GENERAL CONCLUSION

General Conclusion The climates of thinking in and against which women are exhorted to invent the next steps towards a sense of self-identity might best be described as embattled. Feminist subjectivity fights on two fronts. On the one hand, the adversary is a projection of male subjectivity under which women’s identity is subsumed. On the other hand, the assertion of female subjectivity contends against a deconstructionist undermining of subjectivity. Given such a background, Elaine Graham suggests that self-identity must be invented but not too definitively. The challenge, she says, is to cast bodies as a kind of vantage point for experience while lending diversity and provisionality to such accounts. The terms ‘provisionality’ and ‘diversity’ indicate that the steps towards self-identity for women are envisaged to be more like questions than answers. Luce Irigaray gives this sense of ‘provisionality’ an eschatological flavour. She posits an undefined flowering for women: ‘something still held in reserve within the silence of female history’ that ‘keeps the future open’. 1 In this kind of approach it is the lack of definition that appears to be definitive.