9.13: Discussion Questions

1. How can we design a political community or country wherein all forms of individuality have equal opportunity and influence to contribute to our society?
2. Why are “equality politics” and “difference politics” caught within the same binary paradigm?
3. Why and how does intersectional feminism make the gender binary obsolete?
4. What is the role of law within democratic self-government and who should decide the rules regulating electoral competition?
5. How is individualistic liberty ethically different from relational liberty?

Attribution

Dr. Jackie F. Steele, "A Late Modern Typology of Democratizing Feminisms," CC By-NC 4.0.

 

My Discussion Questions

1. Describe and explain Squires’ typology of feminisms: 1) an equality politics [equality feminism] aimed at inclusion through the presumed neutrality of the universal subject, 2) a difference politics [radical feminism, maternal feminism and/or cultural feminists] aimed at reversing patriarchal values through affirmations of the feminine, and 3) a diversity politics [postmodern deconstructivist feminism] aimed at deconstructing traditional categories of analysis so as to displace the male/female binary underpinning the false dichotomies of modernist thinking.
2. Explain what Steele (13.1.4) means when she writes: “Over the past 40 years, mainstream equality feminism and diversity feminisms were exposed for their own internal exclusions of women of various backgrounds, be they black/women of colour (hooks, 1981; Lorde, 1984; Abu-Laban, 1998; Razack, 1998), aboriginal women/indigenous feminists (Green, 2007; Monture-Angus; Two-Axe Early), Québécois feminists (de Sève, 2000, Lamoureux, 2000), queer and lesbian feminists (Butler, 2006; Majury, 1994; Rich, 1981), or women with disabilities (Peters, 1995; 2003), to name just a few.”
3. Explain what Steele (13/1.4.1) means when she writes: “Postmodern (deconstructive) diversity feminism chose the rejection of the concept of “women” and all legal categories as monolithically oppressive. By contrast, intersectional reconstructivist feminisms opted for an explicit displacement of white, middle-upper-class women as the “norm” of feminist theory-activism, and a re-centring and reconstruction of diverse womxn’s intersectional experiences of inequality as the political and legal category around which intersectional feminist organizes.”
4. Describe what is meant by Civic Republican Intersectional Feminism (13.1.5) being sure to address all bolded [emphasis added] parts of the following paragraph: The end goal of this last iteration of a civic republican intersectional feminism is to displace the hyper-individualist reading of political liberty qua self-government as the aggregate output of abstract individuals devoid of any pre-democratic relational power differentials. Rather, by restoring and reconstructing a collectively-practiced concept and iteration of democratic liberty as a system of collective self-government and self-determination of all of the intersectional diversities constitutive of the population, the primary aim is to displace liberal individualism’s reductive view of liberty as merely an “absence of government interference” (Pettit, 1997), and to restore the ethical power-distributing and power-sharing role of representative democratic institutions as the co-authoritative praxis dynamically constituting an intersectionally diverse yet co-equal citizenry. This reframes political representation and all representative institutions as the constitutive symbols of the collective freedom of the self-determining peoples, nations, social groups and individuals regulated by the democratic rules of the political community and who are structurally positioned under its jurisdiction of care.
5. Explain and evaluate Steele’s claim [emphasis added] that: “the rule of law can and must be used to intentionally break up the corruption, collusion, and nepotistic hegemonies that hold our public offices and our parliaments hostage to pre-democratic status-privileges. The use of intersectional, power-distributing legal quotas mechanisms is the democratic solution we have avoided, I suggest, due to liberal assumptions that political liberty was “present” if there was “less government interference” (Steele, 2009). This has left our most sacred political competitions largely unregulated by democratic law. Advocacy of this “deregulated space” has been defended by political party leaders who would prefer to retain complete and selfish license to choose not from the full intersectional diversity of human excellence and experience present within the population, but from the narrow and nepotistic social affinity groups who support the private agendas and partisan control of existing party elites over the levers of governance.
6. How do feminisms help us in thinking about and advancing the movement for individual and collective liberation? What practical guides to thought and action do they offer?