One of the claims pervading this book is that a revived feminist liberalism must engage the challenge of intersectionality. Can this school of feminism generalize about women while remaining attentive to salient differences among them? Can feminist liberalism make room for the self-interpretations of diverse women? This chapter begins by posing these questions to Nussbaum's HCA. It then examines the problem that adaptive preferences pose for her feminist liberalism and considers her attempts to resolve this. This issue receives extended treatment because it has been argued that adaptive preferences pose an insuperable obstacle to any reconciliation of liberalism and feminism. This chapter's concluding section sketches a slightly different way of understanding the HCA, one that tries to avoid some of the conundrums currently entangling it.

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

As we saw in Chapter 5, the intersectionality debate became a pressing issue for Okin's feminist liberalism in her discussion of group rights. Many of Okin's first responders accused her of being neglectful of or indifferent to differences among women. Okin was also charged with: pitting the category of women against that of culture; according too little, if any, agency to women in cultural or religious minorities; treating non-Western cultures in a simplistic and sometimes pejorative way; seeing cultures as unified and homogenous, rather than sites of contestation and resistance; envisaging cultures as separate, bounded, independent wholes; and judging all cultures by liberal standards.