Dr. Patricia Misciagno, former chair of the Political Science Department at Manhattanville College and professor of political science at Bucknell University, passed away due to complications from lupus. She is survived by her two brothers, Philip and Robert, her sister Elaine, her nieces Lori, Lisa, and Allison, her nephew Michael, and her long-time friend and partner, John Carney. Patty was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 2, 1948, and was the first daughter of Phil and Alice Misciagno. Patty was a born teacher, as her mother’s early memories of Patty were of her as a little girl setting up a schoolroom with her small friends on the front porch of her house in Bay Ridge. Later, she attended Staten Island Community College before transferring to Brooklyn College, and then eventually Purchase College (SUNY), from which she graduated with honors. Her thesis, “The Specific Oppression of Women and the General Oppression of the Working Class: Working Towards an Understanding of Marxist-Feminism,” which was supervised by her friend and mentor, Dr. Mary Edwards, helped garner a partial scholarship to the PhD program in politics at New York University.
Patty studied with professors H. Mark Roelofs and Bertell Ollman at New York University, where she continued her analysis of women and politics. Patty was struck by the numerous contradictions that are evinced in American politics and culture, especially by this one: Many women did not accept the label “feminist,” but did feminist things. Eventually, this condition gave rise to the phrase, “I’m not a feminist, but.”
Could it be the case, she thought, that it is the exigencies of life that make women “do feminist things,” even while bracketing the various labels associated with the label, “feminist.” Patty drew on the concept of praxis, as developed by philosophers Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir, to create her own richly textured idea of praxis. The use of this new understanding of praxis as both immanent and transcendent, cognitive and practical, allowed her to grasp and explain the diversity of women’s political agency. This helped her to underscore women’s political activity even in times that seemed like dormancy and in venues seemingly foreclosed to any expression of feminism. Thus, women who engage in feminist activities based on their existential condition, whom Patty referred to as “De-Facto Feminists”, are the largely unacknowledged or invisible historical agents of social change.
Another area of focus for her research was the relationship between culture and politics in the United States. Patty built upon her mentor, H.Mark Roelofs’s work, Ideology and Myth in American Politics. A core element of the American political system, Roelofs argued, was the “Myth of Presidential Greatness.” Patty saw that the creation of myth depended on distance from the public and a strong line of demarcation between the personal lives of presidents and their public persona. Yet, by the 1990s, it was already becoming clear to Patty that the emerging technologies of the postmodern media age were eroding the firewall between the personal and the public, particularly in the cases of celebrities and well-known public officials, such as the president. In her work, “Rethinking the Mythic Presidency,” Patty argued that this linchpin of American political culture, the concept of Presidential Greatness, could no longer serve as the ideological foundation for the American political system. At the time of her passing, Patty was working on a book, Estranged: Alienation in Contemporary America, with her co-author, John Carney. Patty loved Saratoga Springs in the summer, a nice bottle of Gran Cru, and underdogs. Memorial donations in Patty’s honor can be directed to any Native American charity of your choice.
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