FEMINISM gender by Tina chanter Marxism Women have been trivialised and manipulated through their association with

madness. Marxist categories of analysis are blind to the dynamics of gender. Reducing gender to class, Marxism ends up subsuming feminism. Geared to the categories of labor and production, and based on patriarch cal model of the worker, Marxist theory could only be applied to women either by lumping them in with the apparently generic category of laborer - a masculinized model or by reinforcing the gendered expectation that womens work was in the home and that Marxist categories were inapplicable to it. Patriarch cal ideology has failed to acknowledge the central role that women have played in the relations of production. The tendency has been to construe women as having a privileged relation to reproduction and to exclude them from the analysis of production. The third way of applying Marxist categories is to parse out womens role in the reproduction of the workforce both on the level of day to day rejuvenation and at the level of generational reproduction. Women facilitate the reproduction of capitalist processes in the form of housework which replenishes the worker enabling him to return to work day in and day out with a full stomach and clean clothes and enough energy to sustain him as a productive laborer. Women also ensure the continuous availability of the workforce. The result is that womens roles can only be accounted for by an economic, class analysis, an analysis that remains blind, for example to the hidden dimension that womens unpaid work in the home adds to the value of commodities. The problem with construing housework as the ultimate form of surplus value is that it conforms to the subsumption of feminism by Marxist theory. Patriarchy divided the interests of the working class by perpetuating the idea that men should be paid a higher wage than women, and capitalism adapted accordingly. The wage differential discouraged women from joining the workforce providing them with an incentive to remain at home and perform the traditional tasks that have been considered proper for women. As manufacturing industries continue to relocate to developing countries where overhead costs are relatively low, unemployment rates high, and worker organization often barely existent, exploitation of third world women is particularly acute. Third world women are paid the lowest wages. Feminist theorists have begun to reflect on how the theory of surplus value might apply to work which is typically unremunerated and relegated to women housework. Capitalism succeeds by increasing profits, the more profits the more money becomes available for capital investment, the more factories built, the more workers employed the more goods produced, the more goods produced, the cheaper the costs of production, the greater the profit. Surplus value is the diff b/w what the owners of production pay the workers (usually determined by whatever it takes to ensure their biological survival) and the amount the commoditities can command on the market. In other words surplus value is the difference in what it costs to keep a labor force alive and the exchange value of the commodity. Profits are made by increasing the gap between the cost of the mean of subsistence and the amount at which commodities are sold. Whereas the value of a product is determined by its function a coat, or its use bread; the exchange value is the amount of money for which a particular commodity can be sold. By establishing a common denominator money that can mediate between material goods, money provides a universal

exchange system which abstracts from the particular use value of an object at the same time reducing the material differences between various goods to a common value represented by money. Though this process of abstraction, the sensuous character of the commodity is negated. The grain of a wood or the skill of a carpenter is rendered invisible when they are leveled out in order to be measured according to some ratio that establishes one form of labor as equivalent to another. The social or human relations that stand behind the commodities are obscured (by advertising and a consumption driven by desire for designer brands or up to date electronics) as we come to be governed by the laws of the marketplace. Since Marxist analyses focused upon the public masculinzed realm of the workplace, they tended to neglect housework. IN response the feminist theorists insisted that not only the process of production but also the process of reproduction are central to the success of capitalist enterprise. The labor performed to send the worker back to work refreshed the next day remains invisible to Marxism. Precisely because that labor is unpaid. Both capitalism and Marxism reduces sex to class so that women are only acknowledged as a member of two groups the proletariarat or the owners of production. This analysis leaves no room for a acknowledging that within either group, patriarchy and capitalism discriminate against women who tend to occupy low employment positions and whose wages are lower than their male counterparts. Marxism cannot explain why women are discriminated against by sex, why women are not promoted, why they are not considered managerially competent, why they are not paid the same wages, Lesbian theory = Monique Wittig makes the controversial claim that lesbians exit the category of women. As Julia Kresteva says biology, anatomy, physiology, nature, DNA structure, genetics, materiality, the body comes before, logically and chronologically, social structures, gendered roles, historically engendered expectations and preconceptions, cultural mores, prescriptions and taboos of sexual behavior. However Christine Delphy says the reverse is true. Gender precedes sex. In this way. We posit some ostensibly natural ground from an always already cultural point of view, and then we start to act like it was always there, as if it were some necessary unchanging platonic essence pre existing us, eternal. Such a positing reassures us, makes us feel we are on firm ground in justifying us in our quirky, historically produced cultural beliefs about who we are and who we should be and what possibilities should bind us. Thus gender is no mere overlay superimposed upon a pre-existing structure that is still discrete and that we can still cal sex, as if sex had some autonomy from all social prescriptions. Gender is the way we organise sex. The law of gender determines how we see sex there is no outside of culture on which we cant stand as pre cultural subjects, a position from which we can construe bodies as if they were somehow in and of themselves outside the cultural matrix within which we configure them. Lesbians and gays suffer from an institutionalised heterosexism. Patriarchal nationalism creates myths of nationalism by selectively narrating anti colonial versions of nationalism, constructing their nations in reaction to the alleged corruption of the west by asserting their spirituality in atavistic terms and then commandeering women to be representative of the spiritual nation, confining them to the hearth and to the home that is so conventionally the domain of women.

