SOURCE: "Gender and Subjectivity: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Feminism," in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 18, No. 1, Autumn, 1992, pp. 89-110.

In the following essay, Kruks offers a reexamination of Beauvoir's view of female subjectivity and her relationship to contemporary postmodern and feminist thought.

Theoretical debate among North American feminists in the last decade has been widely influenced by postmodernism. Indeed, some have gone so far as to claim that feminist theory is inherently postmodern, its very project necessarily challenging such "Enlightenment myths" as the existence of a stable self or subject and the possibility of attaining objective truth about the world through the use of reason. They argue that feminist theory, with its deconstruction of what appears natural in our society, its focus on difference, and its subversion of the stable phallocentric norms of Western thought, "properly belongs in the terrain of postmodern philosophy...