  With this socially-constructed notion of gender, early second-wave theorists sought out an understanding of woman as a universal subject and agent of feminist politics.   A major set of fault lines in feminist thought since the 1990s is over the questions of the subject of “woman.” According to Mary Dietz’s 2003 article laying out the field, there are two large groups here.  One champions the category of woman (in the singular and universal), arguing that the specificity of women’s identity, their sexual difference from men, should be appreciated and revalued. (The other, discussed below, takes up women’s diversity.) This “difference feminism” includes two distinct groups: (i) those who look at how gendered sexual difference is socially constituted and (ii) those who look at how sexual difference is constructed symbolically and psychoanalytically. The first, social difference feminism, includes theories that revalue mothering and caring and has been developed largely in the Anglo-American context. (See for example Tronto 1993 and Held 1995.) The second, symbolic difference feminism, is that of what are often referred to as the French Feminists, including Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva. They belong in this group to the extent that they value and distinguish women’s specific sexual difference from men’s. Irigaray’s focus on sexual difference is emblematic of this. Social-difference and symbolic-difference feminisms have very little to do with each other but, Dietz argues, they share the notion that a feminist politics requires a category woman that has a determinate meaning (Dietz 2003, 403; Nicholson 1994, 100).