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Julie MacKenzie
Department of Gender Studies, University of Sydney
'Political Liberalism and Global Feminism: Tension or Template?'
Feminism has long grappled with its overwhelming identification with the concerns of white Western women. It is an identification that has spawned fierce debate as to the appropriateness, and indeed even the possibility, of developing a global feminist project that is responsive to difference. Two feminists, Martha Nussbaum and Drucilla Cornell, have recently argued that the political liberalism of John Rawls can provide the basis of a revivified internationalist feminism. Political liberalism revises the conceptual basis for liberalism from a comprehensive theory to a theory that encodes only political principles, and is applicable only to a political realm. It does so, Rawls argues, in order to better accommodate the pluralism constitutive of liberal society. As a political rather than a comprehensive theory, political liberalism can act as a freestanding core that can be filled out by any number of metaphysical positions. This freestanding core, Rawls suggests, can be the object of an 'overlapping consensus' between plural positions. Both Nussbaum and Cornell suggest that the notions of freestanding core and overlapping consensus can be adopted as a model for forging universal agreement between plural cultures in a way that does not assimilate such pluralism. I argue that while political liberalism is indeed an important attempt to revise liberalism in a way that better attends to difference, there are a number of reasons to remain wary of the adequacy of political liberalism for resuscitating internationalist feminism. I suggest that the desire to identify 'political' rather than metaphysical issues that can be the object of an overlapping consensus can both mask the metaphysical attachments embedded in a 'freestanding core', and render such a core less amenable to contestation and transformation from the claims of difference.
Bio: Julie MacKenzie is currently completing doctoral research on universalism and feminist theory in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Sydney.
<juliemackenzie@student.usyd.edu.au>