A instância corpórea do humano: Sexualidades e subjectividades, mulheres e ética

• Main Author: Isabel Allegro de Magalhães
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra 2010-06-01
• Series: Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais
• Subjects: body; feminism; sexual identity; equality and difference; new materialisms; subjectivities
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/3740

This text reflects on the main phases in the evolution of feminist thought with regard to the question of difference and sexual identity, from the initial waves of Anglo-American and French feminisms to the explosion of social and theoretical women’s groups in the USA (lesbian, black and gay studies in the 1980s; queer theory in the following decade; the new materialisms of the 2000s). Is sexual difference merely the remains of the historical and cultural construction that patriarchal thinking created for women and the feminine? In returning to the bodily structure of the subject, the new neo-materialist trends are forcing us to reconsider sexual difference in connection with new kinds of links with the non-human, the animal world, biotechnologies, technoscience and the biosphere. Perhaps, if they wish, women may form a unique force that connects physiology and symbolisation, and offer their own response to the complexities of the world, conveying a dimension of maternity that now operates both symbolically and ethically.