What ails feminist criticism?

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 878-902

  Gubar, Susan ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0001057440     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448900     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. (Janet Todd, "Anglo-American Difference: Some Thoughts of an Aging Feminist," Tuba Studies in Women's Literature 12 [Fall 1993]: 243-44). Yet the generational model "means privileging a kind of family history that organizes generations where they don't exist, ignores intra-generational differences and inter-generational commonalities, and thrives on a paradigm of oppositional change," as Judith Roof has shown (Judith Roof, "Generational Difficulties, or The Fear of a Barren History," in Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue, ed. Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan [Minneapolis, 1997], p. 72)
2. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York, 1991), pp. 74-75
3. See Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York, 1979), pp. 33-49
4. To be sure, as Evelyn Fox Keller has pointed out, "a focus on the supposed coherence of seventies feminism obscures the fact that, from its earliest days, feminist theory was in fact characterized by a marked multiplicity in its goals, and in its stated functions"; however, I am arguing that there was more solidarity and coherence in the seventies than in its later evolution (Hirsch and Keller, "Conclusion: Practicing Conflict in Feminist Theory," Conflicts in Feminism, p. 382)
5. Elaine Showalter, "Toward a Feminist Poetics," The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Showalter (New York, 1985), p. 129
6. See The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York, 1970)
7. Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, ed. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (New York, 1971)
8. Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and about Black Women, ed. Mary Helen Washington (Garden City, N.Y., 1975)
9. Lillian S. Robinson, Sex, Class, and Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1978)
10. and Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York, 1978)
11. Showalter, "Toward a Feminist Poetics," p. 129
12. See Ellen Moers, Lilerary Women (Garden City, N.Y., 1976)
13. Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, N.J., 1980)
14. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (Westport, Conn., 1980)
15. and Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (New York, 1979). If The Madwoman in the Attic seems unusually gothic in this context, both its subtitle-The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination-and the title of the collection of essays Sandra Gilbert and I edited that same year-Shakespeare's Sistersparticipate in the exuberant universalizing so common in the late seventies and viewed with so much suspicion today
16. see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 1979) and Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Bloomington, Ind., 1979). I have placed Barbara Christian's work in this stage rather than the next because of its early date of publication and also because it used the rhetoric of recovery
17. see Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York, 1985). In her frequently reprinted "The Laugh of the Medusa," Hélène Cixous began by using Derrida's notion of hierarchized binary oppositions to censure Western culture's identification of masculinity with activity, rationality, culture, and logos and of femininity with passivity, sensitivity, nature, and pathos. Then she attempted to excavate an écriture féminine composed of "mother's milk... white ink," in a "language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death" (Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 [Summer 1976]: 889). Similarly, in her influential Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), Luce Irigaray castigated the specular logic of the same in philosophical traditions established from Plato to Hegel and Freud that situate woman outside representation. For Irigaray, parler-femme, described in "This Sex Which Is Not One," constitutes a recoverable and infinitely fluid style that is "always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them" (Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke [Ithaca, N.Y., 1985], p. 29). On British input into feminist criticism in this period, see Todd's Feminist Literary History (New York, 1988), as well as the special issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 12 (Fall 1993) on Anglo-American criticism
18. See Barbara Johnson, "Nothing Fails Like Success," A World of Difference (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 11-16
19. See Gilligan's description of her dismay at seeing herself disparaged by feminists as an advocate of the "Victorian 'angel in the house'" and '"pious maternalism"' (Carol Gilligan, "Getting Civilized," in Who's Afraid of Feminism? Seeing through the Backlash, ed. Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell [New York, 1997], p. 26)
