ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the points of intersection between the Deleuzian project to transform the images of thought and feminist theorists' figurations of changing female subjectivities, taking as one's guiding light the notion of materialism. The feminism of sexual difference should be read as emphasizing the political importance of desire as opposed to the will, and as stressing the role of desire in the constitution of the subject. The chapter highlights that desire is what is at stake in the feminist project of elaborating alternative definitions of female subjectivity. The attempt to activate a discursive ethics based on sexual difference as a site of empowerment of women is both an epistemological and a political move. Irigaray and other strategic essentialists propose the figuration of the "woman divine" as marking forms of representation of a specific form of transcendence, a female humanity with its own forms of discursive presence.
