Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice

Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice

by Cressida Heyes
Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice

Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice

by Cressida Heyes

Paperback

$39.95 
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Overview

At the heart of feminist theory lies the seemingly intractable issue of essentialism. Feminism has thus far failed to transcend critiques of essentialism and currently offers only two inadequate positions against it. One response reifies the category "women," representing the experience of oppression of privileged women as archetypal for feminism, and the other denies the category because it unjustly overgeneralizes, thus undercutting the possibility of a robust theory of gender oppression. To spur anti-essentialist methods and practice around such issues as sexual violence, feminist theory crucially needs a constructive and politically powerful strategy for defining women.Cressida J. Heyes deftly elucidates and then travels beyond the essentialism debates to rescue the efficacy of feminist theory for activism and research. She offers a genealogy of essentialism, specifically as it applies to the work of Carol Gilligan and Catharine MacKinnon, and employs a Wittgensteinian approach to feminism that understands similarities between women as family resemblances and political decisions about inclusion and exclusion as contextual and purposive. Line Drawings argues for an anti-essentialist method that enables generalizing feminist discourse but insists on paying close attention to the operations of power in constructing claims about women. This is a fresh and vitally important step past stymied debate on what is arguably the most pressing issue in cross-disciplinary feminist theory.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780801486692
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Publication date: 04/18/2000
Pages: 240
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Cressida J. Heyes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta.

What People are Saying About This

Elizabeth V. Spelman

The Surprising Bedfellows Award goes hands down to Cressida Heyes for finding Wittgensteinian routes out of the swamp of the essentialism debates in feminist theory. Elegant, persuasive, politically engaged, Line Drawings will be required reading for many years to come.

Naomi Scheman

Extraordinarily well written and well argued, Cressida Heyes's book is an engagement with issues of great political urgency and intellectual complexity that manages to be responsive and responsible both to practice and to theory. Heyes manages this complex interrogation with clarity and grace, fair-mindedness and passion, intellectual seriousness and accessibility. Line Drawings is an exciting, promising, and relatively unexplored way of addressing and repairing the often disabling splits between theory and activism.

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