Elemental Philosophy: Language and Ontology in Mary Daly's Texts

Abstract

In 'The Church and the Second Sex', originally published in 1968, Mary Daly took seriously the place of language in the social production of women and their experiences. She did this within a theological context. Her denunciation of the Eternal Feminine, an essentializing conception of women that held that women had a fixed, unchanging nature, was accompanied by a strong stand for a social constructionist perspective that was an attempt to refocus and rethink the idea of Woman. Her work was and remains blatantly political and strategic, a deliberate search to reconceive the ideas of Woman and divinity within her own divisive and destabilizing discursive framework.