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Feminist Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/1464700105053690
2005 6: 115Feminist Theory
Clare Hemmings
Telling feminist stories
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115
Telling feminist stories
TF
Clare Hemmings London School of Economics
Feminist Theory
Copyright © 2005
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 6(2): 115–139.
1464–7001
DOI: 10.1177/1464700105053690
www.sagepublications.com
Abstract This article identiﬁes and analyses the dominant stories that
academics tell about the development of Western second wave feminist
theory. Through an examination of recent production of
interdisciplinary feminist and cultural theory journals, I suggest that
despite a rhetorical insistence on multiple feminisms, Western feminist
trajectories emerge as startlingly singular. In particular, I am critical of
an insistent narrative that sees the development of feminist thought as a
relentless march of progress or loss. This dominant approach
oversimpliﬁes the complex history of Western feminisms, ﬁxes writers
and perspectives within a particular decade, and repeatedly (and
erroneously) positions poststructuralist feminists as ‘the ﬁrst’ to
challenge the category ‘woman’ as the subject and object of feminist
knowledge. Rather than provide a corrective history of Western feminist
theory, the article interrogates the techniques through which this
dominant story is secured, despite the fact that we (feminist theorists)
know better. My focus, therefore, is on citation patterns, discursive
framings and some of their textual, theoretical and political effects. As
an alternative, I suggest a realignment of key theorists purported to
provide a critical break in feminist theory with their feminist citational
traces, to force a concomitant re-imagining of our historical legacy and
our place within it.
keywords loss, postmodernism, progress, the seventies, Western
feminism
Introduction
How does Western feminist theory tell the story of its own recent past?
Despite feminist theory’s clear variety, both within and outside ‘the West’,
when telling its own recent story a dominant narrative, albeit one with a
range of affective or critical inﬂections, does emerge. That story divides the
recent past into clear decades to provide a narrative of relentless progress
or loss, proliferation or homogenization. Western feminist theory tells its
own story as a developmental narrative, where we move from a preoccupation
with unity and sameness, through identity and diversity, and on to
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difference and fragmentation. These shifts are broadly conceived of as
corresponding to the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s respectively,
and to a move from liberal, socialist and radical feminist thought to postmodern
gender theory. A shift from the naïve, essentialist seventies,
through the black feminist critiques and ‘sex wars’ of the eighties, and into
the ‘difference’ nineties and beyond, charts the story as one of progress
beyond falsely boundaried categories and identities. A shift from the politicized,
uniﬁed early second wave, through an entry into the academy in the
eighties, and thence a fragmentation into multiple feminisms and individual
careers, charts the story as one of loss of commitment to social and
political change.1 Which theoretical approaches are characterized as
belonging to the 2000s is largely dependent on which version of this story
one aligns oneself with. When the story is a celebration of difference, we
are commonly invited to (re)turn to affect as a source of individual and
collective knowledge. When the story is one marked by grief, the contemporary
call is instead for a return to the material contexts of women’s lives.
Yet, however inﬂected, the chronology remains the same, the decades overburdened
yet curiously ﬂattened, and poststructuralism animated as the
key actor in challenging ‘woman’ as the ground for feminist politics and
knowledge production.
I take issue with this double story for a number of reasons. Firstly, it
oversimpliﬁes different areas of feminist thought and the contests over
meaning that characterize feminist debate at all points of its history. In
particular, and as I explore further in this article, it either ﬁxes racial and
sexual critique of feminism as decade-speciﬁc, as a necessary but temporary
stage in the movement towards a more generalized notion of difference,
or it places the blame for feminist theory’s ills singularly at the house of
the already beleaguered feminist academic. Neither tack can be satisfactory,
surely. Secondly, within this story, feminist poststructuralist theorists
are repeatedly positioned as the ﬁrst to deconstruct ‘woman’, and as either
heroic in surpassing past mistakes, or responsible for the ills of feminism
in general. I dispute this characterization of poststructuralism for the
simple reason that one of the abiding concerns for the majority of feminist
theorists has always been, and remains, such a deconstruction.2 Thirdly,
this story has rightly been critiqued as an Anglo-American trajectory
within Western feminist thought, one that forces European or non-Western
feminist theorists either to reposition themselves in line with the former’s
logic, or to depict themselves as critical or transcendent, but nevertheless
as responsive.3
Perhaps, then, this double story needs to be more carefully characterized,
not simply as ‘Western’ but as Anglo-American. I wonder, though, if
such a move fails to do justice to the story’s pervasiveness. National
naming of this kind gives the mistaken impression that the problem is
predominantly one of exclusion, that what is needed to correct the story is
clear – more non-Western and Continental European discussion and
reframing. And this is certainly the case. Yet Continental feminist theory
not only differentiates itself from this ‘Anglo-American’ narrative of
progress or loss, but also actively, if inadvertently, reconstitutes it. So, for
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example, in Italian Feminist Theory and Practice (Parati and West, 2002),
a volume that challenges the dominance of French and Anglo-US feminist
theory in the last three decades, the story of what has gone before is still
reiterated as comprising a familiar move from sex to gender, or from essentialism
to deconstruction. The (Italian) future may be different, but the
(Anglo-American) feminist past remains the same. As Domna Stanton and
Rosi Braidotti both warn us, the dominance of this story thus not only
stiﬂes the particularities of different trajectories, but also sidelines the
multiple differences within both Anglo-American and Continental
feminist thought in the process (Stanton, 1985; Braidotti, 1997). NonWestern
perspectives are also not absent from the dominant story feminist
theory tells about its recent past. In fact, and as I explore below, the absorption
of the work of non-Western identiﬁed theorists such as Chandra
Mohanty (1988), Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1989) and Uma Narayan (1997) into a
Western trajectory can easily function as a further indication of that
trajectory’s advancement. Finally, this story circulates so widely that ﬁxing
its origins as Anglo-American never quite captures the transitions and
translations across English and non-English speaking feminist contexts
that mark its progress. So for now I want to stick with ‘Western’, aware of
the omissions the term at once generates and demonstrates.
The doubled story of Western feminist theory is, of course, not the only
story we are told. Innovative and challenging accounts of feminist theory
are myriad. But, for my own part, despite the fact that I ﬁnd my own reading
of the recent feminist past at odds with this story, I also ﬁnd myself repeating
its logic in research and teaching contexts. And I have noticed other
feminist theorists using this story as a kind of common-sense gloss enabling
them to move on to the more pressing concerns of their research. Its repetition
alone suggests that it is worthy of more precise attention. My focus is,
then, on how this dominant story is secured through our publishing and
teaching practices despite the fact that we know it obscures the complexities
we cherish. Which parts of this story are so consistently reproduced
that they are understood to ‘speak for themselves’ without further elaboration?
How is a dominant narrative of a shift from 1970s sameness, through
1980s identity, to 1990s difference within Western English speaking
feminist theory textually and rhetorically secured? What discursive and
political work does this narrative do, in terms of authenticating a particular
feminist school or subject, or privileging a particular intellectual
biography or national location? In essence, I am interested in the technology
of Western feminist storytelling – its form, function and effects.
