This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that Brandom can (...) provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of cross-border migration for social work's normative commitment to social justice. Specifically, it interrogates Nancy Fraser's conceptualisation of social justice in guiding social work practice with refugees. The paper is grounded in an ethnographic study conducted from 2008 to 2009 in a South African church which had provided shelter to a group of refugees following their displacement by an outbreak of xenophobic violence. The study's findings reveal that various kinds of misframing created multiple forms of (...) voicelessness amongst its foreign participants. These filtered out to justify, perpetuate and deepen other types of injustice, particularly misrecognition and maldistribution. There was some evidence of resistance, solidarity, recognition and small acts of redistribution. However, such positive practices proved difficult to sustain. The paper confirms the central importance of the notion of misframing for conceptualising and responding to social injustice in the absence of citizenship?as required of practitioners in the field of social work with refugees and indeed other groups rendered vulnerable within current economic, social, political and cultural constellations. In this regard, Fraser's contribution looks set to enrich social work's commitment to social justice both in normative and practical terms. (shrink)

Cosmetic surgery provides a problematic case for feminist theorizing about femininity and women's relationship with their bodies. Feminist accounts of femininity and beauty are unable to explain cosmetic surgery without undermining the women who opt for it. I argue that cosmetic surgery may have less to do with beauty and more to do with being ordinary, taking one's life into one's own hands, and determining how much suffering is fair.

The paper identifies the phenomenal rise of increasingly invasive forms of elective cosmetic surgery targeted primarily at women and explores its significance in the context of contemporary biotechnology. A Foucauldian analysis of the significance of the normalization of technologized women's bodies is argued for. Three "Paradoxes of Choice" affecting women who "elect" cosmetic surgery are examined. Finally, two utopian feminist political responses are discussed: a Response of Refusal and a Response of Appropriation.

This paper provides an overview of twenty years of feminist philosophy in Northamerica. The professionalization of feminist theory that has occurred through the mainstreaming of feminist philosophy creates a danger of a gap between theory and practice that creates the danger of co-optation. Three stages of feminist philosophizing are outlined, including the radical critique, gender difference and difference/post-modernist stages. The last stage, it is argued, leads to an conceptual impasse about feminist strategies for social change.

This paper explicates Foucault's conception of experience and defends it as an important theoretical resource for feminist theory. It analyzes Linda Alcoff's devastating critique of Foucault's account of sexuality and her reasons for advocating phenomenology as a more viable alternative. I agree with her that a philosophically sophisticated understanding of experience must remain central for feminist theory, but I demonstrate that her critique of Foucault is based on a mistaken view of his philosophical position as well as on a problematic (...) understanding of phenomenology. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that contemporary democratic theory gives insufficient attention to the important contributions dissenting citizens make to democratic life. Guided by the dissident practices of activist women, I develop a more expansive conception of citizenship that recognizes dissent and an ethic of political courage as vital elements of democratic participation. I illustrate how this perspective on citizenship recasts and reclaims women's courageous dissidence by reconsidering the well-known story of Rosa Parks.

I argue that Johanna Meehan's call to examine the extra-linguistic psychic, affective and biological dimensions of gender identity is extremely important both for feminist theory in particular and for contemporary Continental philosophy in general. However, I suspect that such an examination might necessitate more than a mere expansion or reconstruction of Habermas' views; on the contrary, I suggest that Meehan's line of argument might lead instead toward a radical deconstruction of Habermasian critical theory. Key Words: feminism • Habermas • identity (...) • moral vs ethical. (shrink)

This essay examines the educational opportunities of people in poverty who receive social welfare assistance. The dominant political theory underlying social policy (including education policy) in the United States has evolved from 1960s and 1970s welfare liberalism into 1980s and 1990s style neo-conservatism—a theory that embraces principles of the market and individual liberty as paramount social values. Against this backdrop, I review two recent books that provide compelling evidence for this turn and I call for increased understanding of the relationship (...) between social welfare policies and higher education opportunities for those in poverty. (shrink)

Theorists analyzing the concepts of race and gender disagree over whether the terms refer to natural kinds, social kinds, or nothing at all. The question arises: what do we mean by the terms? It is usually assumed that ordinary intuitions of native speakers are definitive. However, I argue that contemporary semantic externalism can usefully combine with insights from Foucauldian genealogy to challenge mainstream methods of analysis and lend credibility to social constructionist projects.

