SOURCE: Knight, Diana. Review of What Is a Woman?, by Toril Moi. Modern Language Notes 115, no. 4 (September 2000): 827-30.

In the following review, Knight evaluates the themes of What Is a Woman?

Faced with the less than warm American reception of her Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), Toril Moi always denied that she had set out to advance the claims of high French feminism (abstract, theoretical) at the expense of its more lowly Anglo-American counterpart (pragmatic, empirical). Rather, she thought she had written a critique of both in the light of a politically committed materialist feminism. Nevertheless, a number of American feminists—unappreciative perhaps of an academic style that Moi associates with Britain in the early eighties, where pleasurable intellectual friendships could be marked by “intense intellectual disagreements carried over from the seminar room to the pub” (261)—chose to remain offended, equating female-authored critique with unsisterly betrayal. With hindsight Moi identifies...