The Fantasy Of Individuality Av Almudena Hernando

The Enlightenment promised humanity a bright future of emancipation which never actuallymaterialized. Instead, our social order is still based on gender inequality, which rests upon afalse conviction: that the individual can be conceived of as separate from community; that themore individualized a person is, the less they need to establish links with their communityto feel safe; and that the more they use reason to build a relationship with the world, the lessthey need emotions. Th is conviction, which guides the ideals of our social system, is basedon a fantasy: the fantasy of individuality.This volume is a step in fleshing out the historical reasons for gender inequality from theorigins of humankind to present times in the Western world. It is a theoretically-informedand up-to-date overview of the history of gender inequality that takes as its starting pointthe mechanisms through which human beings construct their self-identity.Starting from a peripheral, interdisciplinary and heterodox perspective, this book intends toappraise the complexity of gender identity in all its richness and diversity. It seeks to understandthe persistence of relationality in supposedly fully individualized male selves, and theconstruction of new forms of individuality among women that did not follow the masculinemodel. It is argued here that by balancing community and self beyond the contradictions ofhegemonic masculinity, modern women are struggling to build a new, more empoweringform of personhood.The author is an archaeologist, who uses her discipline not only to provide data, theory anda long-term perspective, but also in a metaphorical sense: to construct a socio-historicalgenealogy of current gender systems, through an examination of how personhood and self- identityhave been constructed in the Western world.