Dependent Individuality and Independent Individuality

Abstract

So far the book has been exploring the divergent constructions of male and female identities before modern times. The advent of modernity, however, signals a turning point. Women gradually gain access to literacy, education, and specialized training and become individuated subjects as a result. Yet for them disavowing or outsourcing the care of relationality is not an option, since there is no third party that could play for them the same role they had played for the men. They must therefore develop a type of individuality that is fully aware and capable of accommodating the demands of relationality, balancing both forms of personhood. This is what we might call a truly independent individuality, one that combines reason and emotion, the demands of the self and the bonds with others, and the contradictory desires and affects that bind them all together. This form of independent individuality, in the author’s view, is arguably the mode of personhood that ought to become dominant in the future for both men and women. Dependent individuality of the hegemonic masculine type, which is usually posited as the goal of a politics of gender equality, is fundamentally untenable, as it always requires subaltern subjects caring for the relational sphere.