Alcoff on hating your parents

But that move, to hate your mother and father, sounds like a statement that’s overtly counter to everything feminism has tried to develop theoretically over the last century. In the move from “born of woman” to “adopted by the father” there’s a rejection of the genealogical tie, there’s a rejection of materiality and semantic tie, and that rejection of the materiality and the genealogical is always a rejection of the female and the mother. To paraphrase Irigaray, it’s an old dream of transcendence. Is this the price of universalism: a revival of old-fashioned patriarchy?

–Linda Alcoff, in a response to Slavoj Zizek