Abstract

Through her reading of The Odyssey, Adriana Cavarero proposes a strategy for feminist action basedon the creation of small communities as a means of disconnection from patriarchal society. On the faceof it, her argument may seem like a straightforward appeal for feminist separatism, but it is in factintended as a critique of the political theory of Hannah Arendt. In arguing that the public space isinherently patriarchal, and proposing that women therefore abandon the public space in favour of smallcommunities that can provide islands of freedom from patriarchy, Cavarero rejects Arendt’svalorisation of action in a central public realm. This makes Cavarero’s work interesting in the contextof contemporary debates on Arendt, in which several commentators have attempted to ‘decenter’Arendt’s political theory. Cavarero’s ‘small-community’ model of action also unsettles the traditionaldichotomy between models that locate action within a central, public space and models that construeaction as the individualistic transgression of social norms. Her work is therefore important in thecontext of the growing interest in small-community models of action. However, Cavarero’s genderingof Arendt’s concept of political action as masculine leads her to engage in identity politics, and thisrenders the strongest version of her argument unsound. Nonetheless, a slightly weaker version ofCavarero’s argument can support her thesis that Arendt’s political theory must be decentered by theinclusion of a small-community model of action