What is a Woman?

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.