Feminist Practice Meets Feminist Theory

It is always welcome to have a smart, committed feminist engage seriously with big questions of social and political theory, all the more so when her work takes the variety of writings considered "radical feminist theory" seriously enough to make them a central part of her project without simultaneously limiting herself only to those works. Zerilli's Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom puts thinkers as different from one another as Hannah Arendt and the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, Emmanuel Kant and Monique Wittig into the same paragraphs, if not the same sentences. Moreover, her argument also offers a Eurocentric impulse to push American feminists past the stale equality-difference debate and the anxiety about collective action by "women" that seems to accompany it here. As a person who works on European feminism, I especially appreciate this attention to feminist writings about collective action that have not received the attention in the United States that they merit. Finally, Zerilli deserves a third round of applause for taking the rhetorical work of claims-making as the serious political action that I also think it is. Rather than taking political arguments as merely "theory," she considers them as efficacious in their own terms, as means of making political subjects and actions "real-izable" by opening up new spaces in which struggles can and do occur. To meaningfully grant her those three kudos, this essay outlines the sense of her argument for those who have not yet read the book, as well as evaluates some of her claims. To do so, I take up each of these three praiseworthy contributions in more detail. I then turn to ask a few questions about the limits of her arguments, particularly as they might apply to creating the actual spaces for action that she expects political claims to do. The first thing to note about the work of feminist theoretical reflection that Zerilli offers is the scope of the previous work that she draws into her frame of reference. What Zerilli actually means by the "abyss of freedom" is the radical uncertainty about the outcomes of their actions that challenges all actors who seek to "make a difference" in the world. But a second "abyss" addressed by Zerilli is the gulf usually seen between the philosophical concerns and approaches with which she deals. On the one side, she anchors herself in two of the classic authors of nonfeminist political philosophy, Emmanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt. On the other side, she builds directly upon two classics of contemporary European feminist theory - Monique Wittig's Les Guerillieres (1969/1985) and the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective's manifesto (1987). This latter book was actually translated into English under the title of Sexual Difference (1990), but as Zerilli points out, would more properly have been called "What's Wrong with Rights." Stretching herself across the vast gulf between the classic thinkers on politics and second-wave feminists who attempt to theorize from their political practices, Zerilli attempts to provide a bridge strong enough to support liberatory feminist political claims. To construct such a structure