ABSTRACT
Drucilla Cornell and Judith Butler have frequently been grouped together under the name of postmodern feminism. Both have been vocal critics of this label. Cornell shifts between talking about the realm of possibility in both temporal terms and spatial terms. In this chapter, the author focuses on how Cornell develops, defends, and modifies her understanding of “sexual difference” through her particular interpretations of Derrida, Lacan and Luce Irigaray, and in an on-going dialogue with Butler that persistently exposes the dilemmas attendant to aspects of poststructuralism, psychoanalytic thought and French feminism. In her 1994 article “Against Proper Objects,” Judith Butler offers a critique of the way lesbian and gay studies and feminist theory have described their respective “objects” of investigation. From a structuralist perspective, sexual difference is a matter of the relation between individual parts in a more complex order, or structure, where the individual parts depend for their meaning on their relation to each other.
