SOURCE: Gray, Frances. “Elemental Philosophy: Language and Ontology in Mary Daly's Texts.” In Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly, edited by Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, pp. 222-45. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Gray examines Daly's subversion of male-defined language and philosophy through the calculated use of metaphor, naming, and linguistic inventions, particularly as such strategies reveal Daly's view of language as fundamentally linked to the process of becoming.]

You are the icon of woman sexual
in herself like a great forest tree
in flower, liriodendron bearing sweet tulips,
cups of joy and drunkenness.
You drink strength from your dark fierce roots
and you hang at the sun's own fiery breast
and with the green cities of your boughs
you shelter and celebrate
woman, with the cauldron of your energies
burning red, burning green.

—Marge Piercy, “The Window of the Woman Burning”

In The Church and the Second Sex, originally published in 1968, Mary Daly took seriously the place of language in the social production of women and their experiences. She did this within a theological context. Her denunciation of the Eternal Feminine, an essentializing conception of women that held that women had a fixed, unchanging nature, was accompanied by a strong stand for a social constructionist perspective that was an attempt to refocus and rethink the idea of Woman. Her work was and remains blatantly political and strategic, a deliberate search to reconceive the ideas of Woman and divinity within her own divisive and destabilizing discursive framework.

Central to her concerns is her desire to create discourse(s) specific to women which represent their interests. Daly's explicit assumption is that language is not sex/gender neutral: rather, language is sex/gender specific. She maintains that all languages carry implicit symbolics and semantics. In Western societies, the symbolics and semantics of the dominant language are that of white, middle-class men who have created a master discourse. For such men, language serves the function of maintaining hegemonic masculinity with its associated power and sanctioned pseudoneutrality. On the whole, women accept this alleged neutrality. Daly claims, however, that women find themselves victims within this purportedly neutral system that seeks to define and name them. It is in this context that one should understand Daly's claim that women have had the power of naming stolen from them. And it is in this context that Daly elaborates the idea that language use is subversive: Daly's use seeks to overthrow the purported neutrality of patriarchal discourses and to claim a ground on which women can create their own sex-specific discourses.

Daly's subversive use of language is also strategic. By this I mean that she acknowledges that language always operates within sociopolitical contexts and that language is therefore implicitly perspectival. But she challenges men's discursive hegemony by making language work for her in an attempt to produce and initiate women's discourses. So, at one level, she uses the rules and plays of the master language with its apparently irresistible claim to neutrality as her own theological springboard. At another, she deliberately subverts that master language by undermining its foundations. She takes a pre-existing condition of language—that it is not neutral, but sexed/gendered and monopolizes those who are constituted within its sphere—and then she manipulates that condition in order to subvert its supposed neutrality. Daly's intention is to be divisive and to destabilize language to show that women and their experiences are produced through men's discursive practices, in which women cannot name for themselves. But she also intends to re-conceive language to enable women to name for themselves once more.

Note that Meaghan Morris, in writing about Gyn/Ecology, has argued that Daly uses language strategically.¹ When she uses the term “strategy”² Morris refers to the way in which Daly deploys “punning, alliteration, word-play, allegory, and the Great Metaphor of the Voyage”³ to achieve her revolutionary ends. For Morris, however, Daly's strategy is unsuccessful. She maintains that Daly confines her critique to “a politics of subverting isolated signs, not one of transforming discourse” (71) or “language in use” (73).

What Morris means by ‘discourse’ is spelled out in her lengthy “digression on discourse” which she argues that Daly is concerned with semantics and not with contextual matters, “with the semantics of the said, rather than the enunciative strategies of saying.” Her main claim is that Daly situates meanings in words instead of in contexts (74). Because Daly does this, then according to Morris, Daly fails to acknowledge that “a context—in particular, at least an image of an audience—plays a part in what is said and how it's said. Mary Daly's approach can imply quite the opposite: because you have ‘true meanings’ to articulate, you are likely to say the same thing in the same way in the same language in any circumstances to anyone to whom you accept to speak politically. It is then up to the audience to situate itself/themselves accordingly” (75).

On this view, Daly's preoccupation with nouns and their meanings renders hers a project that cannot be transformative, because énonciation should be the primary site of transformative discourse. To support her reading, Morris cites Pym's view of discourse as “‘constraints on semiosis,’ semiosis being defined as the production of meaning by signs in continuous action [sic]” (77; Morris' italics) and Benveniste's idea of discourse as the “‘product of a speaking position’” (90).⁴ Morris's stress then is on énonciation, the activity of language, what “everybody does every time that they open their mouths (to good or evil effect).”⁵ In her view, Daly is not concerned with discursive action at all.

I am not persuaded by Morris's argument. It is not clear to me that Daly is unconcerned about either “speaking position” or the “production of meaning by signs in continuous action.” Daly's desire to destabilize discourse is situated in her belief that patriarchy constitutes itself through the semantic position that Morris describes so well (and ascribes to Daly). Daly's focus on nouns, on radicalizing their meanings, depends for its success on énonciation: without a speaking position, without acknowledging that meaning is produced precisely as Morris suggests, there is little point to Daly's critique of the meaning/reference of nouns and discourse in general.⁶

Further, and this follows from what I have just claimed, Morris's contention about Daly's subverting isolated signs is strange given the post-modern culture in which she situates herself. Both Ferdinand de Saussure and Derrida argue that no sign can be isolated: that a sign is always a sign within a system and that to change one sign is to change the system as a whole.⁷ I will argue, contrary to Morris, that Daly, cognizant of structural analysis, is successfully strategic and that her ontological concerns could not be articulated in any other way. Hence I will argue that Daly's is not a strategy of subverting isolated signs at all, but an attempt to displace supposedly neutral (but men's) discourse in order to produce a women's discourse, the function of which is to articulate women's Be-ing.⁸ Punning, alliteration, wordplay, and allegory are all integral to the transformation of discourse and are not acts of terrorism against isolated linguistic signs: there can be no isolated aspects of, no isolated signs in, language. Daly's speaking position emerges from the oppression of women. Her choice of which aspects of language/discourse to subvert reveals a deep-seated commitment to producing new meanings by rethinking discourse as continuous activity.

