Recasting freedom, with Wendy Brown
“Most familiar is the claim that freedom of the bourgeois variety is male - premised upon and advancing the interests of an autonomous, self-interested, excessively individuated subject, a subject easily panicked by intimacy, averse to relationality, and obsessed with independence.
Generally, the normative analogue of these accounts is that women seek an intimate, connected, relational, nurturant human order, not necessarily an order suffused with freedom.
Certainly the essentialism, cultural narrowness and reified femininity in this variant of feminism has annoyed as many women as it has captured, but only a very few feminist theorists have struggled to recast rather than sustain or reject the masculinist binary between intimacy and autonomy, relationality and independence.”
Wendy Brown, States of Injury 1995:20