20. Gayle Greene writes about how feminists in the eighties established credentials by "demonstrating how feminism fits in with or around Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard, or how we're superior to our benighted compatriots (Showalter and Gilbert and Gubar are the favorite targets)" (Gayle Greene, "Looking at History," in Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Greene and Coppélia Kahn [New York, 1993], p. 17)
21. Describing a 1987 conference at which she witnessed "the raw hostility" of attendees, Susan Bordo admits feeling "dismayed at the anger that (white, middle-class) feminists have exhibited toward the work of Gilligan and Chodorow" (Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body [Berkeley, 1993], p. 233; hereafter abbreviated U)
22. When Dale Bauer confesses, "most feminist professors I know have to fight on a daily basis the temptation to give up. The level of frustration can be overwhelming," she stresses the difficulties of keeping the discipline "vital precisely at the time society, the economy, and conventional politics are making it increasingly difficult for us to thrive" (Dale M. Bauer, "Personal Criticism and the Academic Personality," in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, ed. Roof and Robyn Wiegman [Urbana, Ill., 1995], p. 65). On this same issue, I remain saddened when I think about the cohorts hired in the period after I arrived at Indiana University in 1973, for many of the women were unable to stay in the profession. Some did not get tenure; some suffered untimely deaths or debilitating illnesses; some could not sustain relationships with partners working elsewhere. There is no casualty rate comparable among the men hired in those years or in any other period of the department's history. Even a relatively welcoming profession like English still remains more difficult for women than for men. In relation to the vulnerability of African American women within the humanities, Ann duCille writes about "the startling number of brilliant black women scholars who have produced only one book or no book" in part because they have been "used up as role models" who couldn't "just say "no"'" to student demands (Ann duCille, Skin Trade [Cambridge, Mass., 199G], p. 97)
23. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, preface to "And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures with You: Racism in the Women's Movement," part 3 of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Moraga and Anzaldúa (New York, 1981), p. 61
24. Doris davenport, "The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin," in This Bridge Called My Back, p. 87. Of course davenports analysis never attains the sophistication of the subsequent African American and postcolonial thinkers I consider; however, the volume in which she appears played an important role in the intellectual history I am tracing
25. Moraga and Anzaldúa, preface to "And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures with You," p. 61. To be sure, the rancor of early black feminists has to be understood in terms of the unraveling of the Black Power movement and the perception that white feminists were co-opting the language of civil rights. For another example of it, see Lorraine Bethel's poem "What Chou Mean We, White Girl?" Conditions: Five: The Black Women's Issue (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1979), pp. 86-92, which is equally angry in its dedication "TO THE PROPOSITION THAT ALL WOMEN ARE NOT EQUAL; I.E. IDENTICALLY OPPRESSED": So this is an open letter to movement white girls: Dear Ms Ann Glad Cosmic Womoon, We're not doing that kind of work anymore educating white women. [Pp. 86, 88] In particular, Bethel rages against white feminist lesbians "who would be scorned as racist dogs if they were heterosexual white men / instead of white lesbians hiding behind the liberal veneer of/ equal bedroom opportunity" (p. 90). Unlike this indignant work, Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis's Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (New York, 1986) insists on "the importance of Black women and White women connecting their specific understandings of oppression to an understanding of the political totality that thrives on these oppressions" (p. 14)
26. See Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, N.Y., 1984) and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, Calif, 1982). As my reference to the civil rights movement that preceded feminism's second wave indicates, I am not arguing that feminist criticism produced African American studies because I am well aware of how much feminist criticism profited from it. Indeed, a figure like Lorde speaks to the interrelatedness of these two enterprises
27. Bell hooks [Gloria Watkins], Ain't l a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston, 1981), p. 15; hereafter abbreviated Al
28. Hazel V. Carby, "White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood," in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, ed. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London, 1982), p. 214
29. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," in Contemporary Pastcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London, 1996), p. 175; hereafter abbreviated "UW."
