Rosi Braidotti's framing metaphor, or "figuration" as she calls it, for her theories of contemporary subjectivity, is that of the "nomadic subject", which, she feels, is an appropriate theoretical and political stance in the current critical context. She is concerned with developing new kinds of feminist figuration, so as to escape recapitulation of problematic modes of past epistemological representation. Her figuration of the nomad is a political fiction as well as a critical consciousness, an attempt to "explore and legitimate political agency, while taking as historical evidence the decline of metaphysically fixed, steady identities."(p.5) Nomadism entails a constant state of "in-process" or "becoming", which Braidotti refers to as "as-if".

The practice of "as-if", for Braidotti, is a "technique of strategic re-location in order to rescue what we need of the past in order to trace paths of transformation of our lives here and now."(p.6) Braidotti also understands "as-if" as "the affirmation of fluid boundaries, a practice of the intervals, of the interfaces, and the interstices." While grounded in postmodernist theory of repetition, parody, pastiche, etc., Braidotti is insistent that for "as-if" to be useful, it must be grounded in deliberate agency and lived experience. Postmodern subversions and parody "can be politically empowering on the condition of being sustained by a critical consciousness that aims at engendering transformations and changes." (p.7)

Braidotti feels it is necessary to engage with current academic discourses, particularly postmodernism. She understands postmodernism to be "a moment in which in-depth transformations of the system of economic production are also altering traditional social and symbolic structures." (p.2) She aims to work within postmodern parameters, albeit critically, yet without recourse to "nostalgia for an allegedly more wholesome [theoretical] past." (p.2) Postmodernism, for Braidotti, represents both a crisis in values and an opening of new possibilities.

Acknowledging that much feminist work on subjectivity has chosen to begin with the body and corporeal materiality, Braidotti notes that she intends to work with the body as "a point of overlapping between the physical, the symbolic, and the sociological."(p.4) Locating subjectivity in the body is not an essentialist position, according to Braidotti; in fact it is radically anti-essentialist, because it forces subjective specificity according to lived and complex experience and orientation within multiple discourses and physical positions.

Another theoretical starting point for Braidotti is "the affective", unconscious processes or desire, particularly the disjuncture between language and the affective. As a helpful figuration for this concept, a variation on the nomad, Braidotti suggests the polyglot, who "knows that language is not only and not even the instrument of communication but a site of symbolic exchange that links us together in a tenuous and yet workable web of mediated misunderstandings..."(p.13) The polyglot does not lay claim to any kind of natural symbolic order, but rather translates through multiple languages and identities. Furthermore, "a fundamental imbalance exists between libidinal and affective grounds and the symbolic forms available to express them."(p.13) All knowledges are necessarily incomplete and partial. Here, Braidotti nods to the role of psychoanalysis, proposing that psychoanalysis, "as a philosophy of desire", is "a theory of cultural power. The truth of the subject is always in between self and society."(p.14) However, she cautions that "arbitrary does not equat absurd and polyvalence does not mean anarchy." In other words, she calls for a system of "ethical entities" which can both incorporate multiplicity without losing the capacity for thoughtful evaluation, nor slipping into complete relativism.

At this point it is obvious to the reader that Braidotti is primarily concerned with the act of writing. She notes: "Writing is, for the polyglot, a process of undoing the illusory stability of fixed identities, bursting open the bubble of ontological security that comes from familiarity with one linguistic site."(p.15)

In working with her figuration of the nomad, Braidotti is careful to distinguish it from an exile or migrant. In terms of exile, Braidotti finds a position of "nonchalant detachment", and a luxury available only to people who are able to reject their home. In the obvious parallel to theory, she is referring here to some forms of poststructuralism and postmodernism which proclaim the absolute erasure of the unitary self. In addition, Braidotti feels that issues of exile are much too serious to be used playfully as a metaphor, given the very real forms of exile and forcible displacement now practiced globally. She is also wary of the metaphor of "migrant", who goes from one point to another with a clear destination. The migrant is more socially marked than the nomad; the migrant tends to exist within a subculture and does not easily make links with inhabitants of the hegemonic culture in which she arrives.

