In this article, I develop an account of judgment that I term embodied reflective judgment, which implies that thinking and feeling are connected, entangled, and crucial for critical judgment. How we think about something can prompt an emotional response, and that response can prompt further reflection necessary for critical judgment. I clarify the relationship between thinking and feeling in judgment by foregrounding guilt feelings as a specific issue that individuals and political collectivities must deal with to make embodied reflective judgment (...) possible. I ground the concept of embodied reflective judgment in an engagement with Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

In this article, I bring Marx and Adorno into conversation with affect theory to establish three points: First, an affective reading of the concepts of alienation and exploitation via Marx’s metaphor of the “vampire capital” explains how capitalism depletes raced, gendered, and sexed working class of their bodily and mental powers. Second, discussing these thinkers’ ideas in the context of the larger mind and body opposition revives attention to the body in contemporary political theory and exposes how the mind and (...) body opposition covers the suffering caused by capitalism. Third, it shows that we must theorize the mind and body, feeling and thinking, as a mediated relation to grasping how particularly negative feelings can generate critical thinking, necessary to rebel against the vampire capital. (shrink)

Identity politics is commonly criticized as endangering democracy by undermining community, rational communication, and solidarity. Drawing on both radical democratic theory and standpoint theory, this article posits the opposite thesis: identity politics is pivotal for the democratization of democracy. Democratization through identity politics is achieved by disrupting hegemonic discourse and is, therefore, a matter of power, while such forms of power politics are reasonable when following minority standpoints generated through identity politics. The article develops this approach by connecting radical democratic (...) theories with standpoint theories and highlighting their commonalities and potential for mutual enhancement. Standpoint theory allows us to substantiate and reconcile two initially contradictory claims: particular minority standpoints are necessary to criticize the prevailing discursive and institutional orders, and these standpoints stem from intersubjective reason and embody ‘strong objectivity.’ This discussion presents a new perspective on the tension between particularity and universality, as well as the relationship between power and reason in democracy. Democratization is an oscillation between these polarities, and political theory should not aim to resolve this tension but to recognize and articulate it. Such recognition might involve elevating knowledge emerging from oppressed groups and exercising epistemic modesty when assessing specific forms of identity politics. (shrink)

In the chapter “Emancipatory Engagement with Oppression: The Perils of Identity in Feminist and Anti-Racist Politics” Oda Davanger argues against basing emancipatory struggles on identity categories. According to Davanger, conceptualizing oppression in terms of different axes, i.e. identity categories, can be harmful to feminist philosophy and ideology since it contri- butes to upholding whiteness and maleness as norms and there- fore fails to “dismantle the system of domination”. In opposition to different versions of identity politics and the analytical and political (...) concept of intersectionality, Davanger complements bell hooks’ notion of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy with a post-structuralist perspective. Davanger’s answer to feminist and anti-racist struggles based on identity categories is a politics that is built around an “abstract and alienated desire” that makes possible engaging in the struggle for a world without oppression based on identity, regardless of individuals’ own experience of oppression. (shrink)

Interrogating the oft-stated emotion of ‘guilt’ amongst young female activists, I develop a theoretical account of why young women seem to be more burdened with such negative emotions than young men. Drawing on feminist theorising, I posit that young women’s emotional accounts of activist work highlight the retraditionalisation of gender under neoliberal modernity. I provide evidence of the gender-differentiated demands that heightened forms of reflexivity place on women, young women in particular. I then consider alternative conceptions of politics, grounded in (...) the work of Hannah Arendt, and extending my own earlier work on relational agency (Kennelly, 2009). Drawing on phenomenology to offer an account of political engagement grounded in the lived experiences of activists, I suggest that social movements might be bolstered through a deepened understanding of the role played by webs of relations and world-building practices, without losing sight of the gendered implications of such a turn. (shrink)

An encyclopedia entry providing an overview of the philosophical issues entailed in the theory and practice of "identity politics." Open access and online. Regularly updated.

This paper examines recent forms of post-identity thought within contemporary gender theory, specifically the works of Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz and Bobby Noble. Despite the many insights that these theories offer, I argue that they suffer from what Lois McNay has labelled ‘social weightlessness’ insofar as their models of subjectivity and agency are disconnected from the everyday realities of social subjects. I identify two ways in which this social weightlessness is manifested in radical gender theories that endorse a post-identity politics: (...) they overlook the social and political importance to many individuals of establishing stable, coherent identities; they are unable to offer a satisfactory account of agency. I suggest that these issues arise, at least in part, from the anti-recognition stance adopted by such radical gender theorists. I argue that by incorporating a properly nuanced model of recognition back into their theories they can imbue their accounts with a properly grounded model of the subject that is responsive to the inequalities and oppressions that infuse the particular concrete contexts in which we experience and live out our identities. (shrink)

This article considers Foucault’s analysis of ordoliberal and neoliberal governmental reason and its reorganization of social relations around a notion of enterprise. I focus on the particular idea that the generalization of the enterprise form to social relations was conceptualized in such exhaustive terms that it encompassed subjectivity itself. Self as enterprise highlights, inter alia, dynamics of control in neoliberal regimes which operate through the organized proliferation of individual difference in an economized matrix. It also throws into question conceptions of (...) individual autonomy that underpin much political thought and upon which ideas about political resistance are based. Self as enterprise also problematizes the viability of Foucault’s later work on ethics of the self as a practice of resistance. I go on to argue that Foucault’s discussion of an unresolved clash in civil society between monarchical and governmental power, between law and norm, offers an elliptical but more promising account of opposition to normalizing bio-power. (shrink)

Resistance and Rights. Comparing Arendt, Foucault, and YoungThe question if rights can be used in addressing gender-based oppression is at the center of recent debates in feminist theory. On the one hand, post-structuralist critiques have argued that differentiated rights, aimed at redressing injustices, reify the identity of oppressed groups (). On the other hand, proponents of differentiated rights have argued that these should be understood social-phenomenologically, as enabling social agents to counteract their oppression (Young 2011; ). This paper argues in (...) favor for the latter position while taking seriously the concern with regard to social identity articulated by the former. I do so by comparing Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on the relation between resistance and rights. Starting from the observation that Arendt and Foucault agree on the need for a new law that can curtail the destructive dynamics of late-modernity, I argue that their account of resistance ascribes great importance to rights. Discussing the two authors in turn, I focus on two parallel themes. Firstly, confronted with the fight against anti-Semitic persecution (Arendt) and the struggle against governmental techniques (Foucault), they invoke rights against the near-total domination by late-modern states. Secondly, reflecting on how freedom practices require relationships with others in which one can develop one’s individual uniqueness, they hint towards rights that consolidate these relationships, of which friendship is the paradigmatic example. In conclusion, I return to the feminist debate on differential rights to show how Young’s model of communicative democracy is influenced by and is an instance of the relational rights that can be found in Arendt and Foucault. (shrink)

On the basis of a case study of the integration of Haredi Jewish women into the Israeli high-tech industry, we explore how gender–religiosity intersectionality affects ultra-conservative women’s participation in the labor market and their ability to negotiate with employers for corporate work–family practices that address their idiosyncratic requirements. We highlight the importance of pious women’s affiliation to their highly organized religious communities while taking a process-centered approach to intersectionality and focusing on the matrix of domination formed by the Israeli state, (...) employers, and the organized ultra-orthodox community. We dub this set of actors “the unholy-trinity” and argue that it constructs a specific, religion-centric inequality regime that restrains women’s job and earning opportunities. At the same time, the “unholy trinity” also empowers women in their struggle to create a working environment that is receptive to their religiosity and what that commitment demands of them. (shrink)