I focus on recent interdisciplinary feminist and cultural theory journal
articles, rather than textbooks or readers, to explore these questions. While
textbooks and readers provide clear evidence of the decade by decade
approach to feminist theory I am interested in examining, they are not as
helpful for an examination of techniques of citation that secure a history
as a prelude to the author’s own particular insights. Textbooks are less
useful for indicating a ‘common sense’ understanding of the recent
feminist past, because they seek to produce that past, rather than transcend
it. As a way of reﬂecting my desire to focus on the technologies of feminist
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storytelling, I have cited the publishing arena rather than the individual
author in my analysis. This both looks and feels odd, but my aim is to
indicate that a journal article is the material result of an author’s work,
editorial practice and broader disciplinary and institutional conventions.
Which aspects of an article are ﬂagged by peer reviewers as in need of more
work, which teleologies pass unnoticed and so on are collaborative
decisions. In addition, since I am particularly interested in which assertions
do not need to be evidenced, which histories are told as a matter of
course, I am including passages that reﬂect that tendency rather than the
argument of a given article as a whole.4
Historiographic approaches
My approach to feminist storytelling here, then, is historiographic in that
I am concerned with the contested politics of the present over the ‘truth of
the past’. Historiography is in its broadest sense the name for historical
accounts, or theories of history. Combined with the practice of genealogy,
it has proven particularly amenable to feminist and queer work seeking to
emphasize that all history takes place in the present, as we make and
remake stories about the past to enable a particular present to gain legitimacy.5
Gayatri Spivak cites Hayden White’s ironic attack on the historian
who searches for the absolute truth ‘buried in the archives, hoping to ﬁnd
the “form of the reality” that will serve as the object of representation in
the account that they will write “when all the facts are known” and they
have ﬁnally “got the story straight”’ (White, 1978, in Spivak, 1999: 202–3).
For Spivak, as for White, wanting to ‘get the story straight’ is an act of
disavowed epistemic violence, which prevents attention to the political
investments that motivate the desire to know, and that generate a writer’s
epistemological and methodological practices.6 In a feminist context,
which stories predominate or are precluded or marginalized is always a
question of power and authority.
That there is no single historical truth does not mean that history is
simply a matter of individual opinion, that all truths are somehow equal.
Wary of the accusation of relativism (an accusation productive of a depth
of shame second only to that produced by an accusation of essentialism),
feminist historiographers are keen to highlight the ways in which the
challenge to a single truth allows for increased rather than decreased
political accountability in the present. Queer feminist historiographer
Jennifer Terry, for example, builds on Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of
historians as ‘jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge’, suggesting that
history is useful to the extent that it makes us aware of the power relations
at play in the past and present (Terry, 1999: 25). In her work on the racialization
of sexology and homosexuality in An American Obsession, Terry
pays close attention to how inequalities in the present allow certain stories
to ﬂourish and not others, allow certain alliances to be made and not
others. A historiographic insistence on the politics of the present in the
making of the past more precisely still foregrounds the location of the
historian or teller of tales. Spivak emphasizes that ‘the past is a past present
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– a history that is in some sense a genealogy of the historian. What is
marked is the site of desire’ (1999: 207). For Spivak both a dominant and
a corrective history are what allow ‘the willed (auto)biography of the West
still [to masquerade] as disinterested history, even when the critic
presumes to touch its unconscious’ (1999: 208). Such critical historiographic
accounts of power, history and authorship allow a different set of
questions to be asked about the feminst past. Rather than asking, for
example, ‘What really happened in the 1970s?’ I want to ask ‘How does
this story about the 1970s come to be told and accepted?’ And following
Spivak, ‘Why do I want to tell this story, and in telling it, what kind of
subject do I become?’
In line with the feminist and queer historiographic accounts I have been
discussing, I am sceptical both of linear accounts of the recent feminist
past, and indeed of the importance of correcting that record. Such a statement
is rather disingenuous, however, because my very belief in the
problematic nature of the story of Western feminism arises from my own
recognition of debates within the last three decades that complicate that
story. So one reason why I ﬁnd unsubstantiated claims about the essentialism
of feminist writing in the 1970s so aggravating is that they ignore the
rich discussions about the relationships among gender, sexuality and race
that took place in that decade.7 And indeed you will ﬁnd that in this article
I both gesture to the complexity of those feminist debates (as in note 7,
above), and am hesitant to provide a corrective bibliography for that
complexity for the historiographic reasons that I have been discussing thus
far. To replace one truth with another suggests that the historical problem
is simply one of omission, that once the error has been corrected the story
will be ‘straight’ in the way that Spivak is critical of, an objective representation
untainted by bias. But even if we could fully correct the record,
this does not account for the reasons why certain issues become part of an
accepted story, and others fall by the wayside, or at least not sufﬁciently
to allay my initial frustration at those exclusions. Since I concur with
Michel Foucault’s inspirational observation in The Archaeology of Knowledge
that ‘Discourse is not life: its time is not your time’ (1972: 211),
suggesting that meaning is always multiple rather than singular though the
singular takes precedence, my primary aim is to open up future possibilities
rather than dwelling on past omissions.
In that spirit, this article focuses on what is going on in the present when
feminist stories about the recent past are being told. What textual, rhetorical,
exclusionary, inclusive or diversionary tactics are employed to secure
this story and not that one, this present and past and not those ones? Of
course, the process is not simply one of mechanical deconstruction. Much
feminist work is concerned with the emotional investment needed to
sustain feminist work of a range of kinds. In particular, I cannot think of
the terms ‘emotion’ and ‘feminist work’ together without thinking of the
inspirational work of Audre Lorde in The Cancer Journals (1980), and
Sister Outsider (1984). Lorde’s passion and commitment to living a
black lesbian feminist life reminds her readers of their own values and
embodiment. For Lorde, it is emotional investment and the community ties
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that this produces that allow marginal narratives to be told and to survive.
More recently, Lynne Pearce (2004) has indicated the importance of
thinking through the way feminist texts work to persuade at the emotional
level, echoing my own experience that this is one way in which our own
commitments and writing practices are formed. Feminist emotion, then, is
central to the feminist stories we tell, and the way that we tell them.
Challenges to these stories, from within as well as outside feminism, are
frequently experienced and responded to at an emotional level, and as a
result an account of ways of telling feminist stories needs to be attentive
to the affective as well as technical ways in which our stories about the
recent feminist past work. It hurts because it matters, when we are passionately
invested in academic feminist practice.
The role of the seventies8
Of the recent decades we tell stories about in the Western feminist present,
the 1970s emerges as the least diverse. In this section I begin to explore the
speciﬁc weight that the feminist seventies carries in the service of the
governing feminist story I sketched in my introduction. The dominant and
most familiar attribution to the feminist seventies is of course essentialism,
an accusation so frequently repeated, that it can actually stand as justiﬁcation
for not reading texts from the feminist seventies at all any more. This
in itself should make us suspicious, of course, given the political and
intellectual vibrancy of this era. Weaned on feminist theories of the 1990s,
I was long convinced of the essentialist ills of early second wave Western
feminist texts, many of which I did not read until a decade later. When I
did, I remember being shocked by the diversity of published feminist
materials from the 1970s, and in particular the depth and range of debate
on issues of race, sexuality and class in the journals and newsletters of the
period. It was this ‘shock’ that precipitated my early interest in the telling
of feminist stories.9 My interest here is not whether seventies feminist
theory is or is not essentialist, but the means by which our contemporary
expectation that it is necessarily essentialist is secured. How is such a
seamless decade of essentialism produced and maintained? What form is
this essentialism assumed to take, what evidence is given for it, and how
is it mobilized in the service of a broader narrative of progress or decline?
