Dietz & Butler, Kelsey

In her piece "Context Is All: Feminism And Theories of Citizenship" Mary Dietz explores the ways in which liberalism and liberal feminism as a result have not been sufficient to address the true nature of patriarchal structures and female oppression. She argues that the Wester liberal ideals that permeate our political systems were constructed based on notions about individuality, productivity, and value that are not only gendered towards benefiting men in a patriarchal society but also contribute to the inadequacy of certain feminist political aims, aims that seek redress for gendered wrongs through and in the very system that constructed these wrongs in the first place. She explores how Marxist feminists have been successful in critiquing the capitalist elements of patriarchy but have left little to be determined about his idea of "citizenship" and its social implications. She also depicts maternalist feminists who view the liberal notion of individuality as false, because it assumes a sort of male autonomy that has not been afforded to women historically. Dietz agrees that "context is all" but sees feminism as a solution that can change and reconstruct the systems that make up "context".

In the first chapter of "Undoing Gender", Judith Butler explores how people are "undone" by each other and how relationally is extremely important to our socials and political structures. She discusses how normalization affects the ways we relate to each other not only of personal interactional levels, but in larger social contexts and how these modes of normalization create ways of relating that can sometimes be exclusive and violent. On p. 37 she argues that a "critical democratic project" is needed to combat gender and sex inequality. This project for her is to simultaneously claim entitlement to the "access" that Dietz talks about in liberal terms, and to also critique and reanalyze these systems that we are attempting to "access" at the same time.