ABSTRACT
Some feminists argue that ethical discourse and the elimination of gender-based domination require uniform concepts of gender and subjectivity. It is politically necessary to assert the existence of “women” as an undifferentiated category. Women can be defined by similarities in their material activities, inequalities, and oppression across race, class, and geography. Contemporary identity politics and its integral resistant/complicit partner—difference discourses—are consequences and effects of Lockean and Kantian liberal discourses. These discourses construct identity through two homogeneous, fixed, and exclusive categories: same and different. Dominant liberal notions of identity cannot do justice to the multiple, “impure”, overdetermined yet determining subjects of postmodern society. The complexity and instability of any form of contemporary Western identity renders claims made from it or on its behalf temporary, fragile, and suspect.
