Against Recognition

"Incisive, committed and engaged: this is feminist social theory at it should be practised. McNay?s critique of theories of recognition develops her earlier work on agency and incorporates a powerful and compelling new analysis of the relationship between embodied identity and gender inequalities."
Henrietta L. Moore, London School of Economics and Political Science

"Against Recognition presents a carefully argued critique of recent efforts to represent social and political agency as a struggle for recognition. Though sympathetic to the aims of recognition theorists, McNay finds that their paradigm rests on a reductive conception of power. By way of alternative, she presents a modified version of Pierre Bourdieu's relational phenomenology, whose key concepts of habitus, field, and capital are used to provide a better account of the role that power plays in the complex interplay between agency and social situation."
Andrew Cutrofello, Loyola University, Chicago