Daly's early works, The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father, neither used nor appropriated language in a divisive and destabilizing manner. Daly's work with language begins in Gyn/Ecology and develops in earnest in the subsequent births of Pure Lust, Wickedary, and Outercourse. Daly's primary task in The Church and the Second Sex was to argue for the equality of women and men as church members, to expose the masculine bias of Christian theology, and to demonstrate the explicit iniquitous practical and psychological consequences that this theology had (and continues to have)⁹ for women in the church. She saw the Catholic church as an oppressive, man-dominated institution which failed to reconcile its opposing views of women (as virgin and whore), but that used that opposition to revere, regulate, and revile the lives of its women adherents. In Daly's view, the movement to equality between women and men was anathema (70) to the church hierarchy, who resisted and opposed any change to the status of women within the church. “Those engaged in the struggle for the equality of the sexes have often seen the Catholic Church as an enemy. This view is to a large extent justified, for Catholic teaching has prolonged a traditional view of woman which at the same time idealizes and humiliates her” (107).

Informed as her work was by The Second Sex (107), her writing took on much of Simone de Beauvoir's critique of the socio-ontological arrangements that constitute, encompass, and entrap women. Indeed, Daly's book can be seen as a Catholic response to Simone de Beauvoir's critique of the Catholic church's oppression of women. Daly was keen to reveal the history and social circumstances of women in the church. With this disclosure would come an admission that women have been tied to immanence, tied to materiality and symbolized as the embodiment of temptation, lust, and sin. Daly was committed to arguing for some favorable outcomes once the problems were identified and acknowledged. With identification and acknowledgment, women could begin to overcome the historical and social contingencies that had cast them as secondary beings.

The fundamental difference between Simone de Beauvoir's vision of the Church and women and that which motivated this book is the difference between despair and hope. For this reason our approach is fundamentally far more radical than that of the French existentialist. De Beauvoir was willing to accept the conservative vision of the Church as reality, and therefore has had to reject it as unworthy of mature humanity. However, there is an alternative to rejection, an alternative which need not involve self-mutilation. This is commitment to radical transformation of the negative, life-destroying elements of the Church as it exists today. The possibility of such commitment rests upon clear understanding that the seeds of the eschatological community, of the liberating humanizing Church of the future, are already present, however submerged and neutralized they may be. Such commitment requires hope and courage.

(70)

Daly could, therefore, be seen as an apologist for the Truth that she believed the Catholic church manifested and revealed and this is a position quite contrary to Simone de Beauvoir's (172). However, there is a significant and fundamental point on which Simone de Beauvoir and Daly agree. Like Simone de Beauvoir (171), Daly attacked the essentializing notion of the Eternal Feminine, the Eternal Woman, the idea that there is a “fixed human nature” (155) peculiar to women. Daly's critics have wrongly argued that she does not persist with her exposure, that she ultimately retrieves an idea of feminine essence which revalorizes universalizing concepts of women. On this view, Daly retreats from her agreement with Simone de Beauvoir, and instead, revalorizes and reinscribes the Eternal Feminine in Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, for example, argues that Daly “brilliantly … uses an ontological-linguistic strategy to articulate such an alterity. It is a process of Be-coming instantiated by the Wild, Original, Self-actualizing woman who has made the leap from phallocracy into freedom, into the Other-world of Be-ing” (155).

Schüssler Fiorenza argues that Daly reconstructs the category of Woman as a superior, natural category over and against Man. She describes Daly's position as just one of the many that come “dangerously close to reproducing in the form of deconstructive language traditional cultural-religious ascription[s] of femininity and motherhood, ascriptions all too familiar from papal pronouncements, which have now become feminist norms.”¹⁰ Schüssler Fiorenza's claim is strange, to say the least, when one considers Daly's complete refusal of fixed categorization and her vehement rejection of essentialism and the Eternal Feminine.

Note that Daly continually emphasizes the idea that Woman is in process, that women do not have a fixed, immutable nature. The (potential) creation of new Woman is the acknowledgment of that process. As social circumstances and conditions will change and change again, so too will women in their searches for Be-ing. The Otherworld Journey in which women should be engaged points to potentiality rather than actuality. So Daly is not appealing to the actuality of an Eternal, essential Woman at all. She is signposting the idea that women are in process, redefining their potentialities, re-claiming their own naming and thus their be-ing.

It should be stressed that in The Church and the Second Sex Daly extensively analyses and subsequently dismisses the concept of women's essence. Her reading identifies the Eternal Woman as the essential Woman: she is that which makes a woman truly Woman. It is this idea of essential womanhood that Daly passionately rejects. Daly remarks:

The characteristics of the Eternal Woman are opposed to those of a developing, authentic person, who will be unique, self-critical, self creating, active and searching. … By contrast to these authentic personal qualities, the Eternal Woman is said to have a vocation to surrender and hiddenness; … Self-less, she achieves not individual realisation but merely generic fulfillment in motherhood, physical or spiritual. … She is said to be timeless and conservative by nature. She is shrouded in mystery because she is not a genuine human person.¹¹

She argues that the Eternal Feminine and the Eternal Woman are symbols that operate at a normative level in society.¹² Hence the concepts of the Eternal Woman and the Eternal Feminine, although symbolic, are not merely descriptive. They prescribe how a woman ought to behave in order to count as a Woman. Women, on this account, are genuinely women by virtue of their “passive, dependent, totally relational”¹³ qualities, which are embodied by the idea of the Eternal Woman. But, Daly maintains, these symbolic qualities are “radically opposed to female emancipation”¹⁴ for they evince a perception of women that both describes and prescribes their individual natures as inferior human beings. Paradoxically, anything falling outside this model fails to count as a woman. The Eternal Feminine is, in other words, the essence of individual women: “The formula is very simple: once the a priori norms of femininity have been set up, all the exceptions are classified as ‘defeminised.’”¹⁵ Note the relationship, reminiscent of Plato, between the idea of universal Woman and individual women: one is an individual woman in virtue of participating in the ideal form of Woman.

