Gender Identity without Gender Prescriptions Essay example -- Philosop

The feminist philosopher Susan Bordo suggests that the dilemma of twentieth-century feminism is the tension between a gender identity that twain mobilizes a liberatory politics on behalf of women and that results in gender prescriptions which excludes many women. This tension seems especially acute in feminist debates about essentialism/deconstructionism. Concentrating on the shared bring up of women may run the risk of embracing an essentialism that ignores the protestences among women, whereas emphasizing the constructed natures of sex and gender categories seems to threaten the very project of a feminist politics. I will study the possibility of dismantling gender prescriptions while retaining a gender identity that can be the beginning for an emancipatory politics. Perhaps feminists need not rely on a reified essentialism that elides the differences of race, class, etc., if we begin with our social practices of classification rather than with a priori generalizations about th e nature of women.Perhaps it is easiest to begin with that which seems self-evident we categorize people according to sex. Therefore, it besides seems self-evident that women form a (natural) group based on a shared sex, resulting in a common gender identity. Historically, feminism politics retain relied on this assumed sameness among all women. feminism can represent the interests of all women because, after all, women are all alike in being women. Of course, women differ with regard to race, class, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and so on. But these differences have been seen as less basic than the shared similarity of sex and gender. Recently, however, more and more feminists have protested that these differences field of study just as much to ones identit... ...sitions within each of these economic, cultural, socio-political contexts .... Despite considerable variability in what this means for particular women, this general feature of womens experience is sufficiently universal, by all anthropological and historical depends, that it would seem to support at least a qualified conception of a distinctive womens standpoint, one which takes into account the fact that gender is by no means the only factor shaping womens lives (The Philosophy of Ambivalence Sandra Harding on The Science Question in Feminism as found in Science, Morality and Feminist Theory eds. Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen, Calgary U of Calgary P, 1987, 68).(25) Bordo, Feminism/Postmodernism, 153.(26) To paraphrase Bordo the chief imperative was is to listen, to become aware of ones biases, prejudices, ignorance Feminism/Postmodernism, 138.