Am I That Name?

Writing about changes in the notion of womanhood, Denise Riley examines, in the manner of Foucault, shifting historical constructions of the category of "women" in relation to other categories central to concepts of personhood: the soul, the mind, the body, nature, the social. An attempt to explore the idea that there are historical sedimentations of people into gendered categories, including the asymmetrical distances of both "women" and "men" from changing ideas of the human; the increasing saturation, from the late seventeenth century, of women with their sex; and the nineteenth century elisions between "the social" and "women". It is argued that feminism cannot but play out the inescapable indeterminacy of "women" whether consciously or not, and that this is made plain in its oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference. The author maintains that a full recognition of the ambiguity of the category of "women" is not a semantic doubt, but a condition for an effective feminist political philosophy.