Diana Meyers

Feminist Social Thought brings together key articles by prominent feminist thinkers, offering students sophisticated treatment of the theoretical topics central to feminist social thought. This reader highlights salient concerns in contemporary feminist scholarship and the advances feminist philosophers have made. The editor's introduction outlines alternative routes through the text, allowing instructors to easily adapt this reader to their particular courses and the interests of their students. Each article is prefaced with a short introduction by the editor placing it in context, highlighting the principle issues and the conclusions reached. Students will find these headnotes helpful when tackling the challenging theoretical issues addressed. Representing a spectrum of feminist thinking, Feminist Social Thought is organized around seven topics constructions of gender; theorizing diversity; figurations of women; subjectivity, agency and feminist critique; social identity, solidarity and political engagement; care and its critics; and women, equality and justice. Students will be exposed to a wide variety of feminist philosophy and encouraged to think critically about challenging questions around pivotal subjects including * How are gender norms instilled, enforced, and perpetuated? * What are the relationships between gender and other socially demarcated positions such as race, class and sexual orientation? * What resources do women have at their disposal for recognizing their subordination and resisting it? * What goals should feminist politics pursue? * How can social and legal equality be reconciled with difference?

J. David Velleman develops a canny, albeit mentalistic, theory of selfhood that furnishes some insights feminist philosophers should heed but that does not adequately heed some of the insights feminist philosophers have developed about the embodiment and relationality of the self. In my view, reflenvity cannot do the whole job of accounting for selfhood, for it rests on an unduly sharp distinction between reflexive loci of understanding and value, on the one hand, and embodiment and relationality, on the other. 1 conclude that what is missing from Velleman's account is an appreciation of the psycho-corporeal attributes and capabilities embedded in the embodied self and the relational self.

Part I. The book begins with literary, cinematic, and historical scenarios that exemplify personal autonomy. Meyers uses these vignettes to distinguish personal autonomy from other, variously related types of autonomy and to show that other kinds of autonomy cannot adequately address the concern people have with their own personal decisions. Noting how profoundly social experience impinges on self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction, Meyers characterizes autonomous individuals as persons who do what they really want, and she undertakes to supply an account of an authentic self that acknowledges people's enmeshment in social relations as well as their psychological complexity.

The idea that the self is in need of rethinking, as the title to this collection of essays suggests, presupposes that the self has already been “thought.” And indeed it has—both explicitly, by philosophers, and implicitly, in the practices of everyday life. For philosophers, this thinking about the self has taken place largely in abstract terms; persons have been treated as metaphysical-cum-moral subjects, disembodied minds that could plausibly be split from or melded with other such minds, or as rational agents, capable of choosing a plan in terms of which to live their lives. In everyday life, in contrast, we “think” one another as selves by making assumptions about how the people we encounter fit into the social landscape and about how we ourselves have a place in the world. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, feminists have challenged both ways of thinking of selfhood in various, sometimes contradictory, ways.

This essay examines ‘The Mapping Journey Project’, an installation artwork by Bouchra Khalili. It consists of eight large video screens and headsets. In each video, a migrant draws a map of her/his journey to and in Europe and narrates her/his route. In collaboration with Khalili, I argue, these storyteller/draftspersons create a dissident cartography that superimposes their lived geography on the background of legal geography. Thus, ‘The Mapping Journey Project’ is a work of art that is also a work of advocacy and provocation. Rather than advocating particular policies, however, it advocates in the sense of affirming the dignity of the subjects of the videos and their right to speak the truth of their lives. Moreover, it provokes by elucidating the moral stakes of the current political and economic order and by issuing a pointed demand for humane solutions. So long as vast global disparities of wealth and political power persist, it is no wonder that people who are excluded from the elite privilege of belonging to a prosperous society are burning the borders that protect this unjust regime.

This paper argues that potential cases of oppression, such as sex trafficking, can sometimes comprise autonomous choices by the trafficked individuals. This issue still divides radical from liberal feminists, with the former wanting to ‘rescue’ the ‘victims’ and the latter insisting that there might be good reasons for ‘hiding from the rescuers.’ This article presents new arguments for the liberal approach and raises two demands: first, help organizations should be run by affected women and be open-minded about whether or not the trafficked individuals should remain in the sex industry. Second, the career choices of trafficked individuals should be expanded by the introduction of an opportunity-extending right to asylum