| Popis: |
The ‘critique of reason’ in feminist and postmodernist theory calls upon us to rethink conceptions of the rational subject—the subject of thought and choice—inherited from the Enlightenment. As an element in her critique of this humanist tradition, Judith Butler (following Nietzsche) rejects the conception of the subject as a ‘doer behind the deed’, and offers an alternative model of resistance to our familiar imperatives of gender identity. Drawing mainly on the introduction to Butler’s Bodies That Matter, this essay aims to clarify what she thinks is wrong with the kind of feminism that opposes ‘sex’ (the biological datum) to ‘gender’ (the cultural construct)—that is, with the main current of feminist thinking since the 1970s. It suggests that Butler may have exaggerated the ideological difference between herself and those feminists who have appealed to a sex/gender distinction. |
