The Feminist Production of Knowledge: Is Deconstruction a Practice for Women?

This paper is intended as an introductory overview of some of the main points feminists have made for and against deconstruction. The principal protagonists of deconstruction I take to be Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and this article sets out what I take to be the most important aspects of the current debate between the ideas of feminism and those ofthese two thinkers. It would equallybe possible, however, to stage this as a debate within feminism, given that some feminists have elaborated and defended a poststructuralist or deconstructionist position - Judith Butler and Jane Flax, for example. This paper will draw heavily on these feminist appropriations of deconstruction, as well as on the work of feminists more ambivalent about the proposed alliance between deconstruction and feminism - principally that of Sandra Harding - and of those whose theoretical work is directly opposed to the principles of poststructuralism and is therefore implicitly, where it is not explicitly, critical of deconstruction. The work of Nancy Harstock, for example, falls into this last category. In some ways it is quite illegitimate to lump Derrida and Foucault together at all - they have disagreed with each other quite vehemently and fundamentally - but I think it can be justified in the context of the review I'm proposing here because their work has been seen as offering similar advantages and problems for feminist theory and practice. The aspects of that work I will focus on are firstly, the way it may be said to problematize the modern epistemological model of'the mind as the mirror of nature'; this problematization has been seen as both promising and dangerous for feminist accounts. And secondly, the way it has problematized humanism - the belief or argument that there is an essential human nature with certain human attributes that (a) needs to be liberated and (b) has the potential to be, and can be, liberated if its needs are accurately represented and met. Similarly, anti-humanism