The paper explores gender in philosophical and literary discourse. Philosophy has traditionally exploited the “woman” as a non-subject. Deconstruction revealed unexplored gender thinking beyond the binary heterosexual couple and the so-called phallocentrism. Nevertheless, the persistence of antiessentialism resulted in an increasingly difficult thinking of the "woman," and with that feminism found itself in trouble with its subject. Catherine Malabou recognized the impossibility of a woman in the possibility of philosophy and directed her efforts to relocate that impossibility. Through deconstruction and dialectics, she developed the concept of plasticity, which paves the way for the nonessentialist rehabilitation of the essence of “woman” as a negative subject. The thesis at hand highlights three historical approaches of feminist literary theory to the analysis of gender in literature: "studies of women’s images" from the reader's point of view, "gynocriticism" from the writer's point of view, and "women's writing" from the text's point of view. All three have made important contributions to the understanding of gender in literature, yet their main weakness is the placement of questions that came to literary theory from philosophy. The analysis of the novels Nightwood (Djuna Barnes) and Our Lady of the Flowers (Jean Genet) touches on the author's question in the case of minority literature and then tries to show a change in linguistic reality and reconstruction of gender identity.
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