Introduction

Abstract

Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public argues that feminism needs to devise a theory of the public. Remarking on feminist theory’s traditional adherence to an industrial division of labor—where women are closer to the private sphere, socialization and reproductive processes than other categories of action and identity—I start out by questioning why and how contemporary representations of femininity in literature, theory, and popular rhetoric make it seem incompatible with the public sphere. I argue that on an ideological plane, the incompatibility of femininity and a politics of the public sphere is creating economic zones of regulative nonintervention, beyond state control, by symbolically relegating them as provinces of women’s work. The tools developed by feminist theory can unravel such representations to show how women’s work can be realigned within a theory of the public.