ABSTRACT
The troubled relationship between the subject and the feminine has long concerned feminist writers. Freud’s puzzled question, ‘What does woman want?’, has often been taken as paradigmatic of the refusal of subjectivity to femininity in phallocentric discourse; many feminists have argued that the qualities of rationality, consciousness and agency attributed to the subject in western humanist traditions are qualities also attributed by those same traditions only to masculinity. Femininity is thus at once entirely unimportant to the project of the (hu)man subject and yet also central to its fear of and desire for its Other, the non-subject, the abject. In the face of such erasures and fantasies, feminists have insisted that women are indeed subjects. They insist on the difference between Woman—the feminine as it is imagined in phallocentric discourse—and women as subjects only partly and problematically positioned through the interpellations of Woman. As Teresa de Lauretis (1986a) argues, ‘subjectivity’ is thus central to feminist politics in at least two senses. First, there is a concern for the ways women are subject(ed) to masculinist definitions of femininity; and second, there is the search for women’s resistance to those disciplining processes, a search for women as subjects on their own terms.
