Women and the Fictive Individual of Liberalism

Abstract

»Difference« feminists criticise liberalism as essentially masculine: its supposedly universal categories, notably that of the individual, can not be extended to encompass women. This paper argues that if we see the individual and women as fictive it is possible to understand how liberalism may be more flexible than these feminists allow. The individual and women are analysed as fictive in two senses: i) the Derridean sense in which being »is« not because it is never fully present to itself: there are no stable, determinate identities. The individual and women are deconstructed in the liberal political philosophy of J. S. Mill, ii) the sense in which fictive identities in the first sense produce »effects of truth«: fiction fictions reality. J. Butler's conception of performativity is compared to Laclau's and Mouffe's theory of hegemony: the latter, it is argued, better describes how new (fictive) identities are established in practice. The example is the feminist extension of individual rights to women in the nineteenth century. ; »Difference« feminists criticise liberalism as essentially masculine: its supposedly universal categories, notably that of the individual, can not be extended to encompass women. This paper argues that if we see the individual and women as fictive it is possible to understand how liberalism may be more flexible than these feminists allow. The individual and women are analysed as fictive in two senses: i) the Derridean sense in which being »is« not because it is never fully present to itself: there are no stable, determinate identities. The individual and women are deconstructed in the liberal political philosophy of J. S. Mill, ii) the sense in which fictive identities in the first sense produce »effects of truth«: fiction fictions reality. J. Butler's conception of performativity is compared to Laclau's and Mouffe's theory of hegemony: the latter, it is argued, better describes how new (fictive) identities are established in practice. The example is the feminist extension of individual rights to women in the nineteenth century.