My object of analysis here is journal articles, for the reasons discussed in
the introduction, but even a cursory analysis of feminist theory textbooks
or readers suggests that there is interesting work to be done in this arena
too, particularly concerning their dominant presentation of feminist
thought as a process of displacement over contest.10
The most obvious way in which feminist seventies’ essentialism is
(re)produced is through unfavourable comparison with poststructuralist
feminist theorists. The following example is typical: ‘A particular challenge
which faces poststructuralist feminism is how to undo the essential
or “natural” conception of the self, while simultaneously maintaining the
category “women” which feminism necessarily requires’ (Theory, Culture
& Society, 1997).11 The writers and editorial reviewers of this passage do
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not need to evidence the assumption that there is an essential conception
of the self that it is poststructuralist feminism’s ‘particular challenge’ to
undo, because this sentiment is so often repeated without further
comment, and therefore the momentum it results in is already familiar to
the reader. While the category ‘women’ that poststructuralist feminism
maintains in this extract is in scare quotes, mirroring the ‘natural’ conception
of the self that precedes it and marking both as problematic, the plurality
of the latter term stands in contrast to the singularity of the former,
which is also underlined by its qualifying and matching term ‘essential’.
The familiar repetition of this chronology means that the failure to account
for women’s differences prior to poststructuralist feminist intervention is
itself naturalized as representative of the dominant trend rather than a
position held by an individual theorist. The ‘natural’ of the above extract
shifts to mean ‘understandable’ in this reading. Interestingly, feminism predifference
can thus be marked as innocent of its inevitable exclusions.
Innocence is key to a contemporary feminist dynamic, since marking a past
feminist essentialism as unaware of its exclusions allows contemporary
theorists to lament the fragmentation of a previously uniﬁed women’s
movement in ways that would not otherwise make sense. We can long for
a lost unity of experience and purpose (now), because we did not understand
its effects (then). Nostalgia smoothes away the rough edges of this
particular history; an innocent essentialism can be seamlessly integrated
into a feminist progress narrative, recuperated as loss.12
The feminist story in which essentialism is critiqued and moved away
from is secured through the weaving in of a range of additional binaries,
achieving an overall move from sameness to difference. Sameness and
difference are in value-laden opposition on the one hand, but are also
sequentially tied, as we move forward from (exclusionary) sameness to
(inclusive) difference. I ﬁnd it helpful to denote this as sameness–
difference, where the dash I use here and throughout indicates both a
temporal and a hierarchical separation.
Empirical studies conducted from a range of theoretical perspectives (radical,
socialist and liberal feminist) have all in some way afﬁrmed the existence of
women’s experience as a source of privileged understandings, if not the basis of
an alternative social science. Now, however, the deconstruction of ‘women’ is
having profoundly destabilising effects upon feminist theorising and research
. . . This has liberated a plethora of exciting philosophical, political and cultural
endeavours that tackle the essentialism around women embedded in both
feminist and non-feminist texts. (Gender, Place and Culture, 1994)13
In this extract the standpoint theory and empirical inquiry (of the past) are
contrasted with the deconstructive tools and ‘philosophical, political and
cultural endeavours’ (of the now). Where women’s experience was both
object and source of feminist knowledge, critiquing the category ‘women’
means that it is now the essentialism inherent in that (earlier) inquiry that
becomes the new object to be ‘tackled’. The binaries that this description
produces and relies upon are empiricism–deconstruction, experience–
text, and knowledge–critique, where the ﬁrst term in each case is
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associated with a trenchant afﬁrmation of women, and the second with an
exciting destabilization of the same. The privileged singular gives way to
a liberated plethora, in object and narrative terms. The feminist progress
narrative represented here is an opening up or branching out of meaning
rather than a closing down of the same, so that (sexual) difference as static
object is displaced by poststructuralist methodology itself as generating
(unspeciﬁed) difference. No prizes for guessing which feminist mode of
inquiry we are called to identify with.
Establishing temporality
But how do we know that these juxtapositions of now and then, deconstructionist
versus essentialist, place the ‘then’ in the seventies? As
suggested earlier, work from the feminist seventies is rarely directly cited
but instead implicated by juxtaposition. In order for the ‘then’ of the
familiar story I have been tracing to belong ﬁrmly in the contemporary
feminist imaginary to the seventies, the role of the eighties is key.14 Two
sets of approaches that become associated with the overburdened eighties
in order to facilitate the move from the entrenched then to the expansive
now are black feminism and writing on the ‘sex wars’. In the case of black
feminism, establishing its critique as an eighties phenomenon allows poststructuralism
to become the taker-upper of difference in the nineties. If the
eighties signiﬁes a growing awareness of racial differences within
feminism, the nineties signiﬁes the explosion of difference in general (the
‘plethora’ of the previous extract).
This trajectory ﬁxes a before and after racial awareness, then, retrospectively
coding the essentialism of the seventies ﬁrst and foremost as one of
racial exclusion. The following extract provides the typical chronology:
Perhaps the most important legacy of 1980s feminism is the crucial concern with
difference . . . Initiated by feminists of color who called attention to their
exclusion and/or misrepresentation by mainstream feminist accounts of
‘women,’ the focus on women’s differences was underwritten as well by poststructuralist
feminism. Both critiques have produced the most recent object of
feminist theoretical inquiry: the female subject who inhabits diverse cultural
locations and for whom gender is dynamically engaged with numerous other
social categories and discourses. (Feminist Studies, 2001)15
A combined move, initiated by black feminists, endorsed by poststructuralist
feminists, shifts attention to a different subject, one ‘who inhabits
diverse cultural locations’, and who is ‘the most recent object of feminist
theoretical inquiry’. Often irrespective of its object of critique, black
feminism thus becomes a trope in the service of the idea of a progressive
incorporation of difference, such that an implied seventies feminism
comes to carry the burden of a racial critique that does not need to be
explicit to be thus marked. The shame at being discovered to be essentialist
is thus unbearable for those of us who cut our academic teeth on poststructuralism,
precisely because it gestures towards yet simultaneously
obscures an accusation of racism.
