Feminist Purism and the Question of ‘Radicality’ in Contemporary Political Theory

This paper operates on the premise that a systematic formulation of ‘radicality’ is a worthwhile and potentially productive exercise within political theory. However, I argue that one continues to find a latent ‘purism’ within contemporary understandings of ‘radicality’, primarily in relation to feminism, but also elsewhere. This manifests itself in the tendency to think ‘radicality’ as a function of the inherent properties of particular types of political spaces and political practices. Within feminism, for example, I argue that the ‘radicality’ of a feminist politics is thought in terms of the extent to which it adheres to a specifically ‘1970s’ feminist model of autonomous mobilization. This perspective suffers from a number of conceptual problems, necessitating a formulation of a more dynamic view of radicality with which to evaluate contemporary political practices. To this end, I seek to cast radicality as a function of equivalence (drawn from Ernesto Laclau) and (especially) imagination drawn from Linda Zerilli's Arendtian-inflected feminist theory. Thinking radicality in these terms, I argue, avoids the latent purism of many existing approaches while enabling a critical engagement sensitive to the context of the practice under investigation.