Feminist Theory and Criticism: 5



Feminist Theory and Criticism: 5. 1990 and After

The Johns Hopkins University Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism

Second Edition 2005

Since the late 1960s debates within feminism have been marked by radically different and often incompatible approaches to gender that have shaped feminist analyses of literature and culture. This continues to be the case. Issues raised by liberal, radical, and materialist feminisms remain on the agenda, while postmodern feminists argue for the usefulness of poststructuralist theory for feminist analysis and politics. Postcolonial and Third World feminists seek to understand the implications for women of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, and feminists of color raise the issue of race and ethnicity within First World locations. Queer feminists look at issues of sexuality and explore the dynamics of gender performativity (see gay theory and criticism: 3. queer theory and performance studies). Some writers argue that we have entered a postfeminist phase.

In feminist literary and cultural studies much contemporary debate in the West continues to center on the political usefulness and explanatory power of what has come to be termed "postmodern feminism" (see Braidotti, Butler, Elam, Nicholson). Poststructuralist theory has been taken up in different ways, influenced by the work of jacques derrida, jacques lacan, michel foucault, Gilles Deleuze (see gilles deleuze and félix guattari), and the feminist psychoanalytic theorists julia kristeva, luce irigaray, and hélène cixous. Poststructuralist theory has led to the development of new deconstructive modes of reading and to approaches that analyze literary texts as part of discursive fields in which power is both reproduced and challenged.

Postmodern theory is, however, a site of both influence and contention. For many of its critics, the critique of fixed ideas of truth and of general "grand theories" signifies the loss of the foundations necessary for political action. Nancy Hartsock, for example, has criticized what many opponents of poststructuralist theory see as its negative effects for marginalized groups. She identifies poststructuralist theories of the subject and skepticism toward general theory and historical progress as particularly problematical. A further controversial aspect of postmodern feminism is its use of decentered theories of power that draw on Foucault (see, e.g. , Fraser’s critique in Unruly Practices ). More recently major disagreements have emerged between historical/cultural views that come out of Foucauldian paradigms (e.g. , Halperin) and those that argue that this elides important psychoanalytic and psychic processes (Copjec). Poststructuralist theory has further been criticized by postcolonial feminists, who argue that postmodern critiques of essentialism often lead to a dismissal of "localized questions of experience, identity, culture and history" (Alexander and Mohanty xvii).

Since the early eighteenth century, political struggles for the emancipation of women in the West have most often been grounded in Enlightenment metanarratives based on universalizing, liberal feminist ideas of the rights of women as human beings. In the field of literature this gave rise to demands for women’s access to literary institutions and for their work to be evaluated without reference to the gender of the author in question. Marxist feminism built on the Enlightenment tradition but stressed the importance of ideology and the centrality of class struggle to cultural analysis and social change. Radical feminism maintains that women’s emancipation requires the removal of global patriarchal power structures and seeks, among other things, to analyze representations of patriarchal power in literary texts. Poststructuralist critiques of these approaches see liberalism, Marxism, and radical feminism as universalizing theories based on too simple models of power. They insist on the partiality of metanarratives and their truth claims, which will always be historically and culturally located. Poststructuralist feminists attempted to rethink the foundations of politics and of literary and cultural analysis. Diane Elam, for example, called for a feminism based on an "ethical activism" and a "groundless solidarity" rather than identity politics (109).

This view of theory is thought by many critics of postmodern discourse to lead to pluralism, relativism, and ultimately individualist politics. Critics argue that to avoid relativism, feminists need a shared category "woman" and a general theory of oppression and liberation. It was this conception of woman that underpinned much early work in feminist literary criticism and literary history. Early critics analyzed images of women and women’s oppression in male-authored literary texts and sought to uncover female traditions of writing (Gilbert and Gubar, Showalter). In the various forms of identity politics that developed after 1970 the category "woman" was dispersed into specific groups of women (e.g. , lesbians, black women, or working-class women), and work in literary and cultural studies reflected this move. Attention turned to images of women and literary production by women from the different groups. Individual and group identity was privileged as the basis for both political action and cultural production.

