Dualism: A Sexual Tradition

2.1 provides a brief historical overview of the feminist philosophical discourse. The established distinction between sex and gender operates in the logic of binary metaphysics, according to Butler’s criticism, parallel to dichotomies such as culture/nature and form/matter. 2.2 provides an historically early example of the constitutive exclusion of femininity from metaphysical discourse through Irigaray’s reading of Plato’s Timaeus . 2.3 considers Kant’s thing-in-itself as another variant of a constitutive exclusion. To what extent can the thing-in-itself be associated with “matter” and the feminine?