The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory

Feminist theory began by trying to extend and reinterpret the categories of various theoretical discourses so that women's activities and social relations could become analytically visible within the traditions of intellectual discourse.' If women's natures and activities are as fully social as are men's, then our theoretical discourses should reveal women's lives with just as much clarity and detail as we presume the traditional approaches reveal men's lives. We had thought that we could make the categories and concepts of the traditional approaches objective or Archimedean where they were not already. As we all have come to understand, these attempts revealed that neither women's activities nor gender relations (both interand intra-