## 1. Historical Context and Developments



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 Maria
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 Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua,
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 Jurgen 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" Kimberle 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).


### 2.1 Feminist Engagements with Liberalism and Neoliberalism



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
Maria 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.


### 2.2 Radical Feminism



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:
> SS3.2)
> 
> 
> 



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).


### 2.3 Socialist, Marxist, and Materialist Feminisms



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.


### 2.4 Poststructuralist Feminisms



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).


### 2.5 Care, Vulnerability, Affect



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
(Beltran 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).


### 2.6 Intersectional Feminisms



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 Kimberle
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.)


### 2.7 Transnational, Decolonial, and Indigenous Feminisms



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 Kahnawa: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 Maria 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
Oyeronke Oyewumi (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;
Oyewumi 1997); language (Spivak 1988); identity and
subjectivity--for instance, accounts of hybridity,
border-thinking, multiplicity, and *mestizaje* (Anzaldua
1987; Ortega 2016; Moraga & Anzaldua [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; Verges 2019
[2021]).


### 2.8 Feminist Democratic Theory



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, Beltran
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, Jurgen 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
 Jurgen 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)
> 
> 
> 


## 3. New Directions in Feminist Political Philosophy



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.