[4] These accounts have historically centered on cisgender women, but philosophers such as Gayle Salamon,[5] Talia Mae Bettcher[6] and Robin Dembroff[7] have sought to further explain the genders of transgender and non-binary people.
[1] Beauvoir rejects explanations based on biology, psychoanalytic theory and historical materialism, advancing instead a phenomenological investigation influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
[14] Écriture féminine is a concept from psychoanalytic French feminism that emphasizes the connection between women's writing and their bodies.
[15] In This Sex Which is Not One (1977), Luce Irigaray seeks to create a psychoanalytic narrative that incorporates Lacanian ideas while challenging its phallocentric elements.
[16] Irigaray contends that women can cultivate a sense of identity and sexuality without needing to conform to phallic ideals, and that the female body is multiplicitous.
[20] Conversely, Rosalyn Diprose lends a hard-line Foucauldian interpretation to her understanding of gender performance's political reach, as one's identity "is built on the invasion of the self by the gestures of others, who, by referring to other others, are already social beings".
[21] Feminist theologian Mary Daly proposed in her work Gyn/Ecology (1978) the existence of a feminine nature that should be defended against "male barrenness".
Elizabeth Spelman identified in the 1980s a predominance of realism in Western feminist theory, which she accused of overlooking the differences between women.