ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 concluded with the claim that rape should be considered a political matter, since it severely impacts on women’s ability to appear and to act as political agents and subjects within the public-political sphere. I have also shown earlier that the political signifi cance of rape must be properly understood against the backdrop of a symbolic order which problematises female subjectivity, and it is this matter which I am exploring in more depth in the current chapter, focusing in particular on the ‘feminine turn’ noticeable in western late modern and postmodern philosophy. Of course an exhaustive study of the topic here is not possible, but for the sake of my larger argument about rape, and in recognition of the fact that ‘the western symbolic order’ is not a static monolith but a dynamic and paradoxical, living tradition, I identify in this chapter four stages or positions within recent European thinking about the fi gure of ‘woman’. I show within each stage how the fi gure of the feminine was positioned vis-à-vis the dominant symbolic order, and within this positioning I try to discern both the promising and the limiting aspects as far as women’s subjectivity is concerned.
