Interview with Professor Marie-Gelsomina Linda Zerilli: A “Humanistic Thinker”!

I recently had the opportunity to interview Professor Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli, a Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the former Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago. Professor Zerilli has written many books and publications, and engages with very interesting perspectives on feminism and thought. Her bio reads:

“Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College. She was the 2010–16 Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, where she continues in her capacity as a leading scholar and teacher in the field. Zerilli is the author of Signifying Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), and articles on subjects ranging across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a two-time Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow. In 2016, Professor Zerilli won the University faculty award for excellence in graduate teaching and mentoring. She has served on the executive committee of Political Theory and the advisory boards of The American Political Science Review, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Constellations, and Culture,Theory and Critique.” (bio and photo from University of Chicago Directory)

Could you talk about how you personally got involved in the fields of political science, feminist theory, and the Studies of Gender and Sexuality? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionalities?

I was initially more interested in feminism. In high school, I considered myself a feminist. I attended Ithaca College and studied with Zillah Eisenstein, a well-known socialist feminist, who introduced me to many new ideas in feminist theory. I also studied political theory with her, but I entered the field through feminist theory mainly, which permanently altered my view of the political theory canon.

I then went to graduate school at Berkeley in 1978. At that time, feminist political theory, particularly feminist readings of the canon, was almost nonexistent. In the early 1980s, works like Susan Okin’s Women in Western Political Thought and Jean Elshtain’s Public Man, Private Woman began to appear. Although the field was limited, it has since grown significantly, with many scholars now exploring both canonical readings and new political concepts.

My dissertation, Images of Women in Political Theory: Agents of Culture and Chaos, eventually became the book Signifying Woman: Images of Culture and Chaos in Rousseau and Mill. This work represented a shift from analyzing what political theorists said about women — often negative — to examining how political spaces and ideas are shaped through the exclusion of women. This approach, which I and many others adopted, explores how gendered exclusions shape political theory and its boundaries.

What were your motivations for writing your book “Signifying Woman”?

The title of the book is Signifying Woman for a reason. I wasn’t discussing women per se, but rather the figure of the woman and the conceptual work this figure does in political theory texts. Referring back to what I mentioned earlier, I examined how political theorists like Rousseau, Burke, and Mill — all from the same general time period but with different national backgrounds, concerns, and perspectives — used the figure of the woman in their work. Women were often depicted either as agents of culture, representing proper femininity, or as agents of chaos, symbolizing improper femininity and the disruptive potential of unleashed female sexuality in the political realm.

I was interested in how these androcentric conceptions of citizenship helped define the very meaning of politics — what politics can and should be about. It’s not just that women were excluded; the exclusion itself shaped the content of politics. Issues considered private were deemed irrelevant to politics. This exclusion of women influenced what was considered political and what was not.

The figure of the woman intrigued me because she occupies a liminal space — neither fully inside nor outside the boundaries of the political. She can be both an agent of chaos and an agent of culture. This liminality was fascinating, and I chose passages that illustrated how these thinkers used the figure of the woman to perform specific conceptual political work.

For example, John Stuart Mill, when writing about the poor laws — equivalent to today’s welfare laws — used the figure of the reproductive woman to argue against state assistance for poor families. This trope is similar to modern arguments about the use of public funds for welfare, showing the enduring nature of these concepts in political discourse.

I would also love to learn more about your publication from a few years ago–“Towards a Feminist Theory of Judgment.” Can you please talk about this project?

After Signifying Woman, I wrote a book called Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. In that book, I developed the idea of judgment and its importance for feminism. Essentially, I explored the concept in the essay “Towards a Feminist Theory of Judgment,” which eventually became a chapter in another book. The idea took shape in Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, where I was particularly interested in the challenges within third-wave feminist theory. By third-wave feminist theory, I mean the work of women of color feminism, critiques of the concept of “woman” as a unified category, and the rejection of the notion that all women share the same experiences and forms of oppression.

The second wave of feminism was often perceived as assuming a unified political subject called “women.” Third-wave feminists, including women of color and postmodernist feminists like Judith Butler, criticized this idea of a coherent, unified concept of “women.” The dilemma that emerged was that acknowledging differences among women seemed to threaten the very foundation of feminism as a political movement. Critics of poststructuralist feminism and some critiques from women of color argued that if feminism wasn’t in the name of a subject called “Women,” then what was it? How could feminism exist without a unified political subject?

To address this, I turned to the work of Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jewish émigré from Germany, is one of the most significant political theorists of the 20th century. She wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, among other influential works. One of her main themes was judgment, but she was also a theorist of plurality. For Arendt, the irreducible basis of politics is plurality. I argued that differences among women are not the end of politics but rather its very condition. She distinguished between what someone is — such as a white, upper-middle-class professor — and who someone is, which refers to one’s public persona and the political claims made in the name of, for example, women.

