The Political Context for Personal Empowerment: Continuing the Conversation

In our joint theoretical piece (Lamb and Peterson 2011), we attempted to find points of agreement and further elucidate points of disagreement in relation to the challenging issue of adolescent girls’ sexual empowerment. In particular, we evaluated the divisive question of whether girls’ subjective feelings of sexual empowerment qualify as some useful version of empowerment. We are grateful to the commentators for joining us in this productive and collaborative conversation. In this response, we summarize some of the themes raised by the commentators, and we look for points of agreement around which we, as feminists, can continue to build a conversation on this polarizing issue. We also attempt to better explore the possible relationship between subjective empowerment and political empowerment by resurrecting the idea that “the personal is political.”