ABSTRACT
My purpose in this essay is to summarize what I mean by ethical feminism. I will proceed as follows: First, I will define the sense in which I use the word "ethical" in the context of feminism. Second, I will specify my use of psychoanalysis, particularly as I rely on and yet also critique and re-elaborate certain key concepts of the psychoanalytic framework provided by Jacques Lacan. As I hope to show, this re-elaboration is inspired by a feminist purpose. There is a theoretical need to understand how the symbolic constructions we know as Woman are inseparable from the way in which fantasies of femininity are unconsciously "colored" and imagined within the constraints of gender hierarchy and the norms of so-called heterosexuality. I write "so-called," because it is crucial to my critique of gender hierarchy that gender hierarchy restricts the elaboration of the feminine within sexual difference by its reduction of the feminine to what is not man. A crucial aspect of ethical feminism is that it enlarges continually the space in which we could both write and speak of the rich and multilayered sexuality of a creature that struggles to achieve individuation from the imposed strictures of gender hierarchy and rigid gender identity. Such a creature would remain as other, the heteros to a system of gender hierarchy which thwarts the process and the struggle for individuation. The frame of psychoanalysis I use challenges other psychoanalytic, as well as sociological and historical approaches, that investigate gender as separable from race, class, nationality, and sanc-
tioned heterosexuality. Such approaches frequently fail to grapple with the infection of racial and sexual stereotypes in the definitions of femininity that unconsciously inform the questions that are asked in social-scientific investigations and policy recommendations. 1 As feminists, we need to investigate the complex interplay between fantasies of Woman and the material oppression of women. Such an investigation would demand that we open up the meaning of referentiality. I would never deny that there "are" women and that those of us who are so designated suffer as women, as objects of rape and sexual abuse and as victims of economic discrimination. But if we are to come to terms with the reality of this oppression we will have to alter our conception of the meaning of referentiality. Psychoanalysis can aid in effecting this alteration by providing us with analytic tools which may enable a critique of the way in which social reality is engendered by unconscious fantasies.
