ABSTRACT
I define 'patriarchy' as that form of social organization which takes male bodies and life-patternings as both norm and ideal in the exercise of power. In the patriarchal tradition of metaphysics, birth, growth and differential modes of embodied selfhood remain remarkably untheorized subjects. I am, of course, by no means the first feminist theorist to focus on these issues. But what is distinctive about my own approach is the emphasis on finding a new metaphysics that would allow us to take the female as norm. This is at odds with much recent writing in feminist theory where the issues under debate have focused much more centrally around feminist epistemology and the validity of ascribing distinctively female ways of knowing, experiencing, gazing, writing or speaking. Indeed, metaphysics itself has got a bad name, with many theorists maintaining that there has only been one metaphysics in the history of the west and that all metaphysics is necessarily complicit with patriarchy.