Thus, the nomad does not stand for homelessness (i.e. complete detachment from all roots) nor "compulsive displacement" (with its attendant longing for home), but rather for "the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity."(p.22) Braidotti argues that the nomad is a "form of political resistance to hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity." (p.23) Nomadic concepts are those which do not observe disciplinary boundaries.

Part of Braidotti's praxis involves institutional politics. She is committed to interdisciplinary feminist work in the academy, which engages with but is not limited to contemporary academic discourses.

Another part of Braidotti's theoretical praxis involves creating a theoretical style based on nomadism, which is based on three features: transdisciplinarity; bricolage of speaking voices (theoretical mixed with poetic); and a conscious commitment to feminism and feminist projects.

In this chapter, Braidotti develops a feminist politics of embodiment and sexual difference with a focus on biotechnology, situating them in a context of scientific discourse and its supporting "cultural imaginary".

Braidotti responds to this challenge with a call for subjectivity located in embodiment, which forces specificity, multiplicity, and complexity without endless slippage and relativism. Instead of organs without bodies, Braidotti argues for specifically located bodies who are more than the sum of their organs, and whose bodies are an integral part of their selves and lived experience. With this analysis, Braidotti shows that reference to bodies need not result in essentialism. However, she is mindful of the question of how deeply subjectivity can be rooted in embodiment and sexual difference before it slips into nostalgia or moralism.

By "mothers", Braidotti refers to the maternal role of women, both as "biocultural entities" as well as political subjects who are represented in feminist theory. Her central question, both in this chapter and in the book, is how feminists can "affirm the positivity of female subjectivity at a time in history when our acquired perceptions of 'the subject' are being radically questioned".(p.77)

By machines, Braidotti refers to "the scientific, political, and discursive field of technology". (p.77)

Braidotti combines the three into a discussion of new reproductive technologies, and the (normative) power of science over women's bodies. Her thesis in this chapter is that present incarnations of reproductive technology erases women discursively and physically, by "making procreation a high-tech affair." (p.79)

In the first subsection, Braidotti explores the connection between women/mothers as monsters, pointing out the association of femininity with monstrosity (in other words, the fascinating and abnormal). She relates this conjunction to mainstream epistemology that defines difference as threatening (and reifies the concept of the norm), such that misogyny is de facto implicated in the entire phallogocentric discursive system. Linking this notion to her second subsection, Braidotti points out that the study of teratology/abnormality has formed a significant part of scientific discourse, and that "scientific rationality is implicitly normative; it functions by exclusion and disqualification according to a dualistic logic." (p.84) The third subsection is concerned with the consequences of this difference/femininity-phobic paradigm; namely, the common cultural fantasy of a child born from a man, and the concomitant erasure of the maternal body. As Braidotti writes: "Once reproduction becomes the pure result of mental efforts, the appropriation of the feminine is complete".(p.89) The earlier fascination with and wonder at difference has been replaced with a desire for normativity, and obliteration of deviation, which Braidotti deals with in the fourth subsection.

Braidotti concludes by noting that it is imperative for feminists to continue to explore the links between technology (as discourse and practice) and the body, so that concepts of embodied subjectivity can be explored in the physiological, cultural, and social arenas.

One common feature of feminist philosophy which Braidotti identifies is the critique of traditional dualist thinking which posits maleness as universal and femaleness as difference, and moreover that this dualist paradigm has been held to be natural, or unchanging. New visions of feminist subjectivity tend to conceive of subjectivity as a process with multiple variables, as opposed to an ontological given. Furthermore, new forms of feminist subjectivity stress the experiential, embodied specificity of a feminist subject, which although it begins in the same place as biological essentialism (namely, with the body), is a radical departure from essentialist models. Though essentialist models were fraught with problems, they were nevertheless strategically useful for feminists at a certain historical point. However, now that these categories have been called into question, the central challenge thus becomes how to develop a paradigm of embodied subjectivity after static categories of gender duality have collapsed. How can feminists articulate both an embodied, sexed identity in terms of both "radical historical specificity" and "the new figuration of humanity"? Braidotti believes that the answer lies in the way that feminists approach difference, which is a challenge to traditional conceptions of difference as abnormality/deviation/threat. She asks: "How can we build a new kind of collectivity in differences?"(p.99)

Braidotti notes that feminist work in subjectivity goes beyond merely working with gender (though that itself is, of course, an important project), to a fundamental intervention into the politics of subjectivity, both in terms of identity formation and moving from object to active agent. Thus Braidotti understands this as both a material/institutional and semiotic/discursive process which is both utopian/visionary and regulative/normative.