Poststructuralist critiques of identity question the sovereignty of the rational, intentional subject and argue for subjectivity as a discursive construct that is unstable and plural. Literature, like other forms of cultural practice, is seen as an influential site for the discursive construction of subjectivity. This position has been rejected by many feminist writers, who argue that deconstructive approaches to subjectivity do not allow for agency. Women of color in particular have emphasized the importance of experience and identity as "the primary organizing principles they theorize and mobilize" (Moya 127). While some versions of poststructuralism fail to address the question of lived subjectivity or agency, this has not been the case in many feminist appropriations of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, and Kristeva. More often, agency is seen as discursively produced in the social interactions between culturally constituted, contradictory subjects. Like gender, subjectivity and agency are assumed not to exist prior to their constitution in the discursive practices in which individuals assume subjectivity. For feminists who draw on the work of Foucault, discursive practice is always material, shaping bodies as much as giving meaning to the world (e.g. , Butler, Bodies ). Writing of postmodern theories of subjectivity in the context of race, bell hooks points out that while problematic, "the critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodern thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with reformulating outmoded notions of identity . . . [and] may open up new possibilities for the construction of self and the assertion of agency" ( "Postmodern Blackness," Yearning 28). It is precisely the construction of notions of the self and agency that have become key focuses of postmodern feminist literary criticism.

Poststructuralist feminism’s answer to the charge of politically disabling relativism is partial and located in theory and practice. In this context "partial" implies recognition of the incomplete and interested nature of both theory and practice. This position would also extend to literary-critical practice. From this perspective, pluralism—postmodern or otherwise—does not have to be negative. It can allow for the representation of many competing and sometimes conflicting voices, histories, and interests. Identifying these competing voices, histories, and interests becomes an important aspect of literary analysis. Yet pluralism, in societies governed by class, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and the legacy of colonialism, is always structured by relations of power, which any adequate feminism must recognize and address (e.g. , hooks, "Postmodern Blackness," Alexander and Mohanty). Locating one’s work within existing relations of power is a prerequisite for a feminist critical practice that is attentive to the inequalities that structure difference.

Debates in feminism in the 1990s and after have focused in particular on the materiality of the body, on gender as performance, and on the separate (but related) widespread move from women’s studies into queer theory and gender studies. Each of these areas has influenced and been influenced by feminist theory and criticism (e.g. , de Lauretis; Merck, Segal, and Wright). The 1990s saw extensive debate on the body as a cultural construct. Poststructuralist feminist theorists, influenced to different degrees by Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous, sought to theorize the body and its relation to difference and gendered subjectivity. The body also became a focus in feminist literary criticism, particularly in work influenced by French feminist psychoanalytic criticism and Foucault. Key examples of the theoretical turn to the body can be found in the work of Jane Gallop (Thinking Through the Body), Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies and Space, Time, and Perversion), and judith butler(Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter). Grosz, for example, is critical of what she identifies as the tendency to analyze the representation of bodies without due attention to their materiality. This, she argues, creates the conditions for the dominance of reason. She attempts to disrupt the binary oppositions that she sees as defin-ing the body—inside/outside, subject/object, active/passive, fantasy/reality, surface/depth—using the image of the body as a hinge or threshold, located between psychic interiority and sociopolitical exteriority (Volatile 189). Grosz concludes that "sexual differences, like those of class and race, are bodily differences" and that "the body must be reconceived, not in opposition to culture but as its preeminent object" (Space 32).