The blossoming literature on genealogy in recent years has come as somewhat of a pleasant surprise to the historically inclined among us. It has not, however, come without its difficulties. As I see it, the literature on genealogy is guilty of two conflations, what I call the “debunking/problematizing conflation” and the “problematizing/rationalizing conflation.” Both are the result of the inadequate typological maps currently used to organize the literature. As a result, what makes many genealogies philosophically interesting often remains obscure. In (...) response, I propose a new two-dimensional typology that avoids these conflations and outfits us with a richer conceptual vocabulary with which to understand and organize the genealogies which populate the literature. By identifying a second dimension of analysis which has thus far gone untheorized, my typology enables us to elucidate the various normative objectives and objects of investigation structuring a literature which is more diverse than previously acknowledged. We can thus get a clearer understanding of the problems those genealogies face, of their critical potential, and of their implications for our conception of critique. (shrink)

The paper argues that we should read Taylor’s philosophy as a philosophy of liberation and that it is as a philosopher of liberation that Taylor distinguishes himself as a critical theorist. It beg...

The article presents an original needs-based partial theory of human injustice and shows its relationship to existing theories of human need and human liberation. The theory is based on an original typology of three social structural sources of human injustice, a partial theorization of the mechanisms of human injustice, and a needs-based theorization of the nature of human injustice, as experienced by individuals. The article makes a sociological contribution to normative social theory by clarifying the relationship of human injustice to (...) human needs, human rights, and human liberation. The theory contends that human injustice is produced when oppression, mechanistic dehumanization, and exploitation create systematic inequality in opportunities to address human needs, leading to wrongful need deprivation and the resulting serious harm. In one longer sentence, this needs-based partial theory of the sources, mechanisms, and nature of human injustice contends that three distinct social systemic sources—oppression, mechanistic dehumanization, and exploitation—produce unique and/or overlapping social mechanisms, which create systematic inequality in opportunities to address universal human needs in culturally specific ways, thus producing the nature of the human injustice theorized here: wrongfully unmet needs and serious harm. (shrink)

Since overweight and obesity have been framed as one of the main contemporary health challenges in industrialized countries, it has become a matter of public health efforts. While the belief that obese individuals are personally responsible for their body weight prevails in public opinion, evidence-based health science widely acknowledges that obesity is significantly influenced by socio-economic factors and thus that prevention requires structural changes. This constellation bears the chance of politicizing an issue formerly conceived of as private which really is (...) dependent on societal contingencies, such as the particular availability of food. Reflecting on the prevention of obesity from an ethical point of view, therefore, requires an elaborate concept of political responsibility. The core thesis of this paper is that existing approaches within the field of obesity ethics fall short in reasonably grasping the political dimensions at play, due to the prevailing individualistic understanding of responsibility. Drawing upon Iris Marion Young’s concept of political responsibility, I propose an alternative approach that emphasizes the structural determinants of obesity. By arguing this way, obesity prevention comes into view as a public endeavor that involves public discourse as well as shared action. Political responsibility then cannot be discharged merely by intrusive governmental action nor by individuals on their own, but should be considered as a task all of us share. As I will sketch in the last part of the paper, this includes contesting discourses on interpretations of need. Thereby, the paper contributes to recognizing obesity as a social instead of an individual problem. (shrink)

This article is a feminist intervention into the ways that disability is researched and represented in philosophy at present. Nevertheless, some of the claims that I make over the course of the article are also pertinent to the marginalization in philosophy of other areas of inquiry, including philosophy of race, feminist philosophy more broadly, indigenous philosophies, and LGBTQI philosophy. Although the discipline of philosophy largely continues to operate under the guise of neutrality, rationality, and objectivity, the institutionalized structure of the (...) discipline implicitly and explicitly promotes certain ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies as bona fide philosophy, while casting the ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies of marginalized philosophies as mere simulacra of allegedly fundamental ways of knowing and doing philosophy and thus rendering these marginalized philosophies more or less expendable. This article is designed to show that legitimized philosophical discourses are vital mechanisms in the problematization of disability. (shrink)

