1. See Chantal Mouffe, "Feminism and Radical Politics," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Butler and Scott, especially 373-377.

2. Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). break

3. Carole Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy," in The Disorder of Women (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 118-140.

4. Claude Lefort, "The Question of Democracy," in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 17.

5. Claude Lefort, "Permanence of the Theologico-Political?" in Democracy and Political Theory, ed. Macey, 226.

6. Lefort, "Permanence of the Theologico-Political," 227; "The Question of Democracy," 18.

7. For example, important discussions have focused both on the notion of a black public sphere and the relevance of the concept of the public sphere to African American political history. This work, although it often draws attention to the position of black women, generally thematizes race and the problem of racial exclusions within the modern conception of the public in a way similar to the feminist focus on gender and sexual difference. See Elsa Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere," Public Culture 7, no. 1 (fall 1994), 108-112; and, in the same issue, Michael Dawson, "A Black Counterpublic?" 195-223.

8. Early overviews of feminist theory tended to use the categories of liberal feminist, marxist feminist, socialist feminist, and radical feminist. As the complexity of the debate grew during the early eighties, the categories of black feminism, cultural feminism, lesbian feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, and French feminism were added and then supplemented by various subgroups like black lesbian feminism, S/M lesbian feminism, dual structuralist feminism, and so forth. While these distinctions have been useful in pinpointing the diversity of women's experiences and concerns, they often serve to occlude the formal similarities among the various types of feminist argument. For an interesting account of the way some of the similarities emerged out of radical feminism, see Grant, Fundamental Feminism .

9. As in, for example, the classic texts by Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony.

10. The effort to secure an Equal Rights Amendment in the United States is a clear example. See also the Bill of Rights of the National Organization of Women. For a defense of the continuing struggle for rights against the Critical Legal Studies critique, see Elizabeth M. Schneider, "The Dialectics of Rights and Politics: Perspectives from the Women's Movement," in At the Boundaries of Law, ed. Fineman and Thomadsen, 301-319. For a thorough account of the successes, failures, and general complexity surrounding women's rights claims, see Deborah L. Rhode, Justice and Gender (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

11. See Frances Fox Piven, "Women and the State: Ideology, Power and the Welfare State," and Alice Kessler-Harris, "The Debate over Equality for Women in the Workplace: Recognizing Differences," both in Families and Work, ed. Naromi Gerstel and Harriet Engel Gross (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

12. See Lorenne M. G. Clark, "Women and Locke: Who Owns the Apples continue

in the Garden of Eden," in The Sexism of Social and Political Theory, ed. Lorenne M. G. Clark and Lynda Lange (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 16-40; Christine Di Stefano, "Masculinity as Ideology in Political Theory: Hobbesian Man Reconsidered," in Hypatia Reborn, ed. Azizah Y. Al-Hibri and Margaret A. Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 90-109; Zillah Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longman Press, 1979); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Lynda Lange, "Rousseau on Women," in The Sexism of Social and Political Theory, ed. Clark and Lange, 42-52; Linda Nicholson, Gender and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Patricia Jagentowitcz Mills, "Hegel and the Woman Question,'' in The Sexism of Social and Political Theory, ed. Clark and Lange, 74-98; and Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

13. See especially Landes's account of the development of a gendered conception of the public sphere as it emerged during the French Revolution. She writes that "while the norms of publicity, authenticity, transparency and universal reason may have affirmed men's participation in the public realm, an emerging code of gender propriety prescribed that women were most in conformity with these norms when their behavior and conduct were least public." Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 147.

14. Rhode, Justice and Gender, 94, 96.

15. Rhode writes: "Female flight attendants in hot pants and high boots allegedly were necessary to personify Southwest's [Airlines] 'sexy image' and take passengers 'skyward with love.'" Ibid., 94. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (London: Vintage, 1991), 37-42.

16. See Christine Di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

17. "The civil sphere gains its universal meaning in opposition to the private sphere of natural subjection and womanly capacities. The 'civil individual' is constituted within the sexual division of social life created through the original contract. The civil individual and the public realm appear universal only in relation to and in opposition to the private sphere, the natural foundation of civil life. Similarly, the meaning of civil liberty and equality, secured and distributed impartially to all 'individuals' through the civil law, can be understood only in opposition to natural subjection (of women) in the private sphere. Liberty and equality appear as universal ideals, rather than as the natural attributes of the men (the brothers) who create the social order within which the ideals are given social expression, only because the civil sphere is conventionally considered on its own. Liberty, equality and fraternity form the revolutionary trilogy because liberty and equality are the attributes of the fraternity who exercise the law of male sex right." Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 113-114. See also Pateman's essays in The Disorder of Women .

18. "The unbreachable line between public and private values rests on the tacit assumption that women will continue to preserve and protect personal life, the task to which they have been assigned. In this way the political morality can continue

sustain the fiction of the wholly autonomous individual, whose main concern is a system of rights that protects him from other individuals like himself. The public world is conceived as a place in which direct recognition and care for others' needs is impossible—and that is tolerable as long as the private world 'cooperates.'" Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 197.

