Kristeva's delineation of Western feminism uses the trope of a circle for the concept of time which inspires her second feminist moment. This circularity corresponds to a focus on the female body as a site where feminist politics ground their liberatory narratives. The purpose of Part Two is to analyse the ways in which Russ's fiction participates in such liberatory narratives. As Part One has shown, Russ's fictional texts intersect on many levels with her own critical work as well as with other contemporaneous materialist feminist discourses on agency. My analysis of these intersections foregrounded how Russ narrativizes the issue of agency in her fiction and how her texts destabilize agency at the same time as they appropriate it for women. Similar intersections exist between Russ's work and feminist discourses on sexual difference. At these crossroads, the female body, sexuality and the act of storytelling coalesce and become the basis for an analysis of power whose ultimate aim is not to establish equality, but to confirm difference and to celebrate women's bonds to other women. Thus approaching Russ's oeuvre from the thematic angle of ‘sexuality’ further underscores how agency remains an unstable concept in her writing. Russ's texts do not attempt to resolve the fundamental contradiction between the explicitly anti–essentialist claim for equal agency on one hand, and the ultimately essentialist demand for an autonomous, genuinely femalesexuality.

Since radical materialist feminism explained and demanded agency in Marxist terms, I explored the function of agency in Russ's novels by intersecting these texts with Marxist dialectics, showing similarities and significant departures. Part Two shifts the focus onto psychoanalysis as an exploration of how oppressive power structures work in Western patriarchal cultures. These two systems of analysis have become useful for feminism not in spite of their origin in patriarchal discourse but because of it. The pre–feminist version of Marxism was gender–blind, and psychoanalysis regarded female sexuality as the mirror image/negation of the male norm. However, if one reads Marx and Freud and their followers as descriptions not of ‘reality’ but of patriarchal constructionsof reality, and if one turns the tools of both systems against patriarchy, they become powerful resources for criticism.