Woman, individual and community notes about a feminist controversy

Este artículo aborda la conjunción polémica que se abre al tratar desde diversas posiciones feministas el asunto, tan en boga hoy filosóficamente, de la comunidad. Hemos querido presentar tres modos de aproximarse críticamente a la idea de comunidad que, como nota común, presentan un fondo de suspicacia. Las mujeres han sido secularmente excluídas de la comunidad, esto justifica que frente a ella se opte o bien por rehabilitar su idea cualificándola para incorporar las diferencias y establecer vías fiables de reconocimiento —la opción de Seyla Benhabib, quien revisa y critica el ideal comunitario habermasiano— o bien por poner distancia mostrando una clara aversión por la entraña homogeneizadora de la comunidad —la posición postmoderna de Iris Young—. Una tercera modulación opta por profundizar en la desconfianza ante las aproximaciones de un cierto feminismo impactado por la ética del cuidado de Carol Gilligan y los contemporáneos comunitaristas —tal como hace Marylin Friedman—. Éstos son algunos ejemplos de la controversia crítico-feminista sobre la comunidad.This paper focuses on the polemic conjuction between feminism and the contemporary philosophical topic of community. We have wanted to introduce three specific modes of coping with the idea of community that shares the same characteristic approach that comes from a lack of confidence. Women have been excluded of every kind of community, this justified the idea of rehabiliting the community only after a important critical revision because it has to incorporate differences and to establish ways of recognition for all persons. This is the mode of thinking of Seyla Benhabib who discusses the habermasian ideal of community to «complete» it with new conditions. Iris Young, from a postmodern point of view, show us that the right response to community is aversion because community is the same thing that the pressure to homogeneity. In third place, Marylin Friedman thinks that we have good reasons to untrust to community and she objects the flirtations between some feminist positions, some of them influenced by Carol Gilligan´s ethics of care, and the contemporary reediton of comunitarism. Here we have some examples of the vitality of the controversy between feminist positions and the call to go back to the ideal of community