In my master thesis, I explore the development of the concept of identity, the development of feminist movements, feminist political theory and the emergence of the concept of identity or gender identity within feminist political theories. Feminist political theory is a field that has its roots in feminist philosophy and analyses the category of gender concerning institutionalized spaces of power and processes of struggles for the distribution of power. Feminism is, above all, a political project that seeks to bring about fundamental changes in gender relations. Within feminist theory, it is impossible to speak of a single female subject, because women are a very heterogeneous group of different interests and needs, which also intersect with a diverse field of other differences, such as racial, economic, and socio-political. Despite the diversity of women, some feminist movements, and consequently feminist political theories, have assumed a single category of women's collective identity, which they have grounded in the category of gender identity. This was justified either in terms of biological essentialism or in the necessity of appealing to a multitude of otherwise mutually diverse women for a more unified feminist political action. The notion of identity has had a privileged place of theorization in feminist theory, especially in the shift from the so-called second-wave feminism to third-wave feminism. In my thesis, I argue that the notion of women's collective identity cannot be theoretically developed in a coherent way. However, the inability to theoretically grasp the notion of identity does not imply that concrete political action cannot be unified in other ways. It is necessary to find different ways of including the diversity of women.
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