What Is a Woman?: And Other Essays
In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of The Second Sexs publication, Moi (Literature and Romance Studies/Duke Univ.; Sexual/Textual Politics, not reviewed, etc.) calls on Simone de Beauvoirs help in breaking out of a stalemate she sees as peculiar to recent feminist theory: How to define what it means to be a woman without recourse to either essentialist metaphysics (Woman is . . .) or biological determinism (women must necessarily . . .). The two long new essays in which she examines Beauvoirs notion of female bodies working out their identities through social historythe pair of them amounting to a short book themselvesare followed by nine briefer essays, largely charting a course between Freud and Pierre Bourdieu, in which Moi attempt[s] to work my way out from under poststructuralism. Readers who can stay with Mois densely argumentative styleshe spends over a hundred pages analyzing the first three paragraphs of The Second Sexwill be rewarded with a cutting- edge view of contemporary feminist critique in its continuing struggle to establish just what its subject is.  --Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.