If social roles could be readjusted or radically restructured, if the two sexes could be resocialised, they could be rendered equal. vii + 245. Difference suggests major transformation of the social and symbolic order, which, in patriarchy, is founded by a movement of universalisation of the singular (male) identity. On the other hand, it is also a response to the broad political aims and objectives of feminist struggles. [T]hey are run by a great narrative even as they are busy protecting their theoretical purity by repudiating essentialism. It’s all part of my little summer Deleuze swerve. This kind of question is, moreover, crucially positioned at the heart of the conflict between feminist politics and the requirements of patriarchal knowledges. It is a self-conscious reaction on the one hand to the overwhelming masculinity of privileged and historically dominant knowledges, acting as a kind of counterweight to the imbalances resulting from the male monopoly of the production and reception of knowledges. This broad position assumes that the liberation of women from patriarchal constraints entailed opening up social, economic, political, and sexual positions previously occupied only by men. Biologism is a particular form of essentialism in which women’s essence is defined in terms of women’s biological capacities. She moved to Monash University in 1992. In this brief note, I would like to use a major dispute between feminist theorists–the debate between so-called feminisms of equality and feminisms of difference–to raise the question of the dual commitments of feminist theory and the need to devise appropriate criteria for its assessment. 1994. by. This, however, leads to a paradox: If women cannot be characterised in any general way, if all there is to femininity is socially produced, how can feminism be taken seriously? This tension means that feminists have had to tread a fine line either between intellectual rigour (as it has been defined in male terms) and political commitment (as feminists see it)–that is, between the risks posed by patriarchal recuperation and those of a conceptual sloppiness inadequate to the long-term needs of feminist struggles–or between acceptance in male terms and commitment to women’s terms. Marking a ground-breaking moment in the debate surrounding bodies and "body politics," Elizabeth Grosz's Space, Time and Perversion contends that only by resituating and rethinking the body will feminism and cultural analysis effect and unsettle the knowledges, disciplines and institutions which have controlled, regulated and managed the body both ideologically and … In this sense, the movement, while immediately universalist, is also deeply rooted in the sociopolitical life of nations. Elizabeth Grosz (Author) › Visit Amazon's Elizabeth Grosz Page. Women’s social roles were, in other words, the result of culture not nature, of social organisation rather than biological determinants, and were thus capable of being changed. She also teaches gender studies and architecture at the University of Bergen, Norway, and The University of Sydney, Australia. In the one case, these feminists are accused of straying too far from biological and scientifically validated information; and in the other, of sticking too closely to biological evidence. Elizabeth Grosz, the new Jean Fox O'Barr Professor in Interdisciplinary Feminist Studies. Rev. Brown, Kristen. Elizabeth A. Grosz (born 1952 in Sydney, Australia ) is an Australian philosopher, feminist theorist, and professor working in the U.S. She is Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor at Duke University. These four terms are frequently elided: Each has commonly served as a shorthand formula for the others. She has written on 20th-century French philosophers Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze, as well as on gender, sexuality, temporality, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Elizabeth Grosz (2009) criticizes the idea that feminist theory is a primarily critical discourse, in favour of a description of it as the practice of the creation of concepts. 5. The author uses the works of Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Immanuel Kant to examine contemporary feminist theory and how this informs current legal studies. Is the concept essentialist, or is it an upheaval of patriarchal knowledges? This implies not only that social practices must be subjected to feminist critique and reorganisation but also that the very structures of representation, meaning, and knowledge must be subjected to a thoroughgoing transformation of their patriarchal alignments. One of the leading scholars in women's studies, Elizabeth Grosz is the Jean Fox O'Barr Professor in Interdisciplinary Feminist Studies in the Program in Women's Studies at Duke. In Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art, Elizabeth Grosz, a Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, uses a philosophical framework shaped by Darwin’s theory on natural and sexual selection and applies it to a variety of social, political, economic and conceptual relations. … I think it is absolutely on target to take a stand against the discourses of essentialism, universalism as it comes to terms with the universal–of classical German philosophy or the universal as the white upper class male … etc. Volatile Bodies is launched with the wager that all the effects of subjectivity can be as adequately explained using the subject's unconscious (vii). Try as it may, a feminism of equality is unable to adequately theorise sexual and reproductive equality. Only sameness or identity can ensure equality. It seems that both these criticisms misunderstand the status of claims made by many feminists of difference, judging them in terms inappropriate to their approach. The crucial political questions are, Which commitments remain, in spite of their patriarchal alignments, of use to feminists in their political struggles? 1 Her exuberant work has offered a deep and sustained consideration of space, time and bodies in relation to sexuality and sexual difference. Thus, any attempt to define or designate woman or femininity is in danger of relying on commitments that generalise on the basis of the particular and reduce social construction to biological preformation. of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely, by Elizabeth Grosz. Most significantly, even if the two sexes behave in the same ways, perform the same duties and play the same roles, the social meanings of their activities remain unchallenged. 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