Constituting Feminist Subjects. By Kathi Weeks. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. 196p. $39.95 cloth, $13.95 paper.

Abstract

Feminist theorists have struggled to develop accounts of women's oppression that are historically specific enough to capture the variability in forms of male domination but do not neglect possible transhistorical and transcultural features. A related challenge has been to theorize a feminist subjec- tivity that can anchor an oppositional politics but avoid an overly unified notion of feminist subjectivity, while neverthe- less attending to the patterned effects that women's system- atic location in the social whole may have on their subjectiv- ity.These challenges were the subject of sometimes polemical but mostly fruitful debates throughout the 1980s and 1990s. They have been deeply shaped by two distinct developments. The first is the political struggles and theoretical writings of women of color, whose work on subjectivity and male dom- ination has consistently pluralized women's subjectivity as well as historicized and contextualized male domination in relation to other axes of power. The second is postmodern critiques that charge modernist modes of theorizing are governed by either ahistorical metanarratives insufficiently attentive to variation and contingency or essentialist under- standings of subjectivity in either a humanist/liberal/volunta- rist or determinist/Marxist form.