Description
Book SynopsisThe struggle for recognition features prominently in the work of various thinkers. Lois McNay argues that the insights of the recognition theorists are undercut by their reliance on an inadequate account of power. By focussing on issues of gender she develops an alternative account of individual agency that connects identity to structure.
Trade Review"
Against Recognition is an important critique of some of the recognition theorists, and McNay analyses some important blind spots in the recognition literature. It is certainly a recommendable book."
Political Studies Review "Incisive, committed and engaged: this is feminist social theory at it should be practised. McNay?s critique of theories of recognition develops her earlier work on agency and incorporates a powerful and compelling new analysis of the relationship between embodied identity and gender inequalities."
Henrietta L. Moore, London School of Economics and Political Science
"Against Recognition presents a carefully argued critique of recent efforts to represent social and political agency as a struggle for recognition. Though sympathetic to the aims of recognition theorists, McNay finds that their paradigm rests on a reductive conception of power. By way of alternative, she presents a modified version of Pierre Bourdieu's relational phenomenology, whose key concepts of habitus, field, and capital are used to provide a better account of the role that power plays in the complex interplay between agency and social situation."
Andrew Cutrofello, Loyola University, Chicago
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements.
Introduction: Against Recognition.
Chapter One: Recognition and Misrecognition in the Psyche.
Chapter Two: The Politics of Recognition.
Chapter Three: Narrative and Recognition.
Chapter Four: Recognition and Redistribution.
Chapter Five: Beyond Recognition: Identity and Agency.
Bibliography
