Property, Women & Politics

Fülszöveg

'In this valuable and scholarly contribution to the feminist reconstruction of political thought, Donna Dickenson digs deep into the philosophical canon and retrieves, reinterprets and reappropriates the 'masters tools' of property, contract, alienation and rationality. Informed by contemporary feminist debates about embodiment and personhood, subjectivity, agency and empowerment, she skilfully and elegandy pieces together (and illustrates through case-studies) a theory of property as a dynamic set of relations which incorporates women's reproductive labour, acknowledges women as subjects and agents, and shifts the grounds of a notion of contract to property vested in the person rather than in the body.'
Fiona Williams, Professor of Social Policy, University of Leeds
'Dickenson breaks entirely new ground with her insistence on a conceptualization of property that treats women as subjects. Her analysis will cause the serious reader to reassess both the false universalism of... Tovább

Fülszöveg

'In this valuable and scholarly contribution to the feminist reconstruction of political thought, Donna Dickenson digs deep into the philosophical canon and retrieves, reinterprets and reappropriates the 'masters tools' of property, contract, alienation and rationality. Informed by contemporary feminist debates about embodiment and personhood, subjectivity, agency and empowerment, she skilfully and elegandy pieces together (and illustrates through case-studies) a theory of property as a dynamic set of relations which incorporates women's reproductive labour, acknowledges women as subjects and agents, and shifts the grounds of a notion of contract to property vested in the person rather than in the body.'
Fiona Williams, Professor of Social Policy, University of Leeds
'Dickenson breaks entirely new ground with her insistence on a conceptualization of property that treats women as subjects. Her analysis will cause the serious reader to reassess both the false universalism of existing androcentric theories of property and also the limitations of feminist theories of property that too narrowly assume a woman-as-object perspective. This is a learned, wide-ranging, and unflinchingly focused book.'
Dr Mary Katzenstein, Department of Government, Cornell University
Although many feminist authors have pointed out the ways in which women have been property, they have been less successful in suggesting how women might become the subjects rather than the objects of property-holding. Property, Women and Politics considers the.relationship between women and property from a novel viewpoint, synthesizing political theory from liberal and non-liberal traditions, feminist critiques, history and social policy. The volume-ranges across a series of historical and anthropological studies which include the property position of women in classical Greece, the Anglo-American doctrine of coverture, nineteenth-century prostitution, and structural adjustment programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. It also includes a comprehensive critique of the treatment of property by both mainstream political theorists and such important second-wave feminists as Irigaray, MacKinnon and Pateman.
Property, Women and Politics deconstructs and contests the concept of property. But it also uses important insights in recent feminist thought to suggest productive directions for a reconstructed theory of property, one in which women's work counts. The reconstructed model is applied to such pressing areas of medical ethics as egg and sperm donation, contract motherhood, abortion and the sale of foetal tissue. In addition, it shows how we can revise our assumptions about the 'marriage contract'.
This book is intended for a wide readership in women's studies, political theory, medical ethics, law and social policy, and for both academic and lay readers, combining as it does current topics of public policy with a sound theoretical discussion.
Donna Dickenson is Leverhulme Senior Lecturer in Medical Ethics and Law at Imperial College School of Medicine, London. Vissza