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A progenitor of modern egalitarianism, communitarianism, and participatory democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a philosopher whose deep concern with the relationship between the domains of private domestic and public political life has made him especially interesting to feminist theorists, but also has made him very controversial. The essays in this volume, representing a wide range of feminist interpretations of Rousseau, explore the many tensions in his thought that arise from his unique combination of radical and traditional perspectives on gender relations and the state. Among the topics addressed by the contributors are the connections between Rousseau&’s political vision of the egalitarian state and his view of the &"natural&" role of women in the family; Rousseau&’s apparent fear of the actual danger and power of women; important questions Rousseau raised about child care and gender relations in individualist societies that feminists should address; the founding of republics; the nature of consent; the meaning of citizenship; and the conflation of modern universal ideals of democratic citizenship with modern masculinity, leading to the suggestion that the latter is as fragile a construction as the former. Overall this volume makes an important contribution to a core question at the hinge of modernism and postmodernism: how modern, egalitarian notions of social contract, premised on universality and objective reason, can yet result in systematic exclusion of social groups, including women. Contributors are Leah Bradshaw, Melissa A. Butler, Anne Harper, Sarah Kofman, Rebecca Kukla, Lynda Lange, Ingrid Makus, Lori J. Marso, Mira Morgenstern, Susan Moller Okin, Alice Ormiston, Penny Weiss, Elie Wiestad, Elizabeth Wingrove, Monique Wittig, and Linda Zerilli.
Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes features the work of feminist scholars who are centrally engaged with Hobbes’s ideas and texts and who view Hobbes as an important touchstone in modern political thought. Bringing together scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, history, political theory, and English literature who embrace diverse theoretical and philosophical approaches and a range of feminist perspectives, this interdisciplinary collection aims to appeal to an audience of Hobbes scholars and nonspecialists alike. As a theorist whose trademark is a compelling argument for absolute sovereignty, Hobbes may seem initially to have little to offer twenty-first-century feminist thought. Yet, as the contributors to this collection demonstrate, Hobbesian political thought provides fertile ground for feminist inquiry. Indeed, in engaging Hobbes, feminist theory engages with what is perhaps the clearest and most influential articulation of the foundational concepts and ideas associated with modernity: freedom, equality, human nature, authority, consent, coercion, political obligation, and citizenship. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Joanne Boucher, Karen Detlefsen, Karen Green, Wendy Gunther-Canada, Jane S. Jaquette, S. A. Lloyd, Su Fang Ng, Carole Pateman, Gordon Schochet, Quentin Skinner, and Susanne Sreedhar.
Traditional accounts of the feminist history of philosophy have viewed reason as associated with masculinity and subsequent debates have been framed by this assumption. Yet recent debates in deconstruction have shown that gender has never been a stable matter. In the history of philosophy 'female' and 'woman' are full of ambiguity. What does deconstruction have to offer feminist criticism of the history of philosophy? Yielding Gender explores this question by examining three crucial areas; the issue of gender as 'troubled'; deconstruction; and feminist criticism of the history of philosophy. The first part of the book discusses the work of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary French feminist philosophy including key figures such as Luce Irigiray. Particular attention is given to the possibilities offered by deconstruction for understanding the history of philosophy. The second part considers and then challenges feminist interpretations of some key figures in the history of philosophy. Penelope Deutscher sketches how Rousseau, St. Augustine and Simone de Beauvoir have described gender and argues that their readings of gender are in fact empowered by gender's own contradiction and instability rather than limited by it.
A feminist approach towards the history of philosophy and the theories of Hume, Rousseau, Descartes, Lock, Anne Conway, Kant.
Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment constitutes the first book-length feminist study of Rousseau's sexual politics and the reception of his works by women readers. By today's standards, Rousseau's sexual politics appear reactionary, paternalistic, even blatantly misogynist; yet, among his female contemporaries, his works often met with enthusiastic approval and had tremendous impact on their values and behavior. To probe Rousseau's paradoxical appeal to eighteenth-century readers, Mary Trouille examines how seven women authors responded to his writings and sexual politics and traces his influence on their lives and works. The writers include six Frenchwomen (Roland, d'Epinay, Stael, Genlis, Gouges, and an anonymous woman correspondent who called herself Henriette) and the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The book constitutes an important contribution to French literature, women's studies, and eighteenth-century cultural studies. While a great deal has already been written on the individual women whom Trouille treats, what distinguishes this book is that it places multiple female subjects directly opposite Rousseau, and succeeds in showing that the relationship between mentor and student(s) is both multi-layered and fascinatingly complex.
This volume seeks to capture Jean-Jacques Rousseau's astonishing contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas of modernity. For the contributors to this book Rousseau is present as well as past, because he was so modern and yet so ambivalent about modernity, a position with which we are quite familiar. Highlighted in this volume is the contention that Rousseau set the stage for many discussions of the good and bad of modernity.Previous efforts to deal with Rousseau and modernity have suffered from myopia. In the nineteenth century the Romantics claimed Rousseau as one of their own, pulling him out of his historical context, ignoring his full scale immersion in the debates of the French Enlightenment. In the twentieth century commentators have read into Rousseau the ahistorical and present-minded Cold War theme of "Rousseau the totalitarian."In this volume Rousseau is treated as a person of his age but also as someone who speaks to us today. The topics covered range from feminism, music, science, and political theory, to updating the classics, and to the search for and limitations to the quest for self-knowledge. Few if any figures can compete with Rousseau when it comes to forcing us to face up to the price we pay for "progress."
This book proposes a resolution to the paradox of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's sexual politics—that he is the philosopher of freedom for men yet philosopher of servitude for women. The author examines psychological oppression, which is often overlooked as a consequence of sexual and identity politics, which is revealed in Rousseau's Les Solitaires and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The author addresses logical problems for Rousseau and certain forms of contemporary 'difference' feminisms. With the aid of Simone de Beauvoir's notions of liberty, the author proposes a way to use Rousseau's philosophies to overcome psychological oppression.
In Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory, Nancy Hirschmann demonstrates not merely that modern theories of freedom are susceptible to gender and class analysis but that they must be analyzed in terms of gender and class in order to be understood at all. Through rigorous close readings of major and minor works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill, Hirschmann establishes and examines the gender and class foundations of the modern understanding of freedom. Building on a social constructivist model of freedom that she developed in her award-winning book The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, she makes in her new book another original and important contribution to political and feminist theory. Despite the prominence of "state of nature" ideas in modern political theory, Hirschmann argues, theories of freedom actually advance a social constructivist understanding of humanity. By rereading "human nature" in light of this insight, Hirschmann uncovers theories of freedom that are both more historically accurate and more relevant to contemporary politics. Pigeonholing canonical theorists as proponents of either "positive" or "negative" liberty is historically inaccurate, she demonstrates, because theorists deploy both conceptions of freedom simultaneously throughout their work.
Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women – the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere. Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective, a discourse of “Rousseauean” domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity, and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home. Citoyennes challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762), revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur, and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794), this study brilliantly shows that in text and image, women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families. In addition, Citoyennes offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory, this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns, and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity. Citoyennes breaks new ground, for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood, and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images.