Abstract

My dissertation is a philosophical analysis of the status of the subject in contemporary feminist theory. I perform this analysis through a case study of Roop Kanwar, a 19 year-old Rajput widow, who was immolated on the funeral pyre of her husband in September 1987 in western India. I argue that the aggregate ontology of the racially marked and colonized female body as object/victim predetermines the subject and its knowledge production, given its categories of identity. Can particularity yield and substantiate general claims about the subject, epistemology, and representation? I examine the contradiction between theories that privilege particularity and the condition of philosophy that posits an unknowable subject