In literary and cultural studies the body has become an important object of critical analysis. Butler has also written extensively on the materiality of the body, developing influential theories of gender as performance. She draws on Foucauldian theory, psychoanalysis, and speech act theory, and her work is framed by a critique of what she terms the "heterosexual matrix," that is, the assumption that heterosexuality is the norm. Butler uses this theory to analyze cultural texts, including literary texts. Both poststructuralist feminist theory and queer theory question the naturalness of heterosexuality, suggesting that the relations posited between sex, gender, and desire are political and not natural or causal and that, indeed, all norms are social constructs. Butler wishes to go beyond the conventional limits of constructionist theories to consider how "gendered regulatory schemas . . . not only produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well a domain of unthinkable, abject, unliveable bodies" (Bodies xi). Literature is one site for the articulation of "gendered regulatory schemas."

In Butler’s theory of performativity, gendered subjectivity is acquired through the repeated performance by the individual of discourses of gender. Drawing on Foucault, Butler suggests that the body is an effect of power, that embodied subjectivity is discursively produced and that there is no sex outside of culture. Butler’s appropriation of Foucauldian theory thus involves a decentered notion of the subject and of agency. Agency is located "as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power" (15). Butler, following Foucault, locates possibilities of resistance and transformation within the discursive field that produces both existing power relations and forms of subjectivity. There is no possibility within this model of either fully autonomous subjectivity or a space beyond power from which to act. Agency can, however, transform aspects of material discursive practices and the power relations inherent in them. From this position feminist literary and cultural criticism reads texts as part of specific discursive fields that contribute to the reproduction of existing power relations, including hegemonic discourses of gender, sexuality, and gendered modes of subjectivity. Literary texts can, however, also subvert existing discourses of gender and sexuality and social relations, as in the case, for example, of postmodern feminist writers.

Some of the most hostile critiques of this type of poststructuralist feminism have come from radical feminists (e.g. , Bell and Klein). The radical lesbian feminist Sheila Jeffreys, for example, interprets much recent postmodern feminism as part of what she terms a "return to gender" exemplified in the work of Judith Butler and Diana Fuss. She argues that this approach marks a dangerous depoliticization of feminism in which gender becomes a question of play rather than of politics: "depoliticised, sanitised and something difficult to associate with sexual violence, economic inequality [and] women dying from backstreet abortions" (359). Rather than constituting a political challenge to heterosexist patriarchy, performative gender, celebrated by feminist poststructuralist and queer theory, are seen by Jeffreys as forms of liberal individualism that have even affected lesbian politics, where the rehabilitation of "role playing and lipstick lesbianism" is helping to "shore up the facade of femininity" (366). A true lesbian feminist perspective would, she suggests, contest both patriarchy and heterosexism and celebrate lesbian literary production as an engagement with and affirmation of lesbian subjectivity, identity, and history. What Jeffreys disregards is the argument that performance and play have political significance and may discursively contest patriarchal power and heteronormativity.

This reading of postmodern feminism and queer theory draws attention to the dangers of postmodern approaches to difference that do not pay due attention to the hierarchical relations of power that produce it. Similar arguments are often made about the shift from women’s studies to gender studies, which is seen as abandoning the full force of feminism’s critique of patriarchy and signaling a liberal depoliticization of the radical project of women’s studies. In literary studies this would mean a shift away from a concern with the mechanisms of patriarchy to analyses of gender that often lose sight of oppression.

