Zerilli and Cornell

Two main similarities that is see between Zerilli and Cornell are the relations between Cornells psychoanalytic description of the flux between externalization and internalization and Zerilli's Founding Paradox, and then the similarities between autonomy and making political claims.

The founding paradox, to my understanding, is characterized by the tension between openness and closure. The standpoint of feminism, just like with all democratic legislation, seeks to find a closure, or a place on which to stand that has a centered area of values which represent the oppressed. But this standpoint is founded through an openness, a subjectivity of the individuals who are oppressed, and the second that one forms a standpoint of commonality it creates a closure and therefore ceases to be open. "With this tension between openness and closure in mind, we can now better appreciate why political claims have a fundamentally anticipatory structure: we posit the agreement of others, that is, we preform an act of closure." (Zerilli 171) And once the act of closure is done it demands openness to reform it. This is like Cornell's description of how we internalize and then externalize our ideas of sexual identity. "It concerns the subjective aspect of the assumption of sexual identity--the process through which we internalize both and image and a set of norms that shape who we are as well as who we desire and love... These images and norms are shaped as we externalize them and act out our lives as men and women." (Cornell 145) So then, the way in which we define our identities is a constant flux of internalization and then externalizations, it is a fluid process, just like making political claims is a constant process between openness and closure. The individual voice internalizes the social norms it is exposed too, forms ideas of them, and then externalizes them in the social sphere, sometimes being the voice of commonality with which others then identify which creates a closure. This is why Cornell states that to be autonomous, the master of your own truth and desires, goes with it the will for others to be autonomous, because without individual freedom of the many there would only be one openness and therefore one closure that would govern everyone. Therefore, being autonomous is the same as being free to make political claims, and is in fact a necessary part of democracy as a whole.