ISSN:
0887-5367
Language:
English
Titel der Quelle:
Hypatia : a journal of feminist philosophy
Publ. der Quelle:
Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell
Angaben zur Quelle:
Vol. 32, No. 4 (2017), p. 784-800
DDC:
050
Abstract:
This article offers a reconstruction of Theodor Adorno's work as it concerns sex/gender and feminist praxis. Although the prevailing interpretation of Adorno's work conceptualizes its relationship to women as one of either exclusion or essentialism, I argue that both the reading of Sade's Juliette in Dialectic of Enlightenment , as well as a number of Adorno's aphorisms in Minima Moralia , present complex feminist claims and commitments. Max Horkheimer and Adorno position Juliette as a subject of the Enlightenment, forestalling the possibility that women qua women are potentially utopian figures. I utilize Adorno's work in Minima Moralia to show that he—far from excluding or essentializing women—was interested in metaphorically capturing the subjective conditions developed by a system of binary sex/gender within a heteropatriarchal society. Indeed, one can find an iteration of queer theoretical commitments in Minima Moralia . As a result, I argue that he displays a number of straightforwardly feminist commitments: that a liberated society requires the disambiguation of sex from gender, affirming the nonnaturalness of our social sex/gender regime, and claiming that all subjects as gendered subjects are damaged by living within a heteropatriarchal society. Lastly, I provide preliminary evidence of Adorno's critique of (neo)liberal feminist praxis.
Note:
Copyright: © by Hypatia, Inc.
URL:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hypa.12360/abstract
URL:
https://search.proquest.com/docview/1958564699
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