Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-17T19:00:52.765Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Moral Responsibility and Social Change: A New Theory of Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Ann Ferguson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to rethink classic issues of freedom and moral responsibility in the context of feminist and antiracist theories of male and white domination. If personal identities are socially constructed by gender, race and ethnicity, class and sexual orientation, how are social change and moral responsibility possible? An aspects theory of selfhood and three reinterpretations of identity politics show how individuals are morally responsible and nonessentialist ways to resist social oppression.

Type
Third Revision
Information
Hypatia , Volume 12 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Third Wave Feminisms , Summer 1997 , pp. 116 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by Hypatia, Inc.

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

Abelove, Henry., Barale, Michele, and Halperin, David, eds. 1993. The lesbian and gay studies reader. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Alcoff, Linda. 1988. Cultural feminism vs. poststructuralism: The identity crisis in feminist theory. Signs 13(3): 405–36.10.1086/494426CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alcoff, Linda. 1995. Mestizo identity. In Zack 1995.Google Scholar
Anzaidúa, Gloria. 1987. BorderhndslLa frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.Google Scholar
Appiah, Anthony. 1990. “But would that still be me?”: Notes on gender, “race,” ethnicity as sources of “identity”. Journal of Phihsophy, 87(10): 493–499.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Men in dark times. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1994. On the emancipation of women. Ii Essays in understanding, 1930‐1954, ed. Kohn, Jerome. New York: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
Bar On, Bat‐Ami. 1994. Women in dark times: Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxembourg, Hannah Arendt, and me. Philosophy Department, SUNY Binghamton. Manuscript.Google Scholar
Bar On, Bat‐Ami and Ferguson, Ann, eds. 1997. Daring to be good: Feminist essays in ethico‐potitics. New York: Routledge. Forthcoming.Google Scholar
Bartky, Sandra. 1990. Femininity and domination. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
De Beauvoir, Simone. 1953. The second sex, trans, and ed. Parshley, H. M.New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The bonds of love: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Bornstein, Kate. 1994. Gender outiaw: On men, women and the rest of us. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1995. Melancholy gender/refused identification. Ii Constructing masculinity, ed. Berger, Maurice, Wallis, Brian, and Watney, Simon. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. The reproduction of mothering. Berkeley: University of California.Google Scholar
Cleaver, Eldridge. 1968. Sou! on ice. New York: Delta.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. London: Unwin and Hyman.Google Scholar
Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/ecology: The meta‐ethics of radical feminism. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. 1977. Anti‐Oedipus. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black skins, white masks. Trans. Markmann, Charles. New York: Grove.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Ann. 1981. Patriarchy, sexual identity, and the sexual revolution. Signs 7(1): 158–72.10.1086/493867CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Ann. 1989. Blood at the root: Motherhood, sexuality and male domination. London: Pandora/Unwin and Hyman.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Ann. 1991. Sexual democracy: Women, oppression and revolution. Boulder: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Ann. 1993. Herland or ourland? Feminist Utopias as models for social change. Philosophy Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst . Manuscript.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Ann. 1995. Feminist communities and moral revolution. Ii Feminism and community, ed. Weiss, Penny A. and Friedman, Marilyn. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Ann. 1996a. Bridge identity politics: A feminist integrative ethics of international development. Organization 3(4): 571–87.10.1177/135050849634015CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Ann. 1996b. Can I choose who I am? And how would that empower me? Race, gender, identities and the self. Ii Women, knowledge and reality 2d edition, ed. Garry, Ann and Pearsall, Marilyn. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Findlen, Barbara. 1995. Listen up: Voices from the next feminist generation. Seattle, WA: Seal Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality: vol. I. An introduction New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel., ed. 1980. Herculine Barbin: Being the recently discovered memoirs of a nineteenth‐century French hermaphrodite. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel., ed. 1983. The subject and power. Afterword to Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics by Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Rabinow, Paul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel., ed. 1987. The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom. An interview translated by J.D. Gauthier. Philosophy and Social Criticism 12(3): 1–20.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel., ed. 1988. Technologies of the self. Ii Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Martin, Luther H., Gutman, Huck, and Hutton, Patrick H.Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. 1993. Toward a feminist theory of self: Repressive de‐reification and the “subject‐in‐process”. NWSA Journal, 5(3): 303–324.Google Scholar
