ABSTRACT
What is currently in flux in feminist politics is feminist identitywhat feminism is and what it means. The ‘subject’ of feminism is, ostensibly, women, and its aim to improve the lives of women. This notion of improvement has been based on the argument that the ways in which women have been understood in western culture have denied many possibilities to women because men generally exercise power over them.1 In this analysis, western culture deems women, at best, creatures fundamentally different from, and naturally inferior to, men, whose identity is determined by a relationship of subordinated complementarity with men. At worst, western culture identifies women as inferior or abnormal men and, in order to maintain ‘quality control’, seeks to ‘fix’ as many of the defectives as possible and annihilate the rest. Feminists, from the 1960s, have identified and criticised, in different ways, dualistic, patriarchal, heterosexist models of gender identity in western culture, in which men are taken to be the active, strong and moral half of a human whole which has and needs two parts. Women are the other half: evils necessary for reproduction and other male needs (Elshtain 1981:15-16).