So Daly argues that in a strong sense individual women were expected to derive the idea that they were women from the symbolic Eternal Feminine and the idea of “pure” or “brute” biological nature. The Eternal Feminine is an a priori given; women's sex remains a biological brute fact. Daly saw the Eternal Feminine as an evil which should be exorcised from the church as well as from the lives of women. While the grip of the Eternal Feminine persisted, little could be achieved for women. However, in highlighting the flawed nature of essential Womanhood, Daly resolved to launch on a project designed “to minimize biological differences”¹⁶ in order to change how, and the conditions under which, women should be symbolized.¹⁷ In this context, one must acknowledge that Daly's project was devoted to elaborating an idea of androgyny.

It is important to acknowledge that Daly was then concerned for women to remain within the church and that she believed that it would be possible to transform the church into the kind of institution in which women would have equality. For her the idea of androgyny suitably expressed the neutrality of the subject. Both women and men, if they were to throw off the shackles of essentializing theory, should see androgyny as an ideal. The last two chapters of The Church and the Second Sex are concerned with “some modest proposals” about how this might come about. Daly's optimism witnesses her belief in the liberal feminist commitment to full participation in the pre-established (sex-neutral) forms of hierarchical institutions. For her, acceptance of women as equal partners in an androgynous church would lead to the transformation of the institution itself, wherein “(m)en and women, using their best talents, forgetful of self and intent upon the work, will with God's help mount together toward a higher order of consciousness and being, in which the alienating projections will have been defeated and wholeness, psychic integrity, achieved.”¹⁸

That meant that women and men must abandon the dominant image of women as the embodiment of the Eternal Feminine. In turn, that meant the traditional roles ascribed to women (in which the Eternal Feminine is honored) would need to be re-evaluated so that women could be given the freedom to move into new space(s). Daly contended that men also must go through a process of transformation and come to terms with the ways in which society had imposed values on, and expectations of, them. “The eternal masculine” traps and limits men as much as the Eternal Feminine has women.

What is more the “eternal masculine” itself is alienating, crippling the personalities of men and restricting their experience of life at every level. The male in our society is not supposed to express much feeling, sensitivity, aesthetic appreciation, imagination, consideration for others, intuition. He is expected to affirm only part of his real self. Indeed, it may be that a good deal of the compulsive competitiveness of males is rooted in this half existence. … It is the nature of the disease, therefore, to inhibit the expansion of the individual's potential, through conditioned conformity to roles, and through a total identification of the individual with them.¹⁹

Thus although at the time of writing The Church and the Second Sex Daly had as her primary concern the liberation of women from archaic theory and the social practice built upon that theory, her concern was also for the liberation of all humans, women and men alike. She believed that women and men must fracture the stereotypes by which they are characterized and that the ‘real’²⁰ self somehow exists apart from sexual identity. She took up this theme in Beyond God the Father, where she explored notions centered around androgynous being and in which she generated a trinity: language, transcendence, and androgyny. The relationship among these three is implicit: together they produce the ontological foundations for human becoming to ultimate, authentic Be-ing. Note that later, in Gyn/Ecology, Daly remarked that along with the terms ‘God’ and ‘homosexuality’, ‘androgyny’ is a term she will never use again. Daly situated these terms within the masculine paternal canon. They represent men's interests, not women's.

What I do want to emphasize here is that regardless of what patriarchal intellectual commitments Daly attacks and attempts to refute, her underlying commitment to women's liberation remains couched in terms of language and ontology. Daly uses the patriarchal centeredness of dominant language and ontology ingeniously, as we shall see.²¹ Overwhelmingly, she appropriates and exploits patriarchal language and ontology to make political statements, to address what she considers to be socially and morally corrupt practices, and to redefine the enterprises of theology and philosophy. She reconstitutes language and ontology as her own Elemental Feminist Philosophy in Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust, the works in which she develops her cosmic odyssey, her gynocratic vision.

In Beyond God the Father for example, Daly is very taken by the idea of process theology because it does not present us with a static world view. She obviously admires the work of Charles Hartshorne, who, she says, believes that “process is creative synthesis.”²² But she is dubious about the social worth of theory such as his and is also suspicious about that which is ready-made (man-made) and can apparently be readily appropriated by feminists. Her enterprise is to make new philosophy and create new language out of the experience(s) of women. “The essential thing is to hear our own words, always giving prior attention to our own experience, never letting theory have authority over us. Then we can be free to listen to the old philosophical language (and all philosophy that does not explicitly repudiate sexism is old, no matter how novel it may seem).”²³ Her endeavors, to create out of the old, to renegotiate the relation between ontology and language, should be seen in this light.

From the time of Gyn/Ecology, language is, categorically, the ontological groundwork of Daly's sex-specific women's discourse; in other words, language becomes ontology for Daly: language is the material out of which ontology is constructed, it is the being or esse of ontology. Contra Morris's argument, Daly's strategy involves more than isolating some signs. She seeks to highlight the idea that language and ontology are so related that language is a condition, not just for the articulation of ontology, but for the very possibility of ontology. For her then, the key to directly affecting change in women's lives is through radically re-viewing discourse. Daly's work with nouns begins this change. She is unequivocally committed to transforming discourse in an endeavor to create a space for women, in terms of language and ontology. Hence hers is subversive linguistic activity. By this, I mean that her strategy is to destabilize, refigure, and transform not only discourse, but the way in which one conceives of ontology and one's life, one's be-ing. But of necessity for Daly, the master discursive framework of patriarchal philosophy is the origin of her project.²⁴

So what is the language/ontology relation which Daly affirms? There are three crucial, interconnected elements of Daly's work that elaborate her notion of the ontology/language relation. The first is the idea that women's meanings, the symbolization of their experiences and of women's discourses, must be produced out of existing discourses. The second is that naming is foundational to the creation of meanings; and the third is Daly's use of metaphor.