30. Carby, "White Woman Listen!" p. 233
31. A similar point is made by Barbara Smith in her essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" when-after protesting the absence of black women writers in feminist criticism-she finds "the idea of critics like Showalter using Black literature . . . chilling, a case of barely disguised cultural imperialism" (Barbara Smith, "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Showalter [New York, 1985], p. 172)
32. Consider the thirty-five pages of response to Annette Kolodny's "Dancing through the Minefield" printed by Feminist Studies in I9S2, attacking Kolodny's racism, heterosexism, classism (described by Nancy K. Miller in Getting Personal, p. 83)
33. See Judith Kegan Gardiner et al., "An Interchange on Feminist Criticism: On 'Dancing through the Minefield,'" Feminist Studies 8 (Fall 1982): 628-75, and Kolodny, "Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of Feminist Literary Criticism,"
34. Feminist Studies 6 (Spring 1980): 1-25. In a recent book, Susan Suleiman reprints a letter from Raquel Portillo Bauman, a Chicana mother, who complains that Suleiman's 1989 essay on "Maternal Splitting" excluded not only Bauman's experiences but also those of her Mexican and Mexican American grandmothers and her black mother-in-law. Suleiman notes in her response Bauman's assumption that her ethnicity somehow makes her more representative of "the 'real' experience of minority women" and thus more accurate about them than the supposedly "'advantaged'" scholar writing from a psychoanalytic perspective could ever be (Susan Rubin Suleiman, "Motherhood and Identity Politics: An Exchange," Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature [Cambridge, Mass., 1994], p. 61)
35. Nicole Ward Jouve, White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography (New York, 1991), p. viii
36. Sara Suleri, "Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition," Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 760; rpt. in Identities, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago, 1995), pp. 133-46. Politically correct identity politics that troubled women's studies teachers in the classroom could not be easily addressed in public since the media had already attached the label PC to all feminists within the academy, absurdly linking the teaching of Alice Walker to the decline of cultural literacy and the destruction of Western civilization
37. See the satire Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995), the first installment of which appeared in Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 693-714, that Gilbert and I wrote on this (and related) subjects
38. Todd, "Anglo-American Difference," p. 243. Bordo's point seems pertinent in this regard: "It is striking to me that there is often a curious selectivity at work in contemporary feminist criticisms of gender-based theories of identity. The analytics of race and class-the two other giants of modernist social critique-do not seem to be undergoing quite the same deconstruction" (U, p. 229)
39. Spivak, "Feminism and Deconstruction, Again: Negotiations," Outside in the Teaching Machine, pp. 137, 139
40. Spivak's attention to the disenfranchised and her identity as a Third World critic sponsor her mockery of deluded First World scholars who perform "the 'poor little rich girl speaking personal pain as victim of the greatest oppression'-act that multiculturalist capitalism-with its emphasis on individuation and competition-would thrust upon us" (Spivak, "Feminism and Deconstruction, Again," p. 139). This rhetoric occurs again in an interview with Ellen Rooney when Spivak says, "I think the kind of antiessentialism that I like these days is in the work of Kalpana Bardhan. If you read her, you probably wouldn't see what I was talking about" (Ellen Rooney, "In a Word: Interview," interview with Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 17)
41. In my approach to Spivak, I am indebted to Shirley Geok-lin Lim's discussion of "the kind of bad faith and reasoning inherent in Third World intellectualization within the hegemony of the First World" (Shirley Geok-lin Lim, "Hegemony and Anglo-American Feminism': Living in the Funny House," Tuba Studies in Women's Literature 12 [Fall 1993]: 283). Also of use is Robert Young's insight that "the paradox of Spivak's own work remains: it seems as if the heterogeneity of the Third World woman can only be achieved through a certain homogenization of the First" (Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West [New York, 1990], p. 167)
42. Spivak, "The Intervention Interview," The Post-Colonial Critic, p. 119
43. Spivak, "Feminism and Deconstruction, Again," p. 137
44. Christian, "The Race for Theory," Feminist Studies 14 (Spring 1988): 67