Braidotti then moves into observing how other theorists have developed alternative visions of difference, both conceptually and methdologically. She finds French poststructuralism to be useful for this project, in that it attempts to re-define the theoretical process in order to explore alternative visions of subjectivity. She cites Deleuze as an example of how to think about the challenge of dealing with "the living process of the transformation of the self".(p.100) According to Braidotti, Deleuze views the process of self-development as a succession of experiential "layers", with thinking not about normativity and rationality, but about change and continual transformation. Furthermore, Deleuze privileges affective dimensions of philosophy which tend to be at odds with rational consciousness; he values intensity of thought over "rightness" of thought. This intensity propels us outwards as thinking subjects, towards "multiple becomings".(p.102) Therefore, Braidotti notes, this is a philosophical stance well-suited for political subjectivity in that it embraces multiplicity and internal contradiction while it extends itself outwards (instead of collapsing into narcissistic self-contemplation).

To assign embodiment to the subject is not to situate the subject as a kind of essential biological entity, but rather to view it as "a term in a process of intersecting forces (affects), spatio-temporal variables that are characterized by their mobility, changeability, and transitory nature."(p.112) Thus embodiment refers to a sort of experiential being-in-the-world, as well as an active mediation of diverse identities. Furthermore, for Deleuze, nothing happens at the centre; there is no core of identity; rather diverse processes circulate around the margins of the self.

How does Braidotti, then, take this model up? She identifies a contradictory relationship with it, in that "[o]n the one hand, the becoming-minority/nomad/molecular/woman is posited as the general figuration for the new philosophical subjectivity. On the other hand, however, not all the forms taken by the process of becoming are equivalent."(p.114)

Deleuze calls for feminists to acknowledge a "postgender" world and not get stuck on "women" as a conceptual entity. However, as several theorists such as Irigaray and Hartsock have noted, "one cannot deconstruct a subjectivity one has never controlled." (p.117) The power to play with subjectivity is a luxury enjoyed by those who are already secure in the assertion of their subjecthood.

Three more problems in Deleuze's theory, identified by Braidotti, are: "an inconsistent approach to the issue of the 'becoming-woman'; the reduction of sexual difference to one variable among many, which can and should be dissolved…; and an assumption of symmetry in the speaking stances of the two sexes."(p.117)

The first problem, the inconsistency of the "becoming-woman", is not entirely clear to me. Is Braidotti arguing here that Deleuze has not fully developed his notion of the feminine, or that he appears ambivalent about its value?

Third, Braidotti argues that Deleuze's ascribed equivalence of sexed subjectivity with regard to the phallogocentric order is problematic. This is perhaps the most significant problem with this kind of theory, in that it does not acknowledge its origins in privilege. As Braidotti writes, "Deleuze consequently omits any reference to and consequently fails to take seriously what I see as the central point of the feminist revindication of sexual difference, namely that there is no symmetry between the sexes."(p.118) We may think here of Modleski's "feminism without women"; or rather "women without feminism", for Deleuze's women are women divorced from social context, or even the material bodies which he takes as his point of entry. We might also ask here, in the spirit of Ahmed's "which differences?", "which subjectivities?" It becomes clear that this kind of play of subjectivity is an epistemological luxury.

In contrast, Braidotti notes that theories of embodied female subjectivity employ "a self-reflexive mode of analysis, aimed at articulating the critique of power in discourse with the affirmation of alternative forms of subjectivity… at the articulation of questions of individual gendered identity with issues related to political subjectivity."(p.120) In addition, the identity-subjectivity relation indicates the relationship between desire/unconscious and self-regulated consciousness.

Hence, Braidotti argues, it is not possible simply to insert new wine in old bottles; rather a feminist project of subjectivity which "implies the transformation of the very structures and images of thought, not just the propositional content of the thoughts."(p.120) The theory which Deleuze develops as "an embodied male subject for whom the dissolution of identities based on the phallus results in bypassing gender altogether, toward a multiple sexuality", is not appropriate for female/feminist embodied subjects.