Daly argues that all language establishes and comes out of an ontologically committed context which is not neutral (as I argued earlier).²⁵ Put simply, language constructs ontology: language establishes the conditions of being. However, there is a reciprocal relationship involved here. Not only does language construct ontology, but the limits of language are set by our ontological understandings and commitments. Language is a condition for the construction of ontology, which in turn is a condition for language. For Daly, the production of be-ing, which participates in Be-ing, is grounded in displacing patriarchal meanings, in appropriating language, in acknowledging becoming, in shape shifting.²⁶ It presupposes an extant discourse. In a similar vein, Mark C. Taylor argues: “While philosophy's other always slips through the structures imposed by conceptual reflection, the unthought can only be evoked through the language of philosophy itself. The postphilosophical thinkers must strategically use language against language. ‘In order to make the attempt of thinking recognizable and at the same time understandable for existing philosophy, it could at first be expressed only within the horizon of that existing philosophy and its use of current terms.’”²⁷

Daly commits herself to using language against language: to looking at its etymological sources, using them, abusing them, drawing out their implications for women and doing that within the horizon, which necessarily must change, of existing philosophical and theological discourses. She is, therefore, engaged in a double project: exploring and using the present/past terrain of philosophy, while at the same time shifting the boundaries it imposes on itself and in particular upon women. The subverting of discourse is a strategy Daly deliberately embraces when she disfigures extant discourse in order to highlight the possibility of women's ontology/language. Hers is a political task that depends upon undermining (purportedly neutral) language. Daly understands language as a whole, as a dialogical, transformative means of achieving a radically altered society for women.²⁸ Given this kind of interpretation of Daly's work, Morris' allegation that Daly merely subverts isolated signs, rather than re-shaping discourse as a whole, should be seen as the dubious rendering that it is.

In the Wickedary Daly talks of elemental ontology, “the philosophical quest for Be-ing; rooted in the intuition that Powers of Be-ing are constantly Unfolding, creating, communicating; philosophy grounded in the experience of active potency to move beyond the foreground of fixed questions and answers and enter the Radiant Realms of Metabeing.”²⁹ Such an understanding reinforces her belief that there is an intimate fundamental relation between language and ontology. Her term ‘Meta-being’, “(r)ealms of active participation in Powers of Be-ing, State of Ecstasy,” is intended to convey the necessary conjunction of discourse and be-ing. For her Be-ing, “Ultimate/Intimate Reality, the constantly Unfolding Verb of Verbs which is intransitive, having no object that limits its dynamism; the Final Cause, the Good who is Self-communicating who is the Verb from whom, in whom, and with whom all true movements move,”³⁰ is an energizing process. ‘It’ is not fixed and determined as essence would be: the play of Be-ing scampers with delight in its boundlessness and constant shape changing.

This gives voice to the Heracleitan resonances we find in Daly's work. She stresses that language is primarily “performative/active/animate” activity, potentially alive with meaning. Her emphasis on process underscores her approach to language as an oceanic whole: vast, interrelated, and ever changing. On this basis, Daly proposes a re-orientation of language that will highlight the fluidity of verbs. And this brings us to the second element in her elaboration of the ontology/language relation.

In discussing the activity of naming which she understands as the locus of power, Daly argued:

In order to understand the implications of this process it is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us. Women have not been free to use their own power to name themselves, the world, or God. The old naming was not the product of dialogue—a fact inadvertently admitted in the Genesis story of Adam's naming the animals and the woman. Women are now realising that the universal imposing of names by men has been false because partial. … To exist humanly is to name the self, the world and God.³¹

She identifies naming as a functional process which can oppress (as it has women) or liberate. In short, Daly believes that because men have named, they have controlled. Hence men have power. Language is therefore necessarily political: it provides the foundations for control and power. Language, then, has been, and continues to be, oppressive to women. In this sense, naming functions as a metonym for all of language.³² Naming, in other words, is but one part of language. Yet the fact that naming plays such a decisive role in the productions of meanings and the construction of our worlds affirms the idea that the whole of language is engaged in some way with the process of naming. Naming—language as an activity that implies, and is implied by, discourse—is a prime mover in both the construction and understanding of Being. But, to reiterate, the concept of naming is not meant to be understood in a literal, narrow sense. Naming embraces the whole of discursive practice. In Beyond God the Father, Daly had denounced the monopolistic practice of naming in which men have engaged. She argued that what she calls “old naming” as a function of language has assumed an oppressive role within, and is constitutive of, patriarchal structures including discursive practice(s). So, Daly believed, “new naming” can creatively constitute a world in which all sexual oppression will disappear.

The power of naming, highlighted in Beyond God the Father, is a crucial feature of Daly's work in Gyn/Ecology and by the time of Pure Lust had developed into a highly sophisticated network of critical exploration of language, play on words, neologism, and re-definition. But Daly re-orients what we might think of as ‘usual’ in the practice of naming. Predominantly, we associate naming with nouns: with sorting, categorizing. Daly is scathing about this practice and emphasizes the importance of verbs over nouns. This is where naming as a metonym becomes a clear strategic device for Daly. The shift from noun-naming to verb-naming swings naming to a new position within language. It is not just that one must find suitable nouns to use in naming: it is that with an emphasis on verbs and their open-endedness—the Heracleitian resonances to which I alluded above—the idea of new-naming becomes an idea of what all language is about: referring, expressing, disclosing, creating, and so on. In this sense, language is action, performance, process, being. Language is the embodiment of creation, the condition for the possibility of anything.

The stress on the role of verbs is no better highlighted than in Daly's discussion of the idea of God. In Beyond God the Father Daly argues: “Why indeed must ‘God’ be a noun? Why not a verb—the most active and dynamic of all? Hasn't the naming of ‘God’ as a noun been an act of murdering that dynamic Verb? And isn't the Verb infinitely more personal than a mere static noun? The anthropomorphic symbols for God may be intended to convey personality, but they fail to convey that God is Be-ing. … This Verb—the Verb of Verbs—is intransitive. It need not be conceived as having an object that limits its dynamism.”³³

Daly's concern with the term ‘God’ as a noun is not simply grammatical. ‘God’ either as a proper name or as a mere noun poses a problem for Daly because of her onto-theological concerns and mistrusts. That is to say, Daly ultimately refuses the androcentric term ‘God’, preferring instead ‘Goddess’. This term however, is not intended to convey the idea of a female super-person with whom women might have a personal relationship. Instead, Daly's use is metaphorical. The term ‘Goddess’ represents potential, possibility: it evokes an idea of what women might become.

