What is a Woman?
Toril Moi(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 1. November 1999
Book
Hardback
544 pages
978-0-19-812242-5 (ISBN)
Description
What is a woman? And what does it mean to be a feminist today? In her first full-scale engagement with feminist theory since "Sexual/Textual Politics" (1985), Toril Moi challenges the dominant trends in contemporary feminist and cultural thought, arguing for a feminism of freedom inspired by Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex". This works brings together Moi's work on Freud and Bourdieu, and her studies of desire and knowledge in literature. In the title-essay, Toril Moi rethinks current debates about sex, gender, and the body - challenging the commonly held belief that the sex/gender distinction is fundamental to all feminist theory. Moi rejects every attempt to define masculinity and femininity, including efforts to define femininity as that which "cannot be defined". In the second essay, "I am a Woman", Toril Moi reworks the relationship between the personal and the philosophical, pursuing ways to write theory that do not neglect the claims of the personal. Setting up an encounter between contemporary theory and Simone de Beauvoir, Moi rethinks the need, and difficulty, of finding one's own philosophical voice by placing it in new theoretical contexts.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
bibliography, index
ISBN-13
978-0-19-812242-5 (9780198122425)
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Schweitzer Classification
Content
Part I: A feminism of freedom - Simone de Beauvoir; what is a woman? sex, gender, and the body in feminist theory; I am a woman - the personal and the philosophical. Part II: Appropriating theory - Bourdieu and Freud; appropriating Bourdieu - feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture; the challenge of the particular case - Bourdieu's sociology of culture and literary criticism; the missing mother - Renee Girard's oedipal rivalries; representation of patriarchy - sexuality and epistemology in Freud's "Dora"; patriarchal thought and the drive for knowledge; is anatomy destiny? Freud and biological determinism. Part III: Desire and knowledge - reading texts of love; desire in language - Andreas Capellanus and the controversy of courtly love; she died because she came too late - knowledge, doubles and death in Thomas's "Tristan"; intentions and effects - rhetoric and identification in Simone de Beauvoir's "The Woman Destroyed".