Feminists Theorize the Political

This collection examines the political status of poststructuralist theory within feminism. Challenging the view that poststructuralism weakens feminism, Feminists Theorize the Political confirms that contemporary theoretical debates are politically consequential. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott have posed a number of questions to prominent legal scholars, literary critics, philosophers, political theorists, historians, and cultural theorists. The resulting essays do not settle the questions but generate new and productive directions for them. The essays in this anthology speak to the questions that emerge from the convergence of feminism and poststructuralism: What happens to feminist critique when traditional foundations—experience, history, universal norms—are called into question? Can feminist theory problematize the notion of the subject without losing its political effectivity? Which version of the subject is to question, and how does that questioning open up possibilities for reformulating agency, power, and sites of political resistance? What are the consequences of a specifically feminist reformulation of difference? What are the uses and limits of a poststructuralist critique of binary logic for the theorization of racial and class differences, the position of the subaltern?