marxist analyses remain important to a variety of work being done in contemporary feminist political philosophy (see Dean 2009; Delphy 1984; Federici 2004; Fraser 2009, 2022; Gago 2019 [2020]; Spivak 1987; Vogel 1983).

While the lineage and trajectory of materialist feminism (as distinct from Marxist or socialist feminism) is unclear (see Gimenez 2000), Marxist, Socialist, and materialist feminisms all share an attention to the concrete material conditions underlying existing social arrangements (e.g., of gender hierarchy), the historically specific nature of these conditions, and a commitment to feminism as an emancipatory movement, not merely a scholarly endeavor. Meanwhile, feminists associated with these schools of thought tend to diverge when it comes to which topics of analysis are taken up, which aspects of Marx’s theory are considered pertinent for explaining women’s oppression, and the relationship between feminism and (anti)capitalism (Gimenez 2000). While the categories of socialist and Marxist feminisms are less relevant today, materialist feminism is experiencing something of a renaissance. While “materialist” can mean many things, as in the broader focus on matter and the body animating the work of “New Materialism” (e.g., see Coole & Frost [ed.] 2010), for the purposes of this entry, “materialist feminism” has a deeper and more explicit connection to the Marxist usage of the term “materialism” as described by Engels (and referenced above):

According to the materialist conception, the decisive element of history is pre-eminently the production and reproduction of life and its material requirements. This implies, on the one hand, the production of the means of existence (food, clothing, shelter and the necessary tools); on the other hand, the generation of children, the propogation of the species. (Engels 1884 [trans. Untermann 1902], Preface).

In Martha Gimenez’s view, the fact that materialist feminism has somewhat displaced Marxist and socialist feminisms may have more to do with the “ideological balance of power” in politics, academia, and publishing than the strength of feminist critiques of Marxism for its alleged economism and class reductionism (Gimenez 2000: 25).

Since the 1990s, the feminist concern with culture, identity, and difference—issues that were previously marginalized within mainstream white Anglo-American and French feminist theory and activism—increased, somewhat displacing Marxist and socialist feminism’s focus on systemic social forces and concrete material conditions. Certainly, new generations of materialist feminists and critical theorists tend to be more friendly to postmodern theories of meaning, identity, and subjectivity important in the field (see, for example, Fraser 2009; Fraser & Jaeggi 2018; Amy Allen 2008; McAfee 2008; and Young 2000) and classic works by philosophers like Angela Davis ( Women, Race, and Class , 1981) demonstrate that concerns about identity, culture, and difference are not incompatible with Marxist feminist analysis.

Like Marxist/materialist feminists who take seriously the role that sexual difference plays in systems of production and reproduction, poststructuralist feminists also take sexual difference seriously, attending to the ways in which language and meaning-systems structure experience. Notable among them are the so-called French Feminists, namely Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray. Of them all, Irigaray may have the most developed political philosophy, including several books on the rights that should be afforded to girls and women. Irigaray’s early work (1974 [1985a] and 1977 [1985b]) made the case that in the history of philosophy women have been denied their own essence or identity. Rather, they have been positioned as men’s mirror negation. So that to be a man is to not be a woman, and hence that woman equals only not-man. Her strategy in response to this is to speak back from the margins to which women have been relegated and to claim some kind of “essence” for women, and, along with that, a set of rights that are specifically for girls and women (Irigaray 1989 [1994] and 1992 [1996]). Criticisms of her views have been heated, including among feminists themselves, especially those who are wary of any kind of essentialist and biological conflation of women’s identity. To the extent that Irigaray is an essentialist, her view would be relegated to what is sometimes called symbolic difference feminism (Dietz 2003). However, there are also compelling arguments that Irigaray is wielding essentialism strategically or metaphorically, that she isn’t claiming that women really do have some kind of irreducible essence that the history of metaphysics has denied them (Fuss 1989). This other reading would put Irigaray more in the performative group described below ( section 2.8 ). The same kind of argument could be made for the work of Julia Kristeva—that her metaphors of the female chora, for example, are describing the Western imaginary, not any kind of womanly reality. So whether French feminist thought should be grouped as difference feminism or performative feminism is still very much open to debate.

To the extent that the above two types of feminist theory are pinpointing some kind of specific difference between the sexes, they raise concerns about essentialism or identifying distinct values that women have as women. Such concerns are part of a larger set of criticisms that have run through feminist theorizing since the 1970s, with non-white, non-middle-class, and non-western women questioning the very category of “woman” and the notion that this title could be a boundary-spanning category that could unite women of various walks of life. (See the entries on identity politics and feminist perspectives on sex and gender .) Criticisms of a unitary identity of “woman” have been motivated by worries that much feminist theory has originated from the standpoint of a particular class of women who mistake their own particular standpoint for a universal one. In her 1981 book, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black women and feminism , bell hooks notes that the feminist movement pretends to speak for all women but was made up of primarily white, middle class women who, because of their narrow perspective, did not represent the needs of poor women and women of color and ended up reinforcing class stereotypes (hooks 1981). What is so damning about this kind of critique is that it mirrors the one that feminists have leveled against mainstream political theorists who have taken the particular category of men to be a universal category of mankind, a schema that does not in fact include women under the category of mankind but marks them as other (Lloyd 1984 [1993]).

The question of subjectivity has been a particularly fertile one for feminist political philosophy. Feminist politics and activism, informed by poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of the subject, have spurred new work that seeks to understand what remains of the “feminist subject” after critiques of essentialism and Eurocentrism (Butler 1995; Kramer 2017; Weeks 1998; Zerilli 2005).

Many of the recent developments in feminist political philosophy have followed on the heels of feminist critiques or reinterpretations of the Western philosophical canon. Earlier works by Wendy Brown (1988), Alison Jaggar (1989), Genevieve Lloyd (1984 [1993]), Susan Moller Okin (1979, 1989), Carole Pateman (1988, 1989), and others, revealed the masculinist foundations of mainstream political theory. As Okin put it,

[It] has proved to be no simple matter to integrate women into a tradition of theorizing created by, for, and about men. (Okin 1998: 118)

As she goes on to say,

Great value has been placed on things traditionally associated with men—on the allegedly transcendent nonphysical realm, on excessive individualism, on reason as all-important, and on the so-called manly virtues—including competitiveness and aggression. At the same time, the realm of things traditionally associated with women—concern with physical needs and nurturance, emotionality, cooperation (with other people and with nature)—have been much more inclined to be denigrated. (Okin 1998: 119)

Rather than attempting to align their theories with those values of individualism, rationality, and abstraction associated with masculinity (and classical liberalism), many feminist thinkers have instead sought to revalue traditionally denigrated values associated with femininity.

A prime example is care ethics (see the discussion in the entry on feminist ethics ). Drawing on Carol Gilligan’s pathbreaking research in moral psychology (Gilligan 1982), which showed that the dominant conception of moral development and subjectivity was really a reflection of a particular, masculine style of moral reasoning, feminist political theorists challenged dominant conceptions of political subjectivity, judgment, and action. Just as Gilligan and other feminist ethicists emphasized that styles of moral reasoning associated with women were not inferior because of their distinctiveness from masculinist models—and that distinctiveness includes an emphasis on emotions like empathy and care, responsiveness to need, and an awareness of one’s connection with others and the natural world—feminist political philosophers argued that ways of looking at and organizing the world informed by care are not inferior or pathological. This spurred new approaches to theorizing foundational political concepts that are at odds with liberal political theory in particular. First and foremost, political theorists influenced by the care ethics tradition insist that political subjects are not independent, but fundamentally (inter)dependent , enmeshed in complex networks of relation necessary for survival. This means that as political agents, we do not act on our own, but rely on others who are themselves dependent. This transformed view of the self has both theoretical and practical implications. From a care perspective, agency is relational, and individuals are nonsovereign and heteronomous. Taking up insights about our varied proximity to states of dependency throughout the course of life arising in the field of disability studies, thinkers like Judith Butler have argued that vulnerability is both an enabling and constraining feature of our ontological condition and one that is often politically induced in particular populations, marking them as “precarious” (Butler 2004, 2015). In her 2017 book The Right to Maim , Jasbir Puar draws on similar theoretical approaches in disability studies and biopolitics to analyze and critique the ways that the liberal nation-state “debilitates” populations in order to discipline and control them (Puar 2017). This recent work marks an interest among feminist political theorists in exposing the myriad ways that contemporary liberal and neoliberal frameworks care-lessly intensify and/or manipulate vulnerability. Along with disability, these thinkers seek to expose the ways that gender, race, ethnicity, immigration status, and age are complexly enmeshed in these scenes of abandonment (see also Fineman 2008 [2011]; Fraser 2022; Povinelli 2011; Collins 1990 [2000]). From a policy standpoint, care has also been front and center for feminist political thinkers, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which exposed the radical insufficiency of our infrastructures of care. The authors of The Care Manifesto (known as “The Care Collective”, 2020) explore how we might reorganize our institutions and relationships to meet the moment, including reclaiming public spaces, making healthcare for all a reality, and taking action to protect the natural world.

Some of the foundations and consequences of the care ethics approach have also produced serious skepticism from feminist political philosophers. First, there is the question of whether and, if so, how women-as-care-givers have distinct virtues. Feminists as a whole have long distanced themselves from the idea that women have any particular essence, choosing instead to see femininity and its accompanying virtues as social constructs, dispositions that result from culture and conditioning, not biological givens. So for care ethicists to champion the virtues that have inculcated femininity seems also to champion a patriarchal system that relegates one gender to the role of caretaker. The care ethicists’ answer to this problem has often been to flip the hierarchy. That is, to claim that the work of the household is more meaningful and sustaining than the work of the polis. But critics, such as Drucilla Cornell, Mary Dietz, and Chantal Mouffe, argue that such a revaluation keeps intact the dichotomy between the private and the public and the old association of women’s work with childcare (Butler & Scott [eds.] 1992; Phillips [ed.] 1998: 386–389).

Feminist political theorists associated with the care tradition have explored how the distinct values that arise from practices of care might transform our political concepts, aims, and organizations. How might those activities and values typically relegated to the private realm provide an alternative to the traditional emphases in moral and political philosophy on impartiality, rationality, and universal principles of justice in the public realm? The care approach challenged the default to abstract principles in political philosophy, leading to intense debates between liberals who advocated universal ideals of justice and care ethicists who advocated attention to the particular, to relationships, to care. In Gilligan’s early work, for instance, the care approach is presented as opposed to what she terms “the justice approach”, giving the impression that the two approaches are separate and mutually exclusive styles of moral reasoning (Gilligan 1982). By the 1990s, however, many care ethicists had revised their views. Rather than seeing care and justice as mutually exclusive alternatives, they began to recognize that attention to care should be accompanied by attention to fairness (justice) in order to attend to the plight of those with whom we have no immediate relation (Koggel 1998). Moreover, they recognized that the need to evaluate existing practices or systems of care requires applying principles of justice like equality and fairness (Held [ed.] 1995; Kittay 2002; Schutte 2002).

Like care, the history of Western philosophy has largely disregarded the role of emotion in political life, in particular because emotionality is frequently associated with women and racialized others. However, feminist political philosophers have insisted on the importance of this intersection (for example Hall 2005, Krause 2008, and Nussbaum 2013). Building on the contributions of feminist care ethicists and difference feminists who worked to show the significance of positive affects typically associated with femininity in ethical encounters—such as love, interest, and care—(see Held [ed.] 1995; Tronto 1993), other thinkers worried that this appraisal merely reified a false (gendered) dichotomy between reason and emotion, mind and body. Instead, early work by Alison Jaggar (1989), Elizabeth Spelman (1989 and 1991), Genevieve Lloyd (1984 [1993]), Elizabeth Grosz (1994), and others argued that reason is both embodied and emotion-laden, and that emotion has epistemic and moral value. Building on this work, feminist political theorists have argued that understanding the role of emotion and affect is crucial for understanding a number of important political phenomena: motivation for action (Krause 2008), collective action and community formation (Beltrán 2009 & 2010; Butler 2004 & 2015), solidarity and patriotism (Nussbaum 2006 and 2013), as well as vulnerability (Fineman 2008 [2011]), racism and xenophobia (Ahmed 2004 [2014]; Anker 2014; Ioanide 2015). Meanwhile, others examine the political significance of specific emotions, for instance: shame (Ahmed 2004 [2014]), grief (Butler 2004), anger (Cherry 2021; Spelman 1989; Lorde 1984), fear (Anker 2014), empathy (Hirji 2022), and love (Nussbaum 2013).