The myth of the black rapist is indebted as much to the white Victorian ideal of feminine purity, an idealised version of white feminine sexuality that is tied to the capitalist imperative to reproduce a workforce of docile bodies, as much as it is to its implicit raciliased opposite - that of the black feminine oversexed, pathologisized, immoral and impure, diseased and profligate. To that of the sexually uncontrollable black man as savage, uncivilised, primitive. These mythologies assume a place of such legitimacy in the white imaginary world that white men raping black women is inadmissible. Feminist theory has been so monopolised by western white middle class women that they have in many ways repressed native American womens whose forced assimilation to American individualist capitalist colonialist practice has all but obliterated the collective, tribal traditional ways of life that existed prior to colonization. FEMINIST POWER Seeping down into the capillaries of our bodies, power is multiple, situational, relational, strategic, and variegated. Power is everywhere in pockets of resistance as well as in repressive policies. Recognising the multiplicity of power makes it possible to acknowledge there is no us and them model, a clear oppressor and a clear victim. A white woman might be repressed by the demands of patriarchy, but she herself might also exercise a racialised form of power over other women, indeed she might consciously or unconsciously invoke patriarchal conventions in order to strategcially set herself against minority women, aligning herself with white patriarchal power . Feminism is threatening as it challenges womens conformity with received ideals, prompting a process of de-skilling. Women-confronting feminists who deride beauty parades and make overs, etc and distance themselves from conventional norms of femininity is seen as undermining them and the skills they have worked so hard to acquire and embody. see the minute disciplining of the female body as it occurs through diet, fashion and makeup regimes. Cartesian legacy Meditative self-reflecting, ideal knowers solitary atomistic individuals who strive for a position of neutrality and impartiality with respect to cultural or historical bias. The ideal object of knowledge is assumed to be timeless, unchanging and ahistorical. The subject is assumed to be the abstract bearer of human rights and human rights are premised upon universal features of humanity that are cross national and trans historical. Subjects are posited as if they were essentially the same, and any differences between individuals are treated as incidental, irrelevant or contingent to the proper concerns of philosophy. Feminists have rejected these notions who argue that even scientific knowledge is not disinterested or impartial but reflects the interests of the knowers. If knowledge is construed not as a set of facts that are collected independently of the situatedness of the community of knowers, but rather as socially constructed in a significant sense, then it no longer seems appropriate to conceive of knowledge in ahistorical terms. knowledge is socially situated, not timeless or unchanging. Subjects are not envisaged as identical but rather as embedded in cultural and social circumstances that constitute them in ways that are irreducible to incidental and contingent factors. Differences between individuals, the interplay between the subject and their communities must be factored into philosophical investigation. Once social and political positioning of individuals within and vis a vis their communities is no longer seen merely as information from which philo enquiry must

