Library Catalog

Retrieving Experience : Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics /

Kruks, Sonia

Retrieving Experience : Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics / Sonia Kruks. - 1 online resource (224 p.)

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part 1. Simone de Beauvoir in "Her" World and "Ours" -- 1. Freedoms That Matter: Subjectivity and Situation in the Work of Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty -- 2. Panopticism and Shame: Foucault, Beauvoir, and Feminism -- Part 2: Recognition, Knowledge, and Identity -- 3. The Politics of Recognition: Sartre, Fanon, and Identity Politics -- 4. Identity Politics and Dialectical Reason: Beyond an Epistemology of Provenance -- Part 3: Experience and the Phenomenology of Difference -- 5. Going Beyond Discourse: Feminism, Phenomenology, and "Women's Experience" -- 6. Phenomenology and Difference: On the Possibility of Feminist "World-Travelling" -- Bibliography -- Index

restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

In Retrieving Experience, Sonia Kruks engages critically with the postmodern turn in feminist and social theory. She contends that, although postmodern analyses yield important insights about the place of discourse in constituting subjectivity, they lack the ability to examine how experience often exceeds the limits of discourse. To address this lack and explain why it matters for feminist politics, Kruks retrieves and employs aspects of postwar French existential theory—a tradition that, she argues, postmodernism has obscured by militantly rejecting its own genealogy.Kruks seeks to refocus our attention on the importance for feminism of embodied and "lived" experiences. Through her original readings of Simone de Beauvoir and other existential thinkers—including Sartre, Fanon, and Merleau-Ponty—and her own analyses inspired by their work, Kruks sheds new light on central problems in feminist theory and politics. These include debates about subjectivity and individual agency; questions about recognition and identity politics; and discussion of whether embodied experiences may sometimes facilitate solidarity among groups of different women.


Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.


In English.

9781501731839

10.7591/9781501731839 doi


Existential phenomenology.
Feminist theory.
Postmodernism.
Subjectivity.
Literary Studies.
Womens Studies.
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory.

HQ1190 / .K78 2001

305.42/01