More recently, many feminist critics have turned their attention to the ways that neoliberalism demands resiliency and self-reliance in the face of increasing precarity. Some borrow from Michel Foucault’s late work on biopolitics, examining how neoliberal demands for autonomy, self-sufficiency, self-discipline, and self-investment impact individuals on the level of subjectivity, making both life and the possibility of political action to transform the conditions of life increasingly untenable. Individuals, they argue, are met with increasing vulnerability to economic forces and fewer resources to overcome vulnerability due to social isolation and limited access to social services (Butler 2015; Povinelli 2011). Some feminists study how subjectivity, affect, and morality accommodate these neoliberal trends. For instance, this shows up in how the demand to “overcome vulnerability” via the contemporary emphasis on individual “resilience” attempts to transform vulnerable persons, especially women, into productive neoliberal subjects (James 2015), how productive emotions like “happiness” are encouraged and unruly ones like “willfulness” are discouraged (Berlant 2011; Ahmed 2014), or how the targeted discourse around “self-care” can contribute to individualist consumer culture that diminishes women’s capacities for collective action (Ahmed 2017). Instead, many feminist critiques challenge neoliberal individualism by reasserting that agency need not be synonymous with autonomy, and propose nonsovereign or relational accounts of the agentic subject instead (Butler 2015). Along with care, some theorists have turned to contemplative practices like meditation (in the Zen Buddhist tradition, for instance) to recover important resources for democratic life (Mariotti 2020).

One of the issues that has been most vexing and generative for feminist theory in general and feminist political philosophy in particular is the matter of identity (see the entry on identity politics ). Identity politics, itself a politically vexed term, refers to political practices of mobilizing for change on the basis of a political identity (women, Black, Chicana, etc.; see Alcoff 2006; Matsuda 1996). The philosophical debate is whether such identities are based on some real difference or history of oppression, and also whether people should embrace identities that have historically been used to oppress them. Identity politics in feminist practice is fraught because for some feminists, concerns about identity are thought to weaken feminist political unity and solidarity (Hooker 2009; Zerilli 2005). As Emi Koyama writes in the introduction to “The Transfeminist Manifesto”:

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented broadening of American feminist movement as the result of the participation of diverse groups of women. When a group of women who had previously been marginalized within the mainstream of the feminist movement broke their silence, demanding their rightful place within it, they were first accused of fragmenting feminism with trivial matters, and then were eventually accepted and welcomed as a valuable part of the feminist thought. We have become increasingly aware that the diversity is our strength, not weakness. (Koyama 2001: 11)

Moreover, feminist theorists of color have shown (Davis 1981; hooks 1981; Lorde 1984; Mohanty 1991) that the feminist movement has always elevated the interests of some groups and ignored or disfigured the interests of others. What looks like unity or neutrality is often exclusion. Indeed, those for whom “woman” is only one of several sources for group identification (e.g, Black women) have raised questions about which identity is foremost or whether either identity is apt. Such questions play out with the question of political representation —what aspects of identity are politically salient and truly representative, whether race, class, or gender (Phillips 1995; Young 1997, 2000). The ontological question of women’s identity gets played out on the political stage when it comes to matters of political representation, group rights, and affirmative action. The 2008 U.S. Democratic Party primary battle between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton turned this philosophical question into a very real and heated one from Black women throughout the United States. Was a Black woman who supported Clinton a traitor to her race, or a Black woman who supported Obama a traitor to her sex? Or did it make any sense to talk about identity in a way that would lead to charges of treason?

Theories of intersectionality emerged in the U.S. context from the groundbreaking work of multiple thinkers (for an excellent history of the emergence of “intersectionality” within Black feminist and womanist thought, see J. Nash 2019), including Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Practice” (Crenshaw 1989), Patricia Hill Collins’s book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (Collins 1990), Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class (Davis 1981), Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984), and Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Williams 1991). While their specific language and emphasis varies, these theorists and others generally agree that intersectionality is an analytic framework that helps to understand how oppression and privilege along particular “axes” of identity (gender, race, class, disability, and the like) do not work independently, but intermesh in complex ways that shape our social relations, identities, interests, and experiences. The impact of this work was felt strongly where it originated in feminist legal theory (see feminist philosophy of law ), and has continued to be an important concept for theories of power and oppression in and out of feminist political philosophy. (See also the section on intersectionality in the entry on discrimination .)

While intersectionality emerged largely within the U.S. context, transnational, decolonial, and indigenous feminists theorize the political across, between, and against nation-state borders. Indeed, “the border” becomes an important geopolitical, cultural, and symbolic figure animating the work of feminist thinkers in this area. Here, like elsewhere in feminist political philosophy, new ideas in philosophy are often generated through the examination of practical political concerns in the lives of women. For scholars working in these areas, many of the issues and theories discussed emerge from ongoing histories of colonialism , settler colonialism, and imperialism.

The writings of postcolonial and transnational feminist theorists often raised the need for awareness of multiple global perspectives as a challenge to Euro- and Anglo-centric feminist theory by focusing on the lived realities of women in the Global South, such as issues related to working conditions and migration (Walia 2013). Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Feminism without Borders (2003) is a pathbreaking work in this respect, examining both the theoretical and practical political consequences of global capitalism for women across the globe and for the future of feminist struggle. In the Middle Eastern context, Lila Abu-Lughod famously asked “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” (2013), challenging the notion in many strains dominant in Western feminism that Muslim women are oppressed by their own culture (for more on culture see Narayan 1997). Discussing the impact of transnational feminist work during this period, Sharon Krause writes that, “this development involved the ‘world diversification’ of feminism to a more global, comparative, and differentiated body of work” (Krause 2011: 106). This diversification, Krause notes, is also due to new literature on intersectionality, that is, the ways in which the intersections of our multiple identities (race, gender, orientation, ethnicity, etc.) all need to be attended to in talking about political change (Krause 2011: 107). Intersectionality also resonates with discussions of “hybridity” in postcolonial literature, of religion and globalization, and of the experiences of LGBTQ people. “The result is an explosion of knowledge about the lived experience of differently placed and multiply-positioned women” (2011: 107). Given so many sources of difference and division among women across the globe, is a transnational feminist solidarity possible? Are there universal values and commitments on which to ground feminist activism and solidarity that do not reproduce Western ethnocentrism and imperialism? (For approaches to these questions, see Khader 2019.)

While transnational feminist theorists are largely concerned with the impacts of cross-border global processes, indigenous feminist contributions to political theory in the U.S. and Canada have developed important critiques of settler colonialism and its borders (for more on settler colonial states, decolonial resistance, and post-colonial theory see the entry on colonialism ). Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2014) “interrupts” settler colonial conceptualizations of political terms like legitimacy and sovereignty with alternative meanings rooted in Kahnawà:ke Mohawk life and the political history of the Iroquois Confederacy. (See also Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2017 on place-based resistance to settler colonialism.) In the Australian context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson challenges the ways that white women inside and outside of the academy benefit from colonialism and strategically wield power against indigenous women (Moreton-Robinson 2000). These concerns mark a broader and increasing focus among indigenous, decolonial, and intersectional feminists on critiques of whiteness (see also Alcoff 2006 & 2015).

Decolonial feminists overlap in many areas with other women of color feminists, but they bring several unique concerns specific to the colonial and post-colonial experience. In contemporary decolonial theory, these concerns are largely framed within the discourse of “coloniality”, first theorized in terms of “coloniality of power” by Anibal Quijano (2003). Here, “coloniality” refers to how relations between colonizer and colonized are racialized, for instance how labor, subjectivity, and authority are racialized around the colonial system of capitalist exploitation. (For more on “coloniality”, see Lugones 2010; Mignolo 2000; Maldonado Torres 2008; Wynter 2003.) For feminist thinkers like María Lugones (2007, 2010), gender is another axis around which the global capitalist system of power classifies and dehumanizes colonized people. For Lugones and others, including Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (1997), gender is a colonial imposition in tension with non-modern cosmologies, economies, and modes of kinship. Lugones calls this the “coloniality of gender”, noting that de-colonizing gender is part of a wider project of decolonial resistance opposed to the categorial, dichotomous, and hierarchical logics of capitalist modernity that are rooted in the colonization of the Americas. According to Lugones, the autonomous, independent, and univocal conception of the self is one of the Eurocentric “logics of purity” that has become culturally dominant, shaping our modes of political thought and action in ways that pathologize decolonial resistance. Lugones’ critique is especially evident in her claim that colonized people are not agents. Here, she does not mean that the colonized and oppressed, including colonized women, lack capacities for action and resistance—indeed, she argues that resistance meets oppression “enduringly”. Rather, she points out that according to the Eurocentric logic that defines agency as fully capacitated, intentional, and autonomous, colonized people are considered non-agential (Lugones 2005: 86). Instead, she develops the concept “active subjectivity” to name the kinds of resistant practices that develop under conditions of oppression. Rather than a feminist or decolonial “unity” that collapses difference, Lugones seeks to sustain forms of coalition across difference (Lugones 2003). (See also the section “Latin American Feminist Philosophy” in the entry on Latin American Feminism .)

In feminist decolonial literature, resistance is often discussed in terms of the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2003, 2007, 2010; Oyěwùmí 1997); language (Spivak 1988); identity and subjectivity—for instance, accounts of hybridity, border-thinking, multiplicity, and mestizaje (Anzaldúa 1987; Ortega 2016; Moraga & Anzaldúa [eds] 1981 [2015]; Pitts 2021a); and “world-traveling” (Lugones 1995; Ortega 2016). Many of these same thinkers argue that feminism itself must be decolonized, critiquing feminist universalisms that claim to account for the complex intersections of sexuality, race, gender, and class (see Khader 2019; Lugones 2010; Mohanty 2003; Vergès 2019 [2021]).

Are there any reliable foundations on which to base feminist politics? By the end of the 1990s, postmodern critiques of the subject and feminist critiques of the category “woman” produced real uncertainty about the status of the subject of feminist politics, seeing a radical danger of relativism and disunity, and the field seemed to be at an impasse. But then another approach began to emerge. As Mary Dietz writes in her 2003 essay on current controversies in feminist theory,

In recent years, political theorists have been engaged in debates about what it might mean to conceptualize a feminist political praxis that is aligned with democracy but does not begin from the binary of gender. Along these lines, Mouffe (1992b: 376, 378; 1993), for example, proposes a feminist conception of democratic citizenship that would render sexual difference “effectively nonpertinent”. Perhaps the salient feature of such conceptions is the turn toward plurality, which posits democratic society as a field of interaction where multiple axes of difference, identity, and subordination politicize and intersect. (Dietz 2003: 419; citing Phelan 1994; Young 1990, 1997, 2000; Benhabib 1992; Honig 1992; K. Ferguson 1993; Phillips 1993, 1995; Mouffe 1993; Yeatman 1994, 2001; Bickford 1996; Dean 1996; Fraser 1997; K. Nash 1998; Heyes 2000; McAfee 2000)

Following up on what has happened in feminist political theory since Dietz’s article, Sharon Krause writes that this work is “contesting the old assumption that agency equals autonomy” and makes room “within agency for forms of subjectivity and action that are nonsovereign but nevertheless potent” (Krause 2011; citing Amy Allen 2008, Beltrán 2010, Butler 2004, Hirschmann 2003, and Zerilli 2005.) “For some theorists”, Krause writes,

this shift involves thinking of agency and freedom in more collective ways, which emphasize solidarity, relationality, and constitutive intersubjectivity. (Krause 2011: 108; citing Butler 2004; Cornell 2007; Mohanty 2003; and Nedelsky 2005)

(As we saw in the previous section, decolonial feminists like Lugones were already critiquing Eurocentric conceptualizations of agency that presume individual autonomy and sovereignty [Lugones 2003].)

This constellation of thinkers have a performative account of politics and subjectivity. Performative in several senses: in theorizing how agency is constituted, how political judgments can be made in the absence of known rules (Honig 2009: 309), how new universals can be created and new communities constituted. From a performative feminist perspective, feminism is a project of anticipating and creating better political futures in the absence of foundations. As Linda Zerilli writes,

politics is about making claims and judgments—and having the courage to do so—in the absence of the objective criteria or rules that could provide certain knowledge and the guarantee that speaking in women’s name will be accepted or taken up by others. (Zerilli 2005: 179)

Zerilli calls for a “freedom-centered feminism” that

would strive to bring about transformation in normative conceptions of gender without returning to the classical notion of freedom as sovereignty

that feminists have long criticized but found difficult to resist (ibid.). Rather than basing politics on already existing categories, principles, or values, a performative approach understands categories like identity and gender to be performatively constituted, thus appealing to other people, not to supposed universal truths or foundations. “How we assume these identities”, Drucilla Cornell writes,

is never something “out there” that effectively determines who we can be as men and women—gay, lesbian, straight, queer, transsexual, transgender, or otherwise. (Cornell 2003: 144)

It is something that is shaped as we live and externalize identities with others.

This view takes democracy to be an ongoing and unfinished project with any outcome open to further contestation. It recuperates many of the ideals of the Enlightenment—such as freedom, autonomy, and justice—but in a way that drops the Enlightenment’s metaphysical assumptions about reason, progress, and human nature. Instead of seeing these ideals as grounded in some metaphysical facts, this new view sees them as ideals that people hold and try to instantiate through practice and imagination. Where many ancient and modern ideals of politics were based on suppositions about the nature of reality or of human beings, contemporary political philosophies generally operate without supposing that there are any universal or eternal truths. Some might see this situation as ripe for nihilism, arbitrariness, or the exercise of brute power. The democratic alternative is to imagine and try to create a better world by anticipating, claiming, and appealing to others that it should be so. Even if there is no metaphysical truth that human beings have dignity and infinite worth, people can act as if it were true in order to create a world in which it is seen to be so.

