Critical response i what ails feminist criticism? a second opinion

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 362-379

  Wiegman, Robyn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449323548     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448925     Document Type: Note

References (35)

1. Amanda Cross, "Murder without a Text," in A Woman's Eye, ed. Sara Paretsky (New York, 1991), p. 131; hereafter abbreviated "M."
2. For important contributions to the conversation about generation and feminism, see Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue, ed. Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan (Minneapolis, 1997), and Barbara Christian et al., "Conference Call," Differences 2 (Fall 1990): 52-108
3. Tania Modieski's Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (New York, 1991) opened the decade with a lament about the undoing of feminism, leveling the charge against feminist poststructuralism on one hand and gender studies on the other. But where Modleski saw the poststructuralist evacuation of the category of woman as the "latest ruse of white middle-class feminism" (p. 21), Gubar sets poststructuralism in league with postcolonial and U.S. ethnic feminisms, indicting the way "racialized identity politics made the word women slim down to stand only for a very particularized kind of woman, whereas poststructuralists obliged the term to disappear altogether" (p. 901). For a counter to Modleski, from the perspective of lesbian studies, see Annamarie Jagose, "'Feminism without Women': A Lesbian Reassurance," Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance, ed. Dana A. Heller (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), pp. 124-35
4. For Susan Bordo, postmodernism has been the perpetrator and deconstruction the weapon in battering feminism into a more docile position, so disconnected from its earliest political urgencies has feminism seemingly become. See Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, 1993). For an important counter to the view that postmodernism is incompatible with feminism
5. see Jane Flax, "The End of Innocence," Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Philosophy (New York, 1993), pp. 131-47. For a more positive view of the relationship of deconstruction to feminism, see Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme (New York, 1994)
6. Nancy Fraser's recent essay "Multiculturalism, Antiessentialism, and Radical Democracy: A Genealogy of the Current Impasse in Feminist Theory," Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (New York, 1997), pp. 173-88, offers an importantly broader history of feminist scholarship since the 1970s than the focus on literary criticism provided in "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Explicating the shift in the early 1990s from a focus on differences (racial, sexual) among women to an analysis of "'multiple intersecting differences,'" Fraser argues that what had appeared at first to be a turning inward (instead of focusing on our relation to men, we would focus on the relations among ourselves) seemed instead to invite a turning outward (instead of focusing on gender alone, we would focus on its relation to other crosscutting axes of difference and subordination). In this way, the whole range of politicized differences would become grist for the feminist mill. [P. 180] By placing her discussion in the context of a clear articulation of the political field in which feminism for her necessarily struggles (radical democracy), Fraser is able to mount a critique of culturalist understandings of social change without simultaneously creating a narrative of feminism's fall. Such a method enables feminism to exist in a contradictory historical present, with no overarching nostalgia or reverse teleology. For critical conversations about the broad implications of feminism's self-reflective turn in the 1990s to narratives of its own historical becoming, see Feminism beside Itself, ed. Elam and Robyn Wiegman (New York, 1995), especially the essays by Susan Stanford Friedman, "Making History: Reflections on Feminism, Narrative, and Desire," pp. 11-53
7. and Deborah McDowell, "Transferences: Black Feminist Discourse: The 'Practice' of 'Theory,'" pp. 93-118. For a consideration of the lesbian as the figure around which feminist critical history turns, see Carolyn Dever, "Obstructive Behavior: Dykes in the Mainstream of Feminist Theory," Cross-Purposes, pp. 19-41
8. Kimberlé Crenshaw is often credited with the first use of "intersectional" to describe the project of studying without subordinating the intertwined constructs of gender, race, class, and sexuality. In the context of postcolonial study, the rubric of nation has become a central component of the intersectional imperative. See Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color," Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Crenshaw et al. (New York, 1995) and "Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew," Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, ed. Mari J. Matsuda et al. (Boulder, Colo., 1993), pp. 111-32. Building on Crenshaw's work is Lindon Barrett's analysis of intersectionality in the context of ethnic and women's studies in "Identities and Identity Studies: Reading Toni Cade Bambara's 'The Hammer Man,'" Cultural Critique 39 (Fall 1998): 5-29
9. Gubar's organization of U.S. ethnic and postcolonial feminist thought into a composite category of "racialized identity politics" is problematic in a number of ways. It condenses the intellectual histories and social conditions from which ethnic and postcolonial studies have been generated, eclipsing the differing constructions of U.S. national identities and their contradictory relation to postcolonial frameworks. Racialization is not a uniform or universal process of economic and social disenfranchisement, as scholarship on issues of immigration, colonialization, and national identity currently explores. Rosemary George, for instance, investigates the way that a racialized identity based on color is routinely resisted by South Asian immigrants to the U.S., even as the history of South Asian immigration must be understood in the context of both British colonialism and First World transnational capital flows. See Rosemary Marangoly George, '"From Expatriate Aristocrat to Immigrant Nobody': South Asian Racial Strategies in the Southern Californian Context," Diaspora 6 (Spring 1997): 31-60
10. Important recent texts in the intersectional arsenal, while too numerous to name comprehensively, include Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York, I995); Women Transforming Politics, ed. Cathy J. Cohen, Kathleen B. Jones, and Joan C. Tronto (New York, 1997)
11. Ann DuCille, Skin Trade (Cambridge, Mass., 1996)
12. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, 1997)
13. Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, ed. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi (New York, 1998)
14. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C., 1996)
15. and Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics, ed. Joan Wallach Scott, Cora Kaplan, and Debra Keates (New York, 1997)