According to Daly, that God is construed as a fixed definable thing, that God is reified, is a Deadly Deception. Be-ing, with which she identifies the Goddess, is not a thing at all. In reifying, in making things into objects when that should not be the case, the Divine is essentialized, cast into rocklike solidity that does not change; but Be-ing should not and cannot be contained as nouns contain. (This is what patriarchy practices. Witness Daly's claim that ‘God’ “represents the necrophilia of patriarchy.”)³⁴ Daly argues that reification is a masculine engagement with which she refuses to identify. According to her, the term ‘God’ and what it represents is irredeemably masculine. Daly also acknowledges the possibility of falling into the trap of reifying the Goddess, treating the Goddess as an object named by a noun as ‘God’ has been. But for her, ‘Goddess’, properly used, “affirms the life-loving be-ing of women and nature”³⁵ and is the embodiment of the Verb of verbs.

In refiguring the Divine in terms of concentrating on the “verbness of Be-ing,” Daly is following a long theological tradition that situates discourse in ontology and ontology in discourse. The Old Testament story of the revelation of the Divine Name is enshrouded in cosmic mystery and linguistic difficulties:

Moses then said to God, “Look, if I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is his name?’ what am I to tell them?” God said to Moses, “I am he who is.” And he said, “This is what you are to say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” God further said to Moses, “You are to tell the Israelites, ‘Yahweh, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name for all time, and thus I am to be invoked for all generations to come.”³⁶

Commentators on this biblical passage point out that there are etymological and interpretative worries concerning the text, both of which have bearing on Daly's concerns. Etymologically, they argue, Yahweh is archaically related to the Hebrew verb ‘to be’. But they also acknowledge that it may be the causative ‘he causes to be’ or ‘he brings into existence’.³⁷ In any case, the emphasis is on the activity (being, causing, or both) signified by the word. The interpretational question is, in part, one of how the word functions, for it apparently has a naming role.³⁸ What is pertinent for us is that the naming takes place through the use of the present indicative (a verb function), not through the isolation of properties, characteristics, or features (a noun function in terms of modification and qualification). In other words, God's pronouncement, “I am he who is,” if we do take it to be a case of naming, is a verb-naming rather than a noun-naming. Needless to say, its origins and the rules of Hebrew grammar indicate that it is tied up with the verb ‘to be’ and hence is revelatory of God's Being (as Being).³⁹ Verb-naming according to Daly seeks not to reify, but to characterize the divine as active principle, as elemental, which is precisely what is happening in this Hebrew text.

The impetus for producing a peculiarly women's discourse lies precisely in theological quandaries such as that represented by the Yahweh debate. Daly uncovers the prejudice toward anthropomorphism that she maintains patriarchal use/discourse exhibits in its theological language. She realizes that language constitutes our understandings and conceptualizings, particularly because many of our concepts are “trapped” in nouns. By “playing around” with language, her intention is to create not only a conceptual shift, but an ontological shift: a shift that will make possible the discovery of the (metaphorical) Goddess in the experience of women.

Note that Mary Daly is concerned with “playing around.” Much of her writing is a joyful playing with concepts, ideas, etymologies, and breaking up of syllables to re-emphasise new and different meanings. Daly's writing is the performance of that play. The divine is found not only in the deep and serious matters of the mind. The divine is found in unfolding the contorted layers of meaning that have fabricated women's lives as well as at times of bliss. Humor and play are restored to philosophy.

The mystery that is the divine is exposed in Yahweh's own playfulness, Yahwistic humor—I tell you who I am: I am. The Hebrew story, which historically speaking is assuredly counter-hegemonic and thus already antithetical to dominant Hebrew-inspired patriarchal conceptions of the divine, exhibits a deep religious bias toward acknowledging the Be-ing and mystery of divinity that falls outside noun-naming processes. So, in identifying noun-naming as a problem for “God,” Daly reiterates part of a tradition that she puts superbly to work in her performing of feminist theology. The centrality of verbs, the stress on their processive function, signifies the open-endedness of Be-ing toward which women can move, marking the re-emergence of the Goddess. And this idea of the Goddess as Verb of Verbs should not be read through patriarchal modernist categories.

Daly's notion of the Goddess points “metaphorically to the Powers of Be-ing, the Active Verb in whose potency all biophilic reality participates.”⁴⁰ Notice Daly's use of the word ‘metaphorically’ here. The recognition of this term and its cognates brings us to the third element in Daly's elucidation of the language/ontology relation: her use of metaphor. Just as naming functions as a metonym for the whole of language use and practice, so metaphor guides the explosion of language which occurs with the transference of energy from nouns to verbs. The role of metaphor becomes political. It is the means by which transcendence will be made possible. In other words, the Goddess is an expression of the possibility of women's transcendence, of women's gracious movement. Thus use of metaphor, the idea of the Goddess and transcendence are intimately linked.

Daly's chapter “Bewitching: The Lust for Metamorphosis” in Pure Lust contains a substantial elucidation of both the role and significance Daly wants to give metaphor. There, she argues that metaphors are not mere symbols nor mere abstractions. Metaphors are, as she notes in the Wickedary, “words that carry Journeyers into the Wild dimensions of Other-centred consciousness by jarring images, stirring memories, accentuating contradictions, upsetting unconscious traditional assumptions.”⁴¹ In Pure Lust she also maintains that the Great Mother is one of the “myriad possibilities for naming transcendence”⁴² (and that some women can become fixated on images such as the Great Mother, an example of reification of the Goddess).

A metapatriarchal metaphor “works” precisely to the extent that it carries a woman further into the Wild dimensions of other-centered consciousness—out of the dead circles into Spiralling/Spinning motion. Be-witching metaphors transmute the shapes of perception. They do this by jarring images, stirring memories, accentuating contradictions, upsetting unconscious traditional assumptions, evoking “inappropriate” laughter, releasing pent-up tears, eliciting gynaesthetic sensings of connections, arousing Dragon-identified Passions, inspiring acts of Volcanic virtue, brewing strange ideas.⁴³

Daly's concern is with developing a metaphorical understanding of Woman and divinity that is open-ended. In this sense it is essential that one understands her project as non-literal. Daly situates herself within a tradition of metaphorical discourse of which she is simultaneously subversive.⁴⁴ She alleges: “Metaphors function to Name change, and therefore they elicit change. … Thus the very task of naming and calling forth Elemental be-ing requires metaphors.”⁴⁵ For Daly, change necessitates the use of metaphor.⁴⁶

