"A feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty necessarily involves a deconstruction of these obfuscating and reifying structures to their concrete cultural origins, and an analysis of the ways in which Merleau-Ponty's text legitimates and universalizes structures of sexual oppression. On the other hand, a feminist appropriation of Merleau-Ponty is doubtless in order. If the body expresses and dramatizes existential themes, and these themes are gender-specific and fully historicized, then sexuality becomes a scene of cultural struggle, improvisation, and innovation, a domain in which the intimate and the political converge, and a dramatic opportunity for expression, analysis, and change. The terms of this inquiry, however, will not be found in the texts of Merleau-Ponty, but in the works of philosophical feminism to come."
According to Butler, a feminist critique of MP involves:
Deconstruct the structuralism of the subject, showing the cultural origins at the heart of the distinction, here probably object/subject
MP reliance on universal structures of sexual oppression, like Hegel's M-S dialectic
Appropriation would go a step further: an account of the sexuality of the lived body as the scene for a cultural struggle, but also creativity or innovation, an opening onto something novel.
Can we let go of the structuralism of his account of the subject? What would be lost?
Lonzi says something very similar, also in her last paragraph:
Quote: "Woman has had enough of the ways man has overcome himself by oppressing her and at the same time blaming her immanence. Self-criticism must give way to imagination... The unexpected destiny of the world consists in starting out anew, on a new path where woman is subject... Those who are not part of the master-slave dialectic are coming into consciousness and are introducing into the world the Unexpected Subject." (Lonzi, "Let's Spit on Hegel," p.295)
Context: Hegel Lecture — Carla Lonzi, V. "The New, Unexpected Subject"