In very different contexts, issues similar to those raised in current Western debates about feminism and queer and postmodern theory are being raised by postcolonial and Third World feminists. While the issues at stake in these debates interface with issues in mainstream Western feminism, they have their own specificity and political and social location and cannot be reduced to Western feminist concerns. Decolonization of theory as well as political practice is a key concern. One important focus of debate, one that addresses Western feminism’s colonizing tendencies, is the question of universalism versus cultural specificity, particularly as it relates to women and human rights. This is not a new issue, as debates in earlier decades about Eurocentric approaches to practices such as female genital mutilation and sati illustrate (e.g. , Accad, Daly, Narayan). Much Third World criticism of Western feminism has focused on its Eurocentric tendency to assume that its standards and practices are the best and to measure the needs of women in non-Western societies simply according to Western norms. It implies a decentering of Western norms of literary value and Western cultural canons. Indeed, Third World feminist critiques of Western feminism—for example, Chandra Mohanty’s influential essay "Under Western Eyes" —argue that Western feminists tend to view Third World women as victims of forms of patriarchy based on less rational and enlightened cultural norms. Mohanty shows that one of the effects of this strategy is to produce an undifferentiated Third World subject who is a passive victim of patriarchy and tradition, placed outside of history and without agency. Western literature, including writing by women, has played an important role here, and one objective of feminist postcolonial literary and cultural studies is to draw attention to this process and the ways in which it valorizes particular discourses of whiteness. Mohanty argues for located theory and analysis that does not make prior assumptions about its object of knowledge (see also her Feminism without Borders ). For the feminist literary critic, this implies a detailed knowledge of context and history that does not impose outside meanings and judgments on non-Western literary production but is attentive to the voices of Third World writers and critics.

Postcolonial feminism has placed the legacies of colonialism at the center of the contemporary feminist agenda, including feminist literary and cultural studies. It has reminded feminists in the West that difference as inequality is produced by economic, political, social, and cultural factors, which in the global context include the division of the world into radically different economic zones characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty. Factors that produce difference as oppression further include class, caste, colonial and racist practices, and heterosexism. Feminist literary criticism in this area analyzes both the naturalization and the representation of these forms of oppression in literary texts.

The legacy of colonialism for both Third World and Western feminisms is often focused on Eurocentrism. This includes both what critics have termed the "colonial gaze" and the question of who speaks for whom. These issues are privileged in feminist postcolonial rereadings of literary texts (e.g. , Spivak, "Three" and Critique ). Uma Narayan identifies two key features of colonial modes of representation: the failure to give due attention to social and historical details and the failure to give due attention to context. Crucial are the absence of history and the representation of the Third World as static and timeless. Writing of Mary Daly’s account of sati in Gyn/Ecology and comparing it with her chapter on European witch burning, Narayan points to the absence of historical information about sati. She argues that unlike her treatment of witch burning, Daly’s account of sati renders its temporal and social context invisible, taking little or no account of differences of class, caste, religion, or geographical location. Attending to the detailed specificity of particular practices, she argues, works against the colonialist tendency to represent the Third World as lacking internal differences and complexity. There is, she suggests, a double standard in the work of many Western feminists who represent Western societies as complex and changing and the Third World as uniform and outside of history. These tendencies also inform traditional readings of colonial literary texts.

Postcolonial feminists point out that in campaigning for human rights it is important not to speak on behalf of others in ways that silence them and obscure real material differences. Indeed, the possibility of speaking for others in ways that do not do violence to them has been questioned by postcolonial writers (e.g. , Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"). It is, however, equally important not to deny Third World writers and critics access to narratives of emancipation simply because their origin is Western and they have been used in the past to justify colonialism. Important here, for example, is the strategic reappropriation of discourses of human rights by oppressed groups. In different contexts, such discourses will always already be overlaid with local differences and reappropriated for political purposes under different material and ideological conditions.

As indicated above, many critics of postmodern theory argue that feminism necessarily stands on Enlightenment ground with women as its constituency. Yet such arguments are often blind to the historically specific class and ethnic interests that structure feminist Enlightenment narratives. As postcolonial feminist critics have pointed out, all narratives are necessarily partial, founded on selection and exclusion. gayatri chakravorty spivak, for example, argues that "we cannot but narrate," but "when a narrative is constructed, something is left out. When an end is defined, other ends are rejected, and one might not know what those ends are" (Post-Colonial 18–19). Thus, invoking Western feminist theories—for example, emancipatory liberal feminism or Marxist feminism—as general theories of historical progress often leads to a denial of the specificity of black and Third World women’s interests.

