Democracy and Hierarchy

2021 ◽  
pp. 134-164
Author(s):  
Max Waltman
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Social Categorization ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Intersectionality Theory ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Negative Rights ◽  
State Position

The chapter sets forth a political theory of what would make legal challenges to pornography successful. Obstacles are identified in early liberal concepts of “negative rights,” which prevent interventions against non-state abuses of power. A nuanced view of power recognizes “positive rights” to intervention. The feminist theory of consciousness-raising is explored, shedding light on the necessity of subordinated groups’ representation. Intersectionality theory illustrates how multiple disadvantages prevent redress for people harmed by pornography under existing laws. Hence, legal challenges are hypothesized to be more efficient when the perspectives and interests of survivor groups of pornography-related harms are represented. The postmodern position submitting that subordinated groups’ rights should not be recognized, claiming they will be misappropriated and “renaturalize” oppression, is criticized for being a reductionist anti-state position conflating social categorization with its material consequences, thus denying (like negative rights do) a politics that could challenge that same oppressive material reality.

The Problem of Forfeiture in the Welfare State

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 256-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
Negative Rights ◽  
Modern Welfare State ◽  
The Right ◽  
External Interventions ◽  
The Welfare State

Political theory has a good deal to say both for and against the establishment of the modern welfare state. As one might expect, most of that discussion is directed toward the expanded set of basic rights that the state confers on its members. In its most canonical form, the welfare state represents a switch in vision from the regime of negative rights in the nineteenth century to the regime of positive rights so much in vogue today. Negative rights—an inexact and somewhat misleading term— stress the right of an individual to be free from certain kinds of external interventions. These rights arrange themselves on two basic lists. The first list generates a set of civil capacities that all individuals enjoy over their own labor and property: the right to contract, to make wills, to sue and be sued, to give evidence, and the like. The second list, from which the term “negative rights” derives, protects all persons from interference, either by force or by fraud, in the conduct of their own affairs. The resulting set of rights is short, snappy, and knowable; it is internally consistent; and it prepares the stage for productive human behavior (exchange) while limiting destructive forms of behavior (theft). Even though it is not couched in explicit utilitarian language, it can surely be defended on general functional grounds.

SAILING TOGETHER: THE AGONISTIC CONSTRUCTION OF SISTERHOOD IN SOPHOCLES’ ANTIGONE

Ramus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-126
Author(s):  
Valentina Moro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the meaning of kinship in Sophocles’ Theban plays has raised a great deal of interest in critical interpretations in the fields of philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis. From the 1970s onward, Antigone in particular has also become a staple of feminist theory, both as a philosophical and political gesture contra Hegel and Lacan, but also in connection with post-structuralism. Conversely, the topic of kinship in Athenian drama has attracted comparatively little attention from classical philologists. As a consequence, theorists have often been more inclined to discuss the theme with reference to modern conceptual frameworks, rather than to Sophocles’ language itself.

Lifting the “Claud-Lorraine Tint” over the Republic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Pace Vetter
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Comprehensive System ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Early American ◽  
The Republic

Frances Wright makes several major contributions to political theory. She served as an essential transitional figure from republicanism to early American socialism. Wright outlined a comprehensive system of reform based on an epistemological method of inquiry. Although Alexis de Tocqueville is credited with anticipating aspects of what would become critical race theory, her devastating critique of slavery in America precedes his by several years and includes elements of critical race theory as well. Unlike Tocqueville, Wright also applies those principles to the plight of American women, which prefigures aspects of critical feminist theory. Wright presents an early version of intersectionality by portraying the oppression of women, the enslavement of African Americans, and the injustice of economic inequality as intertwined through institutionalized corruption.

Jane Addams as Feminist Heroine: Democracy and Contentious Politics

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (03) ◽  
pp. 554-561
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Hirschmann
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Hard Time ◽  
Political Analysis

I have long been a puzzled admirer of Jean Elshtain's work, going back to graduate school whenPublic Man, Private Woman(Elshtain 1981) first came out, and I read it for a class in feminist theory taught by Nancy Hartsock. I remember another student, a Marxist, wrinkling her nose and saying about the author, “she's really pretty conservative, don't you think?” I had a hard time understanding this question. As a newcomer to feminism in the early 1980s, I perhaps naively thought that anyone who recognized that gender was an important category for political analysis, that it was a realm of inequality, and that canonical political theory actually had a lot to say about it despite the fact that most of our professors always blithely ignored it, was, by definition, pretty radical.

