Feminist Critical Theory
Term:
Spring 2010
Subject Code:
GPHI
Course Number:
6107
In most recent debates, feminist
critical theorists have encounter the need to meet the challenge of changing
social arrangements in order to establish fairer ways in which to fight against
exclusion. They involve not only identifying how social perceptions need to be
changed, but also, different ways in which certain specific transformations can
be capable of redefining social institutions, while also contributing to new
ways of thinking about the agents of social change. Feminist critical theories
were until now engaged in thinking about the transformation of social
institutions, or finding new definitions of social agents based in two
different and almost irreconcilable strategies: the agonistic model, which
helped create new ways of defining social agents; and the normative model which
helped to redefined justice and autonomy. The strategies of the normative kind
have struggled against old definitions of the self and the critique of cultural
and social institutions and practices posing the accent on transformation. The
strategies about resistance seek to comprehend the complexity of power and
domination by analyzing the different
technologies and practices of subjection that are constitutive of our social
order. The first position highlights the role of autonomy and freedom. The
second one highlights the role of power and determinism. Both are needed in
critical theory but feminists have until now presented these arguments against
one another. The aim of the course will
be to consider how these two strategies need not be seen as contradictory but
they need to be mediated. By presenting empirical examples which illustrate
those tensions between power and agency we will be able to understand the
categories of agonistic agency and normative critique. We will also examine the
most recent literature arguing to develop fully such a position (Lara, Cooke,
Allen). I will be able to define those strategies as a complex dialectic of
self-creation devices and resistance from power.
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