Feminist Philosophy and The Forgetting of Feminine Being

Abstract

Feminist philosophy represents one of the most significant contemporary critical approaches that has sought to interrogate the epistemic structures responsible for consolidating patriarchal dominance and Western centrality in shaping human consciousness. Yet despite its emancipatory aspirations and its effort to redistribute epistemological authority, this project faces a profound ontological dilemma concerning the position of the feminine within its own discourse. While feminism has worked to liberate “woman” as a historical and socio-cultural construct, the question of “the feminine” as a mode of being that exceeds gendered representation has often remained subject to conceptual displacement or ontological oblivion. This dilemma manifests itself in three central forms. First, an anthropological death that appears in the reproduction of stereotypical representations of women under the claim of overcoming them. Second, an ideological death that emerges when feminist discourse becomes a closed system, thereby losing its capacity for self-critique and reproducing mechanisms of exclusion in inverted forms. Third, a methodological death reflected in the limitations of the analytical tools employed and their inability to fully grasp the existential and cultural complexity of feminine experience. This study seeks to deconstruct these three dimensions through an interrogative philosophical approach that rethinks the relationship between woman, the feminine, and the world. It ultimately aims to reopen the feminist question within an ontological horizon that transcends binaries of power and metaphysical oppositions, restoring the feminine as a horizon of understanding rather than merely an object of representation