In this essay, I explore the parallel between the historical exclusions of rhetoric from philosophy and of women from fields of rational discourse. After considering the usefulness and limitations of deconstruction for exposing marginalization by hierarchical systems, I explore links between texts of the sophists and feminist proposals for rewriting/rereading history by Cixous, Spivak, and others. I conclude that sophistic rhetoric offers a flexible alternative to philosophy as an intellectual framework for mediating theoretical oppositions among contemporary feminisms.

Some poststructuralist feminist theorists hold that the body is merely the product of cultural determinants and that gender is a free-floating artifice. I discuss how this "denaturalization" of gender and the body entrenches us yet deeper in the nature/culture dichotomy. The body, I maintain, needs to be "renaturalized" so that its earthy significance is recognized. Through a feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I develop a noncausal linkage between gender and the body. I present the body as an (...) indeterminate constancy that is culturally and historically contextualized, on the one hand, yet part of our embodied givenness on the other. Interspersed throughout the paper are passages that describe my own bodily condition as I wrote the paper. (shrink)

Some poststructuralist feminist theorists hold that the body is merely the product of cultural determinants and that gender is a free-floating artifice. I discuss how this “denaturalization” of gender and the body entrenches us yet deeper in the nature/culture dichotomy. The body, I maintain, needs to be “renaturalized” so that its earthy significance is recognized. Through a feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I develop a noncausal linkage between gender and the body. I present the body as an (...) indeterminate constancy that is culturally and historically contextualized, on the one hand, yet part of our embodied givenness on the other. Interspersed throughout the paper are passages that describe my own bodily condition as I wrote the paper. (shrink)

Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of "woman" that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a "feminine" language is either groundlessly utopian or entails a biological essentialism.

I present a way of thinking about gender that I have found helpful in evaluating various proposed feminist projects. By considering gender and value as independent dimensions, relationships of "difference" can be more clearly perceived as involving relationships of lack, of complementarity, or of perversion. I illustrate the use of my gender/value "compass" with applications to questions of self-identity, rationality, and knowledge. This way of thinking about gender allows a conceptualization of feminism that neither erases nor emphasizes gender distinctions.

Le projet de Georges Duby sur l’histoire des femmes au Moyen Âge repose dans une large mesure sur l’anthropologie structurale de Claude Lévi Strauss et le marxisme structuraliste de Louis Althusser : les femmes de l’aristocratie médiévale, selon Duby, étaient des gages dans un système de parenté contrôlé par et pour les hommes ; elles formaient leurs subjectivités propres à partir de l’idéologie dominante que façonnaient les hommes. Les sources, pour Duby, ne révèlent jamais de voix féminines indépendantes. Les historien(ne)s (...) féministes américain(e)s s’accordent bien souvent avec l’opinion de Duby sur les contraintes du système patriarcal qui pesaient sur les femmes au Moyen Âge. Toutefois, à la différence de Duby, leurs recherches ont mis l’accent sur la résistance qu’expriment les voix féminines. Cette insistance de la recherche féministe, outre-Atlantique, est symptomatique du très large intérêt que porte la recherche américaine aux résistances des groupes dominés. De même, le peu d’intérêt porté par Duby aux actions des femmes semble symptomatique de tendances plus larges de la recherche française. (shrink)

The polemical debate, within feminist theory in North America, in the 1980s, around essentialism is the central focus of this thesis.