Despite the shared post-foundational theorizing among democratic feminist theorists and the commitment to thinking of politics as plural, when it comes to thinking about democratic politics, there are sharp divergences, namely on the question of “what it means to actualize public spaces and enact democratic politics” (Dietz 2003: 419). On this question, theorists tend to diverge into two groups: associational and agonistic. Associational theorists (e.g., Benhabib 1992, [ed.] 1996b; Benhabib & Cornell [eds] 1987; Fraser 1989; Young 1990, 1997, 2000) gravitate more toward deliberative democratic theory. They have roots in the socialist and Marxist traditions, especially as they developed in the Frankfurt-School tradition of critical theory. They are more optimistic about the prospects for democracy. Agonistic theorists (e.g., Mouffe [ed.] 1992a, 1993, 1999, 2000; Honig [ed.] 1995; Ziarek 2001) worry that democratic theories that focus on consensus can silence the kind of disagreement essential for democratic progress. Thus they focus more on plurality, dissensus, and the ceaseless contestation within politics. Agonistic theorists are grounded in much of the poststructural feminist approach described earlier, wary of any claims to universality and identity.

The differences spring from, or perhaps lead to, different readings of the philosopher who has most inspired performative political theory: Hannah Arendt , namely Arendt’s ideas of speech and action in the public sphere, of the meaning of plurality, of the ways in which human beings can distinguish themselves. As Bonnie Honig, a champion of the agonistic model writes,

Political theorists and feminists, in particular, have long criticized Arendt for the agonistic dimensions of her politics, charging that agonism is a masculinist, heroic, violent, competitive, (merely) aesthetic, or necessarily individualistic practice. For these theorists, the notion of an agonistic feminism would be, at best, a contradiction in terms and, at worst, a muddled and, perhaps, dangerous idea. Their perspective is effectively endorsed by Seyla Benhabib who, in a recent series of powerful essays, tries to rescue Arendt for feminism by excising agonism from her thought. (Honig 1995b: 156)

Associational theorists tend to look for ways, amidst all the differences and questions about the lack of foundations, it is possible to come to agreement on matters of common concern. This is seen in feminist democratic theory, perhaps best known through the works of Seyla Benhabib (1992, 1996b), greatly inspired by her non-agonistic reading of Arendt and of the work of the German critical theorist, Jürgen Habermas. Benhabib’s work engages democratic theorists quite broadly, not just feminist theorists. The following passage helps to clarify what she takes to be the best aim of a political philosophy: a state of affairs to which all affected would assent. As she writes,

Only those norms (i.e., general rules of action and institutional arrangements) can be said to be valid (i.e., morally binding), which would be agreed to by all those affected by their consequences, if such agreement were reached as a consequence of a process of deliberation that had the following features: 1) participation in such deliberation is governed by norms of equality and symmetry; all have the same chances to initiate speech acts, to question, to interrogate, and to open debate; 2) all have the right to question the assigned topics of conversation; and 3) all have the right to initiate reflexive arguments about the very rules of the discourse procedure and the way in which they are applied or carried out. (Benhabib 1996b: 70)

Following Habermas, Benhabib contends that certain conditions need to be in place in order for members of a political community to arrive at democratic outcomes, namely the proceedings need to be deliberative. Some take deliberation to be a matter of reasoned argumentation; others see it as less about reason or argumentation but more about an open process of working through choices. (McAfee 2004.)

Not all theorists who tend toward the associational model embrace deliberative theory so readily. Iris Young’s pioneering book, Justice and the Politics of Difference and several of her subsequent works have been very influential and led to a good deal of hesitance in feminist theoretical communities about the claims of deliberative theory. Where Benhabib is confident that conditions can be such that all who are affected can have a voice in deliberations, Young points out that those who have been historically silenced have a difficult time having their views heard or heeded. Young is skeptical of the claims of mainstream democratic theory that democratic deliberative processes could lead to outcomes that would be acceptable to all (Young 1990, 1997). Young, along with Nancy Fraser (1989) and others, worried that in the process of trying to reach consensus, the untrained voices of women and others who have been marginalized would be left out of the final tally. Young’s criticisms were very persuasive, leading a generation of feminist political philosophers to be wary of deliberative democratic theory. Instead of deliberative democracy, in the mid 1990s Young proposed a theory of communicative democracy, hoping to make way for a deliberative conception that was open to means of expression beyond the rational expression of mainstream deliberative democratic theory. Young worried that deliberation as defined by Habermas is too reason-based and leaves out forms of communication that women and people of color tend to use, including, as she puts it, “greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling”. Young argued that these alternative modes of communication could provide the basis of a more democratic, communicative theory. In her last major book, Inclusion and Democracy (2000), Young had clearly moved to embrace deliberative theory itself, seeing the ways in which it could be constructed to give voice to those who had been otherwise marginalized. More recent feminist democratic theory has engaged deliberative theory more positively (see McAfee & Snyder 2007).

Where liberal feminists inspired by John Rawls and democratic feminists inspired by Jürgen Habermas and/or John Dewey hold out the hope that democratic deliberations might lead to democratic agreements, agonistic feminists are wary of consensus as inherently undemocratic. Agonistic feminist political philosophy comes out of poststructural continental feminist and philosophical traditions. It takes from Marxism the hope for a more radically egalitarian society. It takes from contemporary continental philosophy notions of subjectivity and solidarity as malleable and constructed. Along with postmodern thought, it repudiates any notion of pre-existing moral or political truths or foundations (Ziarek 2001). Its central claim is that feminist struggle, like other struggles for social justice, is engaged in politics as ceaseless contestation. Agonistic views see the nature of politics as inherently conflictual, with battles over the direction of political society being the central task of democratic struggle. Advocates of agonistic politics worry that the kind of consensus sought by democratic theorists (discussed above) will lead to some kind of oppression or injustice by silencing new struggles. As Chantal Mouffe puts it,

We have to accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion. (Mouffe 2000: 104)

Where associational theorists seek out ways that people can overcome systematically distorted communication and deliberation, Dietz notes that agonists eschew this project because they understand politics as

essentially a practice of creation, reproduction, transformation and articulation.... Simply put, associational feminists scrutinize the conditions of exclusion in order to theorize the emancipation of the subject in the public sphere of communicative interaction; agonistic feminists deconstruct emancipatory procedures to disclose how the subject is both produced through political exclusions and positioned against them. (Dietz 2003: 422)

As a recent review writes,

Feminist theory today is a sprawling, productive, diverse intellectual and political assemblage. It grows through imaginative interdisciplinary work and critical political engagements. Feminist theory is not only about women, although it is that; it is about the world, engaged through critical intersectional perspectives. (K. Ferguson 2017)

New work in feminist political philosophy continues to transform political philosophy, including ancient debates over identity versus difference, the private and the public, certainty and freedom. For example, new readings of Arendt’s philosophy offer hope of moving beyond the associational/agonistic divide in democratic feminist theory (Barker et al. [eds] 2012). Benhabib’s proceduralism is being surpassed with more affect-laden accounts of deliberation (Krause 2008; Howard 2017). Instead of the rational back-and-forth of reasoned argumentation, theorists are beginning to see deliberative talk as forms of constituting the subject, judging without pre-conceived truths, and performatively creating new political projects (Zerilli 2005 and 2016).

Some of the most generative sites for feminist political theorizing today are the global threats that face all of us, for instance environmental degradation or the rise of authoritarianism. In ecofeminist perspectives, as the entry on feminist environmental philosophy explains, the domination and destruction of “nature” has long been recognized as a feminist issue of political significance (especially due to the deep associations between femininity and nature that run through Western patriarchal philosophy and culture). More recently, ecofeminists have extended theories of democracy, agency, and rights to include elements of the natural world (Nussbaum 2022). Meanwhile, with the rise of authoritarianism in governments across the globe in the second decade of the twenty-first century, feminist political philosophers have tried to understand the roots of recent threats to democracy (Fraser 2019; McAfee 2019; Nussbaum 2018).

In sum, feminist political philosophy is a still evolving field of thought that has much to offer mainstream political philosophy. In the past two decades it has come to exert a stronger influence over mainstream political theorizing, raising objections that mainstream philosophers have had to address, though not always very convincingly. And in its newest developments it promises to go even further.

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Feminism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 27, 2016 • ( 6 )

Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft ‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases/waves — the first wave (political), the second wave (cultural) and the third wave (academic). Incidentally Toril Moi also classifies the feminist movement into three phases — the female (biological), the feminist (political) and the feminine (cultural).

The first wave of feminism, in the 19th and 20th centuries, began in the US and the UK as a struggle for equality and property rights for women, by suffrage groups and activist organisations. These feminists fought against chattel marriages and for polit ical and economic equality. An important text of the first wave is Virginia Woolf ‘s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which asserted the importance of woman’s independence, and through the character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), explicated how the patriarchal society prevented women from realising their creative potential. Woolf also inaugurated the debate of language being gendered — an issue which was later dealt by Dale Spender who wrote Man Made Language (1981), Helene Cixous , who introduced ecriture feminine (in The Laugh of the Medusa ) and Julia Kristeva , who distinguished between the symbolic and the semiotic language.

The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s, was characterized by a critique of patriarchy in constructing the cultural identity of woman. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) famously stated, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” – a statement that highlights the fact that women have always been defined as the “Other”, the lacking, the negative, on whom Freud attributed “ penis-envy .” A prominent motto of this phase, “The Personal is the political” was the result of the awareness .of the false distinction between women’s domestic and men’s public spheres. Transcending their domestic and personal spaces, women began to venture into the hitherto male dominated terrains of career and public life. Marking its entry into the academic realm, the presence of feminism was reflected in journals, publishing houses and academic disciplines.

Mary Ellmann ‘s Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millett ‘s Sexual Politics (1969), Betty Friedan ‘s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and so on mark the major works of the phase. Millett’s work specifically depicts how western social institutions work as covert ways of manipulating power, and how this permeates into literature, philosophy etc. She undertakes a thorough critical understanding of the portrayal of women in the works of male authors like DH Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Jean Genet.

In the third wave (post 1980), Feminism has been actively involved in academics with its interdisciplinary associations with Marxism , Psychoanalysis and Poststructuralism , dealing with issues such as language, writing, sexuality, representation etc. It also has associations with alternate sexualities, postcolonialism ( Linda Hutcheon and Spivak ) and Ecological Studies ( Vandana Shiva )

Elaine Showalter , in her “ Towards a Feminist Poetics ” introduces the concept of gynocriticism , a criticism of gynotexts, by women who are not passive consumers but active producers of meaning. The gynocritics construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, and focus on female subjectivity, language and literary career. Patricia Spacks ‘ The Female Imagination , Showalter’s A Literature of their Own , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar ‘s The Mad Woman in the Attic are major gynocritical texts.

The present day feminism in its diverse and various forms, such as liberal feminism, cultural/ radical feminism, black feminism/womanism, materialist/neo-marxist feminism, continues its struggle for a better world for women. Beyond literature and literary theory, Feminism also found radical expression in arts, painting ( Kiki Smith , Barbara Kruger ), architecture( Sophia Hayden the architect of Woman’s Building ) and sculpture (Kate Mllett’s Naked Lady).

The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism

Preface - Acknowledgements - Introduction: The Story So Far C.Belsey & J.Moore - Women and Literary History D.Spender - The True Story of How I Became My Own Person R.Coward - Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks T.Morrison - Queer Desire in The Well of Loneliness L.Pouchard - The Difference of View M.Jacobus - Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past G.Beer - Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays H.Cixous - Feminist, Female, Feminine T.Moi - Women and Madness: the Critical Phallacy S.Felman - Promises: the Fictional Philosophy in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman J.Moore - Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism C.Spivak - Cross-dressing, Gender and Representation: Elvis Presley M.Garber - Feminism and the Postmodern: Theory's Romance D.Elam - Women's Time J.Kristeva - The Looking Glass, from the Other Side L.Irigaray - Summaries and Notes - Glossary - Suggestions for Further Reading - Notes on Contributors - Index

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31 Politics

Linda Zerilli is Professor of Political Science at University of Chicago.

Published: 09 July 2015
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Feminist theory is assumed to be political by definition, but this view tends to occlude the different ways in which feminists think about politics. This essay discusses competing understandings of politics and examines how it is that things come to count as political within feminism. To think of relations of subordination of political, it is argued, is not simply to discover a relation of power that was already there but to constitute that relation as unjust and subject to change. This is the predicative moment of feminist practice that brings the political into being.

Introduction

On the face of it, the very idea of feminist theory seems unthinkable without politics. Did not feminist theory originate in the context of the first and second waves of the feminist movement? And is not feminist theory itself “political”? Does it not eschew any aspiration to neutrality and make partisan claims about explicitly political things such as power, justice, and rights?

