ABSTRACT
An awareness of how diverse genders and sexualities exist in relation with others also echoed in the philosophical writings of Cavell who was working to bring the human voice back into philosophy. The generation of feminists who went through universities as students in the 1980s often learnt a theoretical feminism that could feel distant from the avowed politics of everyday life that had shaped the women's movement in the 1970s. But there were also different ways that philosophy was being imagined as translation - and though Cavell took courageous stands in the university, there was a way that he sustained a certain distance from the personal engagement with feminism and sexual politics. Reflecting across decades, people were claiming the freedom to shape their own subjectivities and relationships as they were searching a different kind of access to themselves through different ways of knowing and experiencing everyday life and relationships.
