Sympathy and Solidarity: and Other Essays

by Sandra Lee Bartky

Overview

In a rare full-length volume, renowned feminist thinker Sandra Lee Bartky brings together eight essays in one volume, Sympathy and Solidarity. A philosophical work accessible to an educated general audience, the essays reflect the intersection of the author's eye, work, and sometimes her politics. Two motifs connect the works: first, all deal with feminist topics and themes; second, most deal with the reality of oppression, especially in the disguised and subtle ways it can be manifested.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781461715351
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	01/21/2002
Series:	Feminist Constructions
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	409 KB

About the Author

Sandra Lee Bartky is one of the towering figures of second-wave feminist theory. The importance of her work, especially in feminist philosophy, but also in the wider world of women's studies and feminist thought, cannot be exaggerated. She is an influential teacher, speaker, and activist, and the author of Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. Bartky is professor of philosophy and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Suffering to be Beautiful
Chapter 2 Agency: What's the Problem?
Chapter 3 "Catch me if you Can": Foucault on the Repressive Hypothesis
Chapter 4 Sympathy and Solidarity
Chapter 5 Unplanned Obsolescence: Some Reflections on Aging
Chapter 6 Phenomenology of A Hyphenated Consciousness
Chapter 7 In Defense of Guilt
Chapter 8 Race, Complicity and Culpable Ignorance

Editorial Reviews

As a whole, Sympathy and Solidarity admirably combines the personal and the political, stories readers can enjoy and arguments we can engage. The book makes another splendid contribution to feminist philosophy.

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy - Iris Marion Young

Bartky writes with such urgency and intimacy that the reader is not just invited but compelled to see the relevance for both personal experience and political practice. This collection of essays challenges the women's movement with new agenda items, new methods, and new boundaries. Bartky is a rigorous critic and a powerful voice within feminist theory.

Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Written in a strong personal voice, Bartky's new essays display her characteristic blend of moral passion, philosophical insight, radical politics, and dry humor. Bartky moves elegantly between highly concrete experiences and highly abstract philosophical theories, bringing each to illuminate the other. The book is at once philosophically profound and a good read.

Alison M. Jaggar

Bartky's incisive analyses of oppression, and especially of internalized oppression, remain unforgettable long after I first read them. She reminds us of what we would rather not acknowledge: the ambivalences and even pleasures we experience in securing our own oppressions. Here, too, are Bartky's distinctively illuminating analyses of white privilege from the perspective of a philosopher disloyal to white supremacy. Her voice continues to provide an energizing force in contemporary women's studies and philosophy...

Sandra Harding

"Sandra Bartky brings a sensible and sensitive mind and a warm and wise heart to the many important issues she explores in this new work. She once again offers original insights and powerful arguments, toward showing the difficulties but possibilities for alliances that bridge race and class difference, new ways to think about the constructed, and therefore defeasible, nature of some of the problems associated with aging, and new strategies for analyzing racism, the problem of agency, and femininity. If anyone still thinks feminist philosophy cannot be good philosophy, I wish they would read Bartky!"

Linda Martín Alcoff

"Sandra Bartky brings a sensible and sensitive mind and a warm and wise heart to the many important issues she explores in this new work. She once again offers original insights and powerful arguments, toward showing the difficulties but possibilities for alliances that bridge race and class difference, new ways to think about the constructed, and therefore defeasible, nature of some of the problems associated with aging, and new strategies for analyzing racism, the problem of agency, and femininity. If anyone still thinks feminist philosophy cannot be good philosophy, I wish they would read Bartky!"

Linda Martin Alcoff