Chapter Six, "The Ethics of Sexual Difference: The Case of Foucault and Irigaray"

In this chapter, Braidotti takes up the work of Foucault and Irigaray to discuss "the fundamental dissonance between on the one hand the discourse of the crisis of the logos and of its feminine, and on the other the project of feminism in terms of sexual difference."(p.125) She juxtaposes the two to show the disparity in both the origin and direction of their work, in that Foucault proposes a new system that remains "within the confines of sexual sameness" (p.125), while Irigaray argues for a radical re-thinking of "difference" as a point of entry for the development of female subjectivity. Given that "the relationship between the metaphorizations of the feminine and feminist discourse and practice is to be thought out in terms of power and strategy"(p.124), this comparison of their ethical theories illustrates the asymmetry in male and female theoretical subjectivities. Proposing that the women's movement was one of the most significant catalysts for the displacement of the rational subject, Braidotti notes that the consequent interest in "the feminine" has had some positive effects on male philosophers, but that the feminist response to the question of sexual difference has been much different. Thus, it is clear to Braidotti that male and female theoretical subjectivities are articulated in different contexts and with different concerns.

Arguing that Foucault's positioning of himself in relationship to "the exercise of the activity of thought" represents an ethical stance, Braidotti identifies in Foucault's theory three main modes of objectification that convert humans to subjects: scientific discourse; "dividing practices" of "exclusion, separation, and domination within oneself as well as toward others"(p.127); and "internal modes of submission and domination by the subject"(p.127). In Foucault's model, the male body is equated with the body politic, which is useful for critically examining phallocentric discursive structures, and the homosexual male bond which forms the foundation of the social contract. However, nothing here is said about women, and their absence is resounding. As Braidotti concludes, in Foucault's theory, "phallogocentric discourse is a specific political and libidinal economy--one that assigns the sexes to precise roles, poles, and functions, to the detriment of the feminine."(p.129)

In contrast, for Luce Irigaray, "the crisis that spells the death of the logocentric subject opens the condition of possibility for the expression of female sexuality."(p.130) Irigaray's critique of modernity proceeds from a critique of the rational subject and its intrinsic relationship to masculinity. Thus her work has two purposes: to separate the taken-for-granted connection between the masculine and the norm/universal; and to fill the gap with a new language of the feminine (it should be noted that Irigaray's conception of the feminine differs from that espoused by many male philosophers; this feminine does not exist as other in relation to the logocentric masculine subject). Irigaray seeks a kind of double discourse in her project: she wishes to create a new form of sexed communication but still remain in discussion with her mainstream philosophical sources. Her model of the feminine is largely in a not-yet-born state, so that we are required to think of it as a process, as Braidotti notes: "[it] is a woman-defined-feminine and as such it is still a blank, it is not yet there, we are to think of it in the conditional mode: how can the feminine of/in/by women come into being in the sexually undifferentiated system of our culture? What are the conditions that would make the first coming of the female subject possible?"(p.131) The basis of Irigaray's work rests on a profound assumption about sexual difference: the difference between the sexes is essential, it constructs lived experience, and it is an inevitable frame of reference for humans. While this is ostensibly a limited essentialist claim, Braidotti argues that it provides a useful point of entry for theory and politics, noting that "the essentialist belief in ontological difference is a political strategy aimed at stating the specificity of female subjectivity, sexuality, and experience while also denouncing the logic of sexual indifferentiation of phallogocentric discourse."(p.131) The end result of this for an ethical theory is "finding and enacting enabling representations of a new female humanity and a female sense of the divine."(p.133)

Therefore the work of Foucault and Irigaray has several differences. First, for Foucault, sexual sameness is the foundation of a critique, while for Irigaray, sexual difference is the point of entry. Whereas Foucault grounds his critique in history, Irigaray's work has a looking-forwardness in its emphasis on the futurity of women's subjectivities. Braidotti argues that these differences indicate "that conceptual thinking is not neutral but rather very sexual-specific", but that this dissonance is actually positive, in that "the fundamental asymmetry in the thought of sexual difference as elaborated by men and women is precisely what makes the intellectual dialogue between them possible."(p.135)

Chapter Seven, "Envy; or, With Your Brains and My Looks"

