Synopses & Reviews
Womens Liberation and the Sublime is a passionate report on the state of feminist thinking and practice after the linguistic turn. A critical assessment of masculinist notions of the sublime in modern and postmodern accounts grounds the author's positive and constructive recuperation of sublime experience in a feminist voice.
Review
"Overall, Mann's criticisms of postmodern feminism are important and her explanation of the positive feminist use of the sublime breaks new ground."--Feminism and Philosophy
Synopsis
The notion of citizenship is complex; it can be at once an identity; a set of rights, privileges, and responsibilities; an elevated and exclusionary status, a relationship between individual and state, and more. In recent decades citizenship has attracted interdisciplinary attention, particularly with the transnational growth of Western capitalism. Yet citizenship's relationship to gender has gone relatively unexplored--despite the globally pervasive denial of citizenship to women, historically and in many places, ongoing today.
This highly interdisciplinary volume explores the political and cultural dimensions of citizenship and their relevance to women and gender. Containing essays by a well-known group of scholars, including Iris Marion Young, Alison Jaggar, Martha Nussbaum, and Sandra Bartky, this book examines the conceptual issues and strategies at play in the feminist quest to give women full citizenship status. The contributors take a fresh look at the issues, going beyond conventional critiques, and examine problems in the political and social arrangements, practices, and conditions that diminish women's citizenship in various parts of the world.
About the Author
Bonnie Mann is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Her writing is informed by two decades of activism in the movement against violence against women and the anti-war movement. She lives in Eugene, Oregon with her partner and four daughters.
Table of Contents
Preface Introduction: The Linguistic Turn
1. Feminism and the Sublime
2. The Kantian Sublime: A Story in Two Paradoxes
3. The Postmodern Sublime
4. The Stakes of Feminism and the Feminist Postmodern
5. Interlude: Postmodern Goods (Sublime Experience in Feminist Celebrations of Pornography)
6. Talking Back to Feminist Postmodernism (What's Wrong with Discursive Bodies?)
7. Foundations for a Feminist Sublime
8. The Liberatory Sublime
9. The Natural Sublime
Conclusion