Abstract
The introductory chapter presents the volume’s structure and rationale and delineates the research questions and theoretical outlook informing it as a whole. It defines the manifold meanings of authority, comprising status, influence, decision-making power and authorship, and explores the ambits of its relationship with gender, including patriarchal social structures, the male-female binary, constructions of femininity and masculinity, heteronormativity and body politics. The chapter situates the notion of authority in the context of longstanding feminist reflections on power, agency and the intersection between gender and other axes of oppression including race, class, age and sexuality. Finally, it articulates the main aspects and connotations of authority that emerge from the various essays: first, the relationship between formal and informal authority in processes of decision-making; second, the gendered and racialized configuration of authority; and third, the negotiation of authority by traditionally disempowered subjects and the opening up of practices of solidarity, resistance and subversion that reshape authority itself.
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Notes
- 1.
Starting from the two-day international conference Women and the Canon, held at Christ Church, Oxford, in January 2016, the Gender and Authority Network then hosted a series of seminars, roundtable discussions and lectures by scholars from both within and outside the University of Oxford, all addressing the pivotal issues of gender and authority. The project has also reached out to a non-specialist audience through public engagement and knowledge exchange events as well as its popular blog and podcast series BOSS, available online: https://soundcloud.com/gender-authority-network.
- 2.
Canonical contributions to this debate include (among many others): Weber , Politics as a Vocation; Friedrich , Authority; Arendt , “Authority in the Twentieth Century” and “What is Authority;” Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality; Agamben , State of Exception; Sennett , Authority.
- 3.
See Smith , “Auctoritas,” 115.
- 4.
See Agamben, “Auctoritas and Potestas,” in State of Exception, 74–88, and Arendt, “What is Authority.”
- 5.
“Authority,” The Oxford English Dictionary.
- 6.
The semantic link between auctor and auctoritas is discussed by Arendt in “What is Authority,” 121–2.
- 7.
“Authority,” OED.
- 8.
See Foucault , The Will to Knowledge; Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Clinic.
- 9.
do Mar, Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship, 1.
- 10.
Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., Presumed Incompetent, 5.
- 11.
Like power and authority, agency is also a loaded term that has been the subject of extensive investigation and debate by feminist thinkers and activists. For poststructuralist feminist critiques of individual and collective agency, see for example Butler , “Performative Agency”; Davies , “The Concept of Agency”; for a re-elaboration of agency in the direction of care and solidarity, see for example Mahmood , Politics of Piety; Isaacs, “Feminism and Agency.”
- 12.
hooks, “Talking Back,” 127, 124.
- 13.
Ahmed , Willful Subjects, 1.
- 14.
On the concept and origin of intersectionality, see Carastathis , “The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory”; Crenshaw , “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” and “Mapping the Margins.”
- 15.
See Spivak , “Can the Subaltern Speak?.”
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Bardazzi, A., Bazzoni, A. (2020). Introduction: Gender and Authority. In: Bardazzi, A., Bazzoni, A. (eds) Gender and Authority across Disciplines, Space and Time. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45160-8_1
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