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While much black feminist writing is indeed directly critical of white
feminist writing that does not attend to the complex dynamics of raced and
classed en-gendering, what I want to argue is that its citational containment
in the 1980s, and invocation as heralding an increased sophistication
in the theorization of political subjects, marks the work of racial critique
of feminism as over and thus as able to be assumed or gestured to rather
than evidenced in work after that point. As Jackie Stacey once again points
out, making a trope of black feminism means that it is frequently spoken
and written of as a ‘uniﬁed [category] in need of no further differentiation’
(1993: 57). In the previous extract, feminists of color ‘initiated’ the feminist
theoretical concern with difference, a concern presented as a baton passed
to poststructuralists (who are presumed different writing subjects). The
sequencing of the following extract similarly works to produce poststructuralism
as having incorporated but also importantly having surpassed
black feminism:
Two related intellectual debates provided the impetus for critical reﬂection on
‘the subject’ of feminist thinking. First, women of color and Third World women
feminists critiqued ‘the subject’ implicit within most feminist thought at the
time, a subject that normalized the experience of white, middle-class, ﬁrst-world
women (hooks, 1984; Trinh, 1989). This critique stimulated greater interest in
the multiplicity of oppression and fractured the notion of ‘woman’ and her
experience(s). Second, a growing interest in post-structural psychoanalytical
perspectives (e.g. those of Lacan and Derrida), as well as Foucault’s notion of
power/discourse, also profoundly affected feminist theory. Feminists appreciated
post-structural attempts to deploy an anti-essentialist world-view, reject
totalizing ‘grand’ theory, and embrace multiplicity, difference and the ‘decentred’
subject (Sarup, 1988). (Gender, Place and Culture, 1999)
While black feminism and poststructuralism are on one level represented
here as of the same era (all citations are from the 1980s) and as having
related concerns, the temporality I am tracing here is reinforced by black
feminism’s location in the extract once again as catalyst – providing
impetus and simulating interest. The critiques of women of colour and
Third World feminists are referred to in the past tense, while the ‘growing
interest’ in poststructuralism is linguistically still active and present,
allowing its proponents to ‘deploy’, ‘reject’ and ‘embrace’. Poststructuralism
thus imaginatively spills over into the next decade, while the critiques
of women of colour and Third World women are temporally ﬁxed by their
frames of citation.
As much as it is the era of black feminism, the eighties is also understood
as the decade of debates about sexuality, where feminism is forced
to move on from its sexually essentialist past:
From the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the
1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of
contemporary theoretical, social, and political demands . . . [P]ro-sex feminists
argued . . . that radical feminism’s representation of women as disempowered
actors fails to see women as sexual subjects in their own right . . . While radical
feminists see ‘female sexuality’ as repressed by ‘the patriarchy,’ the pro-sexuality
movement sees repression as produced by heterosexism and ‘sex-negativity’ –
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cultural operations often seen as institutionalized in feminism itself. (Feminist
Review, 2000)16
Radical feminism, clearly taking place here in the seventies, is imagined
in wholly negative terms. By framing sexual politics in terms of pro-sex
demands, radical feminist analyses of sexuality can be reduced to their
focus on repression, and indeed be discounted as sexual politics at all. This
historical and political separation is linguistically reinforced through a
series of refusals: thus radical feminist representation ‘fails to see women
as sexual subjects’, and understands sexuality only as ‘repressed’. In
addition, what are perceived to be the key theoretical terms of seventies
radical feminism – ‘female sexuality’, ‘patriarchy’, and ‘sex-negativity’ –
are placed in scare quotes, while pro-sex accounts of heterosexism remain
unqualiﬁed. Oddly absent from the above account is any mention of
lesbian feminism, perhaps resonant only in the term ‘female sexuality’,
then to be erased by an immediate insistence on feminism’s heterosexism.
Lesbian feminism is also absent from the pro-sex demands of the eighties
and nineties here, represented instead by a rather general pro-sexuality
movement, whose focus is heterosexism but whose subjects remain
unspeciﬁed. What does remain is an undoubtedly anachronistic ‘female
sexuality’, replaced by the sexual as well as textual play of the nineties.17
Other accounts are as explicit in their foregrounding of sexuality as key
to feminism’s linear diversiﬁcation.
Whereas the earlier generation of feminist scholars challenged patriarchal
ideologies that reduced women’s prime contribution to society to their ‘biological
capacity’ for nurturing and reproducing, the new gender theorists are
fundamentally concerned with the historical subjectivity of sexed individuals
and the embodiment of sexual identity, seen as indeterminate, ambiguous,
multiple (Morris, 1995). For Judith Butler (1990, 1993), who argues that sexual
identity is lived as a highly regulated performance, one is not female; one can
only ‘do’ female. (Theory, Culture & Society, 1998)
Juxtaposing challenges of ‘the earlier generation of feminist scholars’ with
the ‘historical’ concerns of ‘the new gender theorists’ consolidates the
sense of the former as ahistorical or transhistorical, universalizing, and
privileging of a female subject. A further relation feminism–gender studies
emerges to regulate the difference. The lack of citation underscores this
comparison; the earlier generation is generalizable as well as generalizing,
while Morris and Butler can and should be distinguished from one another,
and later work from earlier work. The citation techniques here consolidate
a trajectory and momentum that does not need to have all its parts detailed.
The seventies in general is invoked through its comparison to the eighties
or nineties in particular.
Citation is a central technique in consolidating the trajectory that I am
tracing here, and the move is consistently from a relative lack of citation,
through to a precise and limited choice of authors. Judith Butler, Donna
Haraway and Gayatri Spivak, in particular, are invoked as threshold
ﬁgures, heralding the dawn of a new feminist era of difference, and representing
in themselves the increased sophistication understood to attend
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that era. Butler, the most cited of all, carries the heaviest teleological
burden, frequently single-handedly inaugurating a move away from
‘woman’ as the invariant ground and subject of oppression, knowledge and
resistance. This extract puts the case succinctly: ‘Perhaps more than any
other feminist theorist, she [Butler] has systematically elaborated a way of
understanding gender identity as deeply entrenched but not immutable
and has thereby pushed feminist theory beyond the polarities of the essentialist
debate’ (Theory, Culture & Society, 1999). Citation of Haraway tends
to occur in accounts charting the move away from essentialist conceptions
of the body, and speciﬁcally away from a sexually differentiated understanding
of the body within feminism. And citation of Spivak seems by
turns to mark a black feminist critique of feminism’s white presumption,
and an account of that difference as postcolonial rather than biological.18
Their citation thus seems to signal ‘the death’ of one way of thinking and
the inception of a newer, more ﬂexible way of thinking; it never evidences
ongoing contests within feminism over precisely these issues. And as the
quotation above suggests, this transition is understood to be one that
feminism pre-difference is forced or pushed into rather than one that it is
already engaged in.
Of particular interest to me here is how attributing such a shift to difference
to a few named authors detaches those authors from their own
feminist trajectories. If Butler, Haraway and Spivak are ‘responsible’ for
feminism’s reluctant acknowledgment of the epistemological problematics
of ‘woman’, they are grammatically as well as temporally posed as distinct
from that history which they have now allowed us to surpass. Citation is
once again a key way that a narrative separating poststructuralism from
feminism is underwritten. The inﬂuences on Butler, Spivak and Haraway
are consistently cited as male theorists, afﬁrming the sense of a break in
feminist inquiry. For example, in the paper the following extract is taken
from, Derrida is the only referenced source of inspiration for Haraway’s
(1985) cyborg ﬁgure: ‘Haraway must acknowledge a siblingship with
Derrida over those central questions of humanism concerning origin,
authenticity and universality. The project for both is to dissolve categorical
distinctions, which Haraway pursues most particularly by challenging
the concept of the natural’ (Body & Society, 1996).19 And despite her
engagement with a range of Third World and postcolonial feminist writers,
one could be forgiven for thinking that Spivak had only ever read Marx
and Derrida from the persistence of such casual introductory phrases such
as ‘To certify the Derridean assumptions upon which thinkers like Spivak
draw . . .’ (Critical Inquiry, 1998).20 Similarly, Foucault, Lacan and Derrida
are more consistently seen as Butler’s primary inﬂuences than Irigaray and
Wittig, despite Gender Trouble’s substantial engagement with these
feminist authors. Repeated statements such as ‘Judith Butler transformed
the study of gender by using Foucault to apply poststructuralist conceptions
of the subject to it’ (Australian Feminist Studies, 2003),21 and
‘because of the inﬂuence of Foucault and Derrida, recondite abstractions
characterize postmodernist feminist theory in general and Butler’s books
in particular’ (Critical Inquiry, 1998), allow Butler to be critically reviewed
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as marking a break with rather than as having an ongoing engagement with
feminist theory.
