This paper engages with two approaches in feminist theory - structural approaches, that theorize gender as a structure and gender oppression as structural form of injustice (Davis, Federici, Young, McKinnon) and feminist theories of freedom that draw on Arendt’s view of action (Zerilli, Honig, Benhabib, Weeks) – and argues that each should integrate insights developed by the other. Structural approaches should integrate the latter’s conception of public action, while Arendt-inspired feminist theories should adopt a conception of action that takes into account the structural context of action. Both approaches should adopt a conception of action I call “structurally and publicly constituted.”
Action is “structurally constituted” in the sense that its public meaning is constituted through processes of interpretation of the cultural meanings, practices and material things whose interaction constitute a social structure. Structures are “read” on the bodies of actions. Without structures there would be only movement of bodies, not actions. Bodily movements become actions when they are interpreted through particular structural lenses, with the cultural knowledge that comes from being a member of a social world. Actions are “publicly constituted” in the sense that the publics of one’s actions play crucial roles in these processes of structural interpretation that confer meaning to actions. Different publics can confer different meanings to an action. Thus, by being structurally and publicly constituted, action is also a collaborative process between the agent and the action’s publics. This is a highly contingent, unpredictable process. I argue that this contingency and unpredictability explain action’s ability to transform the structures within which it is taken.
By adopting this conception of action, structural accounts would avoid an inadequate view of structures that reduces the relation between structures and actions to one of constraint, and thus assumes that structures necessarily inhibit transformative action, which can only come from outside structures. With Arendt-inspired feminist theories of action, this account of action emphasizes the transformative possibilities of action, while showing, against Arendt, that these transformative possibilities are enhanced, not closed off by the structural constitution of action.
