Rorty as Feminist Ally

In this paper, I explore and extend Susan Dieleman’s suggestion that Rorty is a “feminist ally”, arguing that the idea of allyship provides a fruitful and revealing way to understand the political substance and implications of his liberalism. I begin with attention to allyship itself, the core tenets of which are, I suggest, implicit in Rorty’s oft-ignored commitment to hope as a normative philosophical and political ideal. To make further sense of Rorty’s understanding of allyship – and the deference to the experiences of marginalised others that it implies – I reconsider his engagement with feminist philosophy. At the end of the paper, I locate my discussion in the context of recent scholarly conversations about the identity and implications of Rorty’s vision of politics in a liberal community.