“A Contingent ‘Yes’” Revisited

Reading these essays gave me a thrill of excitement like the one I felt on hearing that the #MeToo movement had extended even into China. The ideas in this Critical Perspectives collection go much deeper into the nature of and reasons for descriptive representation than I could two decades ago. Anne Phillips (1995) and Melissa Williams (1998), the two pioneers in this field who produced analyses far more thorough than mine, would, I think, agree with me on this. So would Iris Marion Young, whose early challenge in a talk over lunch inspired me to puzzle out my own take on the problem.