The Gender of Critical Theory: On the Experiential Grounds of Critique

Abstract

Frankfurt School Critical Theory describes itself as an unmasking critique of power, but it has surprisingly little to say about major structural oppressions, including gender. In diagnosing what is wrong with the world, it claims to be guided by the experiences of oppressed groups. Yet, in practice, it pays little heed to these experiences. This book shows how these oversights and tensions stem from the preoccupation with normative foundations that has dominated Frankfurt School theory since Habermas and has given rise to a mode of paradigm-led inquiry that undermines an effective critique of oppression. The assumption of paradigm-led inquiry that too strong a focus on lived experience has parochializing effects on theory stands in tension with the idea that emancipatory critique ought to be primarily concerned with exposing the situation of oppressed groups. This book offers a reconfigured account of context transcendence as the critical insight afforded not by a monist interpretative paradigm but by reasoning dialogically across experiential and theoretical perspectives. By bringing feminist work on gender to bear on Frankfurt School critical theory, it argues that, far from stymying emancipatory critique, attentiveness to the experiences of oppressed groups is one of its enabling conditions. Combining feminist ideas with inherent but underutilized resources in the Frankfurt School tradition, this book proposes the idea of critique as theorizing from experience.