19. "Feminism does not begin with the premise that it is unpremised. It does not aspire to persuade an unpremised audience, because there is no such audience. Its project is to uncover and claim as valid the experiences of women, the major content of which is the devalidation of women's experience. This defines the task of feminism not only because male dominance is perhaps the most pervasive and tenacious system of power in history, but because it is metaphysically nearly perfect. Its point of view is the standard for point-of-viewlessness, its particularity the meaning of universality. Its force is exercised as consent, its authority as participation, its supremacy as the paradigm of order, its control as the definition of legitimacy. In the face of this, feminism claims the voice of women's silence, the fullness of 'lack,' the centrality of women's marginality and exclusion, the public nature of privacy, the presence of women's absence." Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 117.

20. Habermas, "Nachholende Revolution und linker Revisionsbedarf," 232. (My translation.)

21. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 110-111.

22. Habermas, "Discourse Ethics," 66.

23. Klaus Günther, "Universalistische Normbegründung und Normanwendung in Recht und Moral," in Generalisierung und Individualisierung im Rechtsdenken, ed. M. Herberger, U. Neumann, and H. Russmann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992), 6-7. Habermas, "Discourse Ethics," 83-85.

24. Benhabib, "The Generalized and the Concrete Other," 81.

25. Jürgen Habermas, "Morality, Society and Ethics," Acta Sociologica 33 (1990), 96-97.

26. See Klaus Günther, Der Sinn für Angemessenheit: Anwendungsdiskurse in Moral und Recht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988).

27. See Günther, "Universalistische Normbegründung und Normanwendung."

28. See Susan Moller Okin's discussion of the breakdown of a clear distinction between the domestic and public spheres in Justice, Gender and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 128-133. See also Donna Haraway's rejection of the public/private distinction and her notion of the "integrated circuit," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 170 ff.

29. "It has been common forever to speak of the public functions of the family in producing and socializing the 'next generation.' Using this and other rationales the state attempts to determine the content of and then enforce the performance of familial roles, both of parents and children. Modern statutory schemes authorize social welfare agencies backed by the courts to intervene on no more precise grounds than 'the best interests of the child' or the child's 'need for supervision.'" Duncan Kennedy, "The Stages of the Decline of the Public/Private Distinction," University of Pennsylvania Law Review 139 (1982), 1356. See continue

also Frances Olsen, "The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Social Reform," Harvard Law Review 96, no. 7 (May 1983), 1497-1578.

30. See Carol B. Stack's discussion of the complexities of household composition in a poor section of an American Midwestern community, "Sex Roles and Survival Strategies in an Urban Black Family," in Woman, Culture and Society, eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 113-128. Additionally, Frances Olsen's "The Myth of State Intervention in the Family" reveals some of the ways in which the designation of a group as a family tends to empower some members at the expense of others. In Journal of Law Reform 18, no. 4 (summer 1985), 835-864.

31. Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 109-142.

32. For example, see Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman; and Annette C. Baier, "What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?" Nous 19, no. 1, 53-63.

33. Jürgen Habermas, "Three Normative Models of Democracy" Constellations 1, no. 1 (April 1994.), 1.

34. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, 346.

35. In their critique of Foucault (and Luhmann), Cohen and Arato refer to the following concepts as the "key categories" of civil society: the juridical subject; the autonomous, self-reflective moral individual; normativity; legality; publicity; democratic control; and plurality. Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, "Politics and the Reconstruction of the Concept of Civil Society," in Zwischenbetrachtungen Im Prozess der Aufklärung, ed. Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (Frankfurt: Surhkamp Verlag, 1989), 490. I will not address legality and normativity per se insofar as these concepts are intertwined with the notions of the juridical subject and the autonomous, self-reflective moral individual.

36. My alternative to the public/private distinction thus differs from Chantal Mouffe's. Although I agree with her that "every situation is an encounter between 'private' and 'public' " I disagree with her claim that "wants, choices, and decisions are private" while "performances" are public. As I see it, wants, choices, and decisions have a public dimension in that they are constructed interrelationally and always situated in cultural representations, discourses, and matrixes of power. In other words, we can be called upon to defend and justify our choices and decisions and we are often accountable for the ways in which wants and decisions are constructed and imputed. See Mouffe, "Feminism and Radical Politics," 378.

37. Cohen and Arato conceive of five complexes of rights: those concerning cultural reproduction (freedoms of thought, press, speech, communication); those insuring social integration (freedoms of association, assembly); those securing socialization (protection of privacy, intimacy, inviolability of the person); those mediating between civil society and the capitalist economy (rights of property, contract, labor); and those mediating between civil society and the modern bureaucratic state (electoral rights of citizens, welfare rights of clients). See Cohen and Arato, "Politics and the Reconstruction of the Concept of Civil Society," 441. While a number of these rights would clearly fall under the general category of discursive rights (inviolability of the person, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of association), others would lose their fundamental character and become just one consideration among others within a dilemma or dispute. break

38. Rhode, Justice and Gender, 3.

39. Cohen and Arato, "Politics and the Reconstruction of the Concept of Civil Society," 490.

40. Dyson, Reflecting Black, xxiii.

41. As Cohen and Arato argue: "Both the complexity of and the diversity within contemporary civil societies call for the posing of the issue of democratization in terms of a variety of differential processes, forms, and loci depending on the axis of division considered," Cohen and Arato, "Politics and the Reconstruction of the Concept of Civil Society," 415.

42. Ibid., 417.

41. As Cohen and Arato argue: "Both the complexity of and the diversity within contemporary civil societies call for the posing of the issue of democratization in terms of a variety of differential processes, forms, and loci depending on the axis of division considered," Cohen and Arato, "Politics and the Reconstruction of the Concept of Civil Society," 415.

42. Ibid., 417.