Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Re-Reading the Canon)

Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Re-Reading the Canon) by Honig, Bonnie. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9780271014470.

Consisting almost entirely of new essays specially prepared for this volume, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt illuminates the diversity of contemporary feminisms while also generating new and suggestive readings of Hannah Arendts political thought. The contributing authors shared interest in Arendt provides a ground upon which to work out their disagreements regarding feminist theory and practice. At the same time, their shared commitment to some brand of feminism leads them to engage Arendt on an unusually wide array of issues, such as gender, sexuality, the body, politics, friendship, solidarity, identity, nationalism, and revolution. Recent developments in feminist theory and practice have prompted a reconsideration of Arendt that includes a critical reevaluation of earlier feminist judgments of her work. From feminist perspectives that interrogate, politicize, and historicize―rather than simply redeploy―categories like "woman," "identity," or "experience," Arendts well-known hostility to feminism and her critical stance toward identitarian and essentialist definitions of "woman" begin to look more like an advantage than a liability. Arendts famous reluctance to identify herself as a woman and to address womens issues looks less like a personal problem of male-identification and more like a political stand that resists the reach of a symbolic order that seeks to define, categorize, and stabilize her in terms of one essential, unriven, and always known identity. Thus, the volumes authors move beyond feminisms traditional concern with the "woman question" to ask, further, what contemporary feminisms might learn from Arendts conceptions of politics, action, and identity.