ABSTRACT
This paper is intended as an introductory overview of some of the main points feminists have made for and against deconstruction. The principal protagonists of deconstruction I take to be Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and this article sets out what I take to be the most important aspects of the current debate between the ideas of feminism and those of these two thinkers. It would equally be possible, however, to stage this as a debate within feminism, given that some feminists have elaborated and defended a poststructuralist or deconstructionist position—Judith Butler and Jane Flax, for example. This paper will draw heavily on these feminist appropriations of deconstruction, as well as on the work of feminists more ambivalent about the proposed alliance between deconstruction and feminism—principally that of Sandra Harding—and of those whose theoretical work is directly opposed to the principles of poststructuralism and is therefore implicitly, where it is not explicitly, critical of deconstruction. The work of Nancy Harstock, for example, falls into this last category.
