ABSTRACT
In the last chapter we became familiar with the general debate over the merits and limits of identity politics, the debate between such scholars as Charles Taylor, who emphasize the importance of politically recognizing and accommodating group identities, and those, such as Joan Scott and Todd Gitlin, who argue that a politics organized around those identities is necessarily either exclusionary or diversionary. In this chapter I examine how this debate plays out in the specic context of the issue of gender identity. As we shall see, Carol Gilligan in her In a Different Voice argues that there is a fundamental dierence between the way women and men think about moral questions related to an equally fundamental dierence in their early experience within the family. Against this claim that women have, in eect, a distinct identity, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson argue in “Social Criticism without Philosophy” that this and other so-called “essentialist” claims are philosophically and political suspect, and that feminist scholars must therefore avoid making them. Finally, Susan Bordo in “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Scepticism” will take Fraser and Nicholson to task for laying down an “anti-essentialist” law that arbitrarily rules out of court even the possibility that some generalizations about gender might be correct and that thus dogmatically deprives feminist scholars of the intellectual weapons they require.