To treat feminist theory as always already political risks occluding the different ways in which feminists think about politics. It also risks falsely unifying plural conceptions of what theory is and how it relates to political practice. Far from providing a single definition on which all feminists can agree, what counts as political is itself a matter of feminist contestation and debate. However they may coalesce on the need to redefine politics to make visible that which has remained largely hidden in traditional (masculinist) conceptions of politics, feminists diverge in their understanding of what a feminist theory of politics would include. Not unlike the traditional and mostly male thinkers they criticize, feminists, too, bring their own diverse and at times unacknowledged assumptions about politics to bear on theoretical refigurations of inherited concepts. 1

“The Personal Is Political”

The temptation to see unity in diversity when it comes to feminist theories of politics is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in accounts of the well-known slogan of second-wave feminism, “the personal is political.” Typically taken to capture a feminist consensus about what politics is, this famous rally cry seems to state that what has been heretofore considered a private issue is by definition a public matter. Thus housework, sexuality, reproduction, child care, and so on, are all to be redefined as intrinsically political activities deserving of our collective concern. When stated in such a broad way, this understanding of the slogan as the core claim of feminists of all stripes can seem unobjectionable. In reality, it harbors a number of problems that go to the heart of the issue at hand, namely, whether feminists do in fact share an understanding of what counts as politics.

Although it would come to define at least two generations of Western (especially American) feminism, the phrase “the personal is political” originated in a specific response to the ridicule that second-wave feminists encountered in the context of their early attempt at organizing around gender discrimination. Attributed to New York radical feminist Carole Hanisch in an essay of the same title, 2 the claim to the personal being political was initially an attempt to refute the idea that the 1960s early feminist practice of consciousness raising was just “therapy” or little more than yet another expression of the proverbial “female complaint.” 3 Rejecting such psychologizing explanations, especially as they called into question the need for autonomous feminist groups in the context of the New Left, Hanisch defended consciousness raising as an attempt to move away from subjectivizing accounts of oppression and toward a political critique of male power. Accordingly, it was not simply an anonymous capitalist “system” but also individual men who benefited from the gendered division of labor and the ideological privatization of women’s misery.

In important ways, then, feminists call into question the naturalized distinction between public and private realms that has been foundational to the contractual basis of liberalism and the “sexual contract” (i.e., men’s property in women) that underwrites it ( Pateman 1988 ). Far from gender neutral, this distinction presupposes structural forms of injustice that render oppression invisible by concealing it in highly individualized conceptions of gender roles ( Okin 1979 ; Elshtain 1981 ). The respective mapping of masculine and feminine roles onto public and private spheres hides the coercive manner in which gender-based segregation is created and enforced ( Brown 1998 ; Zerilli 1994 ; Di Stefano 1991 ). Consciousness raising was a tool for illuminating the public character of private desires and private identities, revealing them to be expressions of a pervasive structure of gender power.

As it was taken up in second-wave practices of speaking and acting, “the personal is political” was not a description of how things already were (i.e., already political ) but a transformative claim about how they ought to be seen. It was, in other words, by means of publically declaring a private practice such as housework to be political that it actually came to be political and to be seen as such. Even Christine Delphy, who understood housework to be inherently exploitative by virtue of men’s expropriation of women (and others’) unwaged labor in the home, would argue that it had to be politicized to be seen as such. By understanding “the personal is political” to be a mere description of what already is the case, we would miss the very predicative moment of second-wave feminist politics, the moment, that is, when a relation of power became political in being taken up as a matter of common concern. Nothing is political in itself: it is the very act of making public claims that has the power to transform an issue from something personal into something political.

Another way of thinking about early second-wave attempts to remap the terrain of politics is to consider Kate Millet’s famous argument in Sexual Politics . Like Hanisch, Millet calls our attention to the “frequently neglected political aspect” of something that has been heretofore considered “personal” ( Millet 1969 , xiii), in this case the sexual relations between men and women. It might seem, therefore, that Millet is simply making visible a political relation that existed all along. In certain respects, of course, one might say that (hetero)sexuality was always already political, awaiting its discovery by an insightful feminist theorist. And, further, that Millet’s rhetorical brilliance is to open our eyes to what has been there all along. But this would be to miss the radically transformative work of feminist theory when it becomes part of collective practice.

When it is taken up in the speech and action of readers, for whom the text is no mere set of abstract arguments but an occasion to exchange opinions and engage in collective action on a matter of common concern, a work of theory can become a presentation of “new forms/figures of the thinkable,” to borrow Cornelius Castoriadis phrase (1997 , 271). When US second-wave feminists introduced such formulations as the “personal is political” or the “sex/gender distinction” (whose mutability and instability became the focus of considerable empirical feminist scholarship), “the personal is political,” and similar formulations associated with the Second Wave, can be seen as creative theoretical efforts to refigure experience in terms that made it newly thinkable, that is, mutable and amenable to change. Millet’s book was at the center of a firestorm on the state of gender relations and was read and debated by thousands of women seeking to make sense of their own experience and develop new ways of being in the world. The same was true for Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex , which, too, became a lightening rod for critical discussions of femininity. The point is not simply that Sexual Politics or The Second Sex and their authors became famous, but that the texts served as a common object for feminist public-opinion formation about the social, economic, and political conditions of women’s lives. Strictly speaking, one might say that as works of feminist theory, both texts are not intrinsically political books; they became political once they were taken up in the speech and action of (emerging) feminists.

Politics as Power

If the restriction of the term “political” to collective speech and action seems strange, that is because we have come to think of politics not only as something that is a property of an object (or a practice) but also as synonymous with power: where there is power, there is politics. This definition or rather equation of politics with power is compelling insofar as it facilitates our ability to recognize in the most ordinary conditions of daily life relations that are not naturally given but historically constituted and subject to change. But such an equation is also misleading: as we well know, the mere fact of power relations does not automatically issue in political consciousness and change. Furthermore, the identification of politics with power—be it the tradition’s idea that to wield power from above is to act politically or more modern conceptions, such as that of Michel Foucault, where power is not exercised simply in a top-down manner but is more or less everywhere—leads to impasses for feminist theory. One of these impasses is the difficulty such a definition presents for conceptualizing politics as a practice of resisting unjust power. What enables one to see relations of power, in which one group subordinates another, as unjust and open to change?

In their groundbreaking work on new social movements and the future of the New Left, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau bring out the difference between relations of “oppression,” on the one side, and relations of “subordination” on the other. An anthropological view of human nature and a unified subject, they argue, leads us to think that where there is subordination there is oppression: “[I]‌f we can determine a priori the essence of the subject, every relation of subordination when it denies it [e.g., its natural freedom] becomes a relation of oppression” ( Laclau and Mouffe [1985] 2001 , 153). But if we reject this “essentialist perspective,” we need to explain how relations of unequal power come to be seen by subordinated subjects to be oppressive. That some individuals and groups are “subjected to the decisions of another—an employee with respect to an employer, for example, or in certain forms of family organization the woman with respect to the man”—constitutes a relation of power over another, subordination (153). For this relation of power to be seen as a relation of oppression—as unjust and potentially open to change, rather than as natural and timeless—is a political matter. Just as the personal becomes political, a relation of subordination becomes one of oppression when it is transformed into “the site of an antagonism” (153).

Laclau and Mouffe’s arguments are specific to the era of democratic politics that emerged with the eighteenth-century revolutions. They argue that the transformation of women’s subordination into oppression, into a site of antagonism, was inextricably connected with the emergence of a “different discursive formation”—namely, the democratic discourse, with its idea of “the rights that are inherent to every human being” ( Laclau and Mouffe [1985] 2001 , 154). Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman , for example, “determined the birth of feminism through the use made in it of the democratic discourse, which was thus displaced from the field of political equality between citizens to the field of equality between the sexes” ( Laclau and Mouffe [1985] 2001 , 154). Whether Wollstonecraft merely applied the logic of democratic rights discourse to women as disenfranchised subjects or actually transformed its meaning is a matter of some debate ( Maione 2012 ). What is clear, however, is that Wollstonecraft’s ability to bring into view the centuries-long subordination of women as something that was oppressive, hence unjust, involved a radical transformation of a so-called natural relation between man and woman into a social and political antagonism. That not only the Rights of Woman but also its author herself became the subject of countless public debates, however, is what made Wollstonecraft’s brilliant insights into the private reality of gender power truly political. In other words, her texts were taken up by acting subjects in the public space. And in taking up her texts, women became speaking subjects in a public space that had for the most part excluded them, thereby transforming the character of public space and of what counts as a public matter by virtue of their action and speech.

Crossing Borders

We can better appreciate the ways in which what comes to count as political involves a deeply interactive and intertextual practice of putting feminist theory texts to work in diverse practical contexts by turning briefly to the US second-wave classic on women’s health Our Bodies, Ourselves ( OBOS ). Originally written as a set of discussion papers and published under the name of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in 1973, OBOS went on in seven editions to sell four million copies. Kathy Davis explains:

OBOS was a lively and accessible manual on women’s bodies and health. It was full of personal experience and contained useful information on issues ranging from masturbation (how to do it) to birth control (which methods were available and how to use them) to vaginal infections, pregnancy, and nursing. It combined a scathing critique of patriarchal medicine and the medicalization of women’s bodies with an analysis of the political economies of the health and pharmaceutical industries. But above all, OBOS validated women’s embodied experiences as a resource for challenging medical dogmas about women’s bodies and, consequently, as a strategy for personal and collective empowerment. ( Davis 2007 , 1–2)

What makes OBOS of interest to our discussion here is not only how the text was originally written (as discussion papers for meetings, public protests, or collective local action) but also how it has been taken up by feminists across the world as a political rallying point for articulating differences and commonalities. Translated into multiple languages (including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Telugu, Polish, Korean, Serbian, Bulgarian, Armenian, among others) the book’s most remarkable feature, writes Davis, is “its ability to speak to a wide variety of women at different times and in disparate circumstances and social, cultural, and political contexts” (2007, 6). More precisely, this ability to speak across contexts has itself been an interactive global process of interpretation through which OBOS has been understood and deployed to articulate at once shared and divergent conceptions of feminist politics.

Tracking multiple receptions of the book across time and space, Davis explores what Adrienne Rich (1986) coined “the politics of location,” the idea that the specificity of one’s location constitutes the ground from which feminists form political identities and make political claims. As it is also expressed in various ideas of “locational feminism” ( Friedman 2001 ), “feminist conjuncturalism” ( Frankenberg and Mani 1993 ), “postmodern geographies” ( Kaplan 1996 ), “diasporic space” ( Brah 1996 ), and “theory from the borderlands” ( Anzaldúa 1987 ), the politics of location builds on the basic claim of feminist standpoint theory—namely, that political activism has an epistemological basis and that critical epistemology has a basis in political activism. As Nancy Hartsock famously put it, “[W]‌omen’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy, a vantage point that can ground a powerful critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology that constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy” (1983, 231). Although Hartsock was careful to use the term “feminist” rather than “women’s standpoint,” emphasizing the “achieved character and liberatory potential” (232) of standpoint as a political concept, she tended to theorize it as singular and unitary. Critics have held that feminist standpoint theory takes white middle-class Western women as the default subject of political struggle and change ( Collins 1999 ).

Whatever the shortcomings of early standpoint theory, it opened up a new way of thinking about politics by insisting on location, rather than an interiorized conception of identity, as crucial to understanding power. Whereas the early second-wave feminism of Millet and Beauvoir relied on a “temporal rhetoric of awakening, revelation, and rebirth,” as these were captured in the idea of consciousness raising, argues Susan Sanford Friedman, third-wave feminism is organized around a “spatial rhetoric of location, multipositionality, and migration” (2001, 5). As we shall see, this spatialized conception of politics envisions “ feminist political alliances across lines of difference rather than through a shared identity as women” ( Davis 2007 , 9; italics in original). More precisely, identity is now understood as constituted along multiple axes or lines of difference (race, ethnicity, class, religion, and sexuality, etc.) that undercut the “individualist telos of developmental models” ( Friedman 2001 , 8), according to which consciousness is raised and subjection is seen as oppression. In this “new geographics of identity,” argues Friedman, identity is “a crossroad of multiple situated knowledges” (2001, 8).

Friedman’s conception of “locational feminism” may well overstate the difference between a temporal and a spatial rhetoric for articulating feminist politics, and is arguably overly generalizing when it comes to interpreting the dominant idiom of the Second Wave (which surely was not One) as temporal rather than spatial. Nevertheless, her account helps us to see how difficult it has been for feminism to deal with differences without folding them into a single concept of women’s identity or feminist political consciousness that follows more or less one path of liberation. The question would be how plural identities could be brought into a spatialized political rhetoric that recognizes the need to “articulate” differences into what Laclau and Mouffe call the “chains of equivalence” that make possible collective action in the absence of shared identity (1985, 127–129). The idea, in other words, is not what women share qua women but rather how common projects emerge through specific practices of struggle located in time and space without losing track of the basis of feminist politics—namely, plurality.

Although the differences among women have always formed the irreducible basis of feminist politics, concerns about the practical consequences thought to flow from acknowledging plurality have haunted feminism throughout its history. As we shall see when we turn to the US debates over “identity politics,” feminists have struggled to square their commitment to recognizing diversity with the worry that differences will tear feminism apart. This worry expresses the view that if feminism is a political movement that speaks in the name of women, then women must represent a specific sociological group with shared interests based on a shared identity. Absent such prepolitical commonality, feminism would have no collective subject in whose name it could speak.

