UI Press | Edited by Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges

Feminism and the Final Foucault

A new approach to feminism

Feminism and the Final Foucault is the first systematic offering of contemporary, international feminist perspectives on the later work of philosopher Michel Foucault.

Rather than simply debating the merits or limitations of Foucault's later work, the essays in this collection examine women's historical self-practices, conceive of feminism as a shared ethos, and consider the political significance of this conceptualization in order to elucidate, experiment with, and put into practice the conceptual "tools" that Foucault offers for feminist ethics and politics. The volume illustrates the ways in which Foucault's later thinking on ethics as "care of the self" can reintroduce a number of issues and themes that feminists jettisoned in the wake of postmodernism, including consciousness raising, feminist therapy, the subject woman, identity politics, and feminist agency.

Taken as a whole, the diversity of feminist viewpoints presented provide important new insights into "the final Foucault," and thus serve as a productive intervention in current Foucault scholarship.

"This collection is a useful and insightful connection between Foucault's later work on the self and feminist focus on the political nature of the personal. It is sure to be of great interest both to feminists and Foucault scholars."--Jon Simons, University of Nottingham

"Michel Foucault's influence upon feminist theory and practice is probably as great as that of any intellectual figure of the twentieth century. But to this point feminsits have drawn mainly from his "middle works" such as Discipline & Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Like many others, feminist thinkers have not been as readily able to recognize the theoretical and political significance of Foucault's later works. The fine essays in this volume do just that and creatively draw upon Foucault's last works to further feminist thinking and practice."--Melissa Orlie, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Dianna Taylor is an assistant professor of philosophy at John Carroll University. Karen Vintges, a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, has published Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, and other books.

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