Subject

The subject has been one of the most important areas of investigation for feminist theory since at least the 1940s. As a concept central to philosophy, the subject not only is the seat of reason and experience but also is a requisite for thinking about how people can act on their environment to change it (agency). Traditionally, philosophy has characterized the subject as masculine, isolated, dominating, transcendent, and heroic, but feminists have understood it as constructed through relation, difference, embodiment, and fragmentation. This chapter looks at feminism&s;s revision of the philosophical subject, including asking why feminism has returned again and again to a concept that has traditionally been defined as exclusionary, violently appropriative, destructive, universalizing, and dispossessive. This chapter shows feminism rejecting this version of the subject and, instead, constructing a subject that can imagine itself into different types of social relationships, detaching from the patriarchal authority that has constrained its possibilities. Some of the writers referenced in this chapter are Simone de Beauvoir, Carole Pateman, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva.