Radical Feminist Liberalism

Abstract

This essay, which appears in an anthology on the work of philosopher Drucilla Cornell, takes up Cornell's distinctive contribution to the relationship between feminism and philosophical liberalism. In recent years that relationship has been contentious, despite the facts that liberal reformers of the 19th Century were among the first to champion equal rights for women and that the main legal and political advances made by women since that time have generally been justified by reference to the liberal values of equal respect and equal treatment before the law. Since the 1970s, however, feminist critics have pointed out that the liberal presupposition of equality or sameness of legal subjects is itself oppressive when it masks real differences between these subjects that themselves demand respect, as differences, in their own right. Recent debates within feminist political theory have thus been marked by various attempts to reconcile the respect due to difference with the respect due to each without regard for difference.

Cornell's insight is that these positions can be reconciled by reorienting the feminist critique away from its focus on equality and returning instead to the earliest roots of philosophical liberalism and the priority that it grants to freedom over equality. In particular, Cornell argues that Rawls's account of political liberalism can and should be reconstructed to incorporate a concern for sexual difference by first reconceiving the Kantian notion of a sacrosanct sphere of subjective freedom. The Kantian conception of subjective freedom, she argues, which has traditionally been understood to comprise the sphere of conscience (the person's ultimate goals for her life, her fundamental associations and loyalties, and her philosophical, moral or religious beliefs about her life's meaning), must also be understood to include what Cornell calls the person's imaginary domain - the internal space in which the person imagines herself as a sexuate, embodied being. Cornell's argument is thus that the apparent stand-off between the feminist insistence on difference and the liberal insistence on equality can be overcome by reconceiving freedom as embracing both the traditional, Kantian notion of freedom of intellect and her notion of somatic, or sexuate, freedom.

In this essay, I evaluate her argument as a philosophical matter and in terms of its practical consequences for various areas of legal regulation, and also situate it within the feminist debates with liberalism and in the broader history of philosophical liberalism as a whole.

Keywords: Feminism, liberalism, jurisprudence