45. See also Deborah E. McDowell's list of the ways in which the program of black feminist critics diverged from that of poststructuralists; for example, when black feminists asserted the significance of black women's experience, poststructuralists dismantled the authority of experience, in Deborah E. McDowell, "Recycling: Race, Gender, and the Practice of History," Studies in Historical Change, ed. Ralph Cohen (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), pp. 246-63
46. Quoted in Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, pp. 163, 165
47. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990), p. 17; hereafter abbreviated GT. Emboldened by Monique Wittig's argument that "lesbian is the only concept ... which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically," Butler argues that the categories of woman, man, and sex itself had to be debiologized (Monique Wittig, "One Is Not Born a Woman," The Straight Mind and Other Essays [Boston, 1992], p. 20); however, she distinguishes herself from Wittig by claiming that the latter "subscribes to that metaphysics of substance that is responsible for the production and naturalization of the category of sex itself" (GT, p. 20). That any reliance on the "metaphysics of substance" was demonized by poststructuralists appears evident in the pollution metaphors used by Caroline Ramazanoǧlu: The possibility of biological nature, or material bodies, playing some part in explanation of gender difference runs under the fields of feminism like a camouflaged sewer into which the unwary may trip and so be contaminated without fully realising their danger. . . . Many feminists . . . have found the odour of biological essentialism clinging to them. [Caroline Ramazanoǧlu, introduction to Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism, ed. Ramazanoǧlu (New York, 1993), p. 7]
48. Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York, 1991), p. 28; hereafter abbreviated "I."
49. See Linda Charnes on how Butler's "jargon-clotted and, at times, numbingly redundant prose" echoes Foucault's "heavily Latinate, juridical, phallogocentric, often plodding, and by now, institutionally 'authoritative' prose" in her insightful discussion of how Butler's "critical style matters" (Linda Charnes, "Styles That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Ideology Critique," Shakespeare Studies 24 [1996]: 138, 139)
50. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York, 1993), p. 110; hereafter abbreviated B. For other examples of subject-verb disagreements (not all following the pattern of dual nouns with singular verbs), see GT, pp. 91, 126; B, pp. 48, 55, 87, 125, 126, 127, 207, 224, 236; "I," pp. 23, 27; "Against Proper Objects," introduction to Differences 6 (Summer-Fall 1994): 2, 8, 16; and "Feminism by Any Other Name," Differences 6 (Summer-Fall 1994): 31, 33
51. The grammatical problem also proves the truth of Kate Soper's admonition that an "emphasis on the discursive formation of our corporeal existence . . . ceases to be productive if it is pressed at the expense of proper recognition of the impossibility of dispensing with any reference to a pre-discursive reality" (Kate Soper, "Productive Contradictions," in Up against Foucault, pp. 32-33). On the essentialism of always viewing essentialism as reactionary, see Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York, 1989), p. 21. On the limits of poststructuralist views of subjectivity, see George Levine, "Introduction: Constructivism and the Reemergent Self," in Constructions of the Self ed. Levine (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992), pp. 1-13, and Irving Howe, "The Self in Literature," in Constructions of the Self, pp. 249-67
52. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York, 1990), p. 197
53. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York, 1994), p. 170. "Denial of the unity and stability of identity is one thing," Bordo remarks. "The epistemological fantasy of becoming multiplicity-the dream of limitless multiple embodiments, allowing one to dance from place to place and self to self-is another" (U, pp. 228-29)
54. Judith K. Gardiner links antiessentialism with "a fear of mortality" that "springs less from the stable facts of human embodiment than from a current crisis precipitated by the fear of meaninglessness, which is related for the left, even more than for the right, to a crisis of values" (Gardiner, "Radical Optimism, Maternal Materialism, and Teaching Literature," Changing Subjects, p. 90)
55. Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," p. 192
56. Spivak, "Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution," p. 11
57. Susan Stanford Friedman, "'Beyond' Gynocriticism and Gynesis: The Geographics of Identity and the Future of Feminist Criticism," Tuba Studies in Women's Literature 15 (Spring 1996): 31; hereafter abbreviated "BG."
58. Bordo, "Feminism, Foucault, and the Politics of the Body," Up against Foucault, p. 182
59. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, pp. 162, 167