I applied Arendt’s concept of judgment to feminist theory, though not in the conventional sense. Typically, when people think of judgment, they imagine someone who indiscriminately applies rules and concepts to everyone. Instead, I drew on Immanuel Kant’s concept of reflective judgment from his book Critique of Judgment. Reflective judgment involves developing a concept based on the experience of particulars, rather than simply applying pre-existing rules from above to specific cases. This reflective aspect of judgment is crucial for feminism, allowing us to make judgments without relying on rigid, universal standards.

Hannah Arendt discussed judgment extensively in her work, particularly in her unfinished book The Life of the Mind, which was meant to have three volumes: “Thinking,” Willing,” and “Judging.” She died before completing the third volume, but she had explored the idea of judgment throughout her writings. Arendt turned to Kant’s third critique — the critique of aesthetic judgment, rather than his moral judgment — because, after the Holocaust, she perceived a collapse of all traditional standards. She called this the “break in tradition” and argued that true judgment occurs without relying on predetermined rules. Instead, judgment should be reflective and critical, involving a questioning of one’s own standards.

This perspective on judgment is quite different from what people typically imagine. It’s about critically examining our own standards rather than just applying them to others. Arendt’s concept of judgment encourages a more nuanced and self-reflective approach, which I found essential for developing feminist thought. I see it as an alternative way of understanding politics and freedom, not as negative freedom or sovereignty, but as action in concert with others. For Arendt, true freedom involves renouncing sovereignty and engaging in political action collectively.

Can you please discuss your work formerly serving as Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago?

I came to Chicago in 2008, after being at Northwestern and Rutgers. Although I was always in political science departments, I was actively involved with women’s or gender studies, depending on what it was called at the time. When I arrived in Chicago, the “Center for Gender Studies” was in place, now known as the “Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.” There were great people there, but it hadn’t quite coalesced into a strong community, despite having brilliant faculty across the university.

So, I focused on building up that intellectual community. We accomplished a lot, securing several big grants, including a Mellon Fellowship and a Sawyer Seminar Fellowship. We also received a grant for Women’s International Human Rights, which allowed us to bring in a postdoc and have faculty fellows. Additionally, we secured funding to completely renovate the building, providing a dedicated space with student offices. We now offer fellowships, including dissertation fellowships, and an MA certificate. We share the space with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, with whom we have a joint dissertation fellowship.

A lot of the work was infrastructural, not only renovating the building but also creating a newsletter and navigating the university’s decentralized structure. At Chicago, you have to work with various deans and the provost to secure funding, which meant we had to deal with many different departments. But it worked out, and now the center is thriving! Since I finished my second term in 2016, the center has been under the leadership of others who have done an excellent job. Kristen Schilt, a sociologist, took over after me and did great work, and now Daisy Delogu from the French department is leading and doing a wonderful job.

The Center is now a vibrant environment with many activities, workshops, and speakers. You should check out the website to see all the events and faculty projects. It took a lot of my energy, and I don’t think I could have done a third term. The work we did, though, brought great visibility to the Center. We hosted remarkable figures like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Catharine MacKinnon, and Angela Davis. I remember when Angela Davis came; she filled the cathedral to the rafters. It was an incredible experience, and we did it together with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.

There are many cool people at the Center, and it’s a very interdisciplinary space. That’s how I got involved. Despite my background in political science, I don’t really consider myself a political scientist. I am more of a humanistic thinker, so I have a natural affinity for people from various disciplines. It’s great to engage with them, because even if we are reading the same texts, they interpret them differently.

What advice do you have for those interested in fields similar to your areas of interest?

The advice I would give comes from my years of teaching, which I began in 1987. What I have seen is that the most important thing for students, above all else, is to follow their passions! I know students today are under a lot of pressure, especially with the cost of education and their parents urging them to study certain subjects.

There’s also a prevalent view that a humanistic education is a dead end, leading to no job prospects. However, I’ve found that this isn’t true. Students who have studied supposedly “useless” fields like English literature, Romance languages, art, or even political theory have gone on to have successful careers. I believe this is because these disciplines teach a form of critical thought that is invaluable, particularly in Gender and Sexuality Studies. This isn’t propaganda; I genuinely believe that some of my best students have come from this field. They have an incredible critical sensibility and deep curiosity, along with the ability to question things.

So overall, I believe it’s crucial to find what you’re passionate about and stick with it. You should pursue what you truly enjoy, because if you end up writing a dissertation, it has to be on something that excites you every day. You can’t write extensively about something you’re not passionate about. I’ve seen students blossom once they realize they are free to choose their own topics of interest.

While academia is challenging right now, these fields open many opportunities beyond the academic world. They are interdisciplinary, providing diverse career paths. I’ve had students who decided they wanted to do more grassroots organizing or work outside academia. After earning their MA, and sometimes a PhD, they went on to work for NGOs, different associations, and voluntary organizations–and they’ve led fulfilling lives.