Postcolonial feminist advocates of poststructuralist theory argue that its questioning of universals and the possibility of objectivity and its focus on the very criteria by which claims to knowledge are legitimized provide for theory that can avoid generalizing from the experiences of Western, white, heterosexual, middle-class women. It is this perspective that they bring to literary and cultural studies. In its questioning of essences and its relativizing of truth claims, postmodern theory can be used to create a space for political perspectives and interests that have hitherto been marginalized. It also helps guard against creating alternative generalizing theories. As Avtah Brah explains, postmodern discourses "foreground heterogeneity, pluralism, difference and power. And this re-valorisation of the ‘multi’ can be made to work in the service of effecting politics which fosters solidarity without erasing difference" (227). Attention to difference becomes a key factor in feminist literary and cultural criticism.

The question of difference continues to be a major focus of debate within contemporary feminism. As early as the 1970s, black feminists formulated powerful critiques of white feminism’s marginalization of questions of race. This critique was applied to literary criticism and history, among other areas. The critiques to be found in Audre Lorde’s influential essays published in 1984, which argue that white women cannot leave questions of racism to black women, still stand. Lorde argued that differences of all kinds must be acknowledged and that "ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of women’s joint power" (117). The marginalization of writing by women of color within the academies is still a problem. More recently, white women have begun to theorize whiteness and its role in the perpetuation of racism and ethnocentrism. One of the legacies of classical racism is the tendency to assume a white norm and not to see whiteness as racially marked. Classical racism placed white people at the top of its hierarchy of racial difference, an assumption that lives on in the West, both in the ideologies of the radical right and in the normative status given to whiteness. The analysis of constructions of whiteness in literary texts has become a growth area. Whereas right-wing extremism privileges whiteness as a racial category, in mainstream discourses of race whiteness functions as an unmarked neutral category, a norm equivalent to being human (see Dyer, Frankenberg, Ware and Back, Wiegman). If white women are seriously to address whiteness and its role in the perpetuation of racism, then they will be required not only to recognize but also to relinquish their privilege. Barbara Smith argues that white women need to work on racism for their own sake, not as a favor to black and Third World women: "You have to comprehend how racism distorts and lessens your own lives as white women—that racism affects your chances for survival, too, and that it is very definitely your issue. Until you understand this, no fundamental change will come about" (26). This need to address racism applies to literary and cultural studies as much as to any other area of social and cultural analysis.

Rethinking difference is an important emphasis within feminism both in the West and in the developing world. It is linked to the political project of creating a world in which difference can be lived as enriching and valuable rather than as the oppressive effect of hierarchical binary oppositions. Some recent writing by black and Third World women in the West has argued that the diasporic experience creates the conditions for breaking down traditional binary categories and liberating difference (e.g. , Anzaldúa, Mirza). The writing of women of color and Third World women is seen as an important area for articulating and analyzing difference.

One of the strengths of recent feminist debate is the possibilities it offers for thinking difference differently. Much of this work is indebted to women of color in both the developing world and the West. It also draws on the political mobilization of the insights of poststructuralist theory. While the struggle for equal rights remains an important dimension of feminist politics, it is no longer necessary to link rights to sameness. Instead, feminists argue, it is possible to imagine a world in which difference is celebrated and enjoyed free from the hierarchical structures of class, racial, sexual, and gender power. Literary and cultural studies are important areas in which this site of (re-)imagining becomes possible. Yet to move toward such a world continues to require the articulation of marginalized voices and the self-affirmation of oppressed groups, as well as the recognition by white, Western, heterosexual, middle-class women of their structural privileges. This recognition and acceptance of difference has profound implications for the future of literary and cultural studies and publishing, demanding a much more inclusive approach to what is widely read, analyzed and acclaimed.

Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of "talking back," that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice. (hooks, Talking 211)

Chris Weedon

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Bibliography [pic]

See also african american theory and criticism, judith butler, gay theory and criticism, gender theory and criticism, performance studies, postcolonial cultural studies, and race and ethnicity.

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