Review Essays : 'Deconstructed' Inequality: Women and the Public Sphere
Abstract
Review Essays'Deconstructed' Inequality: Women and the Public Sphere SAGE Publications, Inc.1986DOI: 10.1177/072551368601400111 Maria Markus The present decade is marked in feminist theory by a spectacular resurrection of the concept of 'difference' which is being used not only as an analytical tool, but also as a central strategic concept for the subversion of the realities of inequality in social position of women. What makes this development new is, above all, the reformulation of the understanding of 'difference' itself. This new understanding rejects the formulation of difference as a simplistic dichotomous opposition in which one term is defined by the other (or rather by its 'lack' or its lesser degree) - a tradition going back to the Aristotelian characterisation of the female that is a female "by virtue of certain lack of qualities" - and which, therefore, subordinates the 'other' term to the 'first' one. Instead, the difference has been now formulated as having a meaning and a content of its own, that is, as a 'positive' difference. The inspiration for this theoretical turn has come from diverse sources and concrete disciplines, and in the majority of cases has not been explicitly derived from the 'deconstructionist' trend, although the impact