Reviews for The moral parameters of good talk

The average rating for The moral parameters of good talk based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-12-24 00:00:00 Mike Williams Underwhelming. Ferguson maps three broad genres of feminist theory and considers the relative merits and weaknesses of each. She then theorizes a concept of "mobile subjectivities" as a way to productively negotiate between these in the service of effective coalition politics. Overall, this book is frustrating and dated. It is clear that Ferguson wants to maintain the tensions between various genres of feminist theory because she views these as "productive." But given my Marxist sympathies and especially coming hot off the heels of reading Teresa Ebert's excellent "Ludic Feminism and After," I cannot take Ferguson's insistence on incommensurability and discontinuity too seriously. I think she seriously undersells what she calls "praxis feminism" in order to defend the necessity of what she calls "linguistic feminism." Most of what she claims as the strengths of linguistic feminism are things a rigorous historical materialist feminism can do on its own. More generally, this book has confirmed for me the general unhelpfulness of the entire category Ferguson calls "linguistic feminism" for theorizing society and social change. If you are interested in the kinds of metaquestions Ferguson asks about feminist theory, Ebert's "Ludic Feminism and After" is a much better starting place. If you are intrigued by "mobile subjectivities," Chela Sandoval's "Methodology of the Oppressed" offers a superior formulation. And Ferguson's own earlier "The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy" is a fantastic and still urgently relevant text in its own right. But this one can be missed without losing out on much.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-28 00:00:00 Andrew Grinton IRONY.