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Beyond the Public Sphere
Film and the Feminist Imaginary
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Book Presentation:
In Beyond the Public Sphere: Film and the Feminist Imaginary, the renowned philosopher and critical theorist María Pía Lara challenges the notion that the bourgeois public sphere is the most important informal institution between social and political actors and the state.
Drawing on a wide range of films—including The Milk of Sorrow, Ixcanul, Wadja, The Stone of Patience, Marnie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Talk to Her—Lara dissects cinematic images of women’s struggles and their oppression. She builds on this analysis, developing a concept of the feminist social imaginary as a broader and more complex space that provides a way of thinking through the possibilities for emancipatory social transformation in response to forms of domination perpetuated by patriarchal capitalism.
About the Author:
MARÍA PÍA LARA is a professor of moral and political philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. She is the author of a number of books, including Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere, Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, and The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization.
Press Reviews:
". . . the book impresses as both philosophy and social polemic." —W. A. Vincent, Michigan State University, CHOICE
"María Pía Lara’s magnificent book brings an urgent new perspective into old debates about the public sphere: by exploring the potential of the current cinematic imagination, she discloses powerful new tools for feminist critique. A must-read." —Chiara Bottici, author of A Philosophy of Political Myth
"Beyond the Public Sphere offers a highly original conceptualization of the feminist cinematic imaginary as a way of thinking through the possibilities for emancipatory social transformation in response to the forms of domination perpetuated by patriarchal capitalism. By foregrounding issues of gender subordination and sexual violence, Lara’s book shows brilliantly how critical theory of the Frankfurt School tradition can speak to the political paradoxes and challenges of the #MeToo era." —Amy Allen, author of The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory
"Fighting domination and promoting emancipation is not only a matter of norms and arguments but also of powerful images, creative metaphors and the bold imagination of different lives and other spaces. Reconstructing and recovering an important but often neglected thematic strand in Critical Social Theory and Feminist Philosophy, María Pía Lara powerfully advances and exemplifies a view of political and social struggles that highlights the decisive role of images and the imagination." —Martin Saar, author of The Immanence of Power: Political Theory After/According to Spinoza
". . . the book impresses as both philosophy and social polemic." —W. A. Vincent, Michigan State University, CHOICE
"In Beyond the Public Sphere, Lara offers a broad reflection on how to confront political and social injustices based on the convergence provided by a feminist social imaginary, where images not only represent reality, but also construct it every day." —Tania Valdovinos Reyes, Revista de Filosofía
"The present and future of the pandemic will surely force us to rethink everything: from the privatization of the platform experience to the simultaneity of world events to openness and visibility, but also audiovisual deceptions, the utopias of the past and the dystopias of the present, the imaginaries of salvation and catastrophe, forms of sociability, collective action, and the search for meaning. Much remains to be thought about cinema in the ‘world of meaning’ and even more about the meaning of the world transformed in common. María Pía Lara’s commitment to this common world and her gift for exercising an enlightened imagination will be her best weapons to face these challenges." —Nora Rabotnikof, Diánoia
"María Pía Lara has opened a remarkable vein." —Zenia Yébenes Escardó, Diánoia
"Fighting domination and promoting emancipation is not only a matter of norms and arguments but also of powerful images, creative metaphors and the bold imagination of different lives and other spaces. Reconstructing and recovering an important but often neglected thematic strand in Critical Social Theory and Feminist Philosophy, María Pía Lara powerfully advances and exemplifies a view of political and social struggles that highlights the decisive role of images and the imagination." —Martin Saar, author of The Immanence of Power: Political Theory After/According to Spinoza
". . . the book impresses as both philosophy and social polemic." —W. A. Vincent, Michigan State University, CHOICE
"In Beyond the Public Sphere, Lara offers a broad reflection on how to confront political and social injustices based on the convergence provided by a feminist social imaginary, where images not only represent reality, but also construct it every day." —Tania Valdovinos Reyes, Revista de Filosofía
"The present and future of the pandemic will surely force us to rethink everything: from the privatization of the platform experience to the simultaneity of world events to openness and visibility, but also audiovisual deceptions, the utopias of the past and the dystopias of the present, the imaginaries of salvation and catastrophe, forms of sociability, collective action, and the search for meaning. Much remains to be thought about cinema in the ‘world of meaning’ and even more about the meaning of the world transformed in common. María Pía Lara’s commitment to this common world and her gift for exercising an enlightened imagination will be her best weapons to face these challenges." —Nora Rabotnikof, Diánoia
"María Pía Lara has opened a remarkable vein." —Zenia Yébenes Escardó, Diánoia
"María Pía Lara takes us on a dazzling journey through the history of women’s position in our repertoire of visual representations of gender." —Stephanie Graf, Philosophy and Social Criticism
See the publisher website: Northwestern University Press
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