ABSTRACT
Women, becoming the symbolic embodiment of the pollution arising from birth and death, were excluded from the philosophical community. This chapter examines the contemporary feminist discussions of rationality with respect to pregnancy and birthing. It considers the ways in which radical feminists who reject motherhood and postmodern feminists who deconstruct "women" reiterate a conception of reason drawn from ascetic philosophy from Plato to Kant. Although these feminists seek to critique patriarchal rationality, their own theories become built on a transcendence of the temporal, embodied world—and of women's bodies in particular—that is inherited from their ascetic forefathers. The chapter explores the possibility of a feminist materialist perspective that provides an alternative to this ascetic tradition and that can help develop "women"-defined images and practices of pregnancy and childbirth. The postmodern critique of universality convincingly debunks Universalist claims about women's standpoint and reproductive consciousness, as well as the claim that a feminist materialism is the strategy for "opposing all forms of domination".