To recap then: the familiar story is thus. The feminist seventies is
ignorant or innocent of racial and sexual diversity at best, or indeed
actively exclusionary through its whiteness and heterosexism. The poststructuralist
nineties emerges on the other side of the eighties as champion
of multiplicity and difference, although signiﬁcantly an indeterminate
rather than located difference – difference in general. The teleology could
not be more ﬁrmly solidiﬁed than in the following: ‘By the eighties,
changes were taking place that laid the groundwork for the third phase of
feminist criticism, which I will call the engendering of differences’ (Critical
Inquiry, 1998). The seventies and the nineties loom large in such a statement,
despite frequently not being directly mentioned. In order for this
teleology to be maintained a number of other binaries are overlaid onto
this linear trajectory as I have shown (sexual difference–gender theory,
singularity–multiplicity, empiricism–deconstruction, and feminism–poststructuralism),
and different perspectives within the feminist seventies’
literature squashed, erased, or deemed exceptions to the rule.
Let me be as clear as possible. In order for poststructuralism to emerge
both as beyond particularized difference and as inclusive of those
differences, this narrative actively requires the misrepresentation of
interventions within feminism as decade-speciﬁc. A universalized essentialist
feminism is directly or indirectly associated with the seventies,
and racial and sexual critiques contained in the eighties in order for
poststructuralism to have ﬁnally both surpassed the essentialisms and
incorporated the identities associated with sexual difference, sexuality
and race.
Counter narratives
If the above represents the progress narrative, what of the narrative of loss
I also indicated at the outset. There are two main forms of counter narrative,
both of which take issue with the value attributed to the successive
eras, but which leave its teleology otherwise intact. The ﬁrst is a straightforward
reverse narrative, which produces an identical linearity but
which reframes the past as marked by a politicized unity, and the present
by apolitical individualism. This counter narrative is marked predominantly
by nostalgia.22 The second is a more circular narrative of ‘return’
that similarly positions poststructuralism as problematically self-referential,
desiring instead to ‘move forward’ to an era that revalues the
imagined past. This second counter narrative is marked by pragmatism or
frustration, and is often produced by writers previously favouring a
progress narrative.23
Firstly, accounts which represent the seventies as innocent and therefore
‘good’, like those which produce the seventies as essentialist and
therefore ‘bad’, may seem to challenge a dominant vision of feminist
development, but are actually vital for the reproduction of one of its core
mechanisms. As suggested above, a singular innocence is to some extent
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already written into the linear trajectory that moves from universality to
particularity, actively encouraging nostalgia and allowing for a counter-
valuation.
‘Then and there,’ back in the 1970s, we saw ourselves, as many other feminists
did, as ‘producers of feminist theory’ which then informed and was changed by
our practice as feminists; and we entered the academy . . . ‘to know and therefore
to change the world.’ Over the period that has led to ‘now and here,’ it has
been interesting to observe the gradual assimilation of academic feminism, and
the entry into it of successive cohorts who ‘came to feminism’ through the text
rather than through political practice. One of the results of the passing of time
and the perhaps necessary correlates of assimilation has been the rise of a
distinct category of ‘feminist theory’ and a distinctive professional category of
‘feminist theorists.’ What has supported this is a gradually decreasing awareness
of the earlier feminist critique of theory as ‘ideas’ produced through material
practices cross-cut by the operations of power. (Feminist Theory, 2000)24
In this settling of scores, the narrative structure of second wave feminist
history remains unchanged. The seventies is equally uniform, and the
eighties equally implicitly framed by two opposite poles leading not to a
celebration of multiplicity but to a depoliticized present. In the reverse
narrative the eighties needs either to be erased (euphemistically referred to
as the ‘passing of time’ in the above extract), or marked as the last valid
moment of feminist political life before the institutionalization of
feminism. In the quotation above the use of the term ‘assimilation’ in
relation to ‘the passing of time’ implicates the nineties and its feminist
theorists with the co-optation of its concerns while avoiding the problem
of naming. Similar binaries – practice–theory, activist–professional, world–
text – ground the story, but this time the ﬁrst term is imbued with integrity
and the latter with opportunism. Through this series of oppositions it is
‘feminist professionals’ of the ‘now and here’ who bear primary responsibility
for the demise of feminist activism, where before it was a generalized
seventies feminism that was responsible for feminism’s exclusions.25 Yet
feminism proper needs ﬁrst to be established as regrettably but absolutely
over, as belonging to the ‘then and there’ not the ‘now and here’ in order for
her careerist sister to take centre stage in the contemporary imagination.26
Even where the past is understood as imagined, the subjects of those
imagined eras are still the same. In this next example, the seventies functions
similarly as an indicator of feminism’s pre-institutional naïvety,
thereby facilitating the construction of the present in terms of regrettable
sophistication.
Universities have clearly offered opportunities to many students of Women’s
Studies and provided careers for academic feminists. They have also afforded
spaces in which ever more sophisticated feminist thinking can be produced. But
there has been a price to pay in terms of depoliticization and exclusion . . . Issues
are no longer as clear as they were once imagined to be and feminist work may
have a tendency to become inward-looking . . . Critiques of essentialism have
brought contradictory possibilities. On the one hand, there have been positive
gains from the recognition of difference whilst, on the other, loss of the imagined
community of ‘sisterhood’ has led to fragmentation and disrupted political
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cohesion . . . We are left with the question of what new kinds of alliance might
be possible in a post-unitary feminist landscape. (Feminist Review, 1999)
While this extract demonstrates an unusually reﬂexive relationship to
recent Western feminist history both in terms of acknowledging ‘contradictory
possibilities’, and by recognizing a particular trajectory as ﬁctional,
the ‘sisterhood’ is still ‘lost’ albeit ‘imagined’, such that we are left
stranded, once again, in an apocalyptic ‘post-unitary feminist landscape’.
The loss is in fact of the belief that there was unity, yet without that belief,
however ironic a distance one takes from it, further alliance is deemed
unimaginable. For Robyn Wiegman (2000) such apocalyptic feminist positions
expect the present to resemble the past. When it does not, a radical
break is imagined and the future abandoned, leaving only the cultivation
of memory. In the process, the proponents of a feminist poststructuralist
position are implicitly or explicitly marked as masculinist, while proponents
of an earlier, and better, era are marked as authentically feminist.