The echo that rebounds in Daly's exegesis of metaphor resonates with the playfulness to which I alluded above. In using metaphor, one plays; that play constitutes performance, challenging and subverting the categories that subtend language. Énonciation occurs in the written text! For example, she speaks of women's bodies as “transmutable to and from energy” and of “[t]he spiration of the Archimage within Lusty women, who speak women's words, heals broken connections between words and their Sources, reconnecting women with their elemental origins.”⁴⁷ As Daly showed in her analysis of essentialism, this is not the patriarchal way of thinking about women or their bodies. If women in patriarchy are lusty, they are whores; if there is spiration within women, it is the Word of God speaking to a (compliant) Virgin Mother to whom an announcement is made (that she will be the Mother of God). The change in metaphor brings about a change in thinking: Virgin Virtues do not revolve around the idea of submission; Virgin Virtues are “life affirming habits of Uncaptured/Unsubdued women”;⁴⁸ to Gossip is “to exercise the Elemental Female Power of Naming, especially in the presence of other Gossips.”⁴⁹

Ironically, Daly's use of (seemingly stereotypical?) “female” metaphors tempts commentators to interpret Daly as essentialist. But Daly's metaphors appeal to the idea of women as constituted through their own language practices, which are not themselves neutral. This cannot be stressed enough, especially since the claim that there can be no sex-neutral subject is discussed widely in feminist literature and Daly's work highlights this assertion.⁵⁰ But there is a great deal of confusion about what is actually going on when feminist theorists call for a female subject and most of this confusion collapses into debates surrounding essentialism. In other words, the idea that there should or could be a female subject is almost always read as a reaffirmation of the idea of a female essence, even when a theorist taking such a stand identifies herself as a social constructionist and denounces essentialism. This is the case with Mary Daly and her critics.⁵¹

Rosi Braidotti, for instance, has maintained that Daly has a “conceptual tendency to naturalize the feminine”⁵² and thus to reinstate essentializing notions of women. Braidotti's accusation stems from her analysis of Daly's (metaphorical) Goddess imagery, which she misreads as invoking essentialist images. Furthermore, she agrees with Morris, whom she interprets as accusing Daly of “re-naming at the level of lexicon, of the vocabulary, leaving unchanged the syntax of representation.”⁵³ Let me revisit Morris, who writes: “One focus of Daly's interest in Gyn/Ecology is the possibilities offered by changing particular words (those items in the dictionary, ie. the available code—or langue—of patriarchal English). She de-constructs and de-forms them in their inert state as signs whose only context is the dictionary, and then puts them to work in the discourse. … Her strategy is to warp the words of the patriarchal dictionary, to bend the code back against itself until it snaps to their shrieks of derision” (her italics).⁵⁴

To reiterate the point I made earlier in this essay, this interpretation charges that Daly deconstructs terms within language, without deconstructing the corpus, language in use, and her own speaking position. On this misreading, Daly valorizes Woman as she has been understood through the texts of Western philosophy, ascribing to Woman an essence that depends upon the implicit acceptance of the categories of Western thought. Morris's and Braidotti's readings of Daly are, however, literal rather than metaphoric. They fail to let Daly “mess with their minds,”⁵⁵ to let her metaphors dislodge patriarchal meanings and re-orient their thinking. They read her through a modernist lens.

Daly does not reinscribe Western philosophical ideas of Essential Woman at all. To recapitulate, her language is metaphorical and seeks to explore the previously unexplored: the possibility of women's discourse. It is important to stress that both Morris and Braidotti assume that Daly essentializes the Goddess and women because she boldly dismisses neutrality as a construction of patriarchy. It is possible that Morris and Braidotti do not recognize the link Daly makes between patriarchy and neutrality. However, that Daly holds that patriarchy constructs the idea of neutrality is apparent. Her rejection of androgyny, tied as it is to the idea of a gender-neutral “best possible subject,” (“‘John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett-Majors scotch-taped together’”)⁵⁶ states her point sharply and shortly. Daly's underlying argument is always that language is sex specific: there is no gender-neutral sex and, therefore, there can be no gender-neutral language. Since language constructs subjectivities, identities, it follows that there can be no gender-neutral subject. The elimination of the idea of androgyny is couched in these terms.

Daly rejects androgyny; Morris and Braidotti revalorize neutrality. Braidotti's affirmation of neutrality in this text emerges when she argues: “So Daly falls into what I consider one of the worst traps besetting feminism today: the replacement of the masculine subject by the feminine subject. … The latent dogmatism in Daly's thought, quite as much as its reactionary nature, seems to me potentially dangerous for current feminism, insofar as it subverts the signs, not the codes.”⁵⁷

But Daly replies to her critics who choose the concept of neutrality over that of woman:

Particularly insidious is the pseudo-feminist usage of the term essentialist to label and discredit all feminist writing that dares to Name and celebrate the Wild and Elemental reality of women who choose to think beyond the prescribed parameters of patriarchal mandates. … It elicits the patriarchally embedded Self-censor in women attempting to create in women-identified ways. … In other words, the expression of Original Powers and of the Ecstatic existential experience of women breaking free from patriarchal mindbendings is stigmatized by the label “essentialist,” leaving only the grimness of oppression as that which women have in common. Ultimately this reversal/usage functions to negate Hope for Life that transcends the illusion of inclusion in forever male-identified “humankind.”⁵⁸

The development of Woman's Be-ing, Elemental Woman's Be-ing, is dependent ultimately on the rejection of masculine discourse, men's discourse, commonly thought of as neutral discourse. Daly's intuition about the role of discourse is sound. Her belief is that the Divine, the Goddess, is mirrored through language practices and therefore the Divine is the mirror of women. The claim that discourse must be sex/gender specific, and that Daly is creating the context for metapatriarchal discourse, is a superb strategy. But it is more than a strategy.

Earlier I remarked that a member of Daly's trinity in Beyond God the Father was the idea of transcendence. The relation between metaphor and transcendence is intimate. Indeed for Daly, metaphors are “the language/vehicles of transcendent spiraling.”⁵⁹ Metaphors promote transcendence: they embellish the possibilities for women to participate in Be-ing, to persist with the Journey. But what it means to transcend is elusive. And again, the idea of neutrality looms ominously, this time in the context of Simone de Beauvoir.

