Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville

Title

Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville

Role

Co-editors: Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt-Botting

Contributing author: Jocelyn M. Boryczka

Files

Description/Summary

Jocelyn M. Boryczka is a contributing author, “The Separate Spheres Paradox: Habitual Inattention and Democratic Citizenship", pp. 281-304.

Book description: This book moves beyond traditional readings of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) and his relevance to contemporary democracy by emphasizing the relationship of his life and work to modern feminist thought. Within the resurgence of political interest in Tocqueville during the past two decades, especially in the United States, there has been significant scholarly attention to the place of gender, race, and colonialism in his work. This is the first edited volume to gather together a range of this creative scholarship. It reveals a tidal shift in the reception history of Tocqueville as a result of his serious engagement by feminist, gender, postcolonial, and critical race theorists.

The volume highlights the expressly normative nature of Tocqueville’s project, thus providing an overdue counterweight to the conventional understanding of Tocquevillean America as an actual place in time and history. By reading Tocqueville alongside the writings of early women’s rights activists, ethnologists, critical race theorists, contemporary feminists, neoconservatives, and his French contemporaries, among others, this book produces a variety of Tocquevilles that unsettles the hegemonic view of his work.

Seen as a philosophical source and a political authority for modern democracies since the publication of the twin volumes of Democracy in America (1835/1840), Tocqueville emerges from this collection as a vital interlocutor for democratic theorists confronting the power relations generated by intersections of gender, sexual, racial, class, ethnic, national, and colonial identities.

ISBN

9780271034034

Publication Date

2009

Publication Information

Boryczka, Jocelyn. 2009. “The Separate Spheres Paradox: Habitual Inattention and Democratic Citizenship.” In Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville. Eds. Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt-Botting. Re-reading the Canon Series. Ed. Nancy Tuana. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 281-304.

Comments

Copyright 2009 Pennsylvania State University Press

Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville

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