What is a Woman?: And Other Essays - Hardcover

Moi, Toril

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019812242X ISBN 13: 9780198122425

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Toril Moi is Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University and author of the influential and best-selling Sexual/Textual Politics, (ed) The Kristeva Reader, and (ed) French Feminist Thought. Also Simone de Beauvoir: The making of the Intellectual Woman

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019812242X
• ISBN 13: 9780198122425
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 544