In her existentialist philosophy Simone de Beauvoir promoted the idea of transcendence, thought of as a peculiarly male interest. Man achieves transcendence in his own subjectivity, “the male recovers his individuality intact at the moment he transcends it.”⁶⁰ Women do not achieve transcendence: they fail to develop as subjects, for they never transcend their own individuality. Women fail to create value: they make babies instead and remain immanent in the species.⁶¹ This does not mean that women have no values. But it means that they subscribe to values that are produced externally to them and that are believed to be neutral.

Now, by appropriating men's discourse and developing the triadic relation between ontology and language, naming and metaphor, Daly shifts away from transcendence conceived of as a peculiarly men's project. She denies that women cannot achieve transcendence, cannot make their own values and seek their own autonomy. The play of metaphor evokes the Goddess. And it is in the Goddess, the Verb of Verbs, that transcendence moves to liberate. Transcendence thus becomes a function of women's process, of women's movement, and metaphor its expression. Transcendence is not to be reified, as a thing that can be defined. Transcendence is the process in which women are engaged as they name themselves, make and re-make themselves in performing their divinity, their participation in the Goddess. The language of transcendence and the Goddess is the language of metaphor. In Daly's hands, metaphor is the language of the Goddess, the language of divine politics, the language of Be-ing.

When one looks at the claim made against Daly—that she is essentialist because she launches a project that attempts to seek out Woman and that Daly's language betrays her—one wonders how closely her detractors have read her. Daly has not claimed to define, to categorize women. Daly works to find a way for women to become Wild, to be Lusty, to be Strong. Her belief that women can have no ontology, no being without women's language, recommends an analysis of the idea of Woman such as Daly has produced. If one can accept that women are on a Journey and that the Journey is within language, then the possibility of Elemental ontology opens before one. It is dangerous, the Journey, the Journey to ontology, for it is to be on the Outercourse, toward transcendence and Be-ing.

I have been arguing that Mary Daly's work is primarily directed towards the re-creation of women through the dis-membering and re-construction of discourse. I have argued that far from her project's being a mere changing of isolated signs as Morris has argued, Daly is concerned to produce a radically creative and subversive Woman's discourse. Implicit in that project is the development of an ethic that valorizes women without reinscribing real essentialist accounts (such as the Eternal Woman) of Woman. I have also argued, using Schüssler Fiorenza's terminology, that this strategy is ontological-linguistic, meaning that for Daly, a strong relationship exists between ontology and language, indeed that the two are so intertwined that language becomes ontology for Daly in the sense I have outlined above. She calls into question the idea that the dominant discourses of theology and philosophy are sex neutral. Because these discourses are masculine paternal discourses, Daly believes that women should develop their own language in which they can articulate their own be-ing. In other words, Daly seeks to re-vision the idea of women and their experiences, ontology and the divine. In so doing, she creates a politics of divinity that is not sex neutral but is an expression of women's transcendence because it involves the idea that women should reclaim the power of naming for themselves. Her work creates divinity as politics because she seeks to subvert hegemonic conceptions of language, the divine, and transcendence. In her work she seeks to subvert men's ownership of, and the imposition of boundaries on, the divine. Daly's work systematically defies the canons of men's theology and philosophy, within which is the myth of neutrality. While that myth preserves patriarchal—that is, masculine paternal—hegemony, women will not have the words with which they might name for themselves, a women's language. In new naming is new ontology, women's transcendence, and the Goddess. This is be-ing for women, Be-ing in women. This is women's participation in the Verb of Verbs. This is a women's politics of the divine. And this is Mary Daly's legacy to philosophy and theology.

Notes

1. Meaghan Morris, “A-mazing Grace: Notes on Mary Daly's Poetics,” Intervention 16 (n.d.): 71-73.

2. Grosz and other commentators on Irigaray use the term “strategy” in discussing Irigaray's work. See Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1989).

3. Morris, “A-mazing Grace,” 73.

4. Morris here refers, in a footnote, to Pym's work, a 1980 honors thesis at Murdoch University, and notes that the definition was passed on to her by Anna Freadman.

5. Morris, “A-mazing Grace,” 76.

6. One also might consider that in the early days of “second wave” feminism, there were howls of protest from women who realized that terms such as ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ for instance, were meant to be inclusive and gender neutral. But in being inclusive, feminists argued, the terms denoted a disregard for the individuality and sexed subjectivity of women. There was, therefore, a push to subvert what might be thought of as “isolated signs” in the writing of public documents. The infamous replacement of “chairman” by “chairwoman” and then its replacement by “chairperson” and the introduction, in English, of the marriage-status-neutral term “Ms.” for women, instead of the two choices “Miss” (unmarried woman) or “Mrs.” (married woman) are examples of this practice of apparently subverting isolated signs. It is manifest however, that the subversion of isolated signs was, and is, only apparent. Such apparently minor changes have called attention to a problem endemic in many languages and have caused a rethinking of how particular nouns are used and when. I think that this is, in part, what Daly is addressing. I talk further about language neutrality later in this essay.

7. See Ferdinand de Saussure, “Course in General Linguistics” (1916), trans. Wade Baskin, in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, 8-13 (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1992): “[T]o consider a term as simply the union of a certain sound with a certain concept is grossly misleading. To define it this way would isolate the term from its system. … Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (8, 9); and Jacques Derrida, “Différence,” in Easthope and McGowan, A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, 108-32: “[T]he signified concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that refers only to itself. Essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by the systematic play of differences” (115). See also Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), chap. 3, “Semiology.” His discussion of structural analysis, initially using Molière's “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme” is particularly insightful here. See 82-100. Descombes also refers to Saussure's remark “‘In a language there are only differences,’” going on to note, “That is why knowledge of any one element is conditional upon knowledge of the system,” 87.

8. Daly uses the hyphenated forms Be-ing and be-ing to emphasize their “verbness” so that the reader will not be tempted to reify, as she might if she were to read them as nouns.

