Paula Landerreche Cardillo

This article examines the historical and conceptual conditions of the dialogue between republicanism and feminism in Latin America, and argues that this conversation constitutes a political necessity derived from the way in which our republics were built: as universal in promise but colonial, oligarchic, and patriarchal in their realization. The text follows places of convergence of republicanism and feminisms as philosophies of praxis: freedom as non-domination and its feminist radicalization in terms of embodiment, materiality and finance; a critique of the public/private distinction and the Latin-American politization of care as the democratic reorganization of interdependence; and the forms and demands of public participation. Through the notion of paradox—taken from Joan W. Scott and Wendy Brown—this article also argues that the tension between universalism and difference, and the law and emancipation are not incoherences to solve, but rather constitutive structures of democratic politics. In this sense, it claims that the republican-feminist dialogue brings about a reciprocal reconstruction and that the Latin-American contribution to these dialogues has been decisive to formulate a situated universalism that critiques punitivism, and a relational conception of rights oriented toward challenging domination in conditions of persisting structural inequality.

Adriana Cavarero has been, and continues to be, one of the most innovative and influential voices in Italian political and feminist thought of the last forty years. Known widely for her challenges to the male-dominated canon of political philosophy (and philosophy more broadly construed), Cavarero has offered provocative accounts of what constitutes the political, with an emphasis on embodiment, singularity, and relationality. Political Bodies gathers some of today’s most prominent and well-established theorists, along with emerging scholars, to contribute their insights, questions, and concerns about Cavarero's political philosophy and to put her work in conversation with other feminist thinkers, political theorists, queer theorists, and thinkers of race and coloniality. A new essay by Adriana Cavarero herself closes out the volume. Political Bodies ventures beyond the familiar boundaries of Cavarero's own writing and is a testament to the generative encounters that her philosophy makes possible.