Abstract

Kofman traces Rousseau's argument that women's role as mothers requires the subordination of women to men, and the companion argument that women's lust is a threat to the social order, which also justifies the confinement of women within the home. She then relates the claim that women so confined exert a power of their own to Rousseau's erotic obsession with dominant, but maternal, women. Thus, the “Nature” to which Rousseau appeals is seen to be both a reflection of his own specific nature and representative of all phallocratic discourse in its defense of male domination.