ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter describes what entails the feminist goal of valorising women is the deconstruction of the very meanings that have seemed to guarantee the moral status of the individual. The fear, shared by many feminist theorists, is that the deconstruction of enlightenment ideals amounts to the destruction of all possible value. This chapter explains what matters, in bioethics, and more generally for the ethical affirmation of the feminine, is that an acceptance of the leakiness of bodies and boundaries speaks to the necessity of an open response. The strand of postmodernist feminism that insists on the significance of embodiment turns away from the value-resistant and free-floating abstractions of an ultimately irresponsive postmodernism, and asserts that it is not all immaterial. The deconstruction of stable, homogeneous and hierarchical categories need not result in confusion and indistinction, but in an elaboration of differences and a sensitivity to change that demands precision and rigour.
