The award is presented annually by the Northeastern Political Science Association to the best research article published in the previous edition of Polity, the association’s annual journal. In addition to receiving a monetary prize, Taylor receives a plaque and will be the association’s guest at its annual meeting.

Heavily criticized for imposing her liberal feminist values on women from minority cultures residing in Western democracies, Okin’s 1997 essay, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” is easily among the most debated essays in contemporary political theory.

In a clever wordplay that foregrounds her central argument, Taylor’s article, “,” excavates a democratic (rather than liberal) feminist thesis from Okin’s provocative essay. Taylor does this by revealing beneath the conspicuous and troubling “othering” language that has landed Okin in such hot waters with Third World feminists and feminists of color, an imperative to treat “culture” as a political—as opposed to private—matter and to privilege the voices of women within minority cultures. As such, Taylor locates in Okin’s controversial essay a position against treating liberal principles as trumps over the voices of the most vulnerable, thereby exposing Okin’s democratic—as opposed to liberal—leanings.

In addition to forcefully reclaiming a much-debated article, Taylor’s findings urge contemporary political theorists in a direction that contrasts sharply with Linda Zerilli’s recent calls to “outsider liberal judgment” wherein she advocates judging minority cultures from without rather than elevating the voices of actual people within such cultures. By putting Okin’s newly exhumed democratic feminist thesis in conversation with women of color feminism, Taylor invites contemporary political theorists to consider the extent to which liberalism in the form of outsider judgment might be bad for women and to align instead with the insider democratic dialogues typical of U.S. women of color feminism in the 1980s.

Taylor’s article, “Is Liberalism Bad for Women? Reclaiming Susan Okin’s Democratic Feminist Thesis,” was published by Polity in April 2019 and was awarded the prize this past month.

Taylor’s article, “,” will be spotlighted alongside a handful of others, including work by prominent race scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in an effort to foreground scholarship relevant to current discussions around racial justice, systemic racism, and political activism for progressive social change.

Imploring political activists and theorists to take lessons from some of our most rigorous, though largely ignored, political theorists on collective intersectional group politics, Taylor’s research turns to 1980s U.S. women of color feminism to develop a notion of politico-ethical coalition politics as an alternative to contemporary articulations of activist coalition politics that obscure the high-stakes politics of coalescing across hostile race, class, gender, sex, and sexuality divides, and for the sake of intersectional social justice.

Absolutely crucial to concrete coalition politics, Taylor shows, is an appreciation of interlocking oppressions, which produce coalitional understandings of intersectional group politics, identity and consciousness. The ability to do this is captured in what Taylor calls politico-ethical coalition politics, a distinctive understanding of coalition located in Bernice Johnson Reagon’s 1981 coalition speech, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.” Rethinking political joining outside of notions of ontological spectacle and ethical community (typical of Judith Butler), Taylor argues that women of color feminists such as Reagon, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa encourage a uniquely political conception of coalition that resists appeals to political indeterminacy while still anticipating the power struggles and danger inherent to working in coalition. This understanding of coalition, Taylor attests, is nevertheless also an “ethical” one insofar as the political commitment to undermining interlocking oppressive forces grounding such efforts is overtly self-reflexive, thereby encouraging an ethical sensibility characterized by love and existential transformation.

The key concepts presented in Taylor’s research not only enrich discussions surrounding the impetus and longevity of effective progressive coalitional activism, they also present robust theoretical accounts of political subject formation, in the form of coalitional identity, and political consciousness, in the form of coalitional consciousness, that offer promising alternatives to popular feminist poststructuralist notions of the subject-in-process and epistemological undecidability.

Taylor’s article will be available on until December 31, 2020.  This article also forms the basis of Taylor’s book manuscript, “Coalescing for Difference: Women of Color Feminism and Politico-Ethical Coalition Politics,” which is currently under review.