Adult Socialization and Out-Group Politicization: An Empirical Study of Consciousness-Raising

1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Causal Inference ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Women Politicians ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Political Category ◽  
Good For ◽  
Political Character

At the heart of the feminist theory of consciousness-raising is a very precise hypothesis about the conditions in which most women – and members of any other socio-political out-group – will overcome their socialization into the culture of the dominant in-group to acquire political consciousness. The hypothesis is that separate interaction directly among themselves in autonomous, all-female groups will lead women to develop a new consciousness of women as a political category with interests distinct from those of men. This article uses new data about local women politicians in Scotland to test the hypothesis that there will be a strong, symmetrical and independent relationship between a woman politician's political orientation towards women and her experience of separate interaction. This relationship holds good for experience of any kind of separate interaction, even if it is confined to groups of an entirely non-political character, thereby confirming the causal inference that politicization is the consequence of separate experience and not ils precondition.

Feminist Theory and the Canon of Political Thought

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Zerilli
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Nation States

This article describes the connection between feminist theory and the canon of political thought. It explains that feminist approaches to the canon of political theory are characterized by deep ambivalence and the majority of canonical authors have mostly dismissed women as political beings in their own right and casted them instead as mere appendages to citizen man. The article suggests that the question of how to make political judgments about other cultures and practices that deeply affect women is particularly important for feminist theory today. Globalization and the weakening of nation states have also pressed feminists to raise political demands with an eye to their multicultural and transnational significance.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Identity Theory ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Stable Category ◽  
Gender Trouble

This chapter discusses Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (GT) and its legacy in political theory. It sets out five themes of GT: the claim that identity is always the result of power; the interplay between sex, gender, and desire; the critique of “identity politics,” including any feminism that posits a stable category of “women”; the concept of performativity; and the possibility of change via subversive performance. The chapter then goes on to discuss the major impact that GT has had on feminist theory, queer theory, trans theory, and intersectionality, along with the surprising lack of impact on theories of multiculturalism and identity theory more broadly. Finally the chapter discusses some main criticisms of the book.

Experience

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Grant
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Personal Politics ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Point Of Departure

This chapter analyzes multiple conceptualizations of experience developed within Anglo-American and French feminist theory, and traces their relation to the concepts “woman,” “patriarchy,” and “personal politics.” It explores experience as epistemological ground, as a mechanism of subject formation, as a technique in consciousness raising, and as a methodology. Taking the feminist sexuality debates as a point of departure, the chapter also situates the limitations of feminist notions of experience in relation to queer theory, critical theory, poststructuralism, and the problematics of humanism. Finally, the chapter shows how feminist theoretical uses of the idea of experience parallel explorations and developments of the concept in other non-feminist critical theories. Though it has very often been ignored or considered as something of an anomaly by other critical theorists, the chapter demonstrates that feminist theory is a kind of critical theory and situates it in that broader context.

Workers’ Rights

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Zackin
Keyword(s):  
Labor Movement ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
Negative Rights ◽  
Labor Leaders ◽  
Louis Hartz

This chapter examines the campaigns to add labor rights to state constitutions. The quintessential arguments about America's exceptional liberalism and its uniquely negative-rights culture have focused on the labor movement, which Louis Hartz has argued was a participant in—rather than a rival of—the dominant economic and ideological regime. The chapter first considers the labor provisions of state constitutions before discussing the ways that labor leaders and organizations influenced the drafting of new constitutions and amendments to existing constitutions. It then explains how labor rights were created not only to overturn particular court decisions, but also to preempt possible litigation. It also shows how labor organizations used constitutional rights to dictate state legislatures what they had to do while simultaneously telling courts what they could not do. The chapter demonstrates that, even in the area of labor regulation, Americans have successfully pursued the creation of positive rights.

Self-Consciousness Raising

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Grobe
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
West Coast ◽  
The Other ◽  
Feminist Art ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Art Program ◽  
History Of

Two narratives dominate existing accounts of feminist art in America in the 1970s. One says that this art was politically and aesthetically naïve, based too firmly in consciousness raising. The other selects a few artists or works to rescue from this decade and celebrate as precociously deconstructive. In feminist theory of the 1980s and 1990s, the favored model for such anti-confessional, ironic performance is drag. This chapter focuses on the work of two performance and conceptual artists of the 1970s who fit neatly into neither of these stories. Linda Montano and Eleanor Antin each blended self-revelation and roleplay, confession and drag into a single practice, which they insisted was basically “autobiographical.” Placing these two artists in their West Coast feminist context (e.g., in relation to the Feminist Art Program), and rereading the history of drag performance itself, this chapter theorizes “camp sincerity” as, in fact, the signature style of self-performance in the 1970s.

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