the public sphere and she herself approached them through indirection
and allusion.

But the feminisms of 1995 are quite different from those that Arendt
so hastily dismissed. ² Shaped by new multicultural and postcolonial
contexts, recent work in feminist theory tends to focus on plural asym-
metries of power, on how sex-gender identities are riven by race, class,
and other differences, and on how differences of race, class, nationality,
ethnicity, and sexuality are often feminized or sexualized. ³ Whatever
Arendt might have thought about these developments, they enable a set
of feminist engagements with Arendt's work that are quite different from
those of their predecessors.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, feminists turned to Arendt as a woman
thinker with the expectation that she would have something uniquely
gynocentric to offer them. (And, indeed, some still do.) Many commen-
tators came away disappointed. Arendt's heroic, agonistic account of
political action and her public/private distinction led some feminists to
charge her with masculinism. In Adrienne Rich's oft-quoted words,
Arendt The Human Condition is a "lofty and crippled book" that
"embodies the tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideology." ⁴
Others, like Nancy Hartsock, found a nascent feminism in Arendt's
work and praised her particularly for identifying political action with
natality and for replacing the male or patriarchal view of power as the
ability to achieve certain outcomes with a more feminine, cooperative,
and practice-oriented vision of power as action in concert. ⁵ These
otherwise opposing judgments share two assumptions: that Arendt's
primary or essential identity is her sex-gender and that, because she is a
woman, she may be expected to have developed a gynocentric political
theory.

Recent developments in feminist theory and gender studies challenge
these dichotomizing approaches. Rather than treat male and female or
masculine and feminine as categories that organize uniform and already
gendered artifacts, new theorists of gender argue that the categories
themselves help to produce and reinforce the very uniformities they
claim merely to describe. These developments have prompted a reconsid-
eration of Arendt that includes a critical reevaluation of earlier feminist
judgments of her work. From feminist perspectives that interrogate,
politicize, and historicize--rather than simply redeploy--categories like
"woman," "identity," or "experience," Arendt's hostility to feminism
and her critical stance toward identitarian and essentialist definitions of

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