Liberalism is also hard to place. It makes little sense to speak of when it began or how it developed, even though we can name philosophers who have articulated its essence, most of whom lived in the West in modern times. These thinkers include Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Bacon, Thomas Paine, and

The main tenets of liberalism are political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of

In other words, the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted.

Like disability studies, fat studies began in the United States in the 1960s, as fat activism, and has appeared in many forms since, but it has only recently established itself as a distinct branch of identity studies. It also draws strongly on queer Theory and feminism, especially as it has developed in the United Kingdom, and has a strongly

Principled Opposition: Example 2 We affirm that sexism remains a problem in society and needs to be addressed. We deny that Theoretical approaches to gender issues, including queer Theory and intersectional feminism, which work on blank slatist theories of sex and gender, are useful to address it as we believe it is necessary to acknowledge

Similarly, Campbell and Manning note that people seem most inclined to look for evidence of racism and bigotry where it is least evident, noting, We thought of Emile Durkheim, the nineteenth-century French sociologist, who famously asked his readers to imagine what would happen in a “society of saints.” The answer is that there would still be

9 SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ACTION Theory Always Looks Good on Paper

In the 1970s and much of the 1980s, feminist scholars looked closely at women’s roles in the family and workforce and at social expectations that women be feminine, submissive, and beautiful, if not sexually available and pornographic. Marxist ideas of women as a subordinated class that exists to support men (who, in turn, support capitalism)

David Halperin attempts to define “queer” in his 1997 book, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, in which he argues that Foucault’s idea that sexuality is a product of discourse revolutionized gay and lesbian political activism. He describes “queer” as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in