The second counter narrative I am interested in is one that positions
poststructuralism as an interruption to concerns with the social world. As
with the reverse narrative, poststructuralism is cast as irredeemably apolitical,
but in contrast to the apocalyptic or nostalgic tone of the former, this
second counter narrative proposes we advance through a ‘return’ to what
remains valuable, although that ‘return’ is no longer innocent. I am
thinking here of pleas that we return to a focus on everyday lived experience
or material realities instead of remaining mired in a conceptual or
linguistic realm deemed to have no value outside of the academy (Jackson,
2001; Nussbaum, 1999). The key arenas for feminist theory where this
‘return’ is pivotal are debates about the political versus the cultural that
dominated the mid-late nineties (notably Butler, 1997 and Fraser, 1997),
empirical research versus social theory as providing access to the everyday
(Walby, 2000), and a resurgence of interest in psychic excess as a challenge
to the failures of the social constructivist account of the subject (Massumi,
2002; Sedgwick, 2003).
It is not my intention to dismiss the importance of the everyday for
feminist theory – far from it – but to indicate the impact of its invocation
as a solution to a largely imagined problem. While ostensibly challenging
a developmental narrative that sees poststructuralism emerge heroic the
other side of difference challenges to the essentialist seventies, the counter
narrative of a ‘return’ to the material or the real before poststructuralism
retains and endorses the same teleology. In effect, then, feminist calls for
a ‘return’ to common-sense principles rely on and reproduce the separation
of feminist poststructuralists from their feminist citation tracks I discussed
above. The (feminist) political must have been displaced by the (abstract)
cultural in order to be reasserted, a focus on the text must have replaced a
focus on the experiential and so forth. And of course their absolute difference
from one another must be maintained for the hierarchical and
temporal separation of key terms to work. In addition to the speciﬁc
debates that I have mentioned here we also see the same ‘return’ in
academic practices such as the circulation of the casual phrase ‘call me old
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fashioned, but . . .’ in teaching and lecturing contexts. This phrase and
others like it are always delivered in the same rather smug tone, the
prelude to the declaration of a truth no longer imagined to be fashionable,
an indication of one’s own ability to move beyond the constraints of a
contemporary cutting edge. The placing of oneself in the unfashionable
past, then, becomes a primary technique for placing oneself at the centre
of the yet-to-be-validated future.
This counter temporality is secured by a range of overlaid binaries and
citation practices that mirror those I have been discussing throughout
this article. The following example uses the oppositions of feminism–
poststructuralism and world–text in the familiar chronological and
hierarchical manner:
Feminists, and to a certain extent anti-racists, have cautioned . . . that many poststructuralist
positions maintain an androcentric viewpoint and that others,
despite their theoretical challenge to hegemonic meanings, do little to change
the material conditions of marginalized groups such as women and racialized
peoples (Bondi, 1990). Socialist feminists, in particular, have argued that deconstructionists
are as trapped as many of their predecessors in self-referential
language systems and, as a result, actually do little to change the world. . . . We
too are cautious of wandering too close to the abyss of nihilism, and of dissolving
political efﬁcacy within a ‘justice of multiplicities’ (Lyotard, 1984; cf.
Kobayashi, 1993). (Gender, Place and Culture, 1994)
The function of the passage is to restore order, to ask us to return to more
sensible (less nihilistic) times, when difference had not got out of control.
These pleas appeal to our common sense and to our pragmatic sense of
how the world works and seek to make academics themselves confess that
they always were a little uncomfortable with the reiﬁed language and
discursive claims of poststructuralism. For who could disagree that it is
dangerous to wander ‘too close to the abyss of nihilism’? To achieve this
aim the pragmatic counter narratives do not engage particular theorists, but
petition their own and their readers’ idea of poststructuralism, commonly
by reference to secondary source summaries. For example:
As Rosenau points out, materialist approaches are an anathema to many forms
of postmodernism. Postmodernists of various persuasions (both the nihilistic
‘skeptics’ and the more moderate ‘afﬁrmatives’) reject those versions of modern
social science that claim a materialist reality. This leads them to embrace idealist
and relativist approaches to knowledge . . . This relativism cripples their ability
to adjudicate between different knowledge claims. (Gender & Society, 1997)27
The deﬂection of argument onto someone else, in this case Rosenau, and
its emphatic authorial endorsement – ‘As Rosenau points out . . .’ –
produce a sense of this particular story as accepted, as fact rather than
interpretation. Referencing of theorists most commonly associated with
feminism’s ‘turn to language’ is also habitually managed through secondary
source citation, where interpretation stands as evidence of the text’s
meaning, or through a general paraphrasing of ideas.
The disciplinary as well as methodological separation that is a central effect
of this narrative of return is worth closer attention. If a materialist approach
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is understood to provide more transparent access to social reality than
textual analysis in these counter narratives, if economic facts provide more
political clarity than representational traces, then a call to return to the
former is an assertion about the truth being accessible via speciﬁc disciplinary
methods as much as it is about theoretical approaches. Stevi
Jackson is explicit about the call for a ‘return’ to material inquiry as a
concomitant call for disciplinary speciﬁcity when she notes that ‘a
materialist perspective is necessarily a sociologically informed one; hence,
in reasserting the importance of the material and the social, I am also
seeking to reclaim some fundamental sociological insights’ (2001: 284).
Likewise, Sylvia Walby’s insistence that, ‘[f]eminist theory should embrace
argumentation and the scientiﬁc method, rather than seeing knowledge as
limited by social location’ (2000: 203), is a clear call for methodological
reinstatement. My examples here privilege social science over the humanities
of course, but this is not always the case. Attention to identity formation
through narrative coherence over temporal dissonance, or affect over
social context, for example, privilege literature, psychoanalysis and philosophy
over cultural studies. In a sense then the pragmatic call for a
‘return’ to academic common sense is also a call for disciplinary speciﬁcity,
training and rigour, a challenge to the interdisciplinary eclecticism associated
with poststructuralist, and of course feminist, approaches.
Conclusion
Thus far, I have been mapping some of the ways in which narratives of the
recent feminist past, whether seen as successes or failures, ﬁx its teleological
markers in very similar ways. One might simply argue that it is in
the nature of all story-telling to generalize, but to return to the genealogical
inquiry I began this article with, my concern is with which markers stick
over others, and with where our narratives position us as subjects of
feminist history and theory. This particular selective story detaches
feminism from its own past by generalizing the seventies to the point of
absurdity, ﬁxing identity politics as a phase, evacuating poststructuralism
of any political purchase, and insisting we bear the burden of these fantasized
failings. In the process we disappear class, race and sexuality only
to rediscover them ‘anew’ as embodiment and agency. Small wonder it is
not clear what the future of feminist theory holds. In closing, let me ask
the following. How might feminist theory generate a proliferation of stories
about its recent past that more accurately reﬂect the diversity of perspectives
within (or outside) its orbit? How might we reform the relationship
between feminism’s constituent parts to allow what are currently phantom
presences to take shape? Can we do feminist theory differently?
My starting point, in what will inevitably be a longer set of reﬂections,
concerns the role of the citation of key feminist theorists. As I have argued,
in the doubled story of Western feminist theory, Butler, Haraway and
Spivak are imaginatively positioned at the threshold of the ‘death of
feminism’ in several ways. They are celebrated for pointing to the failures
of an ‘early’ feminist emphasis on sisterhood, and heralded as marking the
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long-awaited theoretical sophistication of feminist theory. Yet in this narrative,
and in the counter narratives that dispute this celebration, these
authors are split from their own legacies within feminism, symbolically,
textually and politically situated as ‘other’ to and ‘after’ that imagined past.