In this chapter, Braidotti examines "malestream" poststructuralist philosophy, to ask "What is the position of men in feminism? How does the nomadic feminist regard this issue?"(p.137) In challenging the notion that men should be permitted into feminist space, Braidotti writes feminism as "Pheminism" to indicate an ironic engagement with "phallic subtexts".(p.137)

Braidotti is critical of male participation in feminist theory, given the differential weight accorded to male and female subjectivity by virtue of existing in a phallocentric symbolic and material system. She writes sardonically, "Well may the high priests of postmodernism preach the deconstruction and fragmentation of the subject…well may they keep reading into feminism the image of the crisis of their own acquired perceptions of human consciousness. The truth of the matter is: one cannot deconstruct a subjectivity one has never been fully granted: one cannot diffuse a sexuality that has historically been defined as dark and mysterious. In order to announce the death of the subject one must first have gained the right to speak as one; in order to demystify metadiscourse one must first gain access to a place of enunciation."(p.141) Braidotti argues that the "crisis of the subject", in effect, shifts the terms of engagement so that a "reasoned critique of reason" is never articulated, and the result, for women, is the same.

Reiterating that theoretical movements must always be understood in terms of power and strategy, Braidotti declares her suspicion of male philosophers who, in paroxysms of "male uterus envy", are eager to cast off the constraints of unitary subjectivity so easily in a rush towards "the feminine".

Thus, in restating a commitment towards the materiality of actual women, Braidotti argues that feminism is about more than a theory among theories, more than another product which may be consumed; rather it is "also the liberation of women's ontological desire to be female subjects… to make sexual difference operative at last."(p.144)

Chapter Eight, "Sexual Difference as a Nomadic Political Project"

In this chapter, Braidotti begins to put together her theory of nomadic consciousness with sexual difference. She begins by outlining the role of "difference" in European history, then turns to the role of "difference" in feminist practice. Historically, according to Braidotti, "difference" has existed in an unequally weighted binary in which difference was negative, other, not-like-us. In contrast, "difference" in feminist theory has enjoyed a rather more contradictory status.

Far from dismissing the valorization of difference as an essentialist project, Braidotti wishes to "valorize sexual difference as a project."(p.149) She identifies an interrelationship between female identity, feminist subjectivity, and "the radical epistemology of nomadic transitions from a perspective of positive sexual difference."(p.149)

Braidotti is hopeful that some of the theorists of the 1990s will go on to develop more fruitful ways of thinking about difference. She identifies several streams with this potential: feminist critical theorists who use the German critical tradition; French-based thinkers; Italian feminists who use Irigaray, the women's movement and organized leftist politics; lesbian radicalism such as that of Wittig; and postcolonial/critical race theorists. Central to these new forms of theory, proposes Braidotti, is "the process of constitution of subjectivity as part of [a] network of power and knowledge."(p.157) In other words, a patriarchal mode of representation/symbolic system cannot be worked within, as its very existence is predicated on certain kinds of categories. Absence in this sense is not an oversight by sexist theorists, but rather a structural condition of the system itself, and this system operates on both a material/institutional and discursive/symbolic level, producing and regulating forms of subjectivity. In this model, gender serves as a "regulatory fiction" which creates its own categories of enunciation and enactment as a condition of its being.

Thus, the new question for feminists, given this theoretical and historical context, is how to re-define female subjectivity after discarding the dualism of gender, "privileging notions of the self as process, complexity, interrelatedness, postcolonial simultaneities of oppression, and the multilayered technology of the self?"(p.157) To put this a different way, how can we develop identities that take account of difference between, difference among, and difference within, and conceptualize identity/subjectivity as a continuous dynamic process? This requires both critical/oppositional and positive/constructive components.

Braidotti divides her "feminist nomadism" project into three parts, roughly chronologically organized, with an understanding that all three can co-exist and all are strategic and theoretical options depending on context.

The first part is sexual difference conceptualized as difference between men and women, with men as the normative subjects in the phallogocentric order, and women as irrational other. On this analytic level, the project for feminists is the critique of androcentric universalism, and "the political will to assert the specificity of the lived, female bodily experience; the refusal to disembody sexual difference into a new allegedly 'postmodern' and 'antiessentialist' subject, and the will to reconnect the whole debate on difference to the bodily existence and experience of women."(p.160) The crucial issue here is the simultaneous advocacy for both deconstruction of the authority of the rational subject, and for the particularity of an alternative female subject.

