Liberal Feminism, Gender andMontesquieu.

Liberal Feminism, Gender and Montesquieu Mika LaVaque-Manty University of Michigan There are two familiar critiques of liberal feminism: (1) It has no account of gender as a social category only contingently mapped onto the biological category sex. (2) As a result, liberal feminism has particularly hard time dealing with the cultural variance of gender categories: its only responses to problematic gender practices in other cultures are quietist relativism or unsubtle imperialism. This paper offers a qualified defense of liberal feminism via an exploration of Montesquieu’s work. The paper shows, first, that Montesquieu offers us conceptual resources for a robust account of gender. Second, the paper connects Montesquieu’s style of inquiry with the practices of political judgment, which suggests an alternative to the relativism–imperialism dilemma. Finally, however, the paper identifies limits to what we can get out of Montesquieu and suggests the limits aren’t just limits in Montesquieu’s political imagination or a feature of his times, but theoretical constraints. Liberal feminism, the conventional complaint goes, has ready resources for addressing issues of sex discrimination because such discrimination allocates resources on the basis of contingent facts of birth. However, liberals’ commitment to the principle of “the self prior to its ends” means, according to critics, a commitment to take identities as they come, and internalized norms about social roles, for example, are beyond a political critique. This charge is true even of the paradigmatic liberal feminist John Stuart Mill, but it isn’t, I argue, true of Montesquieu. For him, all social roles and norms are, using a concept from philosopher David Wiggins, “essentially contestable.” Although Montesquieu’s conscious commitment to what we might call feminism is questionable and although he does not use the concepts of gender analysis, I argue his Persian Letters shows how the essential contestability of social meanings can be explicitly applied to the case of gender. The idea of essential contestability is at the heart of Montesquieu’s mode of social inquiry, and it also points to a way of escaping the relativism–imperialism dilemma liberal feminism faces. The approach (discussed by other Montesquieu scholars such as Tzvetan Todorov) is to pass political judgment only in contexts where one is on an epistemically sure footing — in one’s own culture — but to do it in a way that opens the possibility of cross-cultural political engagement. Despite these advantages Montesquieu’s theory offers for liberal feminism, the account is also ultimately limited by his conception of the boundary between the categories of natural and non-natural. Instead of claiming these are problems for Montesquieu but not for us, I argue that the problem is general and theoretical. (Paper submitted for panel #031038, Reinterpreting Montesquieu: Inheritances and Influences, proposed by Annie Stilz) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]