Claudia Leeb's Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism is an original contribution to the fields of feminist, political, and critical theory. Bringing together diverse thinkers with the political urgency to challenge capitalist exploitation, particularly of working-class women, Leeb offers an argument for a novel view of political agency that she names “the political subject-in-outline.” As Leeb puts it, “my idea of the political subject-in-outline deals with the inherent tension in the political subject—its exclusionary character and its necessity for agency by theorizing a mediated relation between subject and object, universal and particular, as well as mind and body” (64). For feminist theorists and activists, the “subject question” in feminism is fraught with anxieties of exclusion and false solidarity in speaking about “women” as a group, yet many counter that without some idea of political agency, we have no way to talk about resistance to oppression or social and political transformation. Leeb's work is a response to these conflicting views in feminist theory.

Through innovative readings of Jacques Lacan and Theodor Adorno, along with Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, and other important feminist and antiracist thinkers, Leeb offers a defense of a political subject who, while subject to structures of oppression, can also resist in a way that does not reinforce false universality among women or liberal individualism. Leeb asks, “Can we theorize the feminist subject who is in a position to not only resist but transform power structures?” (147). Her answer is to think of the subject as an outline, able to be coherent to oneself and others but also able to revise and reflect on that vision through engagement with others.

The concept of the subject-in-outline does a lot of work in Leeb's book, most of it persuasive on the grounds of thinking philosophically about the tension between coherence (the subject) and permanent openness (the outline) (5). The value in such a rethinking of the political subject as a subject-in-outline is that it provides a conceptual vocabulary to understand that the individual is not whole to itself given the idea of the unconscious as well as the “hole” or “limit” in cultural systems of power that Leeb draws out of Lacan and Adorno. This allows her to push against what she sees as Butler's limitations in not thinking enough about political agency as she theorizes how we internalize subjection or how suffering can be transformed into action under conditions of capitalism by paying attention to and activating those moments of suffering that allow us to recognize gaps in how power operates. Leeb notes in the chapter “What Makes Us Rebel”: that pain and suffering “point to the traumatic elements that one could not integrate into one's history, which allow for the subject to realign for sociopolitical transformation” (134).

Some may worry that this vision of the political subject too readily assumes that recognition of a gap or limit point leads to political transformation (non-identity as different from myself and the real as the idea that power never fully determines meaning). The real as it emerges out of Lacanian psychoanalysis functions as a limit point to symbolization or a point of resistance. Since this is always there in a Lacanian system, some may worry that the judgment that allows for politics to operate is not taken into account. This worry is not entirely fair to Leeb's theory of the mediated relationship between subject and object or theory and practice, which is more dynamic than a simple story of unmasking an ideology that condemns working women to suffer in silence, either within capitalism or within the sexism/racism of the culture industry in Western nations. Instead, there will always be something that is left over or that cannot be fully integrated into the system. However, Leeb could make this process more explicit, particularly when addressing the significance of working-class women, who are the main object of her concern. Moreover, Leeb's interest in abolishing capitalism is not fully developed but rather is used as a marker for revolutionary transformation. Certainly others have talked about feminism as a movement to abolish sexist oppression or the need to abolish white supremacy, so the political call for abolition may remain a valuable, revolutionary call.

Leeb can tend toward abstraction when thinking about the figure of working-class women as a way to unlock the critical necessity of political subjectivity so we can act as working-class women. However, the abstraction allows for some productive criticism. For example, she offers a beautiful reading of underappreciated and rather unknown texts from Marx (which she reads in the original German) to show anew how even this critic of capitalism denies working-class women political agency, seeing them as valuable for reproducing the family (unwaged labor) or as “hags” who end up sexually exploited by bourgeois or middle-class society. The last two chapters on Marx and Adorno showcase Leeb's close reading of their limit points, revealing how both fail to conceive of working-class women as political subjects. Other illustrative examples of working-class women and others acting in their own name are peppered throughout the text. While it would be useful to have more of those examples developed in a deeper way, Leeb's conceptual work can help other scholars engage in more ethnographic or case study approaches to particular working-class women acting against exploitation.

For scholars and activists who are interested in feminist critical theory that provides conceptual tools to think about political agency, Leeb's book is a valuable contribution. She shows that there is original and exciting work to be done that links psychoanalysis and critical theory for feminist, anticapitalist purposes.