24 found
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  1. Gender and agency: reconfiguring the subject in feminist and social theory.Lois McNay - 2000 - Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
    This book reassesses theories of agency and gender identity against the backdrop of changing relations between men and women in contemporary societies.
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  2.  52
    Foucault: a critical introduction.Lois McNay - 1994 - New York: Continuum.
    "Foucault: A Critical Introduction offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers. Unlike most books on Foucault, this book offers an assessment of all Foucault's work, including his final writings on governmentality and the self. McNay argues that the later work initiates an important shift in his intellectual concerns which alters any retrospective reading of his writings as a whole." "Throughout, McNay is concerned to assess the normative and political implications (...)
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  3.  72
    Self as Enterprise.Lois McNay - 2009 - Theory, Culture and Society 26 (6):55-77.
    This article considers Foucault’s analysis of ordoliberal and neoliberal governmental reason and its reorganization of social relations around a notion of enterprise. I focus on the particular idea that the generalization of the enterprise form to social relations was conceptualized in such exhaustive terms that it encompassed subjectivity itself. Self as enterprise highlights, inter alia, dynamics of control in neoliberal regimes which operate through the organized proliferation of individual difference in an economized matrix. It also throws into question conceptions of (...)
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  4. Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity.Lois McNay - 1999 - Theory, Culture and Society 16 (1):95-117.
    This article argues that the failure of certain theories of reflexive identity transformation to consider more fully issues connected to gender identity leads to an overemphasis on the expressive possibilities thrown up by processes of detraditionalization. By ignoring certain deeply embedded aspects, some theories of reflexive change reproduce the `disembodied and disembedded' subject of masculinist thought. The issues of disembodiment and disembeddedness are explored through a study of the work of Pierre Bourdieu on `habitus' and the `field'. The idea of (...)
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  5.  18
    Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self.Lois McNay - 1992 - Boston: Polity.
  6.  87
    Democracy, critique and the ontological turn.Mihaela Mihai, Lois McNay, Oliver Marchart, Aletta Norval, Vassilios Paipais, Sergei Prozorov & Mathias Thaler - 2017 - Contemporary Political Theory 16 (4):501-531.
  7.  93
    Subject, Psyche and Agency.Lois McNay - 1999 - Theory, Culture and Society 16 (2):175-193.
    This article considers two themes in Butler's work: the dialectic of subject formation - that the autonomous subject is instituted through constraint - and the relation between the psyche and the social. With regard to the former, the introduction of a notion of historicity into a conception of the symbolic yields a concept of agency. Nonetheless, this concept of agency still lacks social specificity. By reconfiguring the psyche as an effect of the interiorization of social norms, Butler introduces the destabilizing (...)
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  8.  73
    The Foucauldian Body and the Exclusion of Experience.Lois Mcnay - 1991 - Hypatia 6 (3):125-139.
    This paper considers the advantages of incorporating Foucault's anti-essentialist theory of the body into feminist explanations of women's oppression. There are also problems in that Foucault neglects to examine the gendered character of the body and reproduces a sexism endemic in "gender neutral" social theory. The Foucauldian body is essentially passive resulting in a limited account of identity and agency. This conflicts with an aim of feminism: to rediscover and revalue the experiences of women.
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  9. The politics of suffering and recognition : Foucault contra Honneth.Lois McNay - 2012 - In Miriam Bankovsky & Alice Le Goff (eds.), Recognition theory and contemporary French moral and political philosophy: reopening the dialogue. New York: distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan.
     
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  10.  41
    Social Freedom and Progress in the Family: Reflections on Care, Gender and Inequality.Lois McNay - 2015 - Critical Horizons 16 (2):170-186.
    The paper focuses on the discussion of social freedom in the family in Axel Honneth's most recent book Freedom's Right. I argue, on the one hand, that radical democrats have much to learn from Honneth's method of normative reconstruction because it provides a much needed corrective to the “social weightlessness” that characterizes their thought about democracy. In contrast to the current preoccupation with rarefied issues of political ontology, Freedom's Right exemplifies a type of sociologically attuned thinking that is essential for (...)
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  11.  46
    (2 other versions)The limits of justification: Critique, disclosure and reflexivity.Lois McNay - 2016 - European Journal of Political Theory 19 (1):147488511667029.
    I argue that Forst’s justification paradigm is less radical than claimed in that it fails to establish an immanent connection between the role of justification as a transcendental principle and as...
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  12.  21
    Agency, Anticipation and Indeterminacy in Feminist Theory.Lois McNay - 2003 - Feminist Theory 4 (2):139-148.
