Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T21:19:58.727Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Feminism as Epic Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2021

Kate M. Phelan Open the ORCID record for Kate M. Phelan [Opens in a new window]
Kate M. Phelan*
Affiliation:
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
*
E-mail: kate.phelan2@rmit.edu.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Sheldon Wolin identifies a particular tradition within political theory that he calls ‘epic theory’. Epic theory, he explains, is political theory's equivalent of the Kuhnian scientific revolution. This article takes up the analogy between epic theory and scientific revolution to show that feminism is an epic theory in the truest sense of the term, a sense not fully grasped by Wolin. It is so for two reasons. First, it is a theory of the whole. Second, it is less a discovery than an invention of the world. The author seeks to account for the existence of feminism in the face of its impossibility, and to demonstrate the magnitude of the achievement that feminism represents.

Keywords

epic theoryscientific revolutionfeminist theoryCatharine MacKinnon
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 1226 - 1239
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alcoff, L and Potter, E (eds) (1993) Feminist Epistemologies. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Benston, M (1969) The political economy of women's liberation. Monthly Review 21(4), 13–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernick, SE (1992) The logic of the development of feminism; or, is MacKinnon to feminism as Parmenides is to Greek philosophy? Hypatia 7(1), 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brison, SJ (2017) “We must find words or burn”: speaking out against disciplinary silencing. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 3(2), Article 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, W (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, J (1985) Variations on sex and gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault. PRAXIS International 5(4), 505–516.Google Scholar
Chopin, K (1899) The Awakening. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone and Company.Google Scholar
Collins, PH (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd Edn., New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dalla Costa, M and James, S (1975) The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. London: Falling Wall Press.Google Scholar
de Beauvoir S (2010[1949]) The Second Sex. London: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Delphy, C (1980) The main enemy. Feminist Issues 1(1), 23–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenstein, ZR (1979) Developing a theory of capitalist patriarchy and socialist feminism. In Eisenstein, ZR (ed), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 5–40.Google Scholar
Fraser, N and Linda, N (1989) Social criticism without philosophy: an encounter between feminism and postmodernism. Social Text 21, 983–104.Google Scholar
Friedan, B (1965) The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Frye, M (1983) The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. New York: Crossing Press.Google Scholar
Furley, DJ (1967) Parmenides of Elea. In Edwards, P (ed), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan, 47–51.Google Scholar
Gimenez, ME (1975) Marxism and feminism. Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 1(1), 61–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haraway, D (1990) A Manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In Nicholson, LJ (ed), Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, pp. 190–233.Google Scholar
Harding, S (ed) (2004) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harding, S and Hintikka, MB (eds) (1983) Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Hartmann, HI (1979) The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism: towards a more progressive union. Capital & Class 3(1), 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haslanger, S (2002) On being objective and being objectified. In Antony, LM and Witt, CE (eds), A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, 2nd Edn. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, pp. 209–254.Google Scholar
Hite, S (1976) The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality. New York: Seven Stories Press.Google Scholar
Kapur, R (2002) The tragedy of victimisation rhetoric: resurrecting the ‘native’ subject in international/post-colonial feminist legal politics. Harvard Human Rights Journal 15, 1–37.Google Scholar
Kuhn, TS (2012[1962]) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th Edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyotard, JF (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
MacKinnon, CA (1987) Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
MacKinnon, CA (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Marx, K (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Marx, K and Engels, F (1970) The German Ideology: Part One. New York: International Bestsellers.Google Scholar
Murdoch, I (1992) Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Oakeshottt, M (1991) Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.Google Scholar
Phelan, KM (2017) Is feminism yet a theory of the kind that Marxism is? Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 3(1), Article 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romany, C (1991) Ain't I a feminist? Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4, 23–33.Google Scholar
Rorty, R (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rorty, R (1991) Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rowbotham, S (1971) Women's Liberation and the New Politics. Spokesman Pamphlet, no. 17. Bristol: Falling Wall Press.Google Scholar
Scheman, N (1980) Anger and the politics of naming. In McConnell-Ginet, S, Borker, R and Furman, N (eds), Women and Language in Literature and Society. New York: Praeger, pp. 174–187.Google Scholar
White, H (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Wolin, SS (1969) Political theory as a vocation. The American Political Science Review 63(4), 1062–1082.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolin, SS (2016a) On reading Marx politically. In Xenos, N (ed), Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 173–194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolin, SS (2016b) Hobbes and the epic tradition of political theory. In Xenos, N (ed), Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 117–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, IM (1980) Socialist feminism and the limits of dual systems theory. Socialist Review 50/51, 169–188.Google Scholar