Domestic Labor, Citizenship, and Exceptionalism

Rethinking Kant's “Woman Problem”

Dados Bibliográficos

ID23176151
AutoresJordan Pascoe (0000-0001-8495-7966, autor correspondente)
Ano2015
Volume46
Fascículo3
Páginas340-356
Data de publicação2015-09-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Social Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0047-2786 • E-ISSN: 1467-9833
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/josp.12102
OpenAlexW2133728902
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas11

There is no doubt that Immanuel Kant has a woman problem.His anthropological studies of women are full of cutting remarks, and despite a generation of feminist Kantian scholarship, it is an open question whether he meant to include women as full, equal agents in either his moral or political philosophy.Those who engage this question within Kant's political philosophy ask whether or not women can "work their way up" to full, active citizenship. 1 If women can achieve equality in this way, the argument goes, then we can solve Kant's woman problem.But this approach, I argue, asks the wrong question.It focuses on the status of wives rather than on the structure of the domestic sphere as a whole, and therefore obscures the ways in which the valuation of domestic space and reproductive labor shape access to rights and equality in Kant's political philosophy.I will argue that this approach misses the deeper structural and gendered inequalities built into Kant's conception of the state.Re-examining Kant's "woman problem" points us toward a larger problem with labor and inequality in the Kantian state: Kant's map of the rightful institutional order normatively requires that someone do the dependency work that makes independence possible.In making this argument, I am responding to a recent move to reframe the Kantian state as a model of welfare state liberalism. 2 Critics have examined Kant's defense of unconditional poverty relief and distributive justice and his critique of the nobility in order to offer a robust account of the obligations of the public authority in the face of socioeconomic inequality. 3Although most of these analyses have focused on inequality in the public and market spheres, a few have taken up questions about dependency within the domestic sphere.Tamar Schapiro contends that the limits on rights for those within the domestic sphere is merely a temporary and nonideal feature of Kant's account of right.Helga Varden and Ernest Weinrib argue that if this is the case, the state must foster the conditions that will allow women, domestic servants, and other dependents to "work their way up" to full, active citizenship. 4I will show that these arguments fail to grapple with the relationship between reproductive labor and the independence of active citizens in Kant's account of the state, and therefore, that they underestimate the ways in which the domestic sphere operates as a distinct sphere of rights, labor, and relations within the Kantian state.

American exceptionalism · Citation · Citizenship · Exceptionalism · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment