Hypatia articles from September 2007

Hypatia archives from September 2007

Politics improper: Iris Marion Young, Hannah Arendt, and the power of performativity.(RADICAL INTERVENTIONS)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... This essay explores the value of oppositional, performative political action in the context of oppression, domination, and exclusionary political spheres. Rather than adopting Iris Marion Young's approach, Drexler turns to Hannah Arendt's...

The citizen in question.(FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS IN DEMOCRATIC THEORY)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... This essay examines the citizen's apparent agelessness that is foundational to liberal democratic theories. By engaging the notion of citizenship rights, Lanoix challenges this assumed perpetual adulthood and argues for a new way of...

Framing the postcolonial sexual contract: democracy, fraternalism, and state authority in India.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... This essay examines the reconfiguration of the racial and sexual contracts underpinning democratic theory and practice in the transition to independence in India. Drawing upon the work of Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Keating argues that...

Shame and the future of feminism.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Recent works have recovered the ethical and political value of shame, suggesting that if shame is felt for the right reasons, toxic forms of shame may be alleviated. Rereading Hannah Arendt's biography of the "conscious pariah," Rahel...

Standpoint theory and the possibility of justice: a Lyotardian critique of the democratization of knowledge.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Grebowicz argues from the perspective of Jean-Francois Lyotard's critique of deliberative democracy that the project of democratizing knowledge may bring us closer to terror than to justice. The successful formulation of a critical standpoint...

Rethinking the personal and the political: feminist activism and civic engagement.(DEMOCRATIC INTERVENTIONS IN FEMINIST THEORY)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... The slogan "the personal is political" captures the distinctive challenge to the public-private divide posed by contemporary feminists. As such, feminist activism is not necessarily congruent with civic engagement, which is predicated on the...

Cosmopolitan feminism and human rights.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Reilly offers an account of cosmopolitan feminism as emancipatory political practice in an age of globalization. This entails a critical engagement with international human rights law; a global feminist consciousness that contests patriarchal,...

The Dream of the Perfect Child.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... The Dream of the Perfect Child. By JOAN ROTHSCHILD. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Joan Rothschild's The Dream of the Perfect Child opens and closes with an interesting double thesis: First, the eugenic agenda of the...

Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. By LINDA M. G. ZERILLI. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Linda M. G. Zerilli sets out to "find my way back to what once brought me to feminism: the radical...

Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights. By CAROL GOULD. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. In Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights, Carol Gould continues the project she began in Rethinking Democracy (1988) to forge a coherent...

Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. By PATRICIA HILL COLLINS. New York: Routledge, 2005. Patricia Hill Collins explores the way in which race, class, and gender organize our national social life via two...

The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire.(Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions)(Book review)
September 22, 2007... The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. By Cynthia Enloe. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions. By Rosemary Radford Ruether....

Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.(BOOK NOTES)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Edited by DOROTHEA OLKOWSI and GAIL WEISS. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. This edited collection, which is part of the Re-Reading the Canon series edited...

Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate about the Sex Industry.(BOOK NOTES)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate about the Sex Industry. Edited by JESSICA SPECTOR. Stanford, Calif.: Standard University Press, 2006. The goal of this collection is to "bring together an assortment of writings about the...

Socializing Care: Feminist Issues and Public Issues.(BOOK NOTES)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Socializing Care: Feminist Issues and Public Issues. Edited by MAURICE HAMINGTON and DOROTHY C. MILLER. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Defining "the concept of socializing care as the theoretical understanding and application of...

The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvior: Critical Essays.(BOOK NOTES)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2007... The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvior: Critical Essays. Edited by MARGARET A. SIMONS. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. The Fall 1999 special issue of Hypatia (14, no. 4), titled "The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvior," forms the...

Feminism and the A-word: power and community in the university.(MUSINGS)(administrative work)
September 22, 2007... Joan Tronto came to our campus last winter to discuss how her work on the politics and ethics of care might contribute to a richer understanding of professional life and its ethical contours in various settings, including that of academic...

Sharing without knowing: collective identity in feminist and democratic theory.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Many feminist and democratic theorists share the presumption that politics requires a pregiven subject ("women" or "the people") whose identity is grounded in commonality. Drawing on Linda Zerilli's interventions in feminist debates, Ferguson...

"How does change happen?" Deliberation and difficulty.(REVISIONING DELIBERATION)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Theoretically, feminists ought to be the best deliberative democrats. However, political commitments (which this author shares) to inclusiveness on issues of reproductive health and gay and lesbian rights, for example, create a boundary within...

Deliberative democracy and the politics of redistribution: the case of the Indian panchayats.(Indian political system)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... By examining evidence from India, where quotas for women in local government were introduced in 1993, this article argues that institutional reform can disturb hegemonic discourses sufficiently to open a window of opportunity where deliberative...

Recognizing the passion in deliberation: toward a more democratic theory of deliberative democracy.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Critics have suggested that deliberative democracy reproduces inequalities of gender, race, and class by privileging calm rational discussion over passionate speech and action. Their solution is to supplement deliberation with such forms of...

Constituting politics: power, reciprocity, and identity.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... This essay considers whether liberal political theory has tools with which to count gender, and so gender relations, as political. Can liberal political theory count subordination among the harms of sex inequality that the state ought to...

Feminist engagements in democratic theory.
September 22, 2007... For all its variety, feminist theory can be understood as a kind of "hermeneutic of suspicion," and hence it largely operates as a critique of existing theories and practices, including political theory and practice. This special issue is aimed...