Liberalism V, Feminism Liberalism Vs. Term Paper

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" These metaphors play a powerful role in the history of philosophy, shaping and often distorting our views both of reason, mind, emotion, and body and of men and women. Other important discussions of gendered metaphors in philosophy include Irigaray," whose disucssion of the female sex calls woman the gender that is not one, in other words that the female body physically denies the male, liberal split of self and other. This split is intrinsic to patriarchy, even liberal patriarchy, and denies the ability of women to assert 'the feminine' as writ upon their bodies and souls. Philosophers such as French feminist and deconstructionist Luce Irigaray thus deny the presumption of liberal's use of temrs such as the individual and pre-exisintg and 'obvious' existance rights. (Saul, 2004)

Liberalism rests upon a conception of the self, and "the topic of the self has long been salient in feminist philosophy, for it is pivotal to questions about personhood, identity, the body, and agency that feminism must address. In some respects, Simone de Beauvoir's trenchant observation, that the male "is the Subject, he is the Absolute -- she" that is woman, "is the Other," sums up "why the self is such an important issue for feminism" in contrast to liberalism, which was formed in a more purely political form, in terms of questions about the rights of citizens.

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Women and feminism have had to tackle subjects, whether they wanted to or not, beyond that of the political realm, for "to be the Other is to be the non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent -- in short, the mere body," in a legal discourse where bodies are mere chattle, and the male mind is valued over the female mind. "In law, in customary practice, and in cultural stereotypes, women's selfhood has been systematically subordinated, diminished, and belittled, when it has not been outright denied. Since women have been cast as lesser forms of the masculine individual, the paradigm of the self that has gained ascendancy in popular culture and even in liberal Western philosophy "is derived from the experience of the predominantly white and heterosexual, mostly economically advantaged men who have wielded social, economic, and political power and who have dominated the arts, literature, the media, and scholarship. Responding to this state of affairs, feminist philosophical work on the self has had to critique of established views of the self, rather than to accept the existance of the self as a given and define how best to protect its rights in a state of nature, like past forms of liberalism, and to a lesser extent, the versions of modern liberalism as well. (Meyers, 2003)

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