ABSTRACT

From Sex Objects to Sexual Subjects traces some of the ruptures and continuities between the eighteenth-century masculinist formulations of subjectivity elaborated by Rousseau, Diderot and Kant and the contemporary postmodern and feminist critiques of the universal subject--meaning the self viewed as an abstract individual who exercises an impartial and rational (political) judgment that is idential to other similarly defined individuals--developed by Luce Irigaray, Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault.

In her work, Moscovici brings together the wide-ranging discussion of subjectivity with debates about public discourse. In so doing she attempts a synthesis between the two discussions that have recently engaged feminist theorists and others.

chapter |6 pages

Introduction

chapter one|15 pages

The Trope of Dissimulation

Constructing and Deconstructing Sexual and Political Economies During the French Enlightenment

chapter two|11 pages

Sexual Subjects

Luce Irigaray's Economy of Gendered Intersubjectivity

chapter three|29 pages

Turning Toward the Universal

A Feminist Critique of Habermas's Universalizability Principle

chapter four|13 pages

The Field of Cultural Production

A Second Glance at the Erotic, The Aesthetic, And the Social

chapter five|24 pages

Justice, Equality and Proportional Group Representation

The (Im)Possible Future of Democracy?