The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Sandra Lee Bartky is an important philosopher who, in this text, searches for an alternative politics of female bodily comportment, emphasizes positive aspects of personal power or agency, and urges personal and social responsibility in the politics of race relations. The eight essays that constitute Sympathy and Solidarity bring together an array of interests that challenge the women's movement to revitalize leftist politics for a liberated future. Like her earlier book, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, this book is a study of oppression but unlike the previous, it reveals much more about Bartky's positive political vision.

Bartky has long been known as one of the most influential critics of femininity. Some of her previous essays used Foucault's notion of disciplinary practice to argue that standards of beauty create "docile bodies." Women, in effect, become their own disciplinarians as they internalize the social expectations of femininity. Bartky's essay in this collection, "Suffering to Be Beautiful," explores the possible theory/practice divide that such criticisms may engender. That is, the critique of normative femininity does not also include an alternative political practice. Bartky rightly points out that feminists have not offered a compelling "alternative aesthetic of the body" (24) that would not make women simply look like men. Moreover, femininity is inculcated during the formation of subjectivity and thus becomes bound up with our very identity even as it contradicts other aspects of our identity such as self-determination. But resistance occurs all the time. Insofar as women let go of some aspect of the prescriptions of femininity, they engage in resistance. Large-scale transformation of beauty standards, according to Bartky, will likely not occur until there are radical "cultural and political upheavals" as well. She calls for the women's movement to develop a "new politics of the body" as a step toward this "radically democratic society" (28).

While Bartky finds aspects of Foucault's work useful for her analysis of femininity, she has also offered some forceful criticism of it. She includes two essays devoted to that topic here. The first addresses the problem of the loss of subjectivity. By carefully studying some of the secondary literature on Foucault, Bartky argues that there are "two quite distinct models of the operation of power at work in Foucault's texts ... power [as] the maker of persons ... [and] power as one player in a social field—really a battlefield—where multiple centers [End Page 336] of power confront multiple centers of resistance" (41). This allows Bartky to retrieve agency while simultaneously acknowledging the influence of various discourses on the subject.

Foucault's criticism of the "repressive hypothesis" serves as the focal point for Bartky's examination of social movements in her essay "'Catch Me if You Can.'" Bartky offers a thorough analysis of Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume I and argues that Foucault's rejection of the repression hypothesis is unconvincing. Furthermore, he misses the importance of the unconscious or repression in oppressive systems as well as the liberatory potential of movements that challenge the status quo. For instance, Bartky notes the joy that is felt "in breaking out of the isolation that is imposed by rampant sexism and homophobia" (64). She illustrates the binding effects of consciousness-raising groups and the promise that these relations of solidarity reveal.

The essay "Sympathy and Solidarity" explores the problems feminist theorists have had avoiding the trap of exclusion and the possibilities of a "political phenomenology of solidarity" (81). Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Bartky presents four forms of "fellow-feeling": true fellow-feeling wherein the participants experience identical feeling; "emotional infection" wherein one shares in a feeling without conscious choice or knowledge of the cause of the feeling; "emotional identification," which causes the erasure of the self or the other in the intensity of the identification of feeling; and genuine fellow...