Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self

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Catriona Mackenzie, Natalie Stoljar
Oxford University Press, Jan 27, 2000 - Philosophy - 328 pages
This collection of original essays explores the social and relational dimensions of individual autonomy. Rejecting the feminist charge that autonomy is inherently masculinist, the contributors draw on feminist critiques of autonomy to challenge and enrich contemporary philosophical debates about agency, identity, and moral responsibility. The essays analyze the complex ways in which oppression can impair an agent's capacity for autonomy, and investigate connections, neglected by standard accounts, between autonomy and other aspects of the agent, including self-conception, self-worth, memory, and the imagination.

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Contents

Autonomy Refigured
3
AUTONOMY AND THE SOCIAL
33
RELATIONAL AUTONOMY IN CONTEXT
211
Index
301
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Page 48 - Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984...
Page 294 - These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or 'fighting' words — those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.
Page 27 - Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 3. Iris Young, "Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory," in Socialist Review 10, 2/3 (March-June, 1980), p.
Page 49 - Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 25. In his article "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,
Page 67 - These are not characteristics that belong to human beings accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover 'the real me'. They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties. Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast.
Page 289 - ... depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens, of any race, color, creed or religion which said publication or exhibition exposes the citizens of any race, color, creed or religion to contempt, derision, or obloquy or which is productive of breach of the peace or riots.
Page 62 - For them, community describes not just what they have as fellow citizens, but also what they are, not a relationship they choose (as in a voluntary association) but an attachment they discover, not merely an attribute but a constituent of their identity.
Page 64 - As a self-interpreting being, I am able to reflect on my history and in this sense to distance myself from it, but the distance is always precarious and provisional, the point of reflection never finally secured outside the history itself.

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