Gilder, George. 1973. Sexual suicide. New York: Quadrangle.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Steven. 1974. On the inevitability of patriarchy. New York: Morrow.Google Scholar
Gordon, Lewis. 1995. Bad faith and anablaek racism. Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1985. A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism for the 1980s. Socialist Review 15(80): 65–107. Reprinted in Feminism/postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson, New York: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Harris, Angela P. 1990. Race and essentialism in feminist legal theory. Stanford Law Review, v.42: 581, February 1990: 581‐616.10.2307/1228886CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartsock, Nancy. 1983. Money, sex and power. New York: Longmans.Google Scholar
Hartmann, Heidi. 1981. The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism, ed. Sargent, Lydia, Women and revolution. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Hooks, Bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in hnguage: A semiotic approach to literature and art, ed. Roudiez, Leon S., trans. Cooper, Thomas, Jardin, Alice and Roudiez, Leon S.New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques. 1977. The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I. In Ecrits. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
De Lauretis, Teresa. 1990. Eccentric subjects: Feminist theory and historical consciousness. Feminist Studies 16(1): 115–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lorraine, Tamsin. 1990. Gender, identity, and the production of meaning. Boulder: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Lugones, Maria. 1987. Playfulness, world traveling and loving perception. Hypatia 2(2): 3–19.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1987.tb01062.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lugones, Maria. 1990. Hispaneando y lesbiando: On Sarah Hoagland's Lesbian ethics. Hypatia 5(3): 138–146.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1990.tb00612.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKinnon, Catharine. 1987. Feminism unmodified: Discourses on life and law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
McNay, Lois. 1992. Foucault and feminism. Boston: Northeastern University Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Juliet. 1974. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
More gender trouble: Feminism meets queet theory, differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6 (#2‐3), 1994.Google Scholar
Omi, Michael, and Winant, Howard. 1994. Racial formations in the United States, 2d edition. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Raymond, Janice. 1979. The transsexual empire: The making of the she‐male. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. 1980. Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. Signs 5(4): 631–60.10.1086/493756CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riley, Denise. 1988. “Am I that name?” Feminism and the category of “women” in history. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Roiphe, Katie. 1993. The morning after: Sex, f ear and feminism on campus. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Roscoe, Will. 1994. How to become a berdache: Toward a unified analysis of gender diversity. Ii Third sex, third gender: Beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history, ed. Herdt, Gilbert. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Shrage, Laurie. 1995. Ethnic transgressions: Confessions of an assimilated Jew. In Zack 1995.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofksy. 1990. Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1988. Inessential woman: Problems of exclusion in feminist thought. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Stember, Charles. 1976. Sexual racism. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Tiger, Lionel. 1969. Men in groups. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Tronto, Joan. 1993. Mora! boundaries: Toward a politics of care. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Vicinus, Martha. 1993. “They wonder to which sex I belong”: The historical roots of the modern lesbian identity. Ii The lesbian and gay studies reader, ed. Abelove, Henry, Barale, Michele Aina, and Halperin, David M.New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Weir, Allison. 1996. Sacrificial hgics: Feminist theory and the critique of identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wittig, Monique. 1981. One is not born a woman. Feminist Issues 1(2): 47–54.Google Scholar
Wolf, Naomi. 1991. The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. New York: Anchor/Doubleday.Google Scholar
Wolf, Naomi. 1993. Fire with fire: The new female power and how it will change the twenty‐first century. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Wright, Lawrence. 1994. One drop of blood. New Yorker (September 1994): 46–55.Google Scholar
Yeh, Joseph. 1995. Postmodern aspects: An examination of a way to think about yourself. Philosophy Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst . Manuscript.Google Scholar
Young, Iris. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zack, Naomi. 1993. Race and mixed race. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Zack, Naomi, ed. 1995. American mixed race: The culture of micro diversity. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.Google Scholar