WHAT IS A WOMAN?

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of The Second Sex’s publication, Moi (Literature and Romance Studies/Duke Univ.; Sexual/Textual Politics, not reviewed, etc.) calls on Simone de Beauvoir’s help in breaking out of a stalemate she sees as peculiar to recent feminist theory: How to define what it means to be a woman without recourse to either essentialist metaphysics (—Woman is . . .—) or biological determinism (—women must necessarily . . .—). The two long new essays in which she examines Beauvoir’s notion of female bodies working out their identities through social history—the pair of them amounting to a short book themselves—are followed by nine briefer essays, largely charting a course between Freud and Pierre Bourdieu, in which Moi —attempt[s] to work my way out from under poststructuralism.— Readers who can stay with Moi’s densely argumentative style’she spends over a hundred pages analyzing the first three paragraphs of The Second Sex—will be rewarded with a cutting- edge view of contemporary feminist critique in its continuing struggle to establish just what its subject is.