Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (Thinking Gender)

In "Beyond Accommodation", Drucilla Cornell offers a view of what feminist theory can offer contemporary women. She shows how a way to ethical feminism can be found through an alliance with deconstruction. Cornell challenges the essentialist and naturalist accounts of feminine sexuality offered by the feminist legal scholars Catharine MacKinnon and Robin West, and the French feminists Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Helene Cixous. She shows that these accounts actually entrap women, curtailing feminine sexual difference, giving credibility to the masculine fantasy of woman and so reinstating the gender hierarchy. To find a way past essentialism, Cornell looks to recent French philosophy and offers an original reading of Derrida, utilizing his challenge to Lacanian theory and his allegory of the feminine to allow for the affirmation of woman. Cornell's work has broad implications for feminist jurisprudence which is concerned with the harms to women that do not "exist" within the current legal system. She offers an impassioned defence of women's rights and a lucid analysis of the dilemmas of postmodern feminism. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of women's studies and continental philosophy.