Most democratic theorists agree that concentrations of wealth and power tend to distort the functioning of democracy and ought to be countered wherever possible. Deliberative democrats are no exception: though not its only potential value, the capacity of deliberation to ‘neutralise power’ is often regarded as ‘fundamental’ to deliberative theory. Power may be neutralised, according to many deliberative democrats, if citizens can be induced to commit more fully to the deliberative resolution of common problems. If they do, they will be (...) unable to get away with inconsistencies and bad or private reasons, thereby mitigating the illegitimate influence of power. I argue, however, that the means by which power inflects political disagreement is far more subtle than this model suggests and cannot be countered so simply. As a wealth of recent research in political psychology demonstrates, human beings persistently exhibit ‘motivated reasoning’, meaning that even when we are sincerely committed to the deliberative resolution of common problems, and even when we are exposed to the same reasons and evidence, we still disagree strongly about what ‘fair cooperation’ entails. Motivated reasoning can be counteracted, but only under exceptional circumstances such as those that enable modern science, which cannot be reliably replicated in our society at large. My analysis suggests that in democratic politics – which rules out the kind of anti-democratic practices available to scientists – we should not expect deliberation to reliably neutralise power. (shrink)

The disconnect problem arises wherever there is ongoing and severe discordance between the scientific assessment of a politically relevant issue, and the politics and legislation of said issue. Here, we focus on the disconnect problem as it arises in the case of climate change, diagnosing a failure to respect the necessary tradeoff between authority and autonomy within a public institution like science. After assessing the problematic deployment of scientific authority in this arena, we offer suggestions for how to mitigate climate (...) change’s particular disconnect problem, as well as more general proposals for reforming science advising. (shrink)

Human need and related concepts such as basic needs have long been part of the implicit conceptual foundation for social work theory, practice, and research. However, while the published literature in social work has long stressed social justice, and has incorporated discussion of human rights, human need has long been both a neglected and contested concept. In recent years, the explicit use of human needs theory has begun to have a significant influence on the literature in social work.

The paper focuses on the discussion of social freedom in the family in Axel Honneth's most recent book Freedom's Right. I argue, on the one hand, that radical democrats have much to learn from Honneth's method of normative reconstruction because it provides a much needed corrective to the “social weightlessness” that characterizes their thought about democracy. In contrast to the current preoccupation with rarefied issues of political ontology, Freedom's Right exemplifies a type of sociologically attuned thinking that is essential for (...) addressing issues of power and inequality. On the other hand, I argue that Honneth's reliance on a teleological notion of historical progress has deeply constraining effects on his critique of power. First, in so far as it underestimates the impact of growing social inequality on personal and intimate relations, it fails to acknowledge just how extensive, radical and, potentially deeply contentious the political measures needed to realize social freedom in the family may have to be. Second, Honneth's teleological reconstruction provides too thin a basis to generate substantive normative solutions to issues of social justice in the family. Third, teleology tends to depoliticize the process of emancipatory social change by construing it in terms of impersonal mechanisms and developmental tendencies rather than as open-ended, often polemical and deeply contested forms of political struggle. (shrink)

Amy Allen’s insightful and nuanced feminist critical-theoretical account of the politics of our selves could be strengthened with a more complex and differentiated account of power and of gender, and of the social as a site of multiple conflicting and contesting relations. Such an account would adhere more consistently to Allen’s own project of understanding subjects to be constituted through both relations of power and relations of interdependence and mutuality, care and solidarity. The development of this account, and of a (...) situated account of desire or motivation, is essential for a feminist critical theory of self and social transformation. (shrink)

I argue that Nelson's feminist transformation of empiricism provides the basis of a dialogue across three currently competing feminist epistemologies: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theories, and postmodern feminism, a dialogue that will result in a dissolution of the apparent tensions between these epistemologies and provide an epistemology with the openness and fluidity needed to embrace the concerns of feminists.

This article places Foucault's 1977 suggestions regarding the reform of French rape law in the context of ongoing feminist debates as to whether rape should be considered a sex crime or a species of assault. When viewed as a disciplinary matrix with both physical and discursive effects, rape and the rape trial clearly contribute to the “hysterization” of women by cultivating complainants' confessions in order to demonstrate their supposed lack of self-knowledge.