In the counter narratives that position poststructuralism as apolitical and
self-referential, these same theorists are understood both as marking the
death of politically accountable feminism, and as embodying that death
through their own self-referential academic style, frequently denoted in
classroom and conference contexts as aggressive inaccessibility. In both
versions of the story, it is the speciﬁcity of feminist accounts of difference,
power and knowledge at all points in the recent past that is elided.
Instead, I would advocate an approach stressing the links rather than the
discontinuities between different theoretical frameworks, as a way of
challenging the linear ‘displacement’ of one approach by another. Firstly,
schools of thought conventionally pitted against one another, for example
sexual difference and gender theories, might productively be read for their
rather different approaches to the common problem of power in the
production of sexual and gendered meaning. Might there be a methodological
rigour to be extrapolated from my perhaps naïve equal enjoyment
of Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler, despite their own insistence on their
irreducible difference from one another (Braidotti, 2002; Butler, 2004)?
Might it be productive to think through the still harder task of reconnecting
Gayatri Spivak with Luce Irigaray, so that the latter’s consistent citation
predominantly as object of postcolonial critique becomes more difﬁcult to
justify (Spivak, 1987; Irigaray, 1985)?
A closely related second genealogical approach would start from the
citational absences in the secondary readings of those feminist theorists
overburdened with marking a shift away from feminism. If we insist that,
from a feminist perspective, Butler takes her deconstructive cue from
Monique Wittig, as she clearly does, the former’s role as ‘the ﬁrst’ to
challenge (1981) ‘woman’ as the ground of feminist inquiry becomes
impossible to sustain. If we rewrite one of the statements introduced earlier
– ‘Judith Butler transformed the study of gender by using Foucault to apply
poststructuralist conceptions of the subject to it’ (Australian Feminist
Studies, 2003) – to ‘Judith Butler transformed the study of gender by using
Wittig to apply Marxist/lesbian concepts of the subject to it’ we see that
the shift is more than citational. A valuing of the citational absences used
to cement the doubled story I am contesting here repositions both Wittig
and Butler, and tells the story of Gender Trouble as continuous with its
feminist points of reference.28 What I am suggesting as a feminist alternative
to changing the historical record here is a process of revaluing
currently sidelined traces of already key rather than marginal feminist
ﬁgures. In doing so I hope this work might have two primary effects: ﬁrstly
to highlight the restricted nature of what we already think we know about
those ﬁgures and their histories; and secondly, to suggest a way of imagining
the feminist past somewhat differently – as a series of ongoing contests
and relationships rather than a process of imagined linear displacement.
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Notes
1. In both cases, I concur with Jackie Stacey’s suggestion that ‘this history is
a progress narrative of the most conventional kind; we are presented as
the enlightened, knowing subjects at the end of a progressional history’
(1993: 59).
2. Toril Moi (1999) argues that Simone de Beauvoir, for example, had
already identiﬁed what we later come to know as ‘gender trouble’ in the
forties and ﬁfties. Such challenges to poststructuralism’s unique position
tend to see individual theorists as the problem, however, rather than
setting them in the context of their critical and institutional reception.
3. For example, if sexual difference theory is associated with essentialism, as
it is in the ‘progress strand’ of the feminist story I am tracing here (Butler,
1990; Spivak, 1987), its prioritization in French and Italian feminist
thinking can only stand as evidence of these contexts’ lack of development
in comparison. Only when rewritten as appropriately ‘postmodern’ can its
claim to contemporary relevance be substantiated (Schor, 1995).
4. I will provide a short information note from each journal’s web page
when I ﬁrst reference it.
5. Feminist historiographic work includes Rosi Braidotti’s ‘Feminist
Genealogies’ (1991), Joan Scott’s ‘Gender: a Useful Category of Historical
Analysis’ (1988), and Gayatri Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
(1999). Queer historiographic work includes Jennifer Terry’s ‘Theorizing
Deviant Historiography’ (1991), Teresa de Lauretis’s ‘Sexual Indifference
and Lesbian Representation’ (1988), and Judith Halberstam’s ‘Perverse
Presentism’ (1998). In all cases this work takes a dual tack, critiquing
dominant historical accounts of gendered or sexual meaning, and
proposing alternative approaches at the level of methodology over content.
6. Spivak’s historiographic discussion is in part a case for interdisciplinarity,
where the idea of a dominant canon, theoretical framing and
methodologies are usually more contested and thus more subject to
scrutiny. Spivak’s intervention might be read as a critique of Wendy
Brown’s (1997) assertion in ‘The Impossibility of Women’s Studies’ that
disciplinary knowledge (rather than the vagaries of interdisciplinary
knowledge) should be the starting point for a feminist curriculum.
7. As a starting point, I would draw the reader’s attention to the following
texts: Bethel and Smith’s Conditions: The Black Women’s Issue (1979);
June Jordan’s Things That I Do in the Dark (1977); Audre Lorde’s ‘Man
Child: a Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response’ (1979); Pauli Murray’s ‘The
Liberation of Black Women’ (1970); and Pat Parker’s Movement in Black
(1978).
8. Early research on the 1970s was completed with Josephine Brain. See our
co-authored article on the demonization of the seventies (Hemmings and
Brain, 2003), and the collection as a whole, The Feminist Seventies, in
which it appears (Graham et al., 2003).
9. In part, the narrative of 1970s essentialism can be promulgated because
much early 1970s work is now out of print, or hard to obtain. For an
excellent reintroduction to the diversity of this decade see Krichmar,
Smith and Widerrecht’s (1977) international bibliography. For a more, but
not exclusively, UK focused reintroduction to the 1970s, visit The
Women’s Library in London, which houses an extensive collection of ﬁrst
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and second wave feminist materials – see http://www.thewomenslibrary.
ac.uk/
10. The progress or decline narrative in feminist theory textbooks is, if
anything, more marked than in journal articles, since their task is
precisely to map shifts. In readers, the exception to the essentialist rule is
pervasive, with consistent inclusion of one or two black feminist writers
in the seventies, a practice that ultimately underscores, instead of
challenging, a reader’s sense of that decade’s homogeneity. For textbooks,
see Richardson and Robinson (1993), Tong (1998), Weedon (1999) and
Whelehan (1995). For readers see Jackson (1993) and Nicholson (1997).
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s (2002) An Introduction to Women’s
Studies: Gender in a Transnational World, pays more attention to
‘difference’ from the outset, but the texts included are overwhelmingly
US, despite the subtitle. An interesting exception to the decade by decade
approach is Wendy Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski’s (2005) Feminist
Theory reader, which cuts across decades with sections ‘1963–1975’,
‘1975–1985’ and so on.
11.
Theory, Culture & Society was launched in 1982 to cater for the resurgence of
interest in culture in the social sciences . . . Theory, Culture & Society has been
widely acclaimed for its innovative editorial policy, typiﬁed by its
agenda-setting special issues on topics such as the fate of modernity; global
culture; postmodernism; the body; ethics and difference; and love and
eroticism. (Extract from http://tcs.ntu.ac.uk/tcs/. Journal published by SAGE)
12. Other authors who have commented on the function of nostalgia in
feminist theory include Jackie Stacey (1993) and Lynne Huffer (1998). For
a comprehensive account of nostalgia in the formation of national and
gendered narrative more generally see Pickering and Kehde (1997).
