Lois McNay’s new book – a major new contribution to the Frankfurt School of critical theory drawing on feminist work on gender

Combining feminist ideas with inherent but underutilised resources in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory tradition, Lois’s book The Gender of Critical Theory, proposes the idea of critique as theorising from experience.

The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory was a group of political theorists who were critical of both fascism and communism in the 1930s. They were also critical of post-war democracies and claimed to ‘unmask’ hidden dynamics of oppression and suffering. .

However, these thinkers mainly overlooked gender as an area where power and oppression is played out.

Frankfurt School thinkers believed that to successfully ‘unmask power’, criticism needs to listen to the first-hand, lived experiences of those who are oppressed. Yet, in practice, they often ignore them.   

Lois’s book, published by Oxford University Press, explores these oversights in the more recent work of Frankfurt School thinkers and shows how they can be traced back to an important but over-inflated preoccupation with normative foundations.

This preoccupation leads to what she calls ‘paradigm-led’ inquiry which focuses one-sidedly on devising all-encompassing explanatory frameworks and neglects lived experience because of what is held to be its inherently parochial nature.

Lois argues that this opposition of universal theory versus parochial experience is misleading and also in tension with the Frankfurt School’s animating tenet that emancipatory critique ought to be primarily concern with the situation of oppressed groups.

She addresses this tension by offering a new dialogue between experiential and theoretical perspectives.

Lois argues that bringing feminist theory on gender to bear on Frankfurt School critical theory, strengthens a ‘critical unmasking of power’,