One of the key concepts in autonomist Marxism is the ‘general intellect’. As capitalism develops, labour and its products become increasingly ‘immaterial’, inasmuch as the physical side of production is taken over by automated systems. The result is that all aspects of the collective worker's affective, desiring and cognitive capabilities are now brought to bear on production itself. This problematises capitalistic notions of proprietary control, because it raises the possibility that the mass ‘cognitive worker’, and the inherently co-operative principles it (...) embodies, can detach itself from neoliberal mechanisms of subsumption and valorisation and lay the foundation for a new communalistic ethos. What is intriguing is that several autonomists evoke the work of Mikhail Bakhtin vis-à-vis the ‘general intellect’. Bakhtin did maintain that dialogism is an irreducibly collective phenomenon, and that we all contribute to the continuous making and remaking of language. We do not ‘own’ the words we use; as such, meaning is necessarily plural and heterogeneous, the product of the interaction of many texts and voices that can only be pragmatically and contingently unified. The present article seeks to explore the connection between Bakhtin and autonomism, focusing on the insight that communication is always ‘more than myself’, and hence integral to the ‘social brain’ that is a shared legacy, our ‘commonwealth’. It also raises the possibility of a more ‘troublesome’ Bakhtin than is generally countenanced by the liberal academy, and a concomitantly ‘dangerous’ dialogism that haunts a digitalised and networked world marked in equal measure by tremendous emancipatory promise and catastrophic threat. (shrink)

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept rest.... Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted (...) as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult. Michel Foucault (1988b, 154). (shrink)

In this article, Hannah Arendt's concept of action will be used to problematize current transformations of the health care sector and examine some responses by ethicists in light of those transformations. The sphere of human interaction that should typify health care work is identified as an action of unpredictable praxis in contrast to controllable procedures and techniques which increasingly take place in the health care sector.

This article is concerned with the possibility of conceiving a form of social critique that has its locus in the human body. Therefore I engage in a close reading of the (later) work of Butler which can be analysed as an elaboration of a Foucaldian critical ‘virtue’. In order to elaborate and to refine my ideas I go deeper into the criticisms McNay has uttered regarding the very impossibility of taking any distance from a given social or political order within (...) a Foucaldian–Butlerian framework. I show that there is no need to have recourse to a phenomenological perspective, as McNay claims, in order to achieve ‘critical distance’. On the contrary, I argue that it is imperative to explore a register of bodily experience that entails self-expropriation and which is linked to an attitude or ‘ethos’ that renounces any judgemental perspective. (shrink)

More than two decades after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act , people with disabilities continue to live at the margins of American democracy and capitalist society. This persistent exclusion poses a conundrum to political theorists committed to disability rights, multiculturalism, and social justice. Drawing from feminist insights, specifically the work of Nancy Fraser, among others, I examine the necessary conditions for meaningful inclusion to be realized within a deliberative democracy. Using Fraser's concept of “participatory parity” as a (...) proxy for inclusion, I strategize how to overcome informal barriers—economic inequality and misrecognition—that persist even after disabled people are granted the legal right to participate. The analysis concludes that a truly inclusionary and multicultural democracy requires the redistribution of wealth and a more expansive model of political deliberation, one that can recognize unconventional modes of communication through practices of translation. (shrink)

It can be argued that Nancy Fraser's work integrates the concepts of recognition and redistribution by questioning the definition of the concept of recognition in order to bring it closer to the practical scope of redistribution. One of the difficulties raised by the concept of recognition is that it can appear as a kind of social monism by presenting culture as the main factor behind all social criticism, and thus, behind all kinds of claims and conflicts. However, it is possible (...) to acknowledge the theoretical significance of the economy as well. Instead of a monistic framework, we should adopt a dualistic one, founded less on the distinction between economy and culture than on the analysis of their imbrications. Both economy, and status as defined in cultural, ethnic, or sexual approaches to recognition, could work together to minimize the importance of the civil and political rights defended by liberal thinkers. (shrink)

This paper re-examines the relationship between power, reason and history in Horkheimer and Adorno’s "Dialectic of Enlightenment." Contesting Habermas’ highly influential reading of the text, I argue that "Dialectic of Enlightenment," far from being a dead-end for critical theory, opens up important lines of thought in the philosophy of history that contemporary critical theorists would do well to recover. My focus is on the relationship that Horkheimer and Adorno trace between enlightenment rationality and the domination of inner and outer nature.

