Feminist theorists have struggled to develop accounts of
women's oppression that are historically specific enough to
capture the variability in forms of male domination but do
not neglect possible transhistorical and transcultural features.
A related challenge has been to theorize a feminist subjec-
tivity that can anchor an oppositional politics but avoid an
overly unified notion of feminist subjectivity, while neverthe-
less attending to the patterned effects that women's system-
atic location in the social whole may have on their subjectiv-
ity.These challenges were the subject of sometimes polemical
but mostly fruitful debates throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
They have been deeply shaped by two distinct developments.
The first is the political struggles and theoretical writings of
women of color, whose work on subjectivity and male dom-
ination has consistently pluralized women's subjectivity as
well as historicized and contextualized male domination in
relation to other axes of power. The second is postmodern
critiques that charge modernist modes of theorizing are
governed by either ahistorical metanarratives insufficiently
attentive to variation and contingency or essentialist under-
standings of subjectivity in either a humanist/liberal/volunta-
rist or determinist/Marxist form.