1st Edition

From Sex Objects to Sexual Subjects

By Claudia Moscovici Copyright 1997

    From Sex Objects to Sexual Subjects traces some of the ruptures and continuities between the eighteenth-century masculinist formulations of subjectivity elaborated by Rousseau, Diderot and Kant and the contemporary postmodern and feminist critiques of the universal subject--meaning the self viewed as an abstract individual who exercises an impartial and rational (political) judgment that is idential to other similarly defined individuals--developed by Luce Irigaray, Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault.

    In her work, Moscovici brings together the wide-ranging discussion of subjectivity with debates about public discourse. In so doing she attempts a synthesis between the two discussions that have recently engaged feminist theorists and others.

    Introduction 2 The Trope of Dissimulation 3 Sexual Subjects 3 Turning Toward the Universal 4 The Field of Cultural production 5 Justice, Equality and Proportional Group Representation.

    Biography

    Claudia Moscovici is in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University.