J.Bu had me from the very beginning.

After reading the first four sections of chapter one, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the first section: "Women" as the Subject of Feminism. The very last line pretty much sums up what I was thinking while I was reading the first eight pages: "Perhaps, paradoxically, "representation" will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of "women" is nowhere presumed" (8). Sure, women deserve subjectivity, but is representation of a universal woman productive? Especially when distortion is a potential effect (2)?

I'm probably sounding too 'radical' and not enough 'rational', but I don't care. I find "to naturalize" one of the most dangerous and destructive concepts. For instance, think of how many people are harmed by the naturalization of heterosexuality. How about the naturalization of the superiority of white skin? The naturalization of the correlation between sex and gender has driven many to death. The naturalization of 'skinny' is allowing all kinds of companies to rake in profit while women are killing themselves to look "beautiful". I want to write an entire book on my hatred and disgust for the word 'natural' and its applications. My point is that when a system is recognized for naturalizing, that system should be changed.

"[T]he political construction of the subject proceeds with certain legitimating and exclusionary aims, and these political operations are effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes juridical structures as their foundation" (3). To me, this doesn't mean that we need to reevaluate the category of "women" or wait for a juridical system to construct such a category. It means that we need to reconstruct the juridical system. Why hasn't this been done? Look back at the naturalized categories I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and ask yourself if they affect the majority of our politicians? Since most of them are white cis-male heterosexuals, the painfully obvious answer is NO.

I want to back track for a moment ask, Is there an assumed category of men? If "representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women" (2), does representation have the same effect on the category of men? Since I can't answer that question, I'll just leave it here.

If "juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent" than the solution would to rearrange said powers. Foucault is brilliant on the subject of power so the obvious solution would be to get a bunch of well-read feminists in office, right? I'll stop day-dreaming now... 

Does this post have a point? Is there solidarity between all these paragraphs? Maybe there's a point to be made here. There is no universal feminism. There is no universal patriarchy. There is no universal woman (5). There is no specific universal goal and if that is where you are hoping to find all the answers, you're looking in exactly the wrong place. There is a way to move forward and it involves breaking through the chains that language sometimes locks together in systems of power.