CI, Summer 1998, vol.24 no.4
Susan Gubar, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?"
page 1 of 4

Originally, when this essay was a talk entitled "Who Killed Feminist Criticism?," I relished the idea of a rousing arraignment in which I dramatically pinned the blame for the problems currently facing feminist criticism on a host of nefarious culprits, some of them the most prestigious people in the field. Hinting that the grave, rather than the bed, might furnish the final setting in this turn-of-the-century melodrama, I used a murder mystery title to fuel suspicion that feminist criticism's evolution would circumvent the happily-ever-after of the love plot to arrive at the demise demanded by its major narrative competitor. Yet, clearly, feminist criticism has not been mortally wounded or robbed of its stamina: prominent feminist scholars serve as the presidents of major professional organizations; feminist journals and books proliferate; and feminist methodologies routinely shape most literature programs. Besides, wouldn't my original scenario play into reactionary efforts to dismantle the gains the advocates of women's studies have made in higher education? And why would I be so ungenerous as to castigate individuals whose extraordinary intellectual achievements have profoundly enriched my own thinking?1

An equally serious drawback to my initial charge was the way in which the story I was telling could be misunderstood as a self-serving generational account, in which early feminist critics (prominent in the seventies) felt beleaguered by the attacks of their successors (in the eighties and nineties), a group that just happened to be comprised of theorists of color and of lesbianism.2 Oh dear! The rank smell of racism and homophobia reeked from a script which might lead to insinuations that either menopausal rage or maternal rivalry had plunged me into a femicidal fury at the critical daughters supplanting their predecessors. The fact that most of my middle-class, white contemporaries had established quite comfortable niches within the academy only made my complaint seem more self-indulgently whiny. But, despite my anxieties about the misconstruction to which my argument may still be liable, despite my decision to lower the metaphorical decibels with a switch from death to disease, the revised title continues to express my apprehension about the state of feminist literary criticism.

Indeed, there are reasons to consider a number of developments in the eighties and nineties a hazard to the vitality of feminist literary studies. In stating my case against what (not who) has enervated our undertaking, I do not wish to mount a generational argument because generations remain hazy phenomena, their chronologies varying greatly depending on how they are defined. More to the point, the problems that trouble me cross generational lines, no matter where they are drawn. Nor do I want my essay to play into the racism and homophobia of a culture all too willing to exploit disagreements among women in a backlash against all or some of us. In the hope of making my comments constructive, I switched the metaphor from murder to illness in order to argue that -- appearances of vigor to the contrary -- feminist criticism suffers from internal ailments about which one can postulate