ABSTRACT
In her landmark essay ‘The Technology of Gender’ published in 1987, Teresa de Lauretis radically re-thinks the concept of sexual difference. Up to this point, feminist theory had largely conceived sexual difference in binary, ahistorical, and heterosexist terms – as the difference between ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’. De Lauretis sought instead to articulate the social and sexual differences to be found among or within women. Although she utilizes the tools of semiotics and psychoanalysis, she is critical of those discourses, as she is of the male bias of the work of philosopher and cultural historian Michel Foucault. However, it is precisely her turn to Foucault in ‘The Technology of Gender’ that enables her to accomplish what she claims existing psychoanalytic feminism was unable to do, namely, to address the fraught and paradoxical relationship between women – as historically specific individuals – and Woman – an imaginary cultural representation.
