Beyond the Public Sphere

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.

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

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The New Topography of Space1. The Feminist Imaginary Through the Cinematic Imagination2. Three Models of Imagination: As Faculty, as Context, and as Imaginal3. A Genealogy of the Concept/Image of Rape: A Critical Reconstruction of the Patriarchal Social Imaginary4. Anachronisms and Representations as Tools for a Critical Feminist Social Imaginary5. The Lost Promise of Feminist Agency in Modern Political TheoriesConclusion: The New Road to Visibilities: Overcoming Secrets, Invisibility, and ExclusionNotesBibliographyIndex