Субектът на феминизма: етика, различие и различия
The Subject of Feminism: Ethics, Difference and Differences

Summary/Abstract: Starting from a consideration of women's exclusion from full moral and political agency, the paper asks how it might he possible for women to become valorized as subjects in their own right. Subjectivity and agency are predicated in the modern period on the attributes of autonomy and rationality which are systematically denied to women. To be a subject is to characterized in terms of pure, abstract, rational mind, whereas women are historically and persistently Identified with their material and supposedly unruly bodies. The splits of binary difference between mind/body, male/female, subject/object and so on marks an intellectual tradition where knowledge of the world is organised into oppositional pairs in which the terms are not of equal value, but in a hierarchical relation to one another. Rather than attempting to reverse or revalue the hierarchy itself, as previous feminists have done, 1 argue that we should make use of deconstruction to disrupt that relation. Instead of men being the standard against which women are defined in terms of their difference (A and not-A), a poststructuralist approach shows how all such categories are unstable. In place of simple oppositional sameness/difference, which assumes a clarity of boundaries between homogenous categories, the move might be to multiple and plural differences. Women suffer oppression, not as a unified group, but in many diverse ways, and moreover, each of us can occupy not just one but a multiplicity of subject position. The task for feminism is to recognize all the differences, and to reconstitute the ethical to give value to all.

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