Abstract

This dissertation Politics Improper: Radical Democratic Feminist Political Theory, Hannah Arendt, and the Political Importance of the Inappropriate , draws on contemporary democratic feminist ethical and political theory, critical race theory and Hannah Arendt's work in an attempt to both understand and add to the theorization of political action. Framing this project primarily around the work of Iris Marion Young and Maria Pia Lara, and their indebtedness to Habermasian Communicative Ethics, this dissertation examines the theoretical possibilities, and limits, to the turn to Arendt in order to complement and fortify, or else to depart from, Habermas's theories of the public sphere. This dissertation argues that Young's and Lara's revaluations of contestatory political action is invaluable for democratic theory under conditions of oppression and domination. However, their adherence to a Habermasian conceptual framework ultimately reveals significant limitations to their revaluations of practices of dissent. ;By introducing the phrase "Politics Improper," this dissertation articulates a need to re-investigate oppositional, performative political action in order to determine what it can reveal about contemporary possibilities for deepening democratic practice. In utilizing Arendt's theories of action, and in focusing attention on the importance Arendt places on the sheer act of doing rather than behaving, particularly in the context of "dark times," I explore the extent to which deep democracy can be more fully understood by focusing on those elements of the "improper" inherent in oppositional performative acts. I gauge the "political importance of the inappropriate" through an Arendtian understanding of freedom as public and political, and as primarily concerned with doing, creating, and dispersing