ABSTRACT
The fact that these networks often transcend the boundaries of institutional discourses is one factor that has helped to ensure that women do not participate as equals within state institutions and grassroots organizations. Women have responded by developing counter-networks and, in some instances, by establishing women-only groupings, based on alternative discursive structures and norms. The metadiscursive and material constraints that operate on women in civil and public sphere roles mean that some of the more Utopian accounts of the performative theory of gender need to be qualified. Women activists also predominate in new social movements which have helped to enliven the civil sphere as a space where home, work and community all intersect. A number of feminist theorists have called into question the importance of gender as an identity category, given the increasingly heterogeneous and complex nature of most Western societies.