Thinking about “the subject of feminism” as identical with the sociological group called “women” places tremendous pressure on feminists to seek commonality or sameness as the condition of feminist politics, both within and across national boundaries. It is a problem for recognizing differences that, far from unique to feminism, reflects feminism’s entanglement in an inherited model for thinking about politics along the lines of kinship or the family. The traditional modeling of political communities as families is exemplified in the notion of a people bound by blood and gathered within the territorial confines of a nation-state. Within feminism, the kinship claim has taken the form of a “sisterhood,” a kind of communal belonging based in something essentially given and shared. Although the idea of feminism as a sisterhood in the strict sense of a biologically based political affinity of women across time and space has been more the exaggerated creation of its eager critics than actual political actors, the temptation to think about feminist political communities as having to be grounded in something unifying and given, like kinship, has been difficult to shake.

The kinship metaphor that structures feminist critiques of women’s shared oppression underwrites certain iterations of global feminism. The latter term, as Friedman explains, “arose in relation to the common Second Wave feminist assumption of a universal patriarchy and the promotion of a global sisterhood united in its resistance to world-wide male dominance. Global feminism, often represented by Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood Is Global , usefully insisted that feminists in the West look beyond their particular national and western conditions to the status of women in the so-called second and third worlds.” Notwithstanding this salutary call to move beyond the parameters of the US nation-state for theorizing oppression and political strategizing, the idea of a global feminism based on a global sisterhood “became subject to critique, especially by women in non-western settings, for isolating gender from the context of other concerns such as colonialism (and its aftereffects), national identity, race, and class, and for assuming a homogeneous sisterhood of women united together against men” ( Friedman 2001 , 13).

Although characterizations of the Second Wave as wholly captive to totalizing notions of gender power and oppression should be questioned, it seems right to say that feminists today are more likely to reject “notions of monolithic patriarchy and sisterhood in favor of locational heterogeneity and idiomatic particularity in transnational context” ( Friedman 2001, 25 ). Feminism takes root in local contexts but also in relation to global ideas and practices that travel and, in traveling, are reinterpreted and rearticulated in relation to local conditions—just as Our Bodies, Ourselves was. To get a better understanding of how identity has figured in feminist politics, we turn now to what has been the most criticized, if also often misunderstood, way of thinking about feminism along lines of commonality—namely, “identity politics.”

Identity Politics

Reading the vast literature on identity politics, both within and outside feminism, one is struck not only by the elasticity of definition—identity politics means everything from the canon wars that wracked American universities in the 1990s, to French language rights in Canada, to the parochialism of white middle-class American feminism, to the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. day—but also by the remarkable collusion of liberal, conservative, and leftist critics, for whom identity politics (a.k.a. multiculturalism) represents all that went wrong with progressive politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, “the phrase ‘identity politics,’” as Cressida Heyes (2002) observes, is a ‘punching bag for a variety of critics’, a kind of ‘blanket description that invokes a range of political failings’, but most commonly a failure to move outside the narrow circle of a particular oppressed group and join with diverse others in the struggle for justice based on universal political ideals.

According to Todd Gitlin, for example, identity politics has destroyed the “historic ideals of the Left: a belief in progress through the unfolding of a humanity present—at least potentially—in every human being” (1996, 85). “The cant of identity underlies identity politics,” continues Gitlin (1996 , 126), “which proposes to deduce a position, a tradition, a deep truth, or a way of life from a fact of birth, physiognomy, national origin, sex, or physical disability.” In Gitlin’s account, the identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s, as it was extended into the multiculturalism of the 1990s, represents the turn away from the universalism (i.e., class basis) of radical politics. Gitlin claims that by 1969 no one wanted anything to do with the democratic politics of the traditional Left because “identity groups was where the action was … [T]‌he American Indian Movement seized the former prison island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay on Thanksgiving Day in 1969. In Northern cities, Puerto Rican groups organized. In the West and Southwest, Chicanos were doing the same—Cesar Chavez’s farm workers in California, … antiwar Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles, … In California, young Chinese Americans insisted on their distinct needs as an interest group” ( Gitlin 1996 , 134–135). 4

Why don’t the forms of organizing that Gitlin describes as instances of identity politics count as forms of democratic practice? Don’t they share the defining feature of democratic movements: action in concert? We should resist the tendency to ascribe the practice of identity politics to minority racial, sexual, and ethnic groups and to women. At a minimum we should ask how one would characterize the political practice of rich white people, especially men, in the United States, if not as a form of identity politics. As C. Wright Mills showed long ago in The Power Elite , the rich practice a form of politics that is constructed around their cultural identities. To say, for example, that when CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies lobby Congress on an economic matter, they practice interest politics not identity politics is to beg the question. Why is that any different from African Americans demanding a Martin Luther King national holiday or a family wage? Why is it different from women demanding maternity leave and equal pay? Why is it different from Cesar Chavez organizing for the rights of farm workers?

Critics of identity politics are blind to these similarities because they think of identity not as something formed in the crucible of history but instead, to cite Gitlin again, as the voluntary celebration of “a fact of birth, physiognomy, national origin, sex, or physical disability.” They also think of these facts as something that their idealized liberal or Left subject does not share. Black people have race, whites don’t. Women have gender, men don’t. And so on.

What this definition of identity politics leaves out is the politically constituted character of identity. Although not every aspect of identity is political, identity politics is a response to those aspects of being born into group membership that have been made political. Understanding this distinction, the German Jewish émigré political theorist Hannah Arendt sees that the danger to democracy lies in the temptation not only to treat identity as a deep transhistorical truth about oneself and one’s group but also to deny one’s membership in a group that has been singled out for discrimination. As Arendt writes of her stance toward being a Jew in Hitler Germany, “I considered the only adequate reply to the question, Who are you? to be: A Jew. That answer alone took in the reality of persecution” (1968, 17). For Arendt, “counter[ing] the command: ‘Step closer, Jew’” with “the statement: I am a man" is “nothing but a grotesque and dangerous evasion of reality.” “Unfortunately,” says Arendt, “the basically simple principle in question here is particularly hard to understand in times of defamation and persecution: the principle that one can resist only in terms of the identity that is under attack. Those who reject such identifications on the part of a hostile world may feel wonderfully superior to the world, but their superiority is then truly no longer of this world” ( Arendt 1968 , 18). 5

Likewise, Beauvoir, speaking in The Second Sex of a similar temptation in relation to patriarchy, argues that the woman who would deny her existence as a woman will not, despite her protestations, be taken for a human being. “To decline to accept such notions of the eternal feminine … does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality” (1989, xvii). Unlike a man who “never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man,” the woman who would speak at all must not only “admit, provisionally, that women do exist,” she must say: “I am a woman; on this truth must be based all further discussion” (xvii).

Beauvoir and Arendt teach that there are times in history when identity is political and must be articulated politically. Thus the question is not, is taking political account of identity antithetical to democratic or feminist values?, but rather, when does an ascribed cultural identity become political? For Arendt and Beauvoir respectively, the answer “I am a Jew” or “I am a woman” can be either a political act that takes up the identity that is under attack to contest oppression or a pose that serves to reinscribe it. What matters is the context, the political conditions in which such an answer is given. Examining the historical contexts in which a particular identity becomes political, we can see how the denial of one’s identity in contexts in which it is under attack can be a profoundly apolitical act and a dangerous evasion of reality. Reading Gitlin’s happy humanist account one is tempted to conclude that the only answer it would have allowed to the question, “who are you?” is, “why I’m a human being. I don’t know why you continue to mistake me for a woman or a Jew.”

Although it has come to stand for everything that went wrong with second-wave feminism and like-minded political movements of the time (e.g., Black Power, gay and lesbian liberation, Native American liberation), identity politics, then, was initially a mode of organizing around and revaluing oppressed and stigmatized identities ( Young 1990 ). The aim was not to celebrate “difference” as such but to transform the conditions of its production and continued marginalization. In this sense, identity politics was connected with the consciousness raising discussed earlier; it was a means for seeing in long-standing practices of subordination unjust oppression and cause for political organizing. For example, as told in the Combahee River Collective’s classic statement, in 1977, of black feminist identity politics, being continually reprimanded for talking too much or too loud was a mechanism of patriarchal and racist social control, a means for making African-American girl-children both “ ‘ladylike’ and … less objectionable in the eyes of white people … In the process of consciousness-raising, actually life-sharing, we began to recognize the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression” ( Combahee River Collective 1982 , 15). Feminist critics such as Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Marion Tapper argue that identity politics creates a defended self that is invested in its own injury, seething with resentment, and ultimately hostile to differences. ( Tapper 1993 ; Brown 1995 ; Butler 1990 ). As part of the larger “regulatory practice of identity” ( Butler 1990 , 32), identity politics becomes complicit as well in the disciplinary apparatus of the state, which serves as the sole addressee of political identity qua injury claims. Furthermore, as Susan Bickford summarizes—without endorsing—these feminist critiques, “[T]‌he assumption of morally pure and powerless victims eliminates the possibilities for democratic disagreement. Rather than articulating political claims in contestable ways, victims wield ‘moral reproach’ against power” ( Bickford 1997 , 115).

Although identity politics may “run the risk of further entrenching normalizing conceptions of identity and the power of regulatory apparatuses to enforce and police them,” counters Bickford (1997 , 118), we would be mistaken to assume that this must be the case in any identity-based claim ( Young 1990 ). Even more suspect is the idea that any political use of identity necessarily expresses the self-defeatist logic of rancor. Instead, reclaiming stigmatized identities as political identities can involve what bell Hooks calls a “legacy of defiance, of will, of courage” (1989, 9). And there is a difference between feelings of anger at injustice that lead to political action and simmering resentment at suffering that can lead to a self-destructive retreat from the world ( Lorde [1980] 1984 ; Bickford 1997 , 125). Finally, modeling feminist politics on kinship, which many critics impute to every iteration of identity politics, is precisely what the most prominent voices of identity politics themselves characterize as a problematic way of thinking about political alliances ( Reagon [1983] 2011 ; Combahee River Collective 1982 ; Bickford 1997 , 23). Sisterhood is a limiting concept for feminist politics, for it conceals divisions and struggles even within identity groups seen as homogenous from those “outside” them ( Anzaldúa 1987 ; Moraga 1983 ). As Audre Lorde succinctly put it, “By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist” ([1980] 1984, 122).

Just as it is important to recognize that the political claim to identity arose in the wake of the failure of liberal democracy and various progressive movements to include the people each claimed to represent, so, too, is it crucial to see that the emergence of politicized identities did not begin as a narrow claim to identity, as if identity were somehow an unproblematic category in need only of social recognition. It began as a claim to participate equally in politics, to be seen and heard in the space of appearances that was the grassroots struggle (Young 1999). Rather than think of identity as that which identity politics takes for granted as already shared, the common basis on which politics proceeds, we might think of it as that which can be created in the practice of politics as a public persona: “who” rather than “what” someone is, to borrow Arendt’s useful distinction (1989 , 184). Though rooted in the “what” of the identity that one shares with others by membership in a particular group marked by race, gender, class, ethnicity, or sexuality, the “who” is something that comes into being only in and through politics and in the public space that Arendt calls the common world. 6 “It is the space between them that unites them, rather than some quality in each of them,” as Margaret Canovan (1985 , 634) puts the Arendtian difference between a politics built around “what” someone is (i.e., on identity) and one based on “who” someone is (i.e., on world building). Identities come to be politicized identities not only insofar as they are marginalized or disenfranchised but also insofar as the “what” is transformed into the “who” in the in-between space of the common world.

In recent years, several feminist critics have turned to Arendt to articulate a conception of politics attuned to the historical contexts in which politicized identity involves a creative if precarious form of world-building ( Benhabib 2000 ; Bickford 1995 ; Dietz 1995 ; Disch 1994 ; Honig, 1995 ; Orlie 1995 ; Zerilli 2005 ). For them, the space of the “who” is not the safe “home” of a sisterhood but the always uncertain and risk-ridden space of feminism as a motley of alliances and coalitions. Shared identities do not guarantee shared politics but only an occasion to engage in practices of world building, which are always fraught with uncertainty. When you seek out coalitions with others, as Bernice Johnson Reagon argued long ago, you engage in a precarious practice of politics whose outcome cannot be known in advance of relinquishing the safe, home-like space of a fantasized “sisterhood” and putting oneself on the line with others who are very different from you, could work together with you, but could also “kill you” ( Reagon [1983] 2011 ; Bickford 1997 , 123).

To think of identity politics in the explicitly political terms of the “who” is to challenge the critiques lodged, respectively, by leftist critics such as Gitlin, for whom the obsession with difference has led to a loss of interest in the commonalities that undergird the “we” of a collective political movement ( Gitlin 1996 , 177), and feminist critics such as Brown, for whom this obsession undermines the otherwise legitimate grievances and collective world building of politicized identities. The question left unanswered by these and other critics of identity politics, writes Bickford, “is more like: in a context of inequality and oppression, how are multiple ‘we’s’ to be democratically part of the same public thing? What can make possible democratic communication with differently placed others?” (1997, 117). Keeping our eye on the demand to be a participator in government broadly construed, we can better appreciate the real challenge that identity politics and more broadly feminism poses to conventional conceptions of politics: the idea that participation is secondary to representation for politics is little more than a means to an end.

