Summary
Contents
Subject index
This volume takes a critical look at the popular representations of the concept of public and private in the context of democracy. Most analyses of state and citizenship in contemporary times invoke the idea of public and private. Though these are amongst the most commonly used terms in social science discourses, there exists considerable ambiguity about what each of these concepts denotes. Most often they are presented as discrete, if not separate, spheres of life and activity locked in an antagonistic relationship.
The essays in this volume take a critical look at these diverse representations of public and private, the manner in which they reinforce each other and collectively impact democracy. In the era of globalization, the relationship between public and private is being steadily redefined. The book reflects upon these changes and the implications they have for democratic citizenship.
Feminism and the Public-Private Distinction
Feminism and the Public-Private Distinction
I Prologue
I put it to a friend of mine, a well-known feminist author: ‘Supposing you were asked to write on the public-private distinction in feminism, where would you begin?’
‘But I thought we'd finished with all that long ago’, was her spontaneous reply.
Of course, she had to be wrong. A distinction so intrinsic to modern conceptualizations of citizenship and governance, freedom and accountability, justice and the limits of state power, cannot be simply ‘finished with’: it will surely take on new names and new guises. But her reaction was interesting all the same as a confirmation of the built-in obsolescence of academic fashions, whereby yesterday's ideas are cheerfully discarded like last year's wardrobe. Indeed, ‘Second Wave’ feminism ...
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