13.
The aim of Gender, Place and Culture is to provide a forum for debate in human
geography and related disciplines on theoretically-informed research concerned
with gender issues. It also seeks to highlight the signiﬁcance of such research
for feminism and women’s studies. (Extract from http://www.tandf.co.uk/
journals/titles/0966369X.asp. Journal published by Carfax Publishing)
14. Margaretta Jolly (2003) makes the important point that, caught between
the homogenized seventies and the difference nineties, work from the
eighties is rarely analysed as an ‘era’ in its own right.
15.
Feminist Studies is committed to publishing an interdisciplinary body of
feminist knowledge that sees differences in racial identity, sexual orientation,
economic means, geographical location, and physical ability as the touchstone
for our politics and our intellectual analysis. Whether work is drawn from the
complex past or the shifting present, the pieces that appear in Feminist Studies
address social and political issues that intimately and signiﬁcantly affect
women and men in the United States and around the world. (Extract taken from
http://www.feministstudies.org/aboutfs/mission.html. Journal self-published
and located at the University of Maryland)
16.
Feminist Review is an international peer reviewed journal edited by a Collective
based in the UK . . . Feminist Review was founded in 1979 with the objective of
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uniting ‘research and theory with political practice and contributing to the
development of both’ . . . Our aim is to promote materialist work which is
informed by both socio-economic and cultural representational issues. (Extract
from http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/homepage/index.html. Journal
published by Palgrave)
17. Perhaps one of the broader effects of such a teleology is the otherwise
rather overstated opposition between feminism and queer theory
(McIntosh, 1993; Weed and Schor, 1997). Within my framing, here, queer
theory’s poststructuralist credentials can be measured by its distance from
an (anachronistic) feminist focus on (dis)empowerment.
18. As Susan Gubar notes, as ‘the most often cited authority on the matter of
white feminists’ racism . . . [Spivak] combines an attention toward racial
identity politics with . . . poststructuralist methodologies’ (1998: 892). In
this sense, Spivak is more of a transitional ﬁgure than the other two.
19.
Body & Society was launched in 1995 to cater for the upsurge of interest in the
social and cultural analysis of the human body that has taken place in recent
years . . . Body & Society centrally concerns itself with debates in feminism,
technology, ecology, postmodernism, medicine, ethics and consumerism which
take the body as the central analytic issue in the questioning of established
paradigms. (Extract from http://tcs.ntu.ac.uk/body/. Journal published by SAGE)
20.
The ﬁrst thirty years of Critical Inquiry witnessed the emergence of
structuralism and poststructuralism, cultural studies, feminist theory and
identity politics, media and ﬁlm studies, speech act theory, new historicism,
new pragmatism, visual studies and the new art history, new cognitive and
psychoanalytic systems, gender studies, new forms of materialist critique,
postcolonial theory, and discourse analysis, queer theory and (more recently)
‘returns’ to formalism and aesthetics, and to new forms of public and
politically committed intellectual work. (Extract from http://www.uchicago.edu/
research/jnl-crit-inq/features/specialsymposium.html. Journal published by
University of Chicago Press)
21.
As an international, peer reviewed journal, Australian Feminist Studies
publishes academic articles from throughout the world which contribute to
current developments in the new and burgeoning ﬁelds of Women’s Studies and
feminist research . . . We also aim to encourage discussion of interactions
between feminist theory and practice; consideration of government and trade
union policies that concern women; comment on changes in educational
curricula relevant to Women’s Studies; sharing of innovative course outlines,
reading lists and teaching/learning strategies; reports on local, national and
international conferences; reviews, critiques, enthusiasm and correspondence.
(Extract from http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/08164649.asp. Journal
published by Carfax Publishing)
22. There are a large number of recent texts that include an account of
depoliticization. These tend to be either critiques of the progressive
institutionalization of feminist thought (e.g. Messer-Davidow, 2002;
Stanley and Wise, 2000; Stromquist, 2001), or memoirs of ‘the good old
days’ of feminist unity of purpose, the loss of which is the object of
contemporary melancholia (e.g. Brownmiller, 2000; Ehrenreich, 1990;
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Segal, 2000). Wendy Brown (1999) suggests this melancholy characterizes
contemporary left thought more generally, but she leaves intact the
progress narrative that is the other side of the same coin.
23. I would mark a distinction here between work that seeks to value that
which ‘the linguistic turn’ obscured (e.g. Massumi, 2002; Walby, 2000;
Jackson, 2001), and work that seeks to combine the insights of
poststructuralism with further experimentation (e.g. Braidotti, 2002;
Cavarero, 2002).
24.
Feminist Theory is an international interdisciplinary journal that provides a
forum for critical analysis and constructive debate within feminism . . .
Feminist Theory is genuinely interdisciplinary and reﬂects the diversity of
feminism, incorporating perspectives from across the broad spectrum of the
humanities and social sciences and the full range of feminist political and
theoretical stances. (Extract from http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journal.aspx?pid=
105555. Journal published by SAGE)
25. Mary Evans noted this tendency to demonize ‘the selﬁsh feminist
academic’ in favour of ‘the true believer’ in the 1980s (Evans, 1982: 61,
70). Perhaps the most high proﬁle espouser of this view is Martha
Nussbaum, who dismisses poststructuralism in fervent terms:
Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the
way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic
publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic
gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one
need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order
to act daringly. (Nussbaum, 1999: 37)
26. Nussbaum is in fact unusual in characterizing this academic feminist as
passive rather than duplicitous. In addressing her confusion about who
Butler’s audience is, Nussbaum concludes:
It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the
academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser
and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about
the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied
audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of
Butler’s text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the
imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear
deﬁnitions of terms. (Nussbaum, 1999: 38)
27.
A DISTINCTIVELY SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE ON GENDER – Gender & Society
examines gender as one of the foundations of every existing social order.
Emphasizing theory and research from micro- and macrostructural perspectives,
Gender & Society aims to advance both the study of gender and feminist
scholarship. (Extract from http://www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=50.
Journal published by SAGE)
28. But surely Gender Trouble favours Foucault over Wittig? In fact, in direct
discussion of their work, Butler devotes 18 pages to Foucault and 17 to
Wittig, and the author’s critical knife is applied rather equally in both
quantitative and qualitative terms. Foucault’s ‘sentimental indulgence’
(Butler, 1990: 96) mirrors Wittig’s ‘thoroughgoing appropriation’ (1990: 128).
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Clare Hemmings is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Gender Institute,
London School of Economics. Her current research and teaching are divided
into three overlapping areas of inquiry in gender and sexuality studies: 1)
critical practices and histories; 2) patterns of institutionalization; and 3)
cultural translation. Her ﬁrst book, Bisexual Spaces, was published in 2002,
and she is currently completing a second book, also titled Telling Feminist
Stories.
Address: Gender Institute, London School of Economics, Houghton Street,
London WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: C.Hemmings@lse.ac.uk
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