Politics as a Means to an End

The fear that differences will tear feminism apart expresses the tenacious sense that feminism must be grounded in a unified subject whose interests it represents ( Butler 1990 ) and, further, that this subject is identical with the sociological group called women ( Zerilli 2005 ). When we think about politics in accordance with this representational model, it is easy to find in the differences among women both the challenge of political organizing and an uneasy sense of impending crisis. If women are not a homogenous group with similar interests, then there is no unified subject in whose name feminism speaks; it becomes hard to imagine the need or possibility of feminism as a political movement at all. Might not other political movements that represent other interests just as well represent those of women as they are divided along lines of race, ethnicity, and class, to name but three categories of difference?

The idea that the point of politics is to represent the interests of a particular group (e.g., women, blacks, gays and lesbians, small business owners, the middle class, etc.) presupposes that those interests can be known in advance of the practice of politics qua representation itself. It also assumes that politics has a purpose, which is to say, a goal of some sort—in short, politics is a (mere) means to an end. The powerful hold of this instrumentalist conception of politics on the thinking of many feminists is not unique to feminism but expresses the dominant modern view of democratic politics as primarily a means to pursue individual and group interests. On this view, political speech and action are directed at attaining a good of some sort and are valuable only to the extent that they achieve their goal-oriented end. Feminist struggles for reproductive rights, for example, are valuable insofar as they result in changes in law and legislation that provides better access to contraception, family planning, abortion, and the like. As Mary Hawkesworth’s work on transnational coalitions for reproductive justice has shown, however, such struggles create networks of relations among political actors that exceed the success or failure of any particular stated goal ( Hawkesworth 2012 ). Keeping our eye on the emergence of these networks, we can better appreciate feminist politics as a practice of world building and freedom.

So commonplace is this instrumentalist view of politics that it seems almost impossible to question it without falling into a kind of circular logic by which politics is the justification of its own activity. But what activity is that, we might ask? And why would we so much as engage in politics if it were not a means to an end of some sort, something tangible like legislation securing wage parity between men and women, affordable child care, and so on? Although such concrete objectives surely are an important part of feminist politics, and their attainment forms the basis of why particular individuals might engage in politics in the first place, we would miss the world-building aspects of speech and action if we reduced politics to the realization of stated goals. The activities of Boston Women’s Collective mentioned earlier, for example, were organized around the achievement of certain goals having broadly to do with women’s health and well being. Their critique of the medicalization of women’s bodies—that is, the social construction of the female body as an unruly object to be brought under the control of (male) experts—gave rise to a network of relations among women (both local and global) that far exceeded any particular policy objective that was the intended aim of their political organizing. Even failed attempts to change policy or to secure reproductive rights for all women contributed to this world-building practice, the creation of a worldly in-between in which women developed the ability to form, share, and debate opinions with others. This is how political actors can at once constitute and transcend the success or failure of the particular political movements in which they are engaged, how they learn to engage in political activities in the broadest sense, discover what their shared interests are, and make common cause with others.

Put somewhat differently, it is the activity of politics itself that brings into being the shared interests thought to unite a sociological group and to be the prior basis of politics. The “subject of feminism,” then, is not “women” as a sociological group, but “women” in whose name feminist political actors speak. Keeping this distinction in mind we can better understand why the acknowledgment of differences among women need not lead to a crisis of feminism. Feminists can speak in the name of women without assuming a shared identity (and interests) of women as a social group. This speaking can include biological males, self-identified men, and non-gender-normative identities such as transgender and LGBTQ individuals. One does not have to “be” a woman to call oneself a feminist or fight in the name of feminism and, further, identities themselves are refigured in the very practice of politics itself. Identities, though they surely play a role in why someone initially gets involved in politics, are activated in the practice of politics as politically significant in the form of the public persona, the “who” mentioned above.

Finally, to think about feminist politics outside a means-ends instrumental idiom is not to relinquish the idea that political activity can strive for and achieve certain goals. As noted earlier, it is to question the view, first, that the attainment of the goals exhausts the meaning of feminist politics and, second, that to act politically we must be able to control the outcome of our actions, foretell in advance what their consequences will be. This view of politics as excluding unpredictability forgets that whenever we act, we do so into a context of other human wills and intentions that we can never fully know in advance. We can never know with certainty how other political actors will take up our actions; political action always exceeds political actors’ predictions and control ( Arendt 1989 , 289; Zerilli 2005 , 18).

Politics as a Practice of Freedom

Rather than think of politics as a mean to an end, many grassroots feminist organizations, such as the Boston Women’s Collective, have conceptualized politics as a practice of freedom understood as “action in concert” and the freedom to begin anew, to create new forms of being in common. The interdependence of politics and freedom departs radically from the negative idea of freedom as that which politics is supposed to guarantee or secure, a realm independent from politics. On this view, which has historically been associated with liberalism, freedom begins where politics ends, where we are free from politics (in the private realm, for example). Such a view is premised on the idea of freedom as freedom of the will, which is to say on the idea of sovereignty. As the political realm is characterized by plurality, not sovereignty, freedom is seen as existing outside politics and as that which it is the business of a liberal politics to protect and defend.

Although feminists have been critical of the ideal of sovereignty, seeing in it androcentric relations of gender power, many remain entangled in the inherited negative or will-based conception of freedom that underwrites it. To depart from this conception of freedom as based in the will is to take leave of sovereignty as the measure of freedom, where I am most free when I am most independent of others, whose own wills stand as obstacles to my freedom. A nonsovereign conception of freedom entails moving from the I-will to the I-can, and this I-can is only possible with the help of others. The long-standing problem of freedom in feminism, then, cannot be addressed at the level of the autonomy of the individual subject but must involve the creation of the worldly conditions that allow individuals to do what they may will. Women’s freedom involves transforming the conditions of the common world; it is fundamentally a problem of political action.

In “The Meaning of Freedom,” for example, Angela Y. Davis strongly contests the liberal conception for its highly individualist understanding of freedom and argues for a practice of freedom as an engaged collective form of political participation that belongs to a genuine democracy in which women and practically disenfranchised populations engage in common projects aimed at the transformation of real social conditions ( Davis 2012 ). For Davis, freedom is not granted or secured by the state, housed in constitutionally guaranteed rights, or experienced as something that begins where politics ends. It is an ongoing active practice of claiming one’s rights in concert with others and, in the process, transforming the lived conditions of oppressed identities.

The creative or inaugural aspect of feminist politics understood as a practice of freedom has been crucial to the formation of feminism’s ability to put forward alternative ways of engaging with others in public fora and to refiguring the boundaries of the public and the private realms. When understood as action in concert, politics qua freedom is a practice that can emerge in spaces or in relation to activities that have been heretofore considered nonpolitical, just as the second-wave account of consciousness raising held. Such a conception of politics is implicit in the grassroots character of feminist efforts to defamiliarize what counts as a matter of common concern and the spaces in which politics can take place. As already indicated, feminist politics has involved a challenge to the traditional institutional conceptions and spaces of politics, according to which politics is what happens in, say, the Houses of Congress or in protests that take place in officially sanctioned public spaces such as the National Mall in Washington DC.

Like the worries associated with democratic politics in multicultural societies, the debates over the category of women and the fear that differences will tear feminism apart can be interpreted in terms of the distinction between an understanding of politics as life with and among one’s kin versus an understanding of politics as life with and among strangers. “There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It’s over. Give it up,” advises Bernice Johnson Reagon ([1983] 2011 , 344). Precisely because feminist—like democratic—politics consists in an ongoing attempt to live with and among strangers, that is, in the context of plurality, it cannot be based on pre-given notions of what we share by virtue of being born into a particular group or into a particular nation and culture. The temptation to make shared experience the definitive criterion both for membership in a group and for pursuing a politics based on an ascribed identity is caught in a disturbing feature of liberal humanism, namely, the idea that political affiliation can only be based on the logic of sameness: I recognize you as a member of my feminist community to the extent that I find myself in you. The question, then, would be how to articulate political relations of commonality that do not reproduce these relations of dominance, that enable different groups to work together politically, and that respect the plurality of individual differences between members of the same social group.

Although identity has been argued here to be something other than what critics of identity politics claim, we have seen that the difference between the “what” and the “who” of identity actually relies on a radical refiguration of politics from an identity- or subject-based relation to a spatial relation centered on world building. Feminist politics is based not on something inside acting subjects but on the creation of a common space in-between them that unites them. To think of politics in terms of space rather than identity is to take leave of the Western tradition of political thought that sees politics as a substance that inheres in certain activities or even in human beings themselves—that is, the idea of “man” as a political being ( zoon politikon ), with “political” understood as something that belongs to man’s essence. Political, we have seen, is no more the essence of what it is to be human than it is a substance or property that inheres in any particular activity or thing. Politics is the activity of relating to others in a space characterized by plurality and by distance and proximity, the space of the common world that is created through action and speech.

Thinking about politics in terms of the spaces and practices of freedom allows us to account for the unexpected emergence of politics in registers and idioms of life heretofore seen as nonpolitical or private. This inaugural character of feminist politics is easy to overlook when we think about politics in the instrumental terms described above. Looking for the traditional objects of political activity, we risk blinding ourselves to political activity itself, namely, the speech and action that is not necessarily materialized into a stable object such as law, policy, or any material good. And though feminist politics conceptualized as a practice of freedom surely aims at the transformation of the conditions of women’s lives (and thus at these objects), it also creates relations among speaking and acting subjects that exceed the success or failure of any particular material transformation and provide the intangible but crucial basis, the worldly in-between of human relationships, for advancing new struggles.

As other chapters in this volume address feminist views of the state, socialist feminist work on redistributive politics, transnational and critical race feminist approaches to reproductive politics, and feminist postcolonial views of politics, in this chapter I focus only on what it means to call something political, not on the myriad ways in which politics can be manifested. My approach, then, is by no means intended to be exhaustive of what politics has meant in feminist practice and theory but is instead aimed at clarifying how we might think about the kind of activity that politics is.

Strictly speaking, the term itself, writes Hanish, was not her own: “I’d like to clarify for the record that I did not give the paper its title, ‘The Personal Is Political.’ As far as I know, that was done by Notes from the Second Year editors Shulie Firestone and Anne Koedt after Kathie Sarachild brought it to their attention as a possible paper to be printed in that early collection. Also, ‘political’ was used here in the b[r]‌oard sense of the word as having to do with power relationships, not the narrow sense of electorial [ sic ] politics” ([1969] 2006, 1).

As Hanish would later explain, “[T]‌hey [members of the Southern Conference Educational Fund] belittled us to no end for trying to bring our so-called ‘personal problems’ into the political arena. According to Hanisch, “The paper actually began as a memo that I wrote in February of 1969 while in Gainesville, Florida. It was sent to the women’s caucus of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) a group for whom I was a subsistence-paid organizer doing exploratory work for establishing a women’s liberation project in the South. The memo was originally titled, ‘Some Thoughts in Response to Dottie’s Thoughts on a Women’s Liberation Movement’, and was written in reply to a memo by another staff member, Dottie Zellner, who contended that consciousness-raising was just therapy and questioned whether the new independent WLM was really ‘political’… . This was not an unusual reaction to radical feminist ideas in early 1969.”

A similar attack on identity politics and multiculturalism can be found in the pragmatist antiphilosopher Richard Rorty’s latest work, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America . Although Rorty does not accept Gitlin’s metaphysics of humanity approach to building a Left for the new millennium, he shares Gitlin’s frustration with the emergence of a Left that is narcissistically obsessed with identity and that pursues cultural—in contrast to real—politics. Although Rorty claims to attend to issues of difference, his prescriptions for political action are dismissive of race, sexuality, ethnicity (indeed, of everything that is not reducible to the economic). Like Gitlin, Rorty contrasts his ideal of the pre-sixties reformist Left, which “proclaimed that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect each other as such,” against the contemporary “cultural Left” which “urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect each other in our differences” ( Rorty 1998 , 100). Like Gitlin, Rorty holds to an image of the pre-sixties Left that is at odds with the historical record. There is not a word about New Dealers who were segregationists. Not a word about labor unions that excluded racial minorities and discriminated against women. Rorty’s Left liberalism has no place for these accounts because they point to the particularities that cannot be incorporated in his communal subject, the “We” that is to achieve “our country.”

Arendt sees that a focus on identity can lead to a loss of worldly reality. The sense of belonging to an oppressed group, based on expulsion from the world or the denial of one’s rightful place in it, can generate in the oppressed a sense of being a pariah people and thus worldless. What becomes all-important is not care for the world but the survival of the group. “In such a state of worldlessness,” writes Arendt, “it is easy to conclude that the element common to all men is not the world but ‘human nature’ of such and such a type” ( Arendt 1968 , 16). Thus forms of identity politics that model group relations on kinship, brother and sisters who share a social, cultural, and political genealogy, tend to reduce relations with others to the sentimental terms of compassion and pity, shared suffering.

