What is a Woman?: And Other Essays - Hardcover

Moi, Toril

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019812242X ISBN 13: 9780198122425

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2000

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 her internationally renowned 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. Written in a clear and engaging style What is a Woman? brings together two brand new book-length theoretical interventions, Moi's work on Freud and Bourdieu, and her studies of desire and knowledge in literature.
In the controversial title-essay, Toril Moi radically 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 new book-length 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 radically rethinks the need, and difficulty, of finding one's own philosophical voice by placing it in new theoretical contexts.
A sustained refusal to lay down theoretical or political requirements for femininity, and a powerful argument for a feminism of freedom, What is a Woman? is a deeply original contribution to feminist theory.

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

Reviews

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of The Second Sexs publication, Moi (Literature and Romance Studies/Duke Univ.; Sexual/Textual Politics, not reviewed, etc.) calls on Simone de Beauvoirs help in breaking out of a stalemate she sees as peculiar to recent feminist theory: How to define what it means to be a woman without recourse to either essentialist metaphysics (Woman is . . .) or biological determinism (women must necessarily . . .). The two long new essays in which she examines Beauvoirs notion of female bodies working out their identities through social historythe pair of them amounting to a short book themselvesare followed by nine briefer essays, largely charting a course between Freud and Pierre Bourdieu, in which Moi attempt[s] to work my way out from under poststructuralism. Readers who can stay with Mois densely argumentative styleshe spends over a hundred pages analyzing the first three paragraphs of The Second Sexwill be rewarded with a cutting- edge view of contemporary feminist critique in its continuing struggle to establish just what its subject is. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019812242X
• ISBN 13: 9780198122425
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544