ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a number of feminist positions regarding Jacques Derrida work, most of which remain highly critical of his various interventions into and speculations on femininity. It defends Jacques Derrida against common feminist reactions to and resistances of his deconstructive strategies, by showing that they have misunderstood and misrepresented his position. The chapter examines that his account of the ontology of sexual difference, with the aim of showing what a more positive feminist relation to deconstruction may look like. It describes a certain strategic ambiguity in Jacques Derrida's use of the notion of an indeterminate or undecidable sexuality, a sexuality before the imposition of dual sex roles, that is somehow ontological but entirely without qualities and attributes. The chapter presumes that the framework of sexual difference implies: that there is an irreducible specificity of each sex relative to the other, that there must be at least, but not necessarily only two sexes.