To have a “common world” is not to share a worldview, and this common world exists only where there is a plurality of worldviews. Arendt writes:

[T]‌he reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised. For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have different locations in it … Being seen and heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public life … . Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who have gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear. ( Arendt, 1989 , 57)

Our sense of what is common can appear only when it is seen from different perspectives. Consequently, the loss of competing perspectives results not in a world that is more shared but in a loss of what we have common.

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Harvard's TikTok strategy; plus, Shirley Chisholm, the coalition diva

Brittany Luse

Barton Girdwood

Alexis Williams

Liam McBain

Corey Antonio Rose

Jessica Placzek

Veralyn Williams

A hand holding a phone displaying the Tik Tok logo; U.S. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm Dan Kitwood/Getty Images/Ed Tilly/The State Media Company hide caption

TikTok has come under fire for its addictive algorithm and for being a place where misinformation spreads. But still, there is one institution that thinks TikTok actually has the potential to be a source of good in our world: Harvard. To be more specific, it's the Harvard Chan Center for Health Communication. To hear more about how the center is working with TikTok influencers to share researched information with the public, host Brittany Luse is joined by Kate Speer. Kate started as a mental health TikToker, but was recently hired as a marketing director for the Harvard Chan Center for Health Communication. Kate also shares her mental health journey and what it's been like to work within a mental health system that harmed her. Then, Brittany looks at the history left out of the new Netflix film, Shirley , which follows the presidential run of Shirley Chisholm. Brittany sits down with Dr. Anastasia C. Curwood, author of Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics, to discuss what came before the historic race. They talk about how Shirley's various identities informed her approach, and scan for her fingerprint on American electoral politics today. Want to be featured on the show? Record a question for 'Hey Brittany' and send it to [email protected].

This episode was produced by Liam McBain and Corey Antonio Rose with additional support from Barton Girdwood and Alexis Williams. We had engineering support from Ted Mebane and Josephine Nyounai. It was edited by Jessica Placzek. Our executive producer is Veralyn Williams. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sangweni.

black feminism
Black politicians
Shirley Chisholm
mental health
Democratic Party

The Link Between the Resurrection and Elections

A protester dressed in a bible costume stands in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 5, 2022.

I went to a funeral recently. It was an old friend and former colleague . The big "C," diagnosed six years ago. He outlived the first diagnosis by five years but eventually it caught up. Splendid service, lovely music, fine sermon, many poignant moments. I met dozens of people I hadn’t seen for years. All as it should be.

Except for one thing. The service was billed as a "resurrection" celebration. The printed service paper said so. The preacher said so. Some of the hymns said so. But the resurrection itself—a new bodily life in God’s eventual new creation—was conspicuous by its all-but-absence. And that’s a problem. Not only because most people in our culture don’t know what "resurrection" means , but because they don’t know why it matters .

Resurrection matters because what you ultimately hope for affects the person you are right now. More particularly, it matters because people who really believe in resurrection have a different approach to all of life—including politics. Including issues of justice and mercy, at all levels. Including, dare I say, voting and elections. This affects all of us.

Read More: The Hidden History of Those Who Wrote the Christian Story

So what does "resurrection" mean? Most people today assume that it’s a fancy way of saying "life after death." That’s certainly what I would have picked up from that funeral service. But "resurrection" never meant "life after death," or "going to heaven." Plenty of people in Jesus’ day believed in "life after death," in some form, but were still shocked by talk of "resurrection." That’s because "resurrection" always meant people who had been physically dead coming back to a new life—a new bodily life. Whatever we might mean by "life after death" (the Bible actually says very little about that), "resurrection" is a further stage. It’s life after "life after death." Wherever Jesus was after his horrible death, he wasn’t raised again until the third day. "Resurrection" is the final stage in a two-stage post-mortem journey. With that, a new world is born, full of possibilities.

Jesus’ risen body was the first element in God’s long-promised "new creation." A little bit of God’s new world, coming forward from the ultimate future into our surprised and unready present time. And launching the project of new creation that continues to this day.

Most people in our world, including most churchgoers, have never heard this explained. This robs us, as individuals, of our ultimate hope, leaving us with "pie in the sky when you die," which was never the original Christian vision. In particular, it robs us of the motivation to work for God’s new creation in the present. And that means public life—justice, politics, voting—and all that goes with them.

Read More: The Bible’s Most Misunderstood Verse

Here's the point: Jesus’ resurrection doesn’t mean, "He’s gone to heaven, so we can go there too" (though you might be forgiven for thinking it meant that, granted the many sermons both at funerals and at Easter). It means, "In Jesus, God has launched his plan to remake creation as a whole, and if you are a follower of Jesus you get to be part of that right now." What God did for Jesus, close up and personal, is what he plans to do for the whole world. And the project is already under way.

How does this work? One way of putting it is to say that God intends to put the whole world right in the end. This will be a great act of total new creation, for which Jesus’ resurrection is the advance model. In the present time, though, God puts people right—women, men, children—by bringing them to faith in Jesus and shaping their lives by his spirit. And he does this so that they can, here and now, become "putting-right" people for the world. In the future, God will put the world right; in the present, God does put people right.

And the "put-right" people are called to be "putting-right" people, Sermon-on-the-Mount people, lovers of justice and peace, in and for God’s world. They are to be signs of the new creation which began with Jesus’ resurrection. They are to produce, here and now, further signs of that new world. The church as a whole, and every member, is called to become a small working model of new creation.

And that new creation includes (what we call) social reform. Check out the relevant biblical passages. The Psalms sketch the ideal society: in Psalm 72, the No.1 priority for God’s chosen king is to look after the weak, the poor and the helpless. The prophets add their dramatic pictures, as in Isaiah 11 where the wolf and the lamb will lie down together. (They tried that in a zoo in California, and it worked fine provided they put in a new lamb each day.) Already in Jesus’ day some Jewish teachers were interpreting Isaiah’s picture of the peaceable world in terms of warring nations finding reconciliation. Jesus announced that the time had come for this new way of peace. St Paul picked up that theme, seeing the church as, by definition, a multicultural, multi-ethnic society, without social class or gender hierarchy, as a sign and foretaste of the coming new creation of justice and peace.

The tragedy in the western churches is that, by misunderstanding "resurrection," both the "conservatives" and the "liberals" have robbed themselves of the whole message. The conservatives, eager to tell people how to go to heaven, regard any attempt to improve the present world as a distraction, not realizing that with Jesus’ resurrection the new creation has already been launched. The liberals, having long been taught that science has disproved Jesus’ resurrection, dismiss its importance and pursue their own vision of social improvement.

Hence the unholy stand-off: liberal Christians saying "justice and peace" but denying resurrection; conservative Christians saying "resurrection" but meaning "going to heaven." The problem is that trying to get the result (social justice) without the resource (Jesus’ resurrection) is building on sand. Just as a "heaven " that is not "a new creation" is vacuous (and unbiblical), a liberal agenda that is not rooted in the resurrection is rudderless. The 18th-century Enlightenment tried that experiment (reform without resurrection), and it clearly hasn’t worked. No: it is because God raised Jesus from the dead that ultimate new creation is promised, and present new creation becomes possible.

A true understanding of new creation, instead, starts with the Easter message about Jesus’ new bodily life, and the powerful gift of his spirit. It flows out into creative, healing, and restorative work in God’s world—including, of course, political and public life. That insight slices through our present culture wars, where bits of half-remembered "religion" get muddled up with bits of half-understood "politics." It’s time to reset the terms, both of debate and of action. Get resurrection right and political priorities, including wise voting, will rearrange themselves.

That is the hope. And, in the New Testament, "hope" doesn’t mean "optimism" or "always look on the bright side." It means Jesus.

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Cluing in to the crossword’s political meanings

Crossword constructor anna shechtman writes about the women who pioneered the pastime in ‘the riddles of the sphinx’.

Word games are knotty, paradoxical devices. They offer players the illusion of control: What could be tidier than a Scrabble board, or the orderly grid of a crossword puzzle? But they are possible only because language is untamable, flush with connotations and insinuations that we cannot hope to systematize.

No one knows this better than Anna Shechtman, who confronts the waywardness of words both in her capacity as a literature professor at Cornell University and as a contributor of crosswords to the New Yorker. Shechtman was a precocious constructor, as authors of crosswords are called (at least when they are not called, somewhat grandiosely, cruciverbalists); her puzzles were first published in the New York Times when she was in college. After she graduated, she secured a job as assistant to Will Shortz, the paper’s longtime crosswords editor, and it was in his employ that she began to reflect on the political implications of the seemingly innocuous games she designed and tweaked each day. Crossword clues are supposed to draw on “common knowledge,” but who are the proprietors of this mystical article? Is there any such thing? And perhaps most important, can constructors neutralize the chaos of language, with its mad tumult of jostling meanings? Should they even try?

These are some of the questions Shechtman poses in “ The Riddles of the Sphinx ,” a book too mischievously multiform to classify. It is in part a history of the crossword puzzle, which was invented by Arthur Wynne in 1913 and quickly denigrated as a frivolously feminine pursuit. The press delighted in framing the crossword craze that erupted in the 1920s as a “vice,” sometimes even an addiction. Columnists and commentators went so far as to worry that the puzzle was a “threat to the family unit,” as Shechtman writes: Women suspected of contracting “crossword puzzleitis” were accused of neglecting their household duties to riffle through their dictionaries.

For the affluent White women who dominated the field in its first decades of existence, however, crosswords were more than an engrossing distraction. “Writing puzzles offered three unique satisfactions,” Shechtman explains. It afforded the women she surveys throughout the book “a job in journalism, a profession that might otherwise exclude them; a political tool with which to shape the canon of ‘common knowledge’; and, perhaps above all, a coping mechanism for a life under patriarchy.”

For first-wave feminists like Ruth Hale (1887-1934), crosswords were an escape into a domain in which women might exercise some authority for once (indeed, Hale is responsible for formally codifying the rules by which puzzle constructors abide to this day). For traditionalists like Margaret Farrar (1897-1984), the first crossword editor at the New York Times, writing puzzles was work that masqueraded as leisure — and that therefore allowed her to think of herself as a housewife even as she hunched over the grid. (Farrar, who once remarked that the crossword is “as old as the Sphinx … and as fatal in its fascination,” gives the book its title.) And for radicals like Julia Penelope (1941-2013), an erstwhile lesbian separatist who ended up alienating most of her closest allies, crosswords were an occasion to overhaul a language that had been irrevocably tainted by misogynistic associations.

Associations, it emerges, are the currency of crosswords — the cleverest clues are dense with puns, word play and sly allusions — and they are also the currency of Shechtman’s witty and rewarding book. She relates her fascination with puzzles to her love of modernist authors like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who unsettled language by calling attention to its formal qualities in much the same way that the best constructors can, and she allows herself unrepentantly cerebral essayettes on topics ranging from the cantankerous fiction writer and crossword aficionado Jean Stafford to Freudian psychoanalysis — subjects that could prove unapproachably academic in the wrong hands but become fresh fascinations in Shechtman’s.

She even proposes that there is a parallel between her propensity for puzzle-making and her severe anorexia as a teenager and young adult, a connection that she concedes “will strike most people as tenuous or arbitrary.” But by the end of “The Riddles of the Sphinx,” the comparison makes good sense. Whether she was counting calories or organizing words into clean squares in her notebook, Shechtman felt that she was “mastering forms that should be unmasterable,” establishing the dominance of mind over matter. “The crossword constructor makes chaos out of language and then restores its order in the form of a neat solution,” she writes, and the anorexic sets out to impose a similar sort of tidiness onto the unwieldy body.

Yet the flesh is a repository of appetites that we cannot ultimately repress, and language, too, is a trickster intent on defying its speakers. Crosswords work precisely because words cannot be stripped of what Shechtman so beautifully calls their “polymorphic perversity,” because they are drenched in meanings — and because they are not just ethereal abstractions but also shapes and sounds.

The very genre of the crossword relies on the recognition that language is not merely an intellectual instrument but also a substance with material properties. Shechtman, a witty and crisp stylist, evidently relishes its sensuality. She is almost lovingly attuned to all its awkward oddities, writing hilariously, for instance, of “that unholiest of hyphenates, work-life balance.”

But she also understands that words and the games that recruit them are never neutral or innocuous. By the time Shechtman embarked on her constructing career, crosswords were no longer coded as a feminine pastime. Instead, they were regarded as math-adjacent and therefore masculine. “During Shortz’s thirty-year tenure at the Times,” Shechtman writes, “roughly 80 percent of the paper’s puzzles had been created by men.” No Black female constructors were featured in the paper until 2021, a scandal Shechtman rightly deems “shocking.”

The authorship of crossword puzzles is not unrelated to their content. Ever since Hale set out the rules for constructors, according to which “the only requirement [for a crossword clue] is common sense,” cruciverbalists have been custodians of language, as Shechtman discovered when she tussled with Shortz over which words were, in the lingo of the business, “puzzle-worthy.” She bristled when Shortz removed “male gaze,” an allusion to an influential feminist theory, from one of her puzzles, and she soon realized that their clashes were implicitly disagreements over the role of constructors. Was it their job to reflect the linguistic biases of the paper’s readership, or to correct those biases? To reflect that slippery and devious fiction, “common knowledge,” or to reimagine it? Many constructors, it turns out, are not so constructive after all.