This review article takes up certain key issues that are at stake in the valuable collection of essays edited by Lovell. It considers critically the argument that the adoption of Fraser's perspectival dualism implies regression to a base—superstructure theory of the social. It assesses the advantages of extending the dualism of redistribution and recognition to include also the need for participatory parity in the post-Westphalian political order. It raises again the question of whether Honneth is sociologically more forceful than Fraser (...) in arguing that material inequality is merely a facet of a more profound disrespect (lack of recognition). Lovell's assessment of Honneth's `recognition monism' is commended in that it resurrects an earlier critique of structural-functionalism to make a helpful distinction between social integration and (non-normative) system integration. She addresses these issues in terms of a wider critical realism concerned with disaggregating those social relations which are more causally generative from others: an approach which permits illuminating debates over the degree to which patriarchy and heteronormativity are contingent or necessary to late capitalism. Lovell also introduces Bourdieu into the debate, and especially his conceptions of misrecognition and symbolic violence. Finally, Sayer's vigorous arguments about the moral significance of distribution and class are considered as contributing to the current ethical turn. The article ends with an attempt to defend Bourdieu, whom Sayer sees both as a profound sociologist of class but also a theorist oriented too exclusively to agents' egoistic search for strategic advantage. The author concludes that although Fraser's perspectival trinity (or dualism) approach seems preferable to Honneth's monism, this should not obscure the empirical interweaving of deficiencies of distribution and of recognition in social reality. Indeed, new studies show the far-reaching consequences of this. In those societies where maldistribution is most marked, exposure to certain psychosocial risks such as low status (recognition) and low social capital literally incorporate stress, via biological pathways. Hence unequal health outcomes of a surprising range can also be detected. (shrink)

As an alternative to post-structural accounts of ‘performative’ agency (e.g. Judith Butler), Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib and Maria Pia Lara) propose the idea of the narrative self. The concept of narrative is seen as a way of bridging the gap between the formalism of Habermas’s idea of communicative ethics and the dispersion that arises from the post-structural critique of the subject. The idea of the narrative self undoubtedly yields an active and creative account of agency. However, I argue that the (...) attempt to reconcile a narrative concept of the self within a theory of communicative ethics results in a limited understanding of identity and agency in the context of the systemic reproduction of gender inequalities. (shrink)

Methodologies of poststructuralist theory and critical social theory may be appropriated for nursing research and practice. Researchers using either methodology employ an analysis of power to explore experiences in various fields, and raise issues diat are highly relevant to nursing. However, the two methodologies differ and, often, die respective dieories are sharply opposed. In diis paper, die differences bodi from widiin and between each approach are explored, showing dieir tensions and limits. I contend that a reflexive approach to discourse analysis (...) provides insight into some of die methodological challenges diat arise in die context of bodi dieories. It is argued diat die differences between poststructuralism and critical social dieory seem likely to be mellowed by encounters diat treat each other with respect. To some extent, such encounters may tend to converge die two positions. (shrink)

Axel Honneth distinguishes between recognitive practices according to the social domain in which they occur and this allows him to theorise the relationship between power and recognition. 'Love-based recognition', which suggests the centrality of recognition to the relationships that nurture us in the first instance, is located in the family. Honneth argues that relationships encompassed by this category are pre-political, thereby repeating the distinction between the public and the private common to much political theory. This article explores the structure of (...) this delineation in his thinking. I argue that Honneth's analysis marginalises feminist concerns with how power functions through recognition in the private sphere. Honneth also robs himself of a rejoinder to recognition sceptics, who suggest that the desire for recognition is a condition of subordination. The article argues for an alternative approach to the analysis of 'love' within recognitive theory. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. (shrink)

By tracing a specific development through the approaches of Peirce, James, and Dewey I present a view of (classical) pragmatist epistemology that invites comparison with recent work in feminist epistemology. Important dimensions of pragmatism and feminism emerge from this critical dialectical relationship between them. Pragmatist reflections on the role of reason and philosophy in a changing world encourage us to see that philosophy's most creative and most responsible future must also be a feminist one.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Dewey were both pragmatists who recognized the need to restructure the environment to bring about social progress. Gilman was even more of a pragmatist than Dewey, however, because she addressed problems he did not identify-much less confront. Her philosophy is in accord with the spirit of Dewey's work but in important ways, it is more consistent, more comprehensive and more radical than his instrumentalism.

