Perspectives Against Interests: Sketch of a Feminist Political Theory of “Women”

Abstract

Do women share interests? Seeking interests that women share is theoretically problematic and politically undesirable for feminists. Efforts to redefine interests as subjective, contingent and/or context sensitive are unsatisfying for those who want to link women's representation to the fact of their oppression, exploitation, and discrimination. Fortunately, we need not posit shared interests to make strong claims about the importance of women's representation. Nor do we need such a concept to explain why women work together across significant institutional barriers and social differences. Overlapping, entwined sets of global and local social structures define “women” as a social collectivity. Women in diverse organizational, social, and national contexts organize to alter this complex configuration, forging relations of solidarity and shared identities in the process. But this is not reducible to shared interests. Moreover, focusing on things that women have in common de-emphasizes issues that mainly confront marginalized groups of women and/or that are group or context specific but critical to achieving gender justice. Fortunately, feminist theorists have identified bases for political representation and mobilization that offer more useful accounts of social group politics (e.g., Mansbridge 1995; Mohanty 2003; Young 1997, 2000;). The idea of social perspective is one such concept.

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