For unlike the male theorists – Derrida, Jameson, Lyotard, etc. – who sought to abandon what they had come to see as problematic and exclusive conceptions of self-hood, feminist theorists “had not yet experienced this ‘whole’ or ‘unitary’ or ‘essential’ subjectivity that their male counterparts were so eager to get beyond" (12).
Although "most contemporary feminisms have refused to espouse an extreme anti-humanism," Waugh argues that "they have also recognized the contradictions in that liberal-humanism theory which posits a natural 'self' outside, or prior to, the social. What they have articulated instead is a core belief in a self which, althogh contradictory, non-unitary, and historically produced through 'discursive' and ideological formations, nevertheless has a material existence and history in actual human relationships, beginning crucially with those between infant and caretakers at the start of life" (14).
For Waugh, "it is the gradual recognition of the value of construing human identity in terms of relationships and dispersal, rather than as a unitary, self-directing, isolated ego. which has fundamentally altered the course of modern and contemporary women's writing to challenge gender stereotypes" (12-3).