Drawing primarily from the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, the author suggests that a postmodern approach to identity can be used to challenge the essentialism that pervades both feminist empiricism and standpoint theory, and thus move feminist psychology in a more emancipatory direction. A major premise of this paper is that an engagement with postmodernism redirects our attention to symbolic constructions of femininity and to the sociopolitical grounding of experience.

Classical philosophy adopts the standpoint of males in the Greek polis. The consequent adumbration of the standpoint of women and noncitizen men in the oikos, the household, has implications for feminist philosophy. Two systems of action are differentiated: the domestic economy protected by the goddess Hestia, and the political economy protected by Hermes. Shifting one's standpoint to include both the oikos and the polis offers an alternative to gender as the defining issue in feminist theory.