Women and the feminist political subject in the fourth wave

Abstract

These reflections are based on a conceptual review of the exclusion of women in the signing of the social pact that founded modern democracies. The argumentative thread will lead to the thesis that feminism can be understood precisely as female empowerment against this exclusion. Feminism is about the empowerment of a collective subject, «women», an empowerment that, as concluded here, produces the patriarchal reaction expressed as a culture of rape. This culture has no other objective than precisely «disempowering» women as political subjects. To draw this conclusion, the paper returns to the problem of women as the political subject of feminism, to argue its necessity in the so called «fourth feminist wave». And, to frame these reflections,
it takes as a starting point the debate on the topic among some current feminist theorists, namely Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler.