An LSE Gender Institute and Department of Government one-day symposium
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Friday 25 May 2012; 10am-5.30pm
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Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE
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Chaired by Professor Anne Phillips, LSE Gender Institute
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View Programme here
Feminism is almost by definition normative. It seeks both to understand the dynamics of gendered power relations and to transform these. That normativity, however, has been a source of considerable unease. Feminist theory developed, in part, through a critique of the exclusions and distortions that mark and limit mainstream theory when gender is not explicitly acknowledged. It has been unable, with any consistency, to resist arguments about similar exclusions and distortions marking its own work when hierarchies of class, race, sexuality, culture, or nation also go unnoticed. Universalistic claims about what is necessary to gender equality have often been grounded in a more parochial experience; and when that experience is implicated -as it often is – in its own set of power relations, acts of judgment become difficult to justify. What, as Linda Zerilli asks, 'could possibly make a judgment valid for someone else who does not share the judging subject's particular location?' Relativism is not a plausible option for feminism, but when a highly developed politics of location combines with a sensitivity to the coercive closures of normative authority, it generates a problem of feminist judgment.
This one day symposium seeks to explore the nature and problem of feminist judgment. This is an opportune moment to visit the issue, for a number of recent works address the question of how to make judgments while still retaining and building on the critiques feminists have developed of humanism, universalism, and coercive normativity.
This event is free to all, but please register your interest by emailing James Deeley at j.a.deeley@lse.ac.uk
Speakers:
Linda Zerilli
Toward a Democratic Theory of Judgment: What would it mean to foreground the capacity to judge critically and reflectively as a central feature of modern democratic citizenship? This question, raised poignantly albeit not systematically in the work of Hannah Arendt, is of crucial importance for political and feminist theory today. For Arendt, the problem of judgment arises in the wake of the collapse of inherited criteria for judgment or what she called the final break in tradition brought about by the political catastrophes of the 20th century. For contemporary theorists the problem of how to judge in the absence of these criteria remains an important one. But our focus must be different. The problem is not only the collapse of traditional standards but also how to take account of the plurality of standards that characterize multiethnic and multiracial societies such as the United States and, increasingly, Western Europe. In this talk I argue that Arendt's turn to Kant's third Critique was a brilliant attempt to rethink how we might expand our understanding of what can so much as count as an object of judgment precisely as a response to this plurality of standards and to shifting multicultural understandings of what can be called political.
Linda Zerilli is Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is Feminism and the Abysss of Freedom (Chicago University Press, 2005).
Jennifer Nedelsky
The Two Faces of Judgment: For those who work in the context of the Arendtian understanding of judgment, judgment has a very positive connotation. The exercise of Arendtian judgment is essential for politics to function well. It is a key part of what enables both our political and intellectual freedom. Even in everyday speech, it is widely recognized that good politicians—good leaders in every context-need good judgment. But in everyday language, judgment also has very negative connotations. Some of these are famously captured in the Biblical injunction: judge not, lest ye shall be judged. The project of this paper is to work through the puzzle of these conflicting connotations. The start of my path into the negative side of judgment is the idea that people often find it distressing, even humiliating to be the subject of judgment. This was brought home to me by a graduate student remarking that the humiliation attendant on the implementation of categories of deserving and undeserving poor is not so different from that involved in the determination of deserving and undeserving graduate students (e.g. for fellowships). Are there ways of structuring the exercise of judgment so that it is not humiliating to the subjects of judgment? This project is also part of my interest in core similarities between the kinds of judgment exercised in different contexts. The most obvious of these are political, legal, moral and aesthetic. But the example of the student invokes the myriad judgments about “quality of work” that academics make all the time. And, of course, these shade over into judgments about persons: an excellent scholar, an outstanding graduate student. One of the feminist examples I will engage is the question of “good” and “bad” gender norms and the project of transforming them. The similarities between the optimal exercise of judgment in all of these contexts makes me resist a “solution” to the tensions between the dark and light sides of judgment that consists in saying that the word simply means different things in the different contexts. Finally, I shall briefly touch on another puzzle: how (in any context) are we to discern whose perspectives to take into account.
Jennifer Nedelsky is Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. Her teaching and scholarship have been concentrated on Feminist Theory, Theories of Judgment, American Constitutional History and Interpretation, and Comparative Constitutionalism. In addition to her book, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism, she has published numerous articles in these areas. Her most recent book is Law's Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy and Law (Oxford, 2011).
Clare Hemmings
Feeling Judgment: If judgment is fundamental to feminism, which I believe it is, then how does that judgment come about and what marks it as feminist? In this paper, I explore the relationship between feeling and judgment, since I want to suggest that the ways the two are intertwined is an important part of feminism. The paper engages both feminist standpoint epistemology and the political theory of Emma Goldman in asking us to consider the feelings that underpin the judgments that feminists must inevitably make.
Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory at the LSE Gender Institute (from August 2012). Her main research contribution is in the field of transnational gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Gender and Sexuality, co-author of Practising Interdisciplinarity in Gender Studies, and a member of the Feminist Review Collective.
Kim Hutchings
The Judgment of Violence and the Violence of Judgment: feminist reflections: Questions about the ethics of political violence have been central to feminism as a politics and to feminist ethical and political thought. At the same time, the violence effected by moral judgment, its exclusions and determinations, has also been a central concern for feminists. This paper uses contemporary feminist debates about the ethical judgment of war and other forms of organized political violence to address the question of how we might articulate a specifically feminist negotiation with the violence of judgment. View the summary of KIm's paper here.
Kimberly Hutchings is Professor and Head of the Department of International Relations at the LSE. Kimberly Hutchings' main research interests are in international ethical and political theory, feminist ethical and political theory, and the work of Kant and Hegel. Her current research is focused on the areas of global ethics, assumptions about time and history in theories of international relations, and the conceptual relationship between politics and violence in western political thought.
Sonia Kruks
Judging as Who We Are: Recent theoretical discussions about judgment often concern what kinds of statements should be considered properly to constitute judgments. This paper pursues a somewhat different path, focusing not on questions about what constitutes a judgment but rather on how we come to arrive at judgments. Arguing that processes of judgment generally exceed rational deliberation, the paper brings some feminist reflections on the embodied, affective, and situated qualities of the self to bear on how judgments come to be made. It also discusses whether there may be (or may sometimes be) specifically gendered qualities to making judgments.
Sonia Kruks grew up in London. She received her undergraduate degree from Leeds University and her doctorate from the Government Department of the LSE. She is currently the Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics at Oberlin College, USA. Her research interests lie at the intersections of phenomenology and feminist theory. Her most recent books include Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Cornell University Press) and a volume forthcoming from Oxford University Press: Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity.