Women and political obligation

The project is to examine the problem of political obligation, as commonly expressed in political theory, from a feminist perspective. The contention I am concerned with is that social contract theories, as accounts of political authority, are structurally gender biased, towards the masculine. By critically analysing early social contract theories, and the contemporary theorising that has emerged in their wake using contractual notions, I aim to reveal the structural gender bias, and to rethink the focus of the problem of political obligation in the light of this. Using gender psychology and feminist standpoint theory, as well as the influence of postmodernism, I critically examine the "individualist" assumptions of voluntary notions of consent, exposing the particularity of social contract theory and revealing the way it functions to maintain and reproduce patriarchal social relations. Finally, I participate in a feminist project to build new theory, based on feminist assumptions and always wary of totalising fictions, as a contribution to feminism's emancipatory aims