It is thrilling to think – to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep. (Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me').

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis—“woman,” “femininity,” etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A “discursive” approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.

Empty space. The body started off again, heavy and hot, with tremors and flushes of anger assailing the throat and stomach. But no one inhabited that body now. The streets were emptied as though their contents had been poured down a sink: something that a while ago had filled them had been swallowed up. The usual objects were still there, intact, but they had all become disrupted, they descended from the sky like enormous stalactites, or towered upwards like fantastic dolmens. (...) All their usual little appeals, their shrill cicada-chirpings, had vanished into thin air, and were silent. A man's future had once challenged them, and they met it with a scatter of diverse temptations. That future was dead. (Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason.). (shrink)

L'étude des rapports entre féminisme et philosophie politique présuppose une classification des principales tendances du féminisme contemporain. l'article présente d'abord la typologie proposée par Alison Jaggar et indique les problèmes qu'elle pose. Il examine ensuite un ensemble de textes consacrés, expressément ou non, à la taxonomie de ces tendances, pour dégager une grille d'interprétation permettant de les rassembler dans un même cadre théorique explicitant les enjeux qu'elles abordent,mais aussi ceux qui sont ignorés.

In Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, Susan Griffin's embedding of language and culture within the natural world implicitly offers a critique of widespread assumptions, shared by many feminists, that language belongs only to the powerful and that it is inherently violent. Griffin's depiction of the process through which women come to speech is illuminated by V. N. Vološinov's work on the multiaccentuality of language and by Trinh Minh-ha's characterizations of oral traditions. Both authors stress the constant re-creation of (...) language by speakers and listeners. (shrink)

Essentialist and postmodern feminisms are often regarded as incompatible. I propose that Buddhist theories of subjectivity change the nature of the tension between them as presently construed because Buddhist traditions describe a mind not wholly governed by language, and a subjective mental dimension that is entirely integrated with the body and its sensations. A corollary is the compatibility Buddhists perceive between conditioned subjective states (akin to postmodern feminisms) and the unconditioned (akin to essentialist feminisms).

Several decades ago, feminists differentiated between the biologically given basis of sex identity (sex) and the socially constructed cultural practices anchored by sex identity (gender). In recent years, many feminists have challenged that distinction, arguing that biological sex is as much a social construct as are the practices comprising gender. I survey two examples from biological studies of sex identity that, by contrast (I maintain), warrant saving the concept of biologically given sex identity. The result is not antithetical to feminism, (...) however, since these studies also suggest that sex identity proliferates beyond the rigid female/male dichotomy. If articulated carefully, this view can avoid metaphysically essentialist baggage while enriching feminist conceptions of sex identity. (shrink)

Recent attempts by the neurological and psychological communities to articulate thought differences between women and men continue to mismeasure thought, especially women's thought. To challenge the claims of hemispheric specialization and lateralization studies, I argue three points: 1) given more sophisticated biological models, brain researchers cannot assume that differences, should they exist, between women and men are purely a result of innate structures; 2) the distinction currently being drawn between verbal/spatial thinking abilities is fraught with ideological commitments that undermine the (...) intelligibility of the distinction; 3) the model of thinking as information processing which underlies all this research confuses thinking with internal processing strategies. (shrink)

This paper reflects on masculinist biases affecting scientific research on the Premenstrual Syndrome. Masculinist bias is examined on the level of observation language and in the choice of explanatory frameworks. Such bias is found to be further reinforced by the social construction of “the clinical body” as an object of medical interrogation. Some of the political implications of the medicalization of women's premenstrual changes are also discussed.

The book is an attempt to explore the affinities between contemporary critical theories and modernist and postmodernist American poetry. The analysis focuses on poststructuralist theories, notorious for their tendency to destabilize generic boundaries between literary, philosophical and critical discourses. The main argument and the structure of the book derive from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Che cos’è la poesia” [What is poetry?] in which the philosopher postulates the impossibility of defining poetry by comparing a poem to a hedgehog – prickly, solitary, untamed, (...) fragile and protective, rolling itself up into a ball at the first sign of danger or when in the hands of the reader-intruder. The metaphor captures thus the fragility of the relationship between poetry and the world. The book examines this relationship as exemplified by the erinaceous poetics of high modernists and their postmodernist followers In the study I employ also other oststructuralist theories, such as the notion of the text and the pleasure of the text formulated by Roland Barthes, the heories of metaphor as seen by Paul Ricoeur or Paul de Man, and gender-sensitive theories of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. (shrink)

Julia Kristeva is known as rejecting feminism, nonetheless her work is useful for feminist theory. I reconsider Kristeva's rejection of feminism and her theories of difference, identity, and maternity, elaborating on Kristeva's contributions to debates over the necessity of identity politics, indicating how Kristeva's theory suggests the cause of and possible solutions to women's oppression in Western culture, and, using Kristeva's theory, setting up a framework for a feminist rethinking of politics and ethics.

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 article was originally presented as a paper, and since much of what it discusses turns on problems of position, location, self-representation and representativity, I have decided to leave it, as far as is possible, in its original form. Extensive use of the first person pronoun is frowned on in the contexts in which I am used to working, but I have deliberately retained it in this text to try and convey a sense of particularity, of myself speaking in a (...) specific context(s). The use of ‘we’ is a highly politicized act both in anthropology and in feminist contexts. Its use here is intended to convey a sense of audience, that is of myself speaking to others. But, and much more importantly, it also operates as a mark of interrogation, a fictive unity that reveals the lines of fragmentation at the very moment when it claims affinity.1. (shrink)

The relationship between friendship and theory is neither accidental nor essential. In many ways we might define theory as an attempt to break with the seduction of friendship and, in so doing, est...