ABSTRACT
To major eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Condorcet), gender had become an essentially contested concept, which it had not been for their seventeenth-century predecessors (Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke). Moreover, “Philosophical History,” the main Enlightenment theory of world history, included a history of gender regimes, thus making gender into a (useful) category of historical analysis. This chapter sets out firstly to analyse the role of early modern literary and philosophical feminisms, defending the equality of the sexes, in addition to the impact of “globalisation” on Enlightenment culture and thought, in this problematisation of gender. Secondly, through an examination of women authors and their writings in eighteenth-century China (the Qing / Manchu dynasty), it will analyse the extent to which the destabilisation of gender is a specifically European phenomenon, representing a mode of critique that is neither self-evident nor universal. The conclusion examines modern equality as essentially Janus-faced, one face focusing on “sameness,” the other seeking to balance equality and difference, and posits that the greater part of its history remains to be written.