The second level of analysis concerns conceptualizing differences among women. The question on this level is how to "create, legitimate, and represent a multiplicity of alternative forms of feminist subjectivity without falling into relativism."(p.162) Feminist engagement requires "both an epistemological and political distinction between woman and feminist."(p.163) Thus feminists must articulate a course between arguing for the commonality of women's situations and experiences, without homogenizing them; there must be an understanding of the disjuncture between "Woman" and "women". As Braidotti cautions, "the idea of the politics of location is very important."(p.163)

The third level of analysis identified by Braidotti is differences within each woman. Each embodied female subject represents a complex network of identities and positions, and must be conceived of as a process in a constant state of dynamic "becoming", rather than a thing. As such it can never be wholly represented. Braidotti notes that "it is also possible to posit feminist subjectivity as an object of desire for women". (p.167)

Given these three levels of analysis, then, "how to account for a process of becoming while empowering women's historical agency?"(p.168) Braidotti acknowledges that this is a complex project requiring "a knot of interrelated questions that play on different layers, registers, and levels of the self."(p.168) Action happens at the level of identity, subjectivity, and differences among women, and in order to support this process, feminists must begin without a unitary portrait of the self, and adopt instead one which is constantly divided within and without. "[T]ransformation", argues Braidotti, "can only be achieved through de-essentialized embodiment or strategically re-essentialized embodiment: by working through the multilayered structures of one's embodied self."(p.171)

Chapter Nine, "The Politics of Ontological Difference"

Having thus outlined some of the central theoretical concerns for feminists in terms of subjectivity, Braidotti now begins to elucidate some of the strategic questions for feminist engagement. Her aim here is both to develop ideas for feminist projects as well as to deconstruct the logic of essentialism which reduces it to a biological determinism. Her defense of essentialism is predicated on three assumptions: first, that in order to make sexual difference part of a political strategy, feminists need to resist the dissociation of "the feminine" from real women, " of the empirical from the symbolic, or of the material from the discursive, or of sex from gender."(p.177) Second, that this question of sexual difference is significant on both an epistemological and a political level. Third, that "in thinking about sexual difference one is led, by the very structure of the problem, to the metaphysical question of essence."(p.177)

This project, according to Braidotti, requires a "thinking through" of the complex relations between being a woman and being a feminist; this process has both political implications in its engagement with the source of political subjectivity, as well as personal implications for "transformation of self, other, and society."(p.178) Feminism, then, is a way of thinking which is both a speaking stance and a theory of the subject. It is less an ideological movement (in the sense of a body of ideas) and more of an epistemological (in the sense of critical engagement with theory) movement. To this end, Braidotti asks: "how does a collective movement reinvent the definition of the subjective self?" (p.179) And if embodiment is our starting point for this endeavour, "how to rethink the body in terms that are neither biological nor sociological[?]"(p.184)

The starting point, for Braidotti, of declaration of the female subject is "woman" as both representation and experience, for "'I, woman' am the direct empirical referent of everything that has been theorized about femininity, the female subject, and the feminine. 'I, woman' am affected directly and in my everyday life by what has been made of the subject of 'Woman'; I have paid in my very body for the metaphors and images that our culture has deemed fit to produce of 'Woman'."(p.187) So, a re-thinking of "the feminine", according to Braidotti, is not a mere textual game but a serious political project which has consequences both at the material and representational level.

How, then, to theorize this becoming? Braidotti suggests the "conditional present" as a way of representing this, writing that it "posits the continuity of desire as the only unifying agent between self and other, subject and history."(p.189)

Chapter Ten, "On the Female Feminist Subject; or, From 'She-Self' to 'She-Other'"

In this chapter, using examples drawn from postmodernist literature, Braidotti reiterates her commitment to a "vision of the subject as an interface of will with desire."(p.199) Given her attention to the embodiment of the subject, how then "to reconcile the feminist critiques of the priority traditionally granted to the variable sexuality in the Western discourse about the subject with the feminist proposition of redefining the embodied subject in a network of interrelated variables of which sexuality is but one, set alongside other powerful axes of subjectification…"(p.199) This subject is the "she-self", such that "she" is situated in everything related to "Woman" and "the feminine", and the "self" is situated in embodied material reality.

