ニーチェとオイディプス
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概要
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Current national debates on gender suggest the difficulty of addressing questions of gender justice. What these debates indicate, however, is that individual worldviews or preferences regarding gender are more diverse than most conventional feminists have thus far imagined. Although feminists have argued for a society that enables a wide variety of lifestyle choices for women as well as men, they have yet to present a concrete picture of such a society. In this article, I attempt to begin to answer the normative question of gender justice from a pluralist point of view. I draw on John Rawls's work regarding political liberalism as a major pluralist normative theory, and review some of the important feminist critiques of Rawls, especially those focusing on the issue of the family. Rawls recognized the family as an important institution in the basic structure of society, and saw the family as a medium for social and cultural reproduction. Against this backdrop, I attempt to illustrate a pressing general task for pluralist gender theory by examining debate on the family as presented by Rawls and feminist theorists. For the feminist argument, I focus on the work of Susan Moller Okin. Gender can be best understood as a kind of "comprehensive doctrine" (Rawls), in which the social world is understood and constructed using gender categories. On this basis, gender justice can be conceptualized as a form of justice among different comprehensive gender doctrines. This, however, causes a number of problems for feminists as it exacerbates the liberal problem of sharp "public" and "non-public" distinctions. According to Okin, this distinction cannot be sustained, not only because it masks grave injustices in "non-public" spheres but also because the "non-public" inevitably affects the "public," undermining the very basis that Rawls relies on for his "well-ordered society" to be stable. Okin's arguments are unsuccessful in several respects. First, her assumption regarding justice or injustice in the family is dubious. Second, her concept of gender equality fails to overcome current problematic gender doctrines. Third, she fails to see the truly normative nature of Rawls's theory. However, her points well illustrate gaps in Rawls's theory and suggest a pressing task for pluralist gender theory, which is her true contribution. The task is to articulate internal concepts of justice in a variety of social spheres so as to relativize now-problematic effects of current gender doctrines.