While the groundbreaking insights that contemporary theorists have formulated with regards to space---as a multiplicity without essence, as an active event, and as inseparable from subjectivity, power, Otherness and time---have ostensibly purged it of its traditional understanding as absolute, a specific visuality characteristic of Cartesian perspectivalism remains privileged in its theorization which force it to remain so. While the complexity of space cannot be recovered from an abstract contemplation of its visual geometry in a way that reflects these contemporary concerns, (...) there have unfortunately been relatively few attempts to imagine space away from the visual in a way that challenges its traditional absoluteness. To this end, it is argued that because sound and music contain implicit and explicit spatialities, the sonic represents a rich and unexplored area from which to imagine a radical non-visual space that discursively organizes space according to a different economy through which to challenge its assumed visuality. And yet, even when space has been approached through sound, there is a tendency to exteriorize sound into an object or a set of practices that robs it of its defining quality---its own "soundfulness". By breaking down those factors that are considered salient to how space is conceived today along sonic rather than visual lines, the argument is made that the "soundfulness" of sound's physical properties gives it a complex texture of excess that is corporealized within the body and forwards the philosophical possibility of unfolding the spatiality of sound according to vectors beyond the visible in a way that, while reflecting contemporary concerns, prevents its return to absoluteness. To take seriously this "soundfulness" thus allows us to recuperate the sonic as a philosophical and political way of experiencing and knowing the world, including that of space. The arguments, as well as being drawn from the insights of contemporary spatial theory, the physics of sound, the phenomenology of listening, rhizomatic and feminist theory, quantum mechanics and musicology, will be explained through an understanding of space as sound and exemplified in The Disintegration Loops, a post-minimalist musical piece by sonic artist William Basinski. (shrink)

Elements comprising a set of building blocks for a feminist reconstruction of citizenship might include: a critical synthesis of citizenship as a status and a practice; strengthening the inclusive side of citizenship (within and across nation-states); the principle of differentiated universalism, addressing tensions between an analysis grounded in difference and the universalism standing at the heart of citizenship; and a challenge to the binary thinking that constrains the articulation of women's claims to citizenship.

The model of feminism as humanist in practice and postmodern in theory is inadequate. Feminist practice and theory directly inform each other to displace both humanist and postmodern conceptions of the subject. An examination of feminism's use of rights discourse suggests that feminist practice questions the humanist conception of the subject as a self-identity. Likewise, feminist theory undermines the postmodern emphasis on the constitutive instability and indeterminacy of the subject.

This essay explores ethical conflicts underlying the discourse of the policy debate about transracial adoption, focusing on the adoption of Black children by whites. Three underlying conflicts are analyzed, namely, the values of equality versus community, interracial community versus multiculturalism, individuality versus racial-ethnic community. The essay concludes with observations on multicultural families.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.4 (2003) 330-352 [Access article in PDF] Liberal Irony, Rhetoric, and Feminist Thought: A Unifying Third Wave Feminist Theory Valerie R. Renegar School of Communication San Diego State University Stacey K. Sowards Department of Communication Studies California State University, San Bernardino The meanings of a feminist movement and feminism have changed significantly over the past hundred years. From the women's suffrage movement, to the Supreme Court (...) decision in Roe v. Wade, to the 1980s label "feminazi," feminist theories and movements have emphasized many different issues for a variety of reasons. In part, it is these differences that make identification with feminist principles and practices so difficult. As part of the new generation of feminists, we are often left wondering if we are good enough as feminists, if we do enough as activists, and what it is that we really stand for. Many of us have grown up with the benefits and the victories of the feminists in the second wave and feel a responsibility to continue to seek the end of oppression. However, our experiences as feminists and young women often leave us feeling angry, hopeless, and confused as to where we are supposed to go, how we are supposed to get there, and what battles we are supposed to wage as part of a feminist movement. Resolving these tensions and questions will allow us to better understand and articulate what it is that we want and need in a feminist theory. Recent and ongoing division within and among feminist movements and theories, lack of consensus, in-group fighting, and a focus on singular women's theories and issues have created problems and a lack of solidarity that is counterproductive to feminism as a whole."Third wave feminism" is a term used to describe feminists who were born in the 1960s and 1970s. Although not universally recognized as a discrete wave of feminism, the third wave is increasingly distinguishing itself in both popular culture and academic writing. 1 We believe that third wave feminism is an emerging movement that currently lacks an overarching or coherent philosophy of praxis. While this type of unifying philosophy is not necessarily required by a movement, we believe that the presence of such a theory, in the instance of third wave feminism, would be highly [End Page 330] beneficial since it could provide direction and explain the motives of young feminists who are still in the process of developing and defining their feminist beliefs and actions. Often the philosophy of a movement is not apparent until the movement is well established or has accomplished its goals. Third wave feminists, however, are in a unique position to simultaneously create and embrace a coherent philosophy while developing their feminist ideas and practices. In this essay, we argue that Richard Rorty's notion of liberal irony, as interpreted by third wave feminist experience, is a coherent philosophy of thought and action that will center the emerging feminist movement and allow it to prosper.For us, a rhetorical theory constructed from Rorty's liberal irony and pragmatism, together with various third wave feminist theories, provides the sort of solution that addresses many of our concerns about the direction of feminist theory. Rorty's philosophy of liberal ironism is compelling but has received scant attention from feminist or rhetorical theorists. A few feminist philosophers have examined a pragmatist feminism, but have largely focused on the early pragmatists, ignoring Rorty's liberal ironism entirely or discussing it only in the larger context of pragmatism (Aboulafia 1993; Hart 1993; Leffers 1993; Pappas 1993; Rooney 1993; Shuler and Tate 2001; Seigfried 1996; Sullivan 2001; Upin 1993). Donna Haraway (1990), although not dealing directly with irony from a pragmatist perspective, notes that language politics are strongly associated with feminist struggles. She argues that feminists can utilize ironic methods to negotiate identities that "seem contradictory, partial, and strategic" (197). An ironic perspective recognizes the exclusion inherent in naming and allows contradictory fusions of identity to emerge. In this way, irony blurs the boundaries of language... (shrink)

