Feminist Philosophy and The Forgetting of Feminine Being

Abstract

Feminist philosophy represents one of the most prominent contemporary critical approaches to interrogating the epistemic structures that have consolidated patriarchal dominance and Western centrism in the formation of human consciousness. However, despite its emancipatory aspirations and its endeavour to redistribute epistemological authority, this project confronts a profound ontological problem concerning the position of the feminine within its own discourse. While feminism has laboured to liberate 'woman' as a social and historical construct, the question of feminism as a mode of being that exceeds the horizon of gendered representation has remained subject to forgetting or conceptual displacement. This problem manifests in three principal configurations. First, an anthropological death becomes apparent in the reproduction of stereotypical representations of women under the guise of transcending them. Second, ideological death emerges when feminist discourse is transformed into a closed system that loses its capacity for self-critique and reproduces mechanisms of exclusion in inverted form. Third, epistemological death is reflected in the limitations of the analytical tools employed, which are unable to encompass the existential and cultural complexity of the feminine experience. This study seeks to deconstruct these three levels through an interrogative approach that reconsiders the relationships among women, feminists, and the world. In so doing, it aims to reopen the question of feminism within an ontological horizon that moves beyond binaries of power and metaphysical oppositions and to retrieve feminism as a horizon of understanding rather than merely an object of representation.