    Much contemporary work on agency offers only a partial account because it remains within an essentially negative understanding of subject formation. This essay examines the work of Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell and argues that the negative paradigm needs to be supplemented by a more generative theoretical framework, if feminists are to develop a fuller account of agency. In the negative paradigm, the subject is understood in passive terms as an effect of discursive structures. This tends to overlook ideas of (...)
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  13.  28
    The politics of exemplarity: Ferrara on the disclosure of new political worlds.Lois McNay - 2018 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (2):127-145.
    This paper focuses on the idea of exemplarity outlined by the Italian critical theorist Alessandro Ferrara that forms part of his general case for the centrality of disclosure to emancipatory political reasoning. Ferrara argues that “at its best” political thought should have the capacity to animate the democratic imagination by disclosing new political worlds and hence new possibilities for thought and action. I argue that Ferrara’s notion of exemplarity provides important conceptual resources for a re-grounding of critical theory in the (...)
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  14.  39
    Having it Both Ways.Lois McNay - 2003 - Theory, Culture and Society 20 (6):1-20.
    As an alternative to post-structural accounts of ‘performative’ agency (e.g. Judith Butler), Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib and Maria Pia Lara) propose the idea of the narrative self. The concept of narrative is seen as a way of bridging the gap between the formalism of Habermas’s idea of communicative ethics and the dispersion that arises from the post-structural critique of the subject. The idea of the narrative self undoubtedly yields an active and creative account of agency. However, I argue that the (...)
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  15. Recognition as fact and norm : the method of critique.Lois McNay - 2008 - In David Leopold & Marc Stears (eds.), Political theory: methods and approaches. New York: Oxford University Press.
  16.  18
    Ideology Critique: Disclosure and Reflexivity.Lois McNay - 2013 - In Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent & Marc Stears (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies. Oxford University Press. pp. 138.
  17.  36
    Anarchism and authority: A philosophical introduction to classical anarchism.Lois McNay - 2009 - Contemporary Political Theory 8 (2):242-244.
  18. (1 other version)Recognising disempowerment : taking the 'merely experienced' seriously.Lois McNay - 2023 - In Paul Giladi & Nicola McMillan (eds.), Epistemic injustice and the philosophy of recognition. New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
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  19.  14
    The misguided search for the political: social weightlessness in radical democratic theory.Lois McNay - 2014 - Malden, MA: Polity Press.
    There has been a lively debate amongst political theorists about whether certain liberal concepts of democracy are so idealized that they lack relevance to ʹrealʹ politics. Echoing these debates, Lois McNay examines in this book some theories of radical democracy and argues that they too tend to rely on troubling abstractions - or what she terms ʹsocially weightlessʹ thinking. They often propose ideas of the political that are so far removed from the logic of everyday practice that, ultimately, their supposed (...)
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  20.  16
    The politics of welfare.Lois McNay - 2023 - European Journal of Political Theory 22 (1):171-180.
    Steven Klein’s excellent new book The Work of Politics is an innovative, insightful and original argument about the valuable role that welfare institutions may play in democratic movements for change. In place of a one-sided Weberian view of welfare institutions as bureaucratic instruments of social control, Klein recasts them in Arendtian terms as ‘worldly mediators’ or participatory mechanisms that act as channels for a radical politics of democratic world making. Although Klein is careful to modulate this utopian vision through a (...)
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  21. Whose idea of socialism? Conflicting conceptions of the family and women’s subordination.Lois McNay - forthcoming - Philosophy and Social Criticism.
    This article compares Honneth’s attempt to revise socialist thinking on women’s subordination in the family with feminist work on the topic. Both identify economism as the reason why socialism has historically failed to come up with an adequate account of women’s oppression in the family. However, their attempts to overcome economism proceed in different directions. Feminists overcome economism by expanding and enriching ideas of the economic and value producing activity and applying these reworked categories to women’s reproductive labour. Honneth overcomes (...)
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  22.  30
    Who is the ‘communis’ in sensus communis? A response to Ferrara.Lois McNay - 2018 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (2):159-167.
    Of the many interesting points that Alessandro Ferrara raises in reply to my article, I focus in response on the question of context transcendence for, as well as seeming to lie at the heart of our differences, it is of foundational importance to the tradition of critical theory which influences both our work. I agree with Ferrara about the ‘conceptual necessity’ of context transcendence for critique but I disagree with the assumption that he makes that experientially grounded critique is necessarily (...)
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  23. Reviews : Elizabeth Wright (ed.), Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Diction ary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. £60, paper, £16.95, xix + 485 pp. [REVIEW]Lois McNay - 1994 - History of the Human Sciences 7 (1):128-130.
  24.  10
    Economic and Cultural Power. [REVIEW]Lois McNay - 1998 - European Journal of Social Theory 1 (1):155-158.
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