Feminist theorists have struggled to develop accounts ofwomen's oppression that are historically specific enough tocapture the variability in forms of male domination but donot neglect possible transhistorical and transcultural features.A related challenge has been to theorize a feminist subjec-tivity that can anchor an oppositional politics but avoid anoverly unified notion of feminist subjectivity, while neverthe-less attending to the patterned effects that women's system-atic location in the social whole may have on their subjectiv-ity.These challenges were the subject of sometimes polemicalbut mostly fruitful debates throughout the 1980s and 1990s.They have been deeply shaped by two distinct developments.The first is the political struggles and theoretical writings ofwomen of color, whose work on subjectivity and male dom-ination has consistently pluralized women's subjectivity aswell as historicized and contextualized male domination inrelation to other axes of power. The second is postmoderncritiques that charge modernist modes of theorizing aregoverned by either ahistorical metanarratives insufficientlyattentive to variation and contingency or essentialist under-standings of subjectivity in either a humanist/liberal/volunta-rist or determinist/Marxist form.