En la sección 10 de _Mil mesetas_, Deleuze y Guattari precisan su monismo dinámico con la afirmación del devenir-mujer en el comienzo, medio y llave de todo devenir. La cuestión de la diferencia sexual es de este modo introducida y restituida al lugar de la diferencia ontológica radical, a partir de la cual se deviene y existe. Las siguientes páginas se proponen leer la inmanencia _materialista _del devenir a la luz de ese primer movimiento conceptivo y medial, con una interpretación (...) que intercepta el vitalismo deleuzeano-guattariano y el feminismo de la diferencia. (shrink)

This article utilizes Derrida's explorations of the archive in Archive Fever to debate the status of Greek myth as archive. It begins with out lining a conservative notion of the archive, particularly as it has been conceived by those whose object of study is myth. It ends with an interpretation of the myth of Cassandra that seeks to augment the archive, the archive that is now refigured in terms of metaphors of time and space. An archive has traditionally been considered (...) to be something to do with the past. In the case of myth, the archive is understood as the stories told by the ancient Greeks, which are separate from the cat egorization of those stories and explicit theories or ideas about them. This separation locates myth as something prior and organic, as the archive constituted as the object of study, and the interpretation as something secondary and derivative, a commentary on the archive, which is the thing that scholars do. But at what point does the past begin to be the past? Is Ovid's Metamorphoses part of the archive of Greek myth or a commentary upon it? What of Servius? Or Frazer? Or Freud? Or Bernal? Derrida's suggestion that the archive resides in the future perfect tense leads to a reformulation of the relationship between myth and interpretation, which relies what might be described as a typological model of knowledge. His question 'Where does the outside commence?' forces an examination of who has the right of appropria tion, an issue pertinent to the study of the history of the interpretation of myth. (shrink)

This thesis examines some of the contested meanings of what it is to be a self, person and individual. The law of obligations sets the context for this examination. One of the important aspects of contemporary feminist philosophy has been its move beyond highlighting inconsistencies in political and legal theory, in which theoretical frameworks can be shown to rely upon an ambiguous treatment of women. The feminist theorists whose work is considered use these theoretical weaknesses as a point of departure (...) to propose different conceptual frameworks. I start by analysing contemporary work on the self from within both philosophy of science and feminist metaphysics to draw out common approaches from these diverse positions. These themes are then discussed in the context of the law. I then critically examine the concept of legal personhood in the work of Drucilla Cornell and her proposals for the amendment of tort law. This is juxtaposed with an analysis of the practical operation of tort law by adapting François Ewald's work on risk and insurance to English law. I concentrate on women's ambiguous position with regard to both risk and to the image of the individual that is the subject of Ewald's critique. This is followed by an examination of the changing position of women with regard to 'possessive individualism', 'self-ownership' or 'property in the person' in relation to contract law and social contract theory. There are a number of different social contracts discussed in the thesis: Cornell's reworking of John Rawls and the stories of Thomas Hobbes and of Carole Pateman. The final 'social contract' to be discussed is that of 'new contractualism', the employment of contract as a technique of government. I argue that Pateman's critique of possessive individualism continues to be relevant at a time when the breadwinner/housewife model has broken down. (shrink)

I appropriate Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain for a feminist analysis of the girl because it offers more insight into the ways girls construct themselves as performative networks than the death-by-culture or at-risk model preferred by such feminists as Jean Kilbourne, Carol Gilligan, and even Susan Bordo. I proffer that it costs women everything to practise a politics of difference that is by definition reactionary, a reaction to the cultural refusal of leaky gendered bodies that must be overcome. (...) Girl is mapped through such alternations as powerful aggregates of the tremulous, roaming emissions of monstrous particles most desired and desirous. (shrink)

This article opens with the questioning of a now established scholarly category, `French feminism'. It proposes that theoretical and polemical understandings of `French feminism' have been founded on an opposition to its counterpart, `Anglo-American feminism'. The measure of this opposition has been defined mostly as geographical, linguistic and cultural. But underneath such constructions often lies the old sameness vs difference debate that has captivated feminism since the suffragettes. The article argues for a less oppositional and less discounting definition of the (...) two strands of feminism. It proposes to read oppositional classifications as motivation for a dialogue addressed to the `other ' of theoretical constructs; questioning the likelihood of foregoing oppositional classification. (shrink)

Inaugural lecture as Professor of Women's Studies in the Arts Faculty of the University of Utrecht, May 16, 1990.

This thesis draws on poststructuralism/postmodernism to present a feminist investigation into the human body, its modes of (self)identification, and its insertion into systems of bioethics. I argue that, contrary to conventional paradigms, the boundaries not only of the subject, but of the body too, cannot be secured. In exploring and contesting the closure and disembodiment of the ethical subject, I propose instead an incalculable, but nonetheless fully embodied, diversity of provisional subject positions. My aim is to valorise women and situate (...) them within a reconceived ethics which takes account of the embodied feminine. My project entails an analysis and deconstruction of the binaries of those dominant strands of postEnlightenment thought that shape epistemology, ontology, and ethics, which in turn set the parameters of modern bioethics. More importantly, it goes on to reclaim a radical sexual difference beyond the binary, in which the female is no longer the other of the male. My enquiry, then, is strongly influenced by the discursive approach offered by both Foucault and Derrida in differential ways, but I counter their indifference to feminist concerns by qualifying their insights in the light of strategies developed by Irigaray and Spivak, among others. The main method of investigation has been through library research of primary and secondary sources in mainstream and feminist philosophy, and in bioethics. In addition, archival work in both textual and iconographic collections was carried out at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. The contribution made by this thesis is to go beyond modernist feminisms - which would simply revise and add women into existing paradigms - to radically displace and overflow the mechanisms by which women are devalued. And in developing a postmodern critique around some issues in bioethics, I have suggested a new ethics of the body which precedes the operation of moral codes. (shrink)