Braidotti finds the solution to this question in "language, not in anatomy."(p.201) Given this new model of the female subject, how to represent it? The feminist here is assigned a responsibility for "thinking about thinking".(p.203) Evoking Collins' call for ethical theory, Braidotti argues that feminists must generate theory that is ethical and relational, and that thinks beyond phallogocentric frames of reference.

Chapter Eleven, "Women's Studies and the Politics of Difference"

Braidotti does not see reification of a new feminist canon of high theory, with a glorification of "philosopher-queens" as the solution. Rather, what is needed in women's studies, in the context of the concerns Braidotti has identified, is a critique of the idea of high theory itself, with the concomitant critique of the sovereign intellectual. Women's studies, then, has a responsibility to truly re-think institutional structures, texts, discourses, and practices so that it clarifies and challenges power relations within the academy and in relation to knowledge.

Chapter Twelve, "Ethics Revisited: Women and/in Philosophy"

In this chapter, Braidotti challenges the status of philosophy as a discipline which functions as a normative discursive model. She argues that feminists have used a variety of strategies to subvert this model, and is critical of the concomitant effort by male philosophers to use the trope of "the feminine" in response to this wave of feminist philosophical theorizing.

Chapter Thirteen, "The Subject in Feminism"

Chapter Fourteen, "United States of Europe or United Colours of Benetton? Some Feminist Thoughts on the New Common European Community"

In this chapter, Braidotti discusses the project of European unification and its implications for feminist work and women's studies. One point of critique for Braidotti is the normative use of "high" and "low" theory in the European institutional academy. Paradoxically, the commodification of the university means that the institution rails against "low" culture, yet is committed to "the lowest possible common denominator of cultural achievement: marketable profits."(p.248) Thus Braidotti calls for a re-invigoration and re-evaluation of the feminist project of women's studies in a context of transnational economies and global communication. Instead of trying to reify "high theory", she asks, why not market more convincingly the products of "high culture"? How are feminists to disperse their work in this transnational market economy?

Braidotti signifies the importance of thinking through feminism within a global context, as part of an examination of issues related to individual citizenship. She returns to her model of feminist as nomad and migrant.

Chapter Fifteen, "Theories of Gender, or, 'Language is a Virus'"

In this chapter, Braidotti surveys feminist theories of gender, taking account of the diversity of feminist approaches to gender, and suggesting that "gender" can be a useful tool of analysis for other disciplines, in that it "attempts to articulate an alternative to the pretense to objectivity, neutrality, and universality of scientific knowledge".(p.259) Attention to gender has resulted in new kinds of knowledge that are interested in situatedness as well as partiality.

The second stage of gender theories which Braidotti distinguishes is in terms of the political economy of the sex-gender system. In this conception, sex is separated from gender, and gender is a participant in a social, economic, and cultural order which is predicated on "concentrating material and symbolic capital in the hands of the fathers…the sex/gender distinction is turned into a political economy where the institution of heterosexuality supports the male homosocial bond…"(p.268) Thus the system of sex/gender is a fundamental part of the material and symbolic structures of society. Significant, too, in this analysis is the asymmetry of gender, in that gender "is the mark of a position of subordination, which is qualified by a number of powerful variables."(p.268) Gender, here, is thus an important but not the only factor in women's experiences; rather gender is part of "a complex network of power formations".(p.269) Some feminists work with the framework of political economy to show that women are a social class, and that women's oppression as a gender can set the stage for revolution as a class. Other feminists, such as Wittig, argue that gender can only have meaning within a heterosexual system of exchange in which the male is normative. Thus this stage of gender theories is characterized by an expansion of the terms of gender, an acknowledgement of a variety of intersecting factors, and conceptualizations of the structural elements of gender as a system.

The third stage of gender theories, as identified by Braidotti, concerns theories developed within an institutional context in the academy. At this point, gender as a simple binary is no longer theoretically operative, and feminists struggle to redefine female subjectivity in the context of theorizing unity and difference. This contemporary model of gender and subjectivity returns us to Braidotti's central project, which is to work with female subjectivity as a process, in which the "she-self" is in a state of constant flux and change.