But Shechtman is a constructor in the best sense of the word. “I am strongly of the opinion that looking up an unknown word or phrase is not cheating but learning,” she writes. Her puzzles are designed to teach us. Her book, at once a celebration and demonstration of the riotousness of words, does the same.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.

The Riddles of the Sphinx

Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle

By Anna Shechtman

HarperOne. 271 pp. $29.99

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What to know about the crisis of violence, politics and hunger engulfing Haiti

A woman carrying two bags of rice walks past burning tires

A long-simmering crisis over Haiti’s ability to govern itself, particularly after a series of natural disasters and an increasingly dire humanitarian emergency, has come to a head in the Caribbean nation, as its de facto president remains stranded in Puerto Rico and its people starve and live in fear of rampant violence.

The chaos engulfing the country has been bubbling for more than a year, only for it to spill over on the global stage on Monday night, as Haiti’s unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry, agreed to resign once a transitional government is brokered by other Caribbean nations and parties, including the U.S.

But the very idea of a transitional government brokered not by Haitians but by outsiders is one of the main reasons Haiti, a nation of 11 million, is on the brink, according to humanitarian workers and residents who have called for Haitian-led solutions.

“What we’re seeing in Haiti has been building since the 2010 earthquake,” said Greg Beckett, an associate professor of anthropology at Western University in Canada.

Haitians take shelter in the Delmas 4 Olympic Boxing Arena

What is happening in Haiti and why?

In the power vacuum that followed the assassination of democratically elected President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, Henry, who was prime minister under Moïse, assumed power, with the support of several nations, including the U.S.

When Haiti failed to hold elections multiple times — Henry said it was due to logistical problems or violence — protests rang out against him. By the time Henry announced last year that elections would be postponed again, to 2025, armed groups that were already active in Port-au-Prince, the capital, dialed up the violence.

Even before Moïse’s assassination, these militias and armed groups existed alongside politicians who used them to do their bidding, including everything from intimidating the opposition to collecting votes . With the dwindling of the country’s elected officials, though, many of these rebel forces have engaged in excessively violent acts, and have taken control of at least 80% of the capital, according to a United Nations estimate.

Those groups, which include paramilitary and former police officers who pose as community leaders, have been responsible for the increase in killings, kidnappings and rapes since Moïse’s death, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden. According to a report from the U.N . released in January, more than 8,400 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in 2023, an increase of 122% increase from 2022.

“January and February have been the most violent months in the recent crisis, with thousands of people killed, or injured, or raped,” Beckett said.

Armed groups who had been calling for Henry’s resignation have already attacked airports, police stations, sea ports, the Central Bank and the country’s national soccer stadium. The situation reached critical mass earlier this month when the country’s two main prisons were raided , leading to the escape of about 4,000 prisoners. The beleaguered government called a 72-hour state of emergency, including a night-time curfew — but its authority had evaporated by then.

Aside from human-made catastrophes, Haiti still has not fully recovered from the devastating earthquake in 2010 that killed about 220,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless, many of them living in poorly built and exposed housing. More earthquakes, hurricanes and floods have followed, exacerbating efforts to rebuild infrastructure and a sense of national unity.

Since the earthquake, “there have been groups in Haiti trying to control that reconstruction process and the funding, the billions of dollars coming into the country to rebuild it,” said Beckett, who specializes in the Caribbean, particularly Haiti.

Beckett said that control initially came from politicians and subsequently from armed groups supported by those politicians. Political “parties that controlled the government used the government for corruption to steal that money. We’re seeing the fallout from that.”

Haiti Experiences Surge Of Gang Violence

Many armed groups have formed in recent years claiming to be community groups carrying out essential work in underprivileged neighborhoods, but they have instead been accused of violence, even murder . One of the two main groups, G-9, is led by a former elite police officer, Jimmy Chérizier — also known as “Barbecue” — who has become the public face of the unrest and claimed credit for various attacks on public institutions. He has openly called for Henry to step down and called his campaign an “armed revolution.”

But caught in the crossfire are the residents of Haiti. In just one week, 15,000 people have been displaced from Port-au-Prince, according to a U.N. estimate. But people have been trying to flee the capital for well over a year, with one woman telling NBC News that she is currently hiding in a church with her three children and another family with eight children. The U.N. said about 160,000 people have left Port-au-Prince because of the swell of violence in the last several months.

Deep poverty and famine are also a serious danger. Gangs have cut off access to the country’s largest port, Autorité Portuaire Nationale, and food could soon become scarce.

Haiti's uncertain future

A new transitional government may dismay the Haitians and their supporters who call for Haitian-led solutions to the crisis.

But the creation of such a government would come after years of democratic disruption and the crumbling of Haiti’s political leadership. The country hasn’t held an election in eight years.

Haitian advocates and scholars like Jemima Pierre, a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, say foreign intervention, including from the U.S., is partially to blame for Haiti’s turmoil. The U.S. has routinely sent thousands of troops to Haiti , intervened in its government and supported unpopular leaders like Henry.

“What you have over the last 20 years is the consistent dismantling of the Haitian state,” Pierre said. “What intervention means for Haiti, what it has always meant, is death and destruction.”

Image: Workers unload humanitarian aid from a U.S. helicopter at Les Cayes airport in Haiti, Aug. 18, 2021.

In fact, the country’s situation was so dire that Henry was forced to travel abroad in the hope of securing a U.N. peacekeeping deal. He went to Kenya, which agreed to send 1,000 troops to coordinate an East African and U.N.-backed alliance to help restore order in Haiti, but the plan is now on hold . Kenya agreed last October to send a U.N.-sanctioned security force to Haiti, but Kenya’s courts decided it was unconstitutional. The result has been Haiti fending for itself.

“A force like Kenya, they don’t speak Kreyòl, they don’t speak French,” Pierre said. “The Kenyan police are known for human rights abuses . So what does it tell us as Haitians that the only thing that you see that we deserve are not schools, not reparations for the cholera the U.N. brought , but more military with the mandate to use all kinds of force on our population? That is unacceptable.”

Henry was forced to announce his planned resignation from Puerto Rico, as threats of violence — and armed groups taking over the airports — have prevented him from returning to his country.

An elderly woman runs in front of the damaged police station building with tires burning in front of it

Now that Henry is to stand down, it is far from clear what the armed groups will do or demand next, aside from the right to govern.

“It’s the Haitian people who know what they’re going through. It’s the Haitian people who are going to take destiny into their own hands. Haitian people will choose who will govern them,” Chérizier said recently, according to The Associated Press .

Haitians and their supporters have put forth their own solutions over the years, holding that foreign intervention routinely ignores the voices and desires of Haitians.

In 2021, both Haitian and non-Haitian church leaders, women’s rights groups, lawyers, humanitarian workers, the Voodoo Sector and more created the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis . The commission has proposed the “ Montana Accord ,” outlining a two-year interim government with oversight committees tasked with restoring order, eradicating corruption and establishing fair elections.

For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter .

CORRECTION (March 15, 2024, 9:58 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated which university Jemima Pierre is affiliated with. She is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, not the University of California, Los Angeles, (or Columbia University, as an earlier correction misstated).

Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.

Char Adams is a reporter for NBC BLK who writes about race.

For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers.

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The Newest Tech Start-Up Billionaire? Donald Trump.

Trump media, which went public this week, attracted a frenzy of interest on its first day of trading..

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Over the past few years, Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, has been dismissed as a money-losing boondoggle.

This week, that all changed. Matthew Goldstein, a New York Times business reporter, explains how its parent venture, Truth Media, became a publicly traded company worth billions of dollars.

On today’s episode

Matthew Goldstein , a New York Times business reporter.

On a billboard is a large question mark. Cars drive along the street.

Background reading

What to know about Trump Media’s high-flying stock debut .

Ethics experts say the publicly traded company could present a new way for foreign actors or others to influence Mr. Trump , if he is elected president.

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Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Matthew Goldstein covers Wall Street and white-collar crime and housing issues. More about Matthew Goldstein

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500 Words Essay On Feminism. Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas.
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Feminist Political Philosophy. This entry turns to how feminist philosophers have intervened in and, to a great extent, transformed the intellectual field known as political philosophy, which for millennia had largely ignored matters of sex and gender. Traditional political philosophy largely sidelined and excluded the private sphere and civil ...
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While the pervasiveness of women's oppression across cultures requires a distinctly feminist politics of recognition (Baum 2004:1074), the demands for recognition made by women differentiated by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, (dis)ability, nationality etc., has produced, in Henrietta Moore's (2000:1130) words, the "affirmation that women have different contexts and histories, that they ...
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challenges to the literature on gender and politics. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to discuss these two interrelated realms: backsliding on gender equality policies and the emerging political space for feminist responses to this backsliding. We illustrate our framework with empirical observations
Attitudes Toward Women and the Influence of Gender on Political
Sexism, Gender Role Attitudes, and Feminism. One of the older measures is the Attitudes Toward Women Scale, which was developed in the early 1970s to measure attitudes about women's rights, gender roles, proper behavior of women, and women's responsibilities in the public and private spheres (Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1973).Women are consistently more egalitarian in their scores on the ...
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a new research agenda for feminist scholarship in political science. Past work in the field has generally been a matter of extending old lines of inquiry to women. By reviewing alternative approaches now current in history and legal studies, this essay maps out new theoretical and empir-ical ground for feminist research in political science.
Feminism
Feminism, the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. Although largely originating in the West, feminism is manifested worldwide and is represented by various institutions committed to activity on behalf of women's rights and interests. Learn more about feminism.
Taking Feminism Seriously in Political Science: A Cross-Disciplinary
It begins with basic epistemological foundations from political science and philosophy perspectives and then shows how feminist political science has put into action these epistemological pillars in research through an examination of different taxonomies of feminist approaches in political science that reflect the increasing epistemological ...
Feminism in Politics: Definition, Development and Types
Feminism is, therefore, a critique of patriarchy on the one hand and an ideology committed to women's emancipation on the other". Feminism is, therefore, a doctrine which is concerned with emancipation of women. But broadly speaking the concept embraces other areas of women's life such as their development, role in political, social ...
Feminist responses to populist politics
Why discuss feminist responses to populist politics? From the vantage point of mid-2021, human rights politics are being scrutinised from both authoritarian and ultra-liberal perspectives in Europe, yet are united by the invisible threads of a shared normative vocabulary, set of rhetorical arguments, and calls to civility (Bejan Citation 2017).Given this, the proposal for a special issue of ...
Feminism and Gender Studies in International Relations Theory
The essay also considers the conversations or lack thereof between feminist and nonfeminist international relations theories (see Tickner 1997). ... and in 1999 the International Feminist Journal of Politics was established to promote dialogue among scholars of feminism, politics, and International Relations. The sudden collapse of communism ...
Feminism and Politics
The essays in Feminism and Politics answer these questions in a variety of ways, but all see feminism as transforming the way we think about and act in politics. Spanning issues of citizenship and political representation, the ambiguities of identity politics, and the problems in legislating for sexual equality, the readings provide an exciting ...
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Feminist attitudes, feminist identity and women's online political participation. Various analyses have pointed out that feminist attitudes are not a homogenous concept, even though they may share core ideas (Henley, Meng, O'Brien, McCarthy, & Sockloskie, Citation 1998; Siegel & Calogero, Citation 2021).In fact, a number of distinct feminist attitudes can be distinguished, and different ...
Feminism and the politics of resilience: essays on gender, media and
Angela McRobbie's Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, ... Feminism and the politics of resilience: essays on gender, media and the end of welfare by Angela McRobbie, Oxford, Polity Press, 2020, vi + 153 pp., US$22.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-5095-2507-2.
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Feminism: An Essay By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 27, 2016 • ( 6). Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries' struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The movement gained increasing prominence ...
Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media, and
Though she doesn't use exactly these terms, Angela McRobbie's Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media, and the End of Welfare is about how early twenty-first-century British neoliberalism transforms the classic virgin/whore dichotomy into one between so-called "mom bosses" and "welfare queens." A focused complement to Melinda Cooper's Family Values ...
(PDF) The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of
The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism. ... By censuring the body, breath and speech suggesl that we distinguish belween 'feminism' as a political are censored at the same time. position, 'femaleness' as a matter of biology and 'femininity' To write - the act that will 'realise' the un-censored as a set of ...
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Feminist theory is assumed to be political by definition, but this view tends to occlude the different ways in which feminists think about politics. This essay discusses competing understandings of politics and examines how it is that things come to count as political within feminism. To think of relations of subordination of political, it is ...
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At the risk of sounding a little dramatic, you can draw a useful comparison between the Supreme Court's current political position and the one it held on the eve of the 1860 presidential election.
Introduction: Fashion and Feminist Politics of the Present
Altogether, fashion emerges as an ideal diagnostic tool for the feminist politics of the present. If there were ever a moment for feminist studies to take on fashion, this would be it. Over the last couple of years, the industry has framed itself as a diversity vanguardist—with an especially visible promotion of transgender and non-binary ...
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The Newest Tech Start-Up Billionaire? Donald Trump
The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan ...