Gender Identity without Gender Prescriptions Essay example -- Philosop

The libber philosopher Susan Bordo suggests that the dilemma of twentieth-century feminism is the tension between a sexual practice identity that both mobilizes a liberatory authorities 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 sex of women may run the peril of embracing an essentialism that ignores the differences among women, whereas emphasizing the constructed constitutions of sex and gender categories seems to threaten the very assure of a feminist politics. I will analyze the possibility of level gender prescriptions while retaining a gender identity that screw 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 generalizatio ns about the nature of women.Perhaps it is easiest to begin with that which seems self-evident we categorize people according to sex. Therefore, it in addition seems self-evident that women form a (natural) group based on a shared sex, resulting in a common gender identity. Historically, feminism politics obligate relied on this assumed sameness among all women. womens lib 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, much and more feminists have protested that these differences matter just as much to ones identit... ...sitions inside 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 s ufficiently universal, by all anthropological and historical accounts, that it would seem to support at least a dependant 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 doctrine 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.