The model of feminism as humanist in practice and postmodern in theory is inadequate. Feminist practice and theory directly inform each other to displace both humanist and postmodern conceptions of the subject. An examination of feminism's use of rights discourse suggests that feminist practice questions the humanist conception of the subject as a self-identity. Likewise, feminist theory undermines the postmodern emphasis on the constitutive instability and indeterminacy of the subject.

This essay critiques feminist treatments of maternal-fetal "relationality" that unwittingly replicate features of Western individualism (for example, the Cartesian division between the asocial body and the social-cognitive person, or the conflation of social and biological birth). I argue for a more reflexive perspective on relationality that would acknowledge how we produce persons through our actions and rhetoric. Personhood and relationality can be better analyzed as dynamic, negotiated qualities realized through social practice.

This article investigates the intersections of secrecy/interiority, the state, and speech/ expression, and their implications for the rights of women. I propose a critique of commercial pornography that reanimates MacKinnon's claim that pornography and American democracy are in a relationship of mutual reinforcement, and incorporates poststructuralist (Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Butler) commitments to secrecy and unintelligibility, as well as their role in the production of pleasure.