After Antigone: Women, the Past, and the Future of Feminist Political Thought

Abstract

Sophocles' tragedy of Antigone occupies a privileged position in modern political thought, for it has provided modem thinkers with an opportunity to reflect upon the place of women with respect to both the state and the household. Its heroine, Antigone, occupies a similarly prominent position within contemporary feminist thought, a figure around whom feminists have recast the relation of women to political action by contesting and reconfiguring relations between household and polis posed by the westem theoretical tradition. This essay examines three interpretations of the tragedy by feminist political theorists, each of whom identifies in Antigone's actions a model for a distinct variety of feminist politics, and each of whom, moreover, reads the work as a meditation about how feminists may speak politically from within a tradition that positions women, conceptually, as inimical to the public order. It suggests that these three readings, each in a different way and to a different degree, inadvertently collapse important distinctions between past and present and consequently risk accepting in slightly altered form a variety of problematic premises handed down by a tradition they contest. The essay goes on to reread Antigone in ways that heighten rather than attenuate the distinctions between politics past and present, and it suggests ways of thinking about its heroine's actions that may provide contemporary feminist theorists with new ways of engaging the political and theoretical pasts.