abstract, but as constitutive of how knowledge is legitimated as knowledge, then the ideal neutrality and universality of philo knowledge must be questioned. The absent body Philosophy is taken to be the search for impartial value free truths whose import is universal and necessary. The body is irrelevant to philosophy except as it figures as an encumbrance to knowledge in that our sense tend to mislead us, our emotions detract from the capacity for ration thought, our desires distract us from the pursuit of the good. If it figures at all, the body is merely a site to be contained, ruled, and subdued. Feminist thought has reoriented this thinking towards an emphasis on maternal thinking and the ethics of caring/care. Our caring connection to others over and against the atomistic essentially solipsistic ideal of the meditative Cartesian thinker. Rather than envisaging a world that is made of at least potentially rational knowers whose connection to other agents has to be forged and whose duties to others need to be outlined in terms of universals, the care ethic takes as its starting point our embeddedness in relations to others. The networks that constitute our relationships with others inform the way we think. In this sense a rationally explicable world may not be the end that should be assumed by ethical systems, while abstract notions of justice and fairness may not be adequate. For example a test between a boy and a girl. The test: whether it is right for a husband to steal medicine for his sick wife which she urgently needs but cannot afford. The boys answer was that it was better to steal because life is worth more than property. The girls answer was that if he stole the drug, he might have to go to jail, and then his wife might get sick again, so that they should find some other way of getting the drug. The boys answer illustrates the conventions of logic of justice; the girls answer relies on the process of communication. the ethics of care. The girls answer sees the situation not as a hierarchical contest of rights between opponents which depend on the imagery of winning and losing, but in terms of encouraging communication between members of a network of relationships. Feminism and deleuze and derrida By blaming the enemy men in general or the patriarchal way of thinking or the phallocentric system of meaning feminism is in danger of merely occupying a negative position, one that mimics the resentful, bitter recrimination of the judeo christian mindset, denigrating this worldly life as one of suffering, producing guilt and occupying the position of bad conscience. To occupy such a stance is to agree to cast oneself as victim, as over determined by an all powerful oppressor, or in Nietzsches terms to adopt a slave morality. Feminism should commit itself to creating new sites of meaning, inventing new ways of thinking and innovative concepts. Irigary and Kristeva are two of the most interesting theorists to have worked thru the interconnections of feminist theory to psychoanalysis on the one hand and post-Hegelian European philosophy on t other. Kristeva affects a kind of rapprochement between psychoanalytic and linguistic categories. Some terms: Saussures signifier/signified distinction or the symbol and that which is symbolised. Lacans symbolic/imaginary/real; and Kristevas own semiotic/symbiotic distinction = Freuds pre Oedipal/post Oedipal distinction with the proviso that at stake in Kristevas distinction between the semiotic and the

symbolic is the signifying process. Kristeva executes a return to Freud, one mediated by Lacans application of Saussurean and Hegelian concepts and terminology, but one that also elaborates on the pre Oedipal more finely. This is done in order to investigate the role of the maternal vis a vis the paternal function and the consequent implications such a rethinking has for Kristeva will refer to as the totalizing effects of Lancanian discourse. As members of the community language users the task of theorists is inevitably to broach an analysis from the symbolic. To reconstruct ne that presupposes the fixity of terms, the stability conferred by the parlance that language confers on ideas. To acknowledge the liminary (krestiva) or boundary character of language considered from the point of view of syntactical linguistic signs where according to the conventions of language usage certain repetitions have acquired a permanence certain values have stabilised and become fixed, yet beneath the fixity of language, a dynamic unstable domain the topology of which is defined according to drives, primary processes (condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy, needs and demands) is in process. This is the significance of Kristevas critique from linguistics as preoccupied with surface phenomena, and neglectful of the deep, diachronic structures that prepare the subject for language. The objects of formal linguistics, according to his point of view is sclerotic, fetishized; its procedures are necrophilic, treating language as a system of signs already set in place, as if meanings were an archival or archaeological affair, as if language were dead, instead of living and capable of transgression. Putting into question the language of totalisation, the transcendental , the absolute, or the theological, Kristeva conceives of the thetic as permeable or pervious as that which can be transgressed. Hence Kristeva suggests that the Lacanian phallus totalises the effects of signifieds as having been produced by the signifier, asking whether Lancan trancendentalises semiotic motility, setting it up as a transcendental signifier? Without verbal expression, experience would be chaotic and inexpressible. For Kristeva it is precisely the mobility of process of signification that should capture our attention, a process that only comes to be stablised in a final stage which is preceded by a period of language and /or of the order of the signifier and even destroys the symbolic. Presided over by maternal regulation, the semiotic or pre Oedipal is characterised by stases and discontinuities, waves of activity and passivity, charges of energy, absences and presences, but there are as yet no firm distinctions between subject and object (or world) , me and you, inner and outer. Thus even though we designate the function to which needs and wants are harnessed maternal, it is crucial to remember that such designations proceed according to the symbolic realm or paternal law which has already decided in favor of certain privileges, not the least of which is the importance of symbolic castration as marking the entry into language. Even though the pre Oedipal or semiotic is specified with regard to the maternal function, such function is operational for the child in a way that precedes the discovery of castration and as such precedes the discovery of sexual difference. The question for feminists is if the socio symbolic order is governed by a patriarchally conceived father, how is it possible to transgress this order. Artistic practice or more specifically poetic language plays an important role in Kristevas answer.

