Anxiety Of Women’s Identity And The Modernity Of Truth

Under the influence of modernism, the concept of ’men’ has not changed much, while how to understand the concept of ’women’ has become controversial. Beauvoir pointed out that the reason behind this issue is the concept of man equals to men, and the concept of women is invented in contrast to men. When feminism tries to achieve gender equality, how to understand the concept of’women’ becomes the first question to answer. What figure that women identify to stands for the principle of freedom and equality? This question leads to a lasting and hot debate among feminism in the twentieth century. It is argued in this paper that the divergence of female identity is actually the epitome of modern debate of truth. Thus, the anxiety of female identity brought by the uncertain identification originates from Nietzsche’s philosophy about truth. In the ideological origin, several important feminists in the" twentieth century use Nietzsche’s philosophy from different facet individually. Only in the context of Nietzsche’s criticism of modernism can this debate of female identity be understood thoroughly. Around the relation between Nietzsche’s criticism of truth and modern feminism, the first chapter reviews the discussion about female identity in feminism and the meaning of Nietzsche’s philosophy in this discussion. The second chapter begins to discuss how Beauvoir criticizes the essence of women and traditional female role from Nietzsche’s truth of becoming. The third chapter deals with how Betty Friedan embodies the subjectival truth of women under the influence of Beauvoir and how Betty Friedan’s feminism creates a bigger anxiety in the female identity. The fourth chapter explains the relation between Judith Butler, Nietzsche and Beauvoir. In contrast to Beauvoir, Butler uses a more comprehensive version of Nietzsche’s philosophy and thus there is continuity as well as difference between Butler and Beauvoir.