16. Ellen Rooney's discussion in "Discipline and Vanish: Feminism, the Resistance to Theory, and the Politics of Cultural Studies" has influenced my understanding of feminism's institutional intervention. She writes: "A critique of the politics of knowledge production is never merely a side-effect of political activity outside the university... . Feminist theory in the academy is constituted by the discovery that a politicized, theoretical intervention within the disciplines is unavoidable" (Ellen Rooney, "Discipline and Vanish: Feminism, the Resistance to Theory, and the Politics of Cultural Studies," Differences 2 [Fall 1990]: 21)
17. H.Judith Butler has written about the issue of feminism's proper object in an essay analyzing the relationship between feminism and queer studies. See Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects," introduction to Differences 6 (Summer-Fall 1994): 1-26
18. Lauren Berlant argues that feminism has participated in the strategies of sentimental culture by presuming that an identity among women is an ideal state that can be reached through the production of common feeling. Beginning with abolition, national sentimentality has organized liberal culture around the same desire, and we have seen all too clearly the effects of the fantasy that people who "feel" alike are in the same structural position. The virtue identified with a politics of "true feeling" is the site of the compulsion to repeat that Gubar mistakes for feminist unity. See Lauren Berlant, "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics," in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1998)
19. It's not clear why cultural studies has been left out of Gubar's history, since it has done more than feminist work in any of the stages she discusses to challenge the basic precept that literature is the domain of the discipline of English. From Janice Radway's early research on the mass-marketed romance in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984) to Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, Ind., 1989)
20. Elspeth Probyn, Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies (London, 1993)
21. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington, Ind., 1993)
22. Trinh T. Minhha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington, Ind., 1989)
23. Meaghan Morris, The Pirate's Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London, 1988); Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington, Ind., 1986)
24. Cecilia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, and Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987)
25. Gender and Generation, ed. Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava (Basingstoke, 1984); McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From 'Jackie' to 'Just Seventeen' (Basingstoke, 1991)
26. and Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey (London, 1991), feminist analysis, literary and non, has been powerfully influenced by cultural studies's attention to the materiality of textual production, circulation, and consumption
27. Feminist theory's interest in poststructuralism has created a now lengthy discussion concerning the use and abuse of "jargon," the elitism of theory, the irony of feminist engagement with white male European thinkers, and theory's seeming displacement of the feminist commitment to politics outside the academy. See, for instance, Nancy Hartsock, "Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories," Cultural Critique 7 (Fall 1987): 187-206, and Christian, "The Race for Theor)-," The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford, 1990), pp. 37-49. For a defense of poststructuralist influences on feminism, see the essays collected in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Butler and Scott (New York, 1992). Much of this critique of poststructuralism is propelled by the general public attack on the humanities, which continues to undergo a kind of radical reconfiguration of its historical relationship to national identity and culture on one hand and the corporate imperative for instrumental knowledge on the other. From this point of view, then, Gubar's explanation of the language crisis-that "economic forces ... escalated the pressure always exerted on humanities scholars to produce a reputation by engaging in arcane, agonistic maneuvers or by feverishly finding innovative vocabularies" (pp. 900-901)-actually misunderstands the way the critique of philosophical language from within the humanities further undermines the tradition of humanistic inquiry she elsewhere defends by requiring uniform intellectual vocabularies. In a similar way, much of the current conversation about the declining role of the public intellectual positions itself as defending the threatened humanities while tacitly supporting the imperative to reduce critical fluencies by creating for the humanities a monodisciplinary discourse, one that can stand on its own in the mass-mediated commodity sphere
28. Nancy K. Miller's "Philoctetes' Sister" argues convincingly that the aesthetic and the racial/political are not divisible elements of the literary text. "We need a revisionary 'morality of the aesthetic' that would produce a reading capable of interpreting ... the marks of race and gender in the text as intrinsic to literariness itself" (Nancy K. Miller, "Philoctetes' Sister: Feminist Literary Criticism and the New Misogyny," Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts [New York, 1991], p. 113). In October 1998, the University of California, Riverside will host a conference, organized by Emory Elliott, entitled "Aesthetics and Difference: Cultural Diversity, Literature, and the Arts," focused precisely on these issues. This conference signals a renewed interest in understanding how the ideological, the economic, and the political are imbricated in the question of the aesthetic
29. See Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York, 1998)
30. see Steven Mailloux, "Rhetoric Returns to Syracuse: The Reception of Curricular Reform," Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), pp. 151-81
31. see Chow, "The Politics and Pedagogy of Asian Literatures in American Universities," Differences 2 (Fall 1990): 29-51
32. See Wiegman, "The Alchemy of Disloyalty," American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C., 1995), pp. 188-90
33. See Wendy Brown, Stales of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ., 1995)
34. I do not mean to suggest here that whiteness has never been particularized before in the U.S. Certainly segregationist practices produced whiteness as a "marked" category, as the declarative warning For Whites Only might forcefully suggest. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that white identity formation depends on the mobility of its ability to universalize and particularize, which means that in the current decade we are witnessing a powerful new configuration of white particularity and not its originary emergence. See Wiegman, "Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity," Boundary 2 26 (Winter 1999)
35. This is evident, for instance, in her discussion of Nicole Ward Jouve, White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography (New York, 1991), pp. 14-15