Art is a confrontation with the boundary separating nature or animality from culture or humanity. Thus the artistic practices that are played out around the sacrifice of the father by the primal horde founds culture, according to Freud, are capable of miming or re enacting the shift from pre history to society. Art facilitates a rethinking of that boundary. Art can provide a locale in which the founding taboos of culture can be confronted and transformed, reworked, revolutionised. Art is transformative in that it revisits the founding moments of culture. Art can also be in complicity with the cultural codes in operation, supporting hegemonic codes. Feminists must take the lead in forging a new politics and ethics, new ways of relating to one another, both among women and between men and women. Rather than continuing to adhere to competitive, adversarial relationships, feminism should be experimenting with producing environments in which mutually supportive relations are fostered, in which diversity is prized and in which negativity is not allowed to rule. Creating relationship based upon nurturing novelty is not a matter of falsely claiming that women are better at mutuality or caring or being other oriented, even if historically such tasks have fallen t women. It is a matter rather of finding ways of relating, acting, and being that do not fall back into old patterns of ressentiment, domination and competitiveness. Feminist critiques of phallogocentrism have been seen as reactive by Deluezian feminists who argue against the tendency to produce one more grand narrative as if one story fits the experience of diverse women, and as if the privilege of sexual difference were built into the very structure of subjectivity, rendering racial or class differences necessarily derivative or secondary to sexual difference. Delueze emphasizes (taking up Nietzsches celebration of affirmative, the positive and the active,) events, singularities, intensities and flows in a discourse that is anti representationalist. In a critique of the corporeal feminism , braidotti et al feminists have been led astray by excessive emphasis on representation , a continued adherence to an ultimately Cartesian dichotomy between mind and matter and a reactive attitude towards patriarchy. According to corporeal feminism, patriarchy imposes idealised representations of beauty equated in this culture with thinness, for example, and being conditioned by unrealisable ideals of femininity. Taking up deleuze insistence that there is no general body, and no single theory, bray and Colebrook suggest that the anorexic body should not be seen as a pathological response to phallocentric representations of womens bodies, but as a creative event in a network of other events. They call for a specific grammar of anorexic practices, such that calorie counting, weighings and measuring the body and various dietetic regimens are only activities of dietetics, an intensity occurring within a positive field of production. An event connected to other events, thus distancing themselves from theories which posit the phallus as the principal signifier of the body to the post structuralist analysis that the body is a sign. Deleuze particularly in taking up Spinoza provides valuable resources for feminist thought. Dualistic, Cartesian versions of metaphysics on which conceptions of sex and gender are often based whether unselfconsciously or inaccurately give way to a vision of sexuality that is more open to transgendered identities. The allegedly natural ground of the body becomes a hybrid of the artificial and the natural; bodies are no longer envisaged as a stable, passive ground on which gender is founded. Spinozas philosophy allows the modern preoccupation with autonomous individual self hood to

