In this essay, I examine the arguments against physician-assisted suicide (PAS) Susan Wolf offers in her essay, “Gender, Feminism, and Death: Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia.” I argue that Wolf's analysis of PAS, while timely and instructive in many ways, does not require that feminists reject policy approaches that might permit PAS. The essay concludes with reflections on the relationship between feminism and questions of agency, especially women's agency.

I argue for a Wittgensteinian reading of Judith Butler's performative conception of identity in light of Marilyn Frye's analysis of lesbian as nonexistent and Butler's analysis of abject. I suggest that the attempt to articulate a performative lesbian identity must take seriously the contexts within which abjection is vital to maintaining gender, exposing the intimate link between context and the formulation of intention, and shedding light on possible lesbian identities irreducible to abjection.

This article shows that the relationship between Simone de Beauvoir's novel, Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others), first published in 1945, and her essay, Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity), first published in 1947, illustrates her point in “Littérature et métaphysique” that an abstract philosophical theory is grounded in immediate metaphysical experience. An original ethical position emerges from Hélène Bertrand's lived experience in the novel, which anticipates feminist issues addressed in The Second Sex more directly than does Beauvoir's essay.

Liberal rights theory can be used either to challenge or to support social hierarchies of power. Focusing on Ronald Dworkin's theory of rights and Catharine MacKinnon's feminist critique of liberalism, I identify a number of problems with the way that liberal theorists conceptualize rights. 1 argue that rights can be used to challenge oppressive practices and structures only if they are defined and employed with an awareness and critique of social relations of power.

This paper aims to investigate whether and in what respects the conceptions of the body and of agency that Judith Butler develops in Bodies That Matter are useful contributions to feminist theory. The discussion focuses on the clarification and critical assessment of the arguments Butler presents to refute the charges of linguistic monism and determinism.

This article critiques Elizabeth Grosz's understanding that queer theory is unproductive insofar as it disrupts the specific identities of gay and lesbian. Reconsidering ideas about desire, the body, and identity that Grosz takes from Gilles Deleuze's work on Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza, this essay argues that, despite her productive reworking of homophobia in terms of “active” and “reactive” forces, Grosz's application of Spinoza is only partial. Focusing on Spinoza's evaluation of bodies, the essay both critiques Grosz's approach to experimental desire and observes Spinozist preoccupations in order to talk about the experimental body. It concludes that if Grosz were to attend more seriously to the Spinozist imperative to analyze a body in terms of its capabilities—that is, its power to be affected—the epistemological basis of her argument would change. It would be difficult to dismiss the plurality and sensibility of a queer body or its challenge to lesbian and gay as the source of a primary identity.

Anglo-American embodiments of poststructuralist and French feminism often align themselves with the texts of either Michel Foucault or Luce Irigaray. lnterrogating this alleged distance between Foucault and Irigaray, I show how it reinscrihes the phallic field of concepts and categories within feminist discourses. Framing both Foucault and Irigaray as exceeding]acques Lacan's metamorphosis of G.W.F. Hegel's Concept, I suggest that engaging their styles might yield richer tools for articulating the differences within our different lives.

According to Kelly Oliver and Elizabeth Grosz, while Friedrich Nietzsche begins to open Western philosophy to the other, the body, he cuts off feminine body. Here I create a framework through which the possibility and questionability of a symbolically feminine body begins to emerge. I do this by using the metaphor of Indian curry. The metaphor works on two levels: 1) as a symbolically feminine body; 2) as Nietzsche's conception of subject-formation as a dynamic monism.

Hipparchia's use of exile as an ethical and rhetorical space from which to critique convention is the point of departure for an examination of the ethics of using exile as a rhetorically effective position for feminist theorizing. To address the ethical problems involved in using exile as a rhetorical space, I argue for a reading of exile as both a rhetorical and embodied space that can maintain an ethical anchor for feminist rhetorical and political practice.

This paper may be read as a reclamation project. It argues, with Simone de Beauvoir, that patriarchal marriage is both a perversion of the meaning of the couple and an institution in transition. Parting from those who have given up on marriage, I identify marriage as existing at the intersection of the ethical and the political and argue that whether or not one chooses marriage, feminists ought not abandon marriage as an institution.

This paper focuses on Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's philosophical views as exhibited in her early correspondence with Rene Descartes. Elisabeth's criticisms of Descartes's interactionism as well as her solution to the problem of mind-body interaction are examined in detail. The aim here is to develop a richer picture of Elisabeth as a philosophical thinker and to dispel the myth that she is simply a Cartesian muse.

For Simone de Beauvoir, the opposition of subjects is not inescapable as it may be resolved by a relation of reciprocal recognition. I discuss formulations of reciprocity and the problem of the other as outlined in Beauvoir's 1927 diary and her memoir, La Force de l'âge, then turn to examine the account of lesbianism in Le Deuxième sexe.

Is history a category of reason, or is reason a category of history? These opposing questions have divided the structuralist from the materialist—but neither question is wrong. Analysis of the logic of oppositions challenges feminism, in particular, to find a logic—and a poetics—in which to render its values without historical or theoretical naiveté. I explore the question of the timing of feminism through Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of “woman” that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a “feminine” language is either groundlessly Utopian or entails a biological essentialism.

This essay, using works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hazel Barnes, and Elizabeth Fallaize, documents the correspondence between the philosophical content of Beauvoir's She Came to Stay and Sartre's Being and Nothingness (both originally published in 1943). After reviewing the existential/phenomenological philosophical method, this paper examines the two philosophers’ letters and diaries to show that Beauvoir wrote her book before Sartre wrote his and that the distinctive ideas and arguments the two works share originated with Beauvoir.

In this essay I distinguish four different modes of feminist critique of reason. Discussing the work of authors such as Keller, Irigaray, and Butler, I point out that the issue of masculine connotations has been addressed with regard to different concepts—or at least different aspects—of reason. In view of a tendency to overdraw the objections, I suggest to reformulate the feminist critique of reason. I also argue that a rediscovery of those philosophical concepts of reason that do not restrict this term to instrumental rationality might be useful for this purpose.

If liberal theory is to move forward, it must take the political nature of family relations seriously. The beginnings of such a liberalism appear in Mary Wollstonecraft's work. Wollstonecraft's depiction of the family as a fundamentally political institution extends liberal values into the private sphere by promoting the ideal of marriage as friendship. However, while her model of marriage diminishes arbitrary power in family relations, she seems unable to incorporate enduring sexual relations between married partners.

This essay attempts to address the crucial relation of feminist philosophy to minorities inside and outside of feminism. To do so it turns to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, focusing on their concept of “becoming minoritarian” and related concepts. Aided by close readings of two canonical but ultimately negative assessments of Deleuze and Guattari, Alice Jardine's “Woman in Limbo” and Rosi Braidotti's Patterns of Dissonance, the essay outlines and argues the merits of a “minoritarian” feminism.