Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Advisor

Peter Hitchcock

Committee Members

Mary McGlynn

Charity Scribner

Subject Categories

English Language and Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Keywords

feminism, postmodernism, social movements, political writing, 20th-century literature, critique

Abstract

This dissertation examines several theories of political consciousness advanced by American radical movements and thinkers in the 1960s and beyond. I argue that this body of writing often understood political consciousness to be constituted by two parts: an objective theory and a subjective theory. An objective theory is one that critiques society and describes society’s structural reproduction of difference and domination; a subjective theory, meanwhile, is one that elaborates a new identity for an oppressed group, as well as a sense of that group's common experience and role in society’s revolutionary transformation. My principal intervention is to argue that any effort to understand political consciousness must closely examine how a group’s objective theory logically and politically influences their subjective theory, and vice versa. I maintain that efforts to elaborate one theory constrain and shape efforts to elaborate the other, and frequently result in theoretical and political distortions, misapprehensions, and contradictions.

In Part One of this dissertation, I attempt to ground this argument in a social and intellectual history of the 20th-century radical feminist movement. I attend to how feminists’ theories about a pervasively misogynistic society posed issues for their theories about themselves, and how feminists’ developing political subjectivities in turn altered their critiques of patriarchy. I suggest that, along with other political groups that were active in the American 1960s, feminists were unable to reconcile contradictions between the objective and subjective in their theoretical work, particularly as many of them began to enter the academy and became mired in the sex wars of the 1980s. In Part Two, I argue that this relationship between the subjective and the objective became further disarticulated during the postmodern turn, as theorists both inside and outside academia called on political theory to abandon the subject and embrace either a politics of contingency or the rigor of abstract structural analysis. Finally, I conclude that, in the late 20th century, this disjuncture between subjectivity and social analysis culminates in the rise of paranoia as a dominant mode and sensibility, in which political theory becomes debilitated by a technological and cultural landscape that renders the boundaries between subjective and objective completely permeable.

In all, this dissertation argues for a particular way of theorizing groups’ articulations of political consciousness and their writing of this consciousness. It seeks to understand how modes of analyzing society and political subjecthood have changed across time, political groups, and academic disciplines.

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