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Women as zoa politica or Why There Could Never Be a Women’s Party. An Arendtian-Inspired Phenomenology of Female Political Subject

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Women Phenomenologists on Social Ontology

Part of the book series: Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences ((WHPS,volume 1))

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Abstract

Let me begin by telling a story: on the 24 October 1975, women of Iceland went on strike. For one day, 90% of women refused to work, cook and take care of children. Instead, they came together to demonstrate and demand gender equality. In Reykjavik alone, 25,000 women gathered in the Downtown Square. Impressive bird’s-eye photographs of the rally show thousands of women of all ages, carrying banners calling for gender equality and equal pay, but most of all protesting against the political under-representation of women. It was the largest of more than 20 rallies throughout the country.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Brewer (2015).

  2. 2.

    N.N. (2005).

  3. 3.

    Ibid.

  4. 4.

    Brewer (2015).

  5. 5.

    Eythórsson and Jahn (2009, 195–218; 209–210).

  6. 6.

    Kimberlé Crenshaw , Patricia Hill Collins , and Gloria Anzaldúa , among others. See also: Carastathis (2014, 304–314).

  7. 7.

    Cf.: Gaus (1964). Young-Bruehl (1982, 272–273); Arendt (1932, 177–179). Arendt was reluctant to isolate ‘the women’s question’ from the general scope of the political, cf.: Dietz (1995, 17–50, esp. 19).

  8. 8.

    Dietz (1995, 18).

  9. 9.

    Young-Bruehl (1996, 307–324, esp. 324). Young-Bruehl perceives Arendt ’s lack of sensibility towards everyday sexism as analogous to her distinction between ‘everyday antisemitism’, which only affects one personally, and ‘political antisemitism’, which bears serious political consequences. Cf. Ibid. 323. However, this does not explain, why Arendt did not recognize the political facet of sexism.

  10. 10.

    Young-Bruehl (1982, 273).

  11. 11.

    Rich (1993, 224–239, esp. 238).

  12. 12.

    Arendt (1998, 96–98).

  13. 13.

    Arendt (1998, 8).

  14. 14.

    Arendt (1990, 91).

  15. 15.

    Honig (1995, 17–50, 147–148), Jaeggi (2007, 241–250, esp. 246–249), Borren (2013, 197–214, esp. 208–209), Gündoğdu (2015, 55–89).

  16. 16.

    Plato (2016b, 263e; 2016c, 189e–190a). Arendt cites this definition in: Arendt (1981, 185; 2003a, 17–48).

  17. 17.

    Socrates describes his dialog partner as ‘that man who is continually refuting me’ and showing him his ignorance, cf. Plato (2016a, 304e), Arendt (1981, 188).

  18. 18.

    I elaborate on this issue in: Robaszkiewicz (2017, 128–146).

  19. 19.

    This notion of judging is based on Arendt ’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Kant ’s faculty of judgement , cf. Beiner (1989, 89–156).

  20. 20.

    Arendt (1989, 61).

  21. 21.

    Arendt (2003b, 140), emphasis M.R.

  22. 22.

    Arendt (1998, 52).

  23. 23.

    Ibid. 149–150.

  24. 24.

    Ibid. 9.

  25. 25.

    Starting from , through Luce Irigaray and Iris Marion Young , to Linda Alcoff , Sara Heinämaa or Gail Weiss , among others. This approach has been criticized by post-structuralist feminist s, such as Judith Butler and Joan Scott .

  26. 26.

    Young (1980, 137–156, esp. 147).

  27. 27.

    Ibid. 153.

  28. 28.

    Scott (1992, 22–40, esp. 31).

  29. 29.

    Stoller (2005, 158).

  30. 30.

    Kimberlé Crenshaw , who was the first one to use the metaphor of intersection in this context, explains the concept as follows: ‘Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars travelling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination […] But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm’, Crenshaw (1989, 139–67, esp. 149).

  31. 31.

    Arendt (1998, 7).

  32. 32.

    Disch (1994, 21).

  33. 33.

    Bartky (1990, 14).

  34. 34.

    Bartky (1990, 14).

  35. 35.

    Kruks (2001, 150).

  36. 36.

    Ibid. 151.

  37. 37.

    Arendt (1998, 177).

  38. 38.

    Arendt (1968, 170–193, esp. 181–189).

  39. 39.

    Strikingly, reproductive rights were the cause for women to gather for current protests against abortion ban in Poland, culminating on 3 October 2016 in a national women’s strike, ‘Black Monday’, which was an explicit reference to the Icelandic ‘Women’s Day Off’. This outburst of female solidarity was remarkable not only because of sheer numbers of women (and their male supporters) who participated in the strike, but also because it united the proponents of the liberalization of the existing abortion law and those in favour of the status quo. Still, the support for the protest was not unanimous among polish women. The protests were widely broadcasted all over the world. Cf. for example the BBC report: N.N. (2016).

  40. 40.

    About the role of examples in Arendt ’s concept of judgement , cf. Arendt (2003b, 144–145).

  41. 41.

    Arendt (1998, 162).

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  1. Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany

    Maria Robaszkiewicz

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  1. Maria Robaszkiewicz
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Correspondence to Maria Robaszkiewicz .

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Sebastian Luft

  2. Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, Institut für Humanwissenschaften, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Ruth Hagengruber

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Robaszkiewicz, M. (2018). Women as zoa politica or Why There Could Never Be a Women’s Party. An Arendtian-Inspired Phenomenology of Female Political Subject. In: Luft, S., Hagengruber, R. (eds) Women Phenomenologists on Social Ontology. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97861-1_14

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