ABSTRACT
For someone commonly known in the English-speaking world as one of the major three “French feminists” (along with Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray), Julia Kristeva has had surprisingly little to say about feminism. Sometimes what she has to say is quite derogatory, calling some kinds of feminism “the last of the power-seeking ideologies” (Kristeva 1982: 208). Kelly Oliver explains the discrepancy as follows:
So, though Kristeva may have a tendentious relationship with some of the feminist movement, we need not interpret this as a sign of antipathy to the goals of feminism in general. Close attention to her
writing on feminism shows that, though Kristeva has a complicated relationship to feminist thought, she is in fact concerned with bettering women’s situation. She would like to find a way to remove women from the straitjacket of old, sexist thinking that marginalizes women from the currents of social, symbolic thought. But she also wants to avoid the temptation to say that women can be “just like” men. As this chapter will discuss, Kristeva is looking for a “third way” for feminism to proceed, a way for women to feel free to have children and create culture, to be of the body and the mind. She resists any temptation to see these two poles – culture and nature – as antithetical and mutually exclusive. In her thought, the reader can find a way to bring together the biological and the cultural world we inhabit.