9. Although topics such as those raised by Daly about women and the church are commonplace discussion today, little in the sacramental life of the Catholic church (the official position of which remains as it has been for hundreds of years) has changed regarding the understanding and role of women. See John Paul II's apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994) for evidence of this.

10. I have used the past tense here, in spite of the fact that this remains true of Catholic hierarchy and many devout men (and some women) Catholics. Arguments against ordination of women to the Catholic priesthood for example are based upon an assumed inferiority of women developed from Pauline texts in particular. The “different but equal” sentiments that condemn women to lesser positions of power in the church are also an example of this.

11. Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 53.

12. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Picador Books, 1949).

13. Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 221.

14. In the “Post Christian Introduction” in The Church and the Second Sex, Daly speaks of the position she had taken in the first edition in terms of dis-ownership. That is to say, she speaks of herself in the third person, dissociating from and critiquing the views of the earlier Daly.

15. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Part III, in particular her discussion of the Mother and the Virgin Mary, 170ff. It is beyond the scope of this essay, however, to explore in great depth the relationship between Simone de Beauvoir's work and Daly's.

16. Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 70.

17. See in particular Daly's chapters “Demon of Sexual Prejudice: Exercise in Exorcism” and “Roots of the Problem: Radical Surgery Required” in The Church and the Second Sex, 166-91.

18. Ibid., 223.

19. Ibid., 193-94.

20. Throughout this essay, where the term ‘reality’ is obviously contested, I use single quotes. Where it is not necessarily contested, I omit the quotes.

21. The irony here is that according to Meaghan Morris, this very point was made by Layleen Jayamanne at what Morris calls “the Mary Daly event” in Sydney in 1981. But in that scenario, it is a point made against Daly, rather than for her. See Morris, “A-mazing Grace,” 70.

22. Daly, Beyond God the Father, 188.

23. Ibid., 189.

24. Nancy Fraser, discussing Foucault's work, also makes this point. She says: “Now, the fact that Foucault continues to speak (or at least to murmur) the language of humanism need not be held against him. Every good Derridean will allow that there is not, at least for the time being, any other language he could speak. … Foucault himself acknowledges that he cannot simply and straightforwardly discard at will the normative associations with the metaphysics of subjectivity.” Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1989), 57.

25. See, for example, her discussion of titles and roles within a workplace context: “In women one notices ‘accommodation attitudes,’ that is, a self-abnegating and flattering manner that is almost ‘second nature.’ Conditioning to such accommodation attitudes is intensified by such customs as nonreciprocal first naming, common even when the boss (Mr. Jones, Father Jones, Professor Jones or Doctor Jones) is thirty years of age and the secretary, who is sixty, is called ‘Sally.’ A similar custom is reference by ‘the boss’ to ‘Sally’ as ‘the girl’ in the office. A young male ‘executive assistant’ doing essentially the same work as Sally, for a much higher salary, is of course not referred to as a “‘boy.’” See Daly, Beyond God the Father, 136.

26. Daly, “Be-witching: The Lust for Metamorphosis,” in Pure Lust, especially 390ff.

27. Taylor's comment occurs in a discussion of Heidegger in Mark C. Taylor, “Cleaving: Martin Heidegger,” in Alt▽rity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 42-43. In response to the interjector at the “Daly event” in Sydney in 1981, I would cite a claim such as this. Given that one grows up in a culture, how else can one speak except within its terms? Daly is challenging this and attempting to dissipate (a little) the boundaries. Taylor's quotation from Heidegger is Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Works, ed. and trans. D. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 235.

28. This point is reinforced in Daly, Pure Lust. See “On Lust and the Lusty,” passim.

29. Daly, Wickedary, 86.

30. Ibid., 64.

31. Daly, Beyond God the Father, 8.

32. I thank Marilyn Frye for this insight.

33. Daly, Beyond God the Father, 33-34.

34. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, xi.

35. Ibid.

36. Exodus 3:13-15 New Jerusalem Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1985). The “I am has sent me to you” is the translation from the New Jerusalem Bible. For example, the sentence is also translated as “I am who I am.” See RSV, Catholic ed. (Nelson, 1966).

37. New Jerusalem Bible, 85 n. g.

38. In the footnotes, the translators discuss the question of whether or not the intention of God is to give “his” name. They assume (not argue) that “he” does intend so doing and that is the context in which I am writing.

39. Exodus, New Jerusalem Bible, n. g.

40. Daly, Pure Lust, 26.

41. Daly, Wickedary, 82.

42. Daly, Pure Lust, 403.

43. Ibid., 405.

44. Ibid., 407-8.

45. Ibid., 25.

46. Ibid., 408.

47. Ibid., 91.

48. Daly Wickedary, 99.

49. Ibid., 133.

50. See Moira Gatens, “A Critique of the Sex Gender Distinction,” in A Reader in Feminist Knowledge, ed. Sneja Gunew (New York: Routledge, 1991); and see Grosz, Volatile Bodies.

51. A recent example of this is in Lesley Instone's essay “Denaturing Women,” in Contemporary Australian Feminism 2, ed. Kate Pritchard Hughes (South Melbourne: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997). Instone accepts Carlassare's diagnosis of Daly as essentialist, noting that Carlassare qualifies her position by arguing that Daly's essentialism is progressive rather than regressive. Such essentialism is strategic as it is “seen as contextual and emerging from specific historical and social situations” (155).

52. Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, 206.

53. Ibid.

54. Morris, “A-mazing Grace,” 72.

55. Thank you to Sarah Hoagland for this expression.

56. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, xi.

57. Ibid., 207.

58. Daly, Wickedary, 251.

59. Ibid., 82.

60. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 54.

61. Ibid., 54-56.

62. I would like to thank the following women for their encouragement and helpful discussions, insights, and editorial comments in relation to this paper: Marilyn Frye, Sarah Hoagland, Heather Thomson, Angela Bouris, Jan Preston-Stanley, Natalie Stoljar, Cynthia Freeland, and Philippa McLean.

References

Daly, Mary. 1973. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press.

———. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. London: Women's Press.

———. 1984. Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press.

———. 1985. The Church and the Second Sex. Boston: Beacon Press.

Daly, Mary, in cahoots with Jane Caputi. 1988. Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language. London: Women's Press.

de Beauvoir, Simone. 1949. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. London: Picador Books.

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———. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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