Radical materialist feminists and feminists concerned with sexual difference have demanded that images of women in literature speak to the actual experience of women in ‘real life’. Parts one and Two explored ways in which Russ's fiction intersects with these concerns. The readings showed that while Russ's work does develop from prefeminist to explicitly feminist and critically feminist interpretations of social power and sexuality, both concerns are present in most texts and in tension with each other. However, those readings also indicated that there is a third strand in her writing, which undermines and contradicts the foundations of these first two moments in feminism. Feminist theory affiliated with this third moment, which corresponds to Kristeva's third generation, has in various ways criticized the first two moment's investment in universalizing enlightenment categories. Such thinkers for example examine the way in which the category ‘woman’ itself is produced in (patriarchal) discourses. Since to these theories there is no such thing as the essentially female/feminine outside the symbolic order, woman's ‘authentic’ experience does not exist except as a utopian dream—a line of argumentation which at first sight might look like a clever anti-feminist plot. If ‘woman’ is just a product of discourse, anything connected to a universal ‘women's cause’ becomes an essentialist regression and a corroboration of the binary gender system: every time a woman acts to fight for the rights of her sex-class, she actually perpetuates and justifies the system of categorization that created the oppression; every time a woman decides to form primary relationships with women and to put men second, thinking she can ‘escape’ patriarchy, she confirms the expulsion of women from the symbolic order. On the other hand, merely deconstructing patriarchal discourse in a language and medium inaccessible to people outside academia does not change the economic position of women, nor does it release their sexuality from their economic role in reproduction. Russ ingeniously manoeuvres her texts out of this apparent impasse: consciously working with these contradictions, she creates an open subject position for her female characters. This open subject position enables identities that destabilize the closed systems of sex class and sexual difference, without relinquishing the political force of these categories.