Sexual Difference between Skepticism and Dogmatism: A reading of Linda Zerilli’s «Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom»

Abstract

Freedom and feminism have not always been at ease with each other, insofar as Western feminists “have tended to justify the claim to freedom in terms of the social question, social justice, or social utility”, as if, for some unconscious patriarchal reminder, women’s freedom had to be justified by a higher goal, the betterment of society. As if women’s freedom could not have its raison d’être in itself. In her book Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Linda Zerilli affirms that there are “received frames” that interpret freedom in feminism as either a “social question” or as a “subject question”, and they tend to de-politicize feminism, to render freedom either an issue of “equality” or of “sovereignty”. For Zerilli, instead, feminism is a crucial practice of political freedom and its importance lies above all in its ability to create “alternative forms of political association”.

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