Equality

Other feminists deconstruct the apparently gender-neutral qualities said to ground human equality and question the putative neutrality of the liberal state. They examine abstract notions of reason and the individual posited by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) or John Rawls (1921–2002) to warrant formal equality. Abstract reason and individualism require a split between the particular, phenomenal, material, embodied person and the universal, noumenal, unsituated mind. The identification of body with error and mind with capacity to grasp truth maps too neatly with the gendered split of female (body)/male (mind). In particular, some argue, it replicates the devaluation or denial of the unique, generative power of women—only they can give birth to children. Excluding female difference from the public world enables the actual constitution of its modal citizens, male heads of households, to remain obscured. Incorporating sexually differentiated embodiment within reason would undermine its universalistic appearance and hence its capacity to ground equality. If females were no longer the only markers of embodied difference, the gender specificity of all citizens could no longer be denied. Once this were to occur, the patriarchally ordered nature of existing public worlds would be evident. Unless transformed, a patriarchal state cannot institute true gender equality.

Some deconstructive approaches raise the further question of whether there are any universalizable (gender-neutral) qualities that could ground equality, and if so what they might be. Equality would have to be radically rethought without recourse to the presumption that such qualities exist. Such questions intersect with the concerns of gender activists in "postcolonial" states. Here, as in the West, states may use gender as the basis for differential social control and distribution of resources, but such practices may also be justified in the name of a "tradition" that resists contemporary forms of cultural and political-economic Western imperialism. For example, in contemporary Iran and Saudi Arabia, state-sanctioned constraints on women's mobility, public activities, and employment are justified as protecting women's modesty. This modesty is said to be required by the Koran, and in turn Islam is represented as a barrier to postcolonialist Western domination. Given the effects of globalization and transnational politics on the post-colonial states, whether discourses of equality are intrinsically "Western" and colonizing remains an important concern for feminists of these countries.