Toward a Feminist Conception of Politics

Throughout most of the past decade, the syllabus for a political science course in feminist theory would have included texts by feminist historians, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics, but very few political theories by feminists.1 In the last two years, however, a distinctive new direction in feminist analysis has emerged with the publication of several books that introduce a feminist critical theory of politics. Early feminist social science studied gender roles and gender identity, describing gender as if it were a personal characteristic or attribute. Today the limitations of this work are evident in feminists' questioning of the validity of gender as an analytic concept,2 as well as of the possibility of specifying the identity of the group women that is to be liberated by the feminist movement.3 Feminist critical theory shifts the study of gender from individuals' roles and identities to the study of the interplay between gender relations and the institutional contexts within which they take shape.4 It moves beyond thinking about sexual inequality in terms of the opposition between male and female roles to examining the way it is constituted by the structures of various social institutions that gender knits into intricately patterned domination. Feminist critical theory argues that feminist politics takes shape not around women's collective identity, but rather around the public problems of a pervasively gender-structured society. This shift from identity to public problems brings a new story-line to teaching feminist and democratic theory, a story that forges a strong connection between the two that is usually only implicit in works by theorists of both.5 Michelle Rosaldo anticipated the shift I describe in an article that reconsiders early gender scholarship, including her own.6 The principal objective of early feminist social science was to differentiate between sex and gender. Feminists used object relations theory,7 and purportedly universal social structures like the distinction between public and private, and the separation of nature from culture,9 to argue that women's