reconnect with ideals of community, without thereby collapsing hard won individuality into an all encompassing, pre existing collective identity. Spinoza is the prince of philosophers because he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence. His philosophy of radical immanence, his insistence on infinitely complex, materialist monism that has proved so attractive to feminist philosophers. The notion of radical immanence provides a political edge related to power issues. It also opens critical theory to an ethical and an ecological dimension which embeds the subject in social relations of power. Rationality is not a transcendent capacity of a disembodied mind, but an immanent power of active nature. Neither reason nor law come to us from above, but rather develop immanently from our collective situations. Ironically it is precisely because philosophers often fail to acknowledge the embodiendenss of reason and knowledge that this own embodied imaginings play such a large part in their reasoned accounts of politics, morality and justice. Spinoza allows us to move away from dualistic understandings of sexual difference and towards understanding differences as constituted thru relatively stable but dynamic networks of relational powers, capacities and affects. Spinozas immanent and monistic theory of being allows one to theorize the interconnections between sexed bodies and other body complexes such as the body politic or other institutional assemblages (the law, for example) . It is only within these complex assemblages that sexed bodies are produced as socially and politically meaningful bodies. Since Spinoza claims that there can no causal relation between mind and body ( since both are modifications of the attributes of a single substance or nature), sex, in some sense, must be gender, though expressed or made manifest through the attribute of extension rather than thought. In other words, sex is a particular extensive organisation of the material powers and capacities; and gender would amount to the affective powers and affects of such a body. Such an understanding renders both sex and gender dynamic both of them being conceived as complex fields of interconnecting powers and affects. The spinoza-deleuzian conception of bodies, assemblages, the role of affects and the imagination gives rise to a more adequate way of thinking sex and gender, one which is more in keeping with recent tech dev., where transitioning from one sex to another has become feasible and can be construed as fluid and malleable , as part of a nexus that is just one aspect of complex entities and relations. GHOSTS COMMODITIES AND WOMEN IRIGARaY AND DERRIDA BY GERTRUDE POST Derrida offers two paradigms of ghosts one an immaterial body, pure apparition, the spirit incarnating itself in the specter; and the other the Marx notion of a thing as a commodity whereby a commodity retains its materiality but can function within the capitalist market only due to a spectral abstraction that relates it to other things, thus constituting a possible exchange. So two types of ghosts one an immaterial bodily apparition, and the other a material object for which value and meaning are determined through an immaterial, abstract system of exchange. According to irigaray: within western patriarchal culture , nature, earth, mother(body), matter have been used and exploited for the est of the binary systems of symbolic representation for the order of the one. Woman as the other can exist only by providing a negative counterpart, an invisible mirror or projection screen for the visibility and unity of the male sex. Subsequently nature, earth mother(body),

matter are lost., forgotten, and repressed within the current representational economy. The (mother)body as original nourishing ground had to be sacrificed at the altar of symbolic systems, intelligible forms, philosophical categories. The problem is that the father, according to our culture, superimposes upon the archaic world of the flesh a universe of language and symbol which cannot take root in it. The fertility of the earth is sacrificed to delineate the cultural horizon of the father tongue. Market system of exchange presupposes woman as product of male labor whereby these womancommodities have value only because men created the common denominators - their price in phalluses on which women can be exchanged. On this basis, each one looks exactly alike. What remains beyond this common denominator ( which women never decide upon) is invisible and inaccessible. Thus womens value on the male market has nothing to do with their actual body but with a phantom-like reality of this body. In that this reality follows the laws of the phallic currency it not only makes all women appear alike, but it also hides the fact that the now vanished female body once was crucial to the est of the symbolic exchange systems. Thus according to irigaray , woman as commodities have two bodies her natural body and her social valued exchangeable body which is a particularly mimetic expression of masculine values. SEXUAL DIFFERENCE PHENOMENOLOGY AND ALTERITY BY LINDA FISHER For many feminists, phen represents a certain conceptual framework and approach that stands at odds with feminine approaches. There is the perception that pen is an essentialist doctrine, oriented to the abstract and theory bound analyses, seemingly unconcerned with the particularities of socio political discourse. There is the general absence in pen of analyses of gender or sexual difference, the lack of acknowledgement of womens experience and the specificity of that experience, as well as tendencies towards universalism and enforced homogeneity. Phen has steadfastly ignored feminism, but that may be the fault of phenomenologists and not phenomenology. Shared characteristics between phenomenology and feminism 1. a commitment to a descriptive account and analysis of dimensions of lived experience. It consist in the effort to articulate the structures of lived subjective experience from the perspective of an examination of subjective experience (by a subject) in order to extrapolate more generally the fundamental and shared structures of experience and subjectivity. In feminist terms, it refers to the effort to articulate a female dimension, to describe womens experiences in a society organised around systems of gender hierarchy and gender preference. This is enacted in a wide ranging praxis, from early efforts to express and find voice in processes of consciousness raising and politicization, to projects to provide the narrative and analysis of womens experience and particularity, but also gendering the discourse or discipline, - the range of these activities unified by the goal of thematizing a situation by means of subjective articulation of an experience. 2. Much we argue that subjectivity is merely a product of socio political forces and systems of organisation, it still remains that the repercussions of gender hierarchy and a masculinist culture are directed to and felt by individual women collectively. Thus in relating phenomenology to feminism we can point to a shared emphasis on experience and experiential accounts, and also to some shared notion of subjective discourse and experience constitution. More importantly, it is a dialectic created by the particular discursive circumstances and approaches that characterise both phenomenology and feminism, what I would term the tension of generality and specificity.

3. Feminist thought has always had to deal with how to express the specificities of gendered experience, womens experience while at the same time endeavoring to articulate a womens situation, the shared and generalised situation or structure of womens place, role, oppression in society and culture. . The struggle to preserve, accommodate and articulate individualities and avoid homogenizing generalisations is at the heart of many theoretical and political disputes in feminism. Phenomenology displays the same dialectic, not nec construed as a problematic tension, but rather as the particular complexity and contingency of a philosophy of subjectivity attempt to articulate a generalised account of the structures of subjectivity from the perspective of individual subjectivity and owness; investigating the essence of subjectivity while also elaborating the immediacy, particularity and intensity of my experience as a subject. Such a general account need not be equivalent to an absolutist sense of generic, but is understandable rather as the thread of invariance. Not one model fits all. But structural invariance within variance, that which gives shape and coherence to the variance. This I would suggest is one way of construing phenomenological analysis and moreover essential analysis and stands in contrast to what is, an often hasty and unnuanced tendency to assume that any kind of descriptive account aiming for generality must automatically be hegemonic and totalising. In other words generality is not nec equivalent to generalization.

My situation does not cease to be mine just because it is the situation of someone else, and my individual acts nevertheless reproduce the situation of my gender, and do that in various ways. What is being described her is an account of generality, not as a totalising essentialism positing the absolute account and suppressing any variations, but the attempt to articulate the tension of general and specific. In other words it is not necessarily a matter of generalising with problematic associations of hegemony and the leveling out of differences; but of articulating the cohering threads, the overlaps and the commonalities. There is a womans situation, something we are all experiencing and at some level and in some sense we are therefore having a similar experience. An alliance of phenomenology and feminism: Feminism can transform phenomenology by incorporating a gendered and sexed analysis - proceeding from the standpoint that there are significant distinctions between mens and womens lived experiencing which also need to be thematised phenomenologically, - would place emphasis on the elaboration of specific gendered particularities and experiential distinctiveness. A key example for this analysis is body and corporeality. Merleu Pontys existential phenomenology with its emphasis on lived experience and embodiment, the lived experience of the body. Although it falls short it that it fails to explore specificities of gender and sex (aspects seemingly closely connected to embodiment) Do not need a only a phenomenological analysis of gender (which could fall under cultural phenomenology), but phenomomenological analysis that are gendered, where, for example gender is demonstrably an integral part of our subjectivity. The vagaries and paradoxes of experiential discourse, which have vexed feminist discourse, are paradoxes phenomenologist has to some extent confronted and negotiated, such as the possibility of

implementing phenomenological approaches as a means of framing feminist experiential discourse suggests how feminism might benefit from an interaction with phenomenology. What difference does difference make? While Luce Irigary stresses sexual difference as primary, she is not invoking essentialism. She is pointing to the sense of the difference of the feminine as primary to women, and primary to difference; femininity not just different from other qualities, but as the very quality of difference. Difference is also implied in phenomenological analysis where the emphasis on experiential specification and irreducibility occasions in practical terms not only a myriad of analysis of the variety of aspects, but also motivates the articulation of the generality that threads through the differences. In this case there is a primary recognition of the contingency of difference, with an accompanying belief that such difference also displays generalities, so that the corresponding account is not about managing, but mapping the difference with the generality. Thus in phenomenology within the more emphasized generality there is difference, and in feminism within the difference, there is generality. Beauvoirs woman as other constitutes a contribution to feminist phenomenological account of alterity two kinds of otherness or alterity between equals, and that which is not between equals. The pen analysis of alterity highlights the sense in which otherness can be a state, but more significantly a relation, that is our relation to others, the interactive nature of otherness. In other words, a person is othered. In some cases this is conceived more conflictually, in others, more reciprocally; as the reciprocity of otherness in Merleau Ponty, which links ultimately to intersubjectivity. Beauvoirs analysis situates the discussion of alterity squarely in a social context, bringing out the lived interpersonal dynamics of interacting with others in hierarchical and contesting situations. Alterity is thus politicised and more importantly, it is gendered. Thus it enhances our understanding of alterity from the perspective of the dynamics of power and control, but articulated here in terms of a singular dimension otherness in terms of sexual difference, the particular dynamics of the oppression of women. Feminist Phenomenology ed Linda Fisher 2000 Theater Journal 40 1988 Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender