ABSTRACT
Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) is a Paris-based psychoanalyst, novelist, and prolific contributor to debates about subjectivity and its intersections with matters of gender, writing, and religion. She has large intellectual debts to Freud and Jacques Lacan. Their presence in her writing is pervasive even as she differs from them significantly on particular issues. Kristeva figures persons as subjectivities always at risk and in process, lacking anything like assured or reliable identities. This places her as a formidable critic of French structuralist essentialism and of any psychoanalytic theory that takes “the ego,” say, or a particular adult psychic formation, say of “the feminine,” as anything fixed in the individual or “the same” across subjectivities. She has been a major figure defining what has come to be known as third-wave feminism, which denies rigid identity constructions or fixed differences and instead endorses openness to a fluid range of gender identities across biological males and females.
