Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law / Edition 277

by Drucilla Cornell

Overview

This new edition of Drucilla Cornell's highly acclaimed book includes a substantial new introduction by the author, which situates the book within current feminist debates. In Beyond Accommodation, Drucilla Cornell offers a highly original vision of what feminist theory can give contemporary women. She challenges essentialist and naturalist accounts of feminine sexuality, arguing that any attempt to affirm woman's value and difference by either emphasizing her maternal role or repudiating the feminine only entraps women, once again, in a container that curtails feminine sexual difference, legitimates the masculine fantasy of woman, and reinstates, rather than dismantles, the gender hierarchy.

In response to these movements, Beyond Accommodation strives to broaden the scope of feminist theory by articulating a platform, under the concept of relative universalism, which proposes the idea that women are not a unified and homogenous group although they are positioned as women in patriarchy. Cornell's theory allows for differences in women's situations without giving up on the idea that women are fighting a common phenomenon called patriarchy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780847692699
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	10/20/1999
Edition description:	NEW
Pages:	278
Product dimensions:	6.24(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Drucilla Cornell is professor of women's studies, political science, and law at Rutgers University. Her most recent book is At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex and Equality.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Acknowledgmets Chapter 3 Introduction to the New Edition: Feminist Hope Chapter 4 Introduction: Writing the Manifesta: The Dilemma Of Postmodern Feminism Chapter 5 1. The Maternal and the Feminine: Social Reality, Fantasy, and Ethical Relation Chapter 6 2. The Feminist Alliance with Deconstruction Chapter 7 3. Feminism Always Modified: The Affimation of Feminine Difference Rethought Chapter 8 4. Feminine Writing, Metaphor, and Myth Chapter 9 Conclusion: Happy Days Chapter 10 Notes Chapter 11 Index

Editorial Reviews

Drucilla Cornell's ambitious and provocative book reworks in radical ways the very boundaries of feminism, legal theory, and recent continental philosophy. Cornell moves deftly and with unsettling conceptual sophistication from a critique of some feminist legal scholarship, the phallocentrism of philosophy and law, to a call for a utopian recognition of difference.

Judith Butler

Drucilla Cornell is the most intellectually sophisticated legal academic writing on these issues today. The philosophical rigor she brings to any question along with the strong imagining of human needs and aspirations makes her contribution to current debates unique and valuable.

Stanley Fish

Drucilla Cornell shows that rewriting the feminine is part of undoing the material conditions of suffering rather than a luxurious alternative to understanding those conditions. Her book is both a brilliant appropriation of psychoanalysis and perhaps the most intelligent critique of it in feminist theory today.. .. Indispensable for legal and political theory and for those who like an arguement rather than imaginary gestures towards one.

Teresa Brennan

Cornell's work not only reflects incredible philosophical and theoretical breadth, but it is motivated by a powerful concrete and practical vision. Beyond Accommodation is written out of the conviction. . .that women will never be able to attain full equality in western societies until they can be regarded in the public eye as full legal subjects, bearing an authority equal to male citizens.

Patricia Huntington