Dietz and Butler

Caleb Parsons

Feminism’s sphere of influence is vast, yet it appears from Judith Butler and Mary Dietz that feminism has a long way to go in achieving substantial gains. The shortfall feminism faces in Dietz’s view is its refusal to engage in the political process and the development of citizenship. Dietz means to understand the political being in context with the power relations that shaped it. By contrasting liberalism with two popular feminist critiques, those being Marxist feminism and maternalism, Dietz explores the different ways citizenship and democracy have been largely ignored in the contemporary political discussion. For Dietz, citizenship is crucial to re-evaluating the American political environment. It is through a critical analysis of citizenship that democracy in its preferred form will manifest itself in American politics. The role of feminism in this process is to guide the development of virtues, relations, and practices of democratic participation (13-14). Dietz unambiguously outlines a “feminist politics” as a means of ensuring a just extension of citizenship and democracy. In a less unambiguous political scheme, Butler establishes a politics of recognitions, wherein the bodies of those most vulnerable in society are affirmed and valued. While much of American society deems certain lives worth grieving and others not, Butler focuses her attention to the people devalued and dehumanized in the U.S. The human body for Butler has a wide range of relations and influences that impact the larger political body. While autonomy is certainly a desirable condition, Butler asserts that, as human subjects, we own very little of our physical selves. With this thought in tow, Butler elaborates that it must be the responsibility of politics to serve and protect those bodies that are vulnerable to systematic and institutionalized forms of violence. My question for Dietz’s work in particular focuses on the separation she wishes to draw between liberalism and her democratic conception. Is she not relying on a historically liberal practice when she advocates for an expansion of democracy? If she means to withdraw from the liberal-capitalist vision should she not devise a completely new language to approach political organization?