Kadish Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory: Linda Zerilli, University of Chicago

Toward a Freedom-Centered Feminist Historiography

Abstract 

This paper engages debates about the relationship between past and present feminisms to explore the political stakes of historiographic practice. The received metaphor for describing this relationship, “the waves of feminism,” is woefully inadequate for capturing the complex history of diverse struggles, generating deep dissent about who and what counts as belonging to the political tradition of feminism and its unfinished project of freedom. To enable productive encounters between past and present feminisms, argue critics, the progressivist ‘wave’ model of feminist history should be abandoned in favor of a multilinear and multidirectional model of historical time. New chronologies such as “the long women’s movement” have been advanced to yield more inclusive understandings of feminist struggles. Gaining clarity about the hazards of historical writing and the possibilities of new temporalities requires a better understanding of what feminist political actors want and need history for. It has been hard to imagine a relation to past feminisms other than the premodern idea of the past as a storehouse of examples, which received feminist historiography at once displaces and preserves. Though the supposedly transcended past is left behind, it persists in the form of a haunting past, at once calcified in standard narratives (e.g., 1848 Seneca Falls) and rendered invisible as an object of critique. Feminism’s entanglement with the histories and afterlives of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism calls for political judgment. Yet the capacity to judge is foreclosed by the temporal model of linear progress: History itself is the judge, and the vanquished have no say. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Reinhard Koselleck, Jacqueline Dowd Hall, and Saidiya Hartman, this paper moves beyond historicism to advance a freedom-centered feminist historiography.

About Linda Zerilli, University of Chicago:

Linda M. G. Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke and Mill (1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (2005), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (2016), and A Democratic Theory of Truth (2025).

About the workshop:

A workshop for presenting and discussing work in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The central aim is to provide an opportunity for students to engage with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues of potential interest to philosophers and political theorists.

The theme for Spring 2025 is “Critics of Liberalism,” and we will host scholars working in Philosophy, Law, History, and Political Science. Our underlying concern will be the normative critiques of substantive liberal ideas from both the left and right, as well as staunch defenders of liberalism.

This semester the workshop is co-taught by Joshua Cohen and Desmond Jagmohan.