ABSTRACT
Feminist thought serves as a vital supplement to Western political theory given that its many-faceted critique of patriarchy offers an engaging, demanding corrective to the canon. The term “supplement” is employed here in both the conventional and the Derridean senses, since feminism’s revisiting of the canon is both an addition to traditional interpretations as well as a critical destabilization of time-honored ideas. Feminism’s status as supplement does not make it a simple addendum, then, for even as it defends gender as a critical category equal in importance to class, race, religion, and ethnicity, it perceives gender as a transformative lens through which to view canonical texts. Students of feminism thus acquire the tools of analytic dissent, learning, for example, to recognize silences and ellipses, to evaluate covert power relations hidden in the everyday, and to understand the category of “nature” as code for the mandate to simply accept conventions as they are. It is my argument that this supplemental status constitutes one of feminism’s
signature contributions to the field. It adds to time-honored interpretations by demonstrating the ellipses surrounding women, the exclusion of women and the feminine from analyses of power, and the silences that surround women’s experience throughout history. Pedagogically, the task is to raise awareness of how the canon might transform itself once we add women to the mix, broadening and rethinking political theory’s governing ideas once the category of gender joins the conversation. Simultaneously, though, it fosters an appreciation of how feminist analysis destabilizes political theory by calling into question the very notion of canonization and the kinds of hierarchy this creates. The terms of discourse change, unveiling a deviant underside whose very deviance proves
instructive. In this way, feminism asks not only to be admitted to the traditional narratives of political theory; it also questions what counts as canon, teaching students to analyze the evaluative process by which the canon itself is formed. Students learn to ask why one topic, one set of questions, one practice counts as “political” while others are ignored, relegated to the sphere of “nature” or “convention” such that analytic scrutiny is unnecessary. Feminism thus adds and destabilizes; it enriches and undermines at the same time. Indeed, feminism counts among those academic disciplines that question tra-
ditional forms of sovereignty, querying the position of power that a male, Eurocentric, heteronormative worldview has long held. It joins ranks with such relatively recent academic arrivals as post-colonial theory, ethnic studies, queer theory, animal studies, and white studies, all of which urge students to call out the acclaimed cultural referent and investigate what lies behind the master narrative. And although Homi Bhabha is correct in arguing that the “Other” represents a deeply ambivalent construction whose meanings defy fixity, otherness always succeeds in challenging the status quo and its received forms of cultural sovereignty.1 Here, I probe the manner in which feminism’s supplemental powers meaningfully query the sovereignty of political theory’s canon by scrutinizing a canonical figure, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). I bring feminist analysis to bear on Hobbes’s defense of an absolute sovereign in an effort to underscore a tension endemic to feminism’s supplemental status: i.e., its need to add to institutionalized knowledge by joining the canon without becoming institutionalized itself. Before turning to Hobbes, it is first necessary to address this deep-seated ten-
sion. An important aspect of any effort to rethink a canon, feminist or other, lies in recognizing the dangers of replacing one set of hierarchies with another, and reproducing precisely the dynamic that we have critiqued by championing a given point of reference. In raising awareness about a discipline’s omissions by bringing gender, class, race, and heteronormativity to the forefront, the perils of reenactment-that is, of reproducing exactly what we are trying to dismantlecome before us. Thus, like the other critical disciplines mentioned above, feminism must embrace critique without striving to make its own perspective the newfound point of reference whose truth trumps all others. How to critique the canon without becoming canonical oneself? How to meaningfully subvert forms of sovereignty without oneself wielding comparable forms of power? Two venerable progenitors, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), offer insights into this ambiguity.