This paper argues for a reading of Michel Foucault’s works that draws on an expansive concept of normativity and places Foucault’s project in a broader framework. It is argued that the distinction between the normative and the non-normative fails to grasp what is most significant in Foucault’s work. This distinction should be replaced by a broader understanding of normativity permeating all social practices. However, in order to retain the sound intuition of two distinct moments within critical thought, this broader understanding (...) must be complemented with a view of the entwined perspectives of participant and observer, both thoroughly permeated by normativity. However, there is a tension between these perspectives which both Foucault and critics such as Jürgen Habermas recognise as intensified in modernity. This intensification is manifest as instability, an ever-present possibility of shifting between perspectives that seems to demand resolution. Taking the fundamental norm motivating Foucault’s work as “the undefined work of freedom” the paper considers how this norm guides Foucault’s work by affirming this play of perspectives or “revolving door of rationality” in a way that marks a fundamental difference from his critics. (shrink)

In this paper, we bring together Foucault's biography and oeuvre to explore key concepts that support the analysis of nurses' acts of resistance. Foucault reflected on the power relations taking place in health services, making his contribution especially useful for the analysis of resistance in this context. Over three decades, he proposed a nonnormative philosophy while concomitantly engaging in transgressive practices guided by values such as human rights and social justice. Hence, Foucault's philosophy and public activism are an apparent contradiction, (...) but we argue that when analysed together they allow for a different understanding of his work. We describe the evolution of the concept of resistance in Foucault's work, supported by the approaches of Brent Picket (1996) and Miguel Morey (2013). Foucault started his work considering the idea of transgressiveness as it connects to being at the margins of society. He then spent considerable time elaborating the concept of power and identifying resistance strategies as forms of power exercise. In doing so, he considered that people engage with social change from multiple positions, including limited desire for change, fomenting reforms, or engaging in everyday revolutionary acts. As he further elaborated on power relations and defined resistance, Foucault asserted that resistance involves both repressive and productive dimensions of power, governance of biological life, state governance, and deliberate practices of illegalisms. Finally, Foucault shifted his attention to the freedom of ethical subjects, proposing the use of counter‐conduct and counter‐discourses to speak truth against oppression. Such framework offers a comprehensive lens for analysing nurses' acts of resistance within the complexities of the healthcare system and in society. In summary, Foucault's conceptual framework on resistance expands the role of nurses, to understand them not only as caregivers, but also as political agents capable of confronting and transforming oppressive institutional practices. (shrink)