Abstract

The text focuses on theoretical problems and paradoxes that characterize any attempt to conceptualize women’s political subjectivity in the philosophical framework of liberal democracy. The author claims that in this framework acquiring the status of fully-fledged political subjects by women is both necessary and impossible. This paradoxical conjuncture results from the genealogy and structure of a liberal idea of a subject that on the one hand claims to be universal but on the other — proves to have been founded on the unacknowledged exclusion of the feminine. This leads the author to question the compatibility of liberal democracy with feminist political goals and to suggest that it is a democratic component of the liberal-democratic project — rather than the liberal one — that should become a vehicle for women’s political empowerment