Suchergebnisse

Although feminist theory and critical race theory engage questions about human nature and subjectivity, criteria of legitimacy, philosophies of history, structures of power, forms of social and communal organization; and characteristics of a just polity, questions that are central concerns of political theorists, these distinctive theoretical approaches are often ignored, neglected, or marginalized within the subfield of political theory. This article examines the dimensions, causes, and political implications of such exclusion.

This essay first tries to answer two questions: Why did the question of the woman writer disappear from the feminist theoretical agenda around 1990? Why do we need to reconsider it now? I then begin to develop a new analysis of the question of the woman writer by turning to the statement `I am not a woman writer'. By treating it as a speech act and analysing it in the light of Simone de Beauvoir's understanding of sexism, I show that it is a response to a particular kind of provocation, namely an attempt to force the woman writer to conform to some norm for femininity. I also show that Beauvoir's theory illuminates Virginia Woolf's strategies in A Room of One's Own before, finally, asking why we still should want women to write.