Sexual difference has emerged in the last three decades as an enduring question for feminism. Drawing attention to the embodied nature of subjectivity, it enables feminists to counter the more insidious presumptions of universality and the phallocentric economy of knowledge production, and makes possible feminine expressions of subjectivity. At the same time, engaging the nature of difference has opened the way to a more detailed interrogation of identity, specifically the identity of ' woman' and 'the feminine' as categories of feminist analysis. However, tensions have emerged within this field over the concept of community, and how to motivate for political change on the basis of a common identity when the identity of woman is itself contested. In tracing these arguments, this thesis raises a number of considerations about the way difference is understood. It finds that a conceptual commitment to the specificity of the body as properly constitutive of the political can run the risk of sidelining, denigrating and presuming to excise what appears as universal, masculine, or phallocentric. In doing so, it potentially leaves aside a full political engagement with the generative and implicated nature of these terms in the formation of all identity. Consequently, questions around thought, universality, virtuality, and disembodiment may not be given full consideration, with the outcome that feminism may be foreclosing its political domain from important formative concerns. The primary aim of this thesis is to open these categories of analysis to question, to understand how they have been constructed in debates around difference, and to bring to light some of the assumptions which remain axiological to what properly constitutes feminist politics. Engaging Luce Irigaray's reading of divinity for community and identity, this thesis argues that if the implicated nature of identity is taken seriously then the organising categories fundamental to notions of political action and community become a general field of difference which exceeds the reach of feminist politics as it currently stands.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/187417 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Hinton, Peta, Social Sciences & International Studies, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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