Introduction to the Symposium on Maria Pia Lara's Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere

Women's political activism has altered the contours of civil society across the globe, overturning liberal understandings of the private sphere, forcing the state to recognize mothers as political actors and not mere icons, and re-configuring the scope and nature of human rights. In her highly original work Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (1998), Mexican fem-inist philosopher María Pía Lara contributes a new chapter in this unfolding story, arguing that the women's movement has bridged the gap between "the moral and the aesthetic validity spheres." In this way, the question of self-de-termination and the question of self-realization can be redefined so as to reveal the constitutive relationship between autonomy and authenticity. Lara's analysis shows in particular how women's narratives, both autobiographical and imaginative, need to be brought from the margins to the center of our thinking about political activism as well as our definitions of discursive rationality.

Lara makes creative use of contemporary discourse ethics and, especially, Habermasian accounts of the public sphere to reconstruct the normative and philosophical implications of feminist activism. Most importantly, she suggests the means to correct what has come to be regarded as the most serious shortcoming of discourse ethics: its hyper-rationalism and its neglect of cul-tural activity and the aesthetic dimensions of normativity. These problems have been the basis of many postmodernist and feminist critiques of Habermas's communicative ethics. Rather than relinquishing all that is potentially useful in discourse theory because of these problems, Lara takes the route of offering a radical reconstruction. She uses Arendt's account of "storytelling" to develop an analysis of feminist narratives as the site of identity construction, recognition, and the reformulation of justice, and thus to bring less rationalistic social practices and cultural productions to the fore in the assessment of struggles for justice.

In the following symposium, Lara's arguments are considered from two very diverse points of view. From outside the domain of discourse ethics, María Lugones considers whether Lara's proposed reading of feminist narratives as illocutionary acts in the public sphere can accommodate the heterogeneity and infrapolitical nature of subaltern groups. Despite the fact that Lara stresses the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of feminist political activity, Lugones still harbors some skepticism about the focus on the public sphere in Lara's characterization of resistance, and worries that the discourse apparatus will miss the "hidden transcripts" of resistance communities. From a position more solidly within the tradition of discourse ethics, Eduardo Mendieta appreciates Lara's arguments that the aesthetic can be the means to educate and develop moral sensibilities, and suggests that this can also be a means to repair the divide between more postmodern political approaches (e.g. Rorty's), which stress the aesthetic dimension, and Habermas's. But Mendieta also raises the worry that a political championing of aesthetic production and aesthetic cri-teria will return us to the instrumentalist view that art must serve political ends.

In her response to these commentaries, Lara clarifies her views and argues that her account can meet the challenges set by Lugones and Mendieta.

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy, Political Science, and Women's Studies at Syracuse University. Her books include Feminist Epistemologies (1993), co-edited with Elizabeth Potter; Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory of Knowledge (1996); Epistemology: The Big Questions (1998); and Thinking From the Underside of History, co-edited with Eduardo Mendieta (forthcoming). Also forthcoming is Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self. (lmalcoff@hotmail.com)

* © by Linda Martín Alcoff

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