The concept of emancipation lies at the core of feminist political philosophy/theory. Often its thrust is rather presupposed than made explicit. The reasons for this decision can be easily understood – at the same time as emancipation elevates its subjects to the realm of universality and abstracts from their particularities it also effectively prevents the differences of subjects to be affirmed and recognized. The ambiguous character of the concept can be studied further. In my paper, I would like to draw on four traditions of theorizing emancipation: 1) conceptual history, Begriffsgeschichten, which traces the concepts’ history back to Enlightenment and French Revolution, 2) differential genealogy of emancipation of Jews and women as depicted by Wendy Brown, 3) socialist emancipation of women, a concept encapsulating the normative aspects of the dynamism of the gender regime during real-socialism in e.g. Czechoslovakia, 4) radical-democratic conceptual analysis of emancipation as it was carried out by Ernesto Laclau.
