Post-Modern Feminist Philosophy

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

significant that society identifies women and men sexually. Consider, for instance, the way proper nouns and personal pronouns reflect the sex of the person. Consider also a most striking aspect of the conceptual discrimination of the two sexes as manifested in the fact that while the word 'man' can be substituted for humanity or mankind in any sentence without changing its meaning; significantly the word 'woman' cannot.

Baker further points out that even when it comes to interchangeable terms for the word 'woman,' the most frequently used terms of identification by males such as 'bird,' 'doll,' or 'pussy,' reflect a conception of a woman as a mindless plaything, a domesticated pet or servant, or in terms of those parts of the female anatomy associated with sexual intercourse. Leading from this, it is again evident that the current identification of 'woman' in language is indicative of male chauvinism and antithetical to the feminist goal of breaking the oppression of ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

granted to men.

For any feminist movement to succeed in getting society to recognize women as being as important as men, it is important that it possess a feminist philosophy and an agenda with which it works. Currently, however, it appears that the feminist movement is still struggling to resolve certain basic questions such as the very definition of what constitutes a woman. As Luce Irigaray so aptly observes in Questions, the answer is difficult in so much that any attempt is invariably one where the definition becomes the inverse, the negative, or the complement of the definition of a man.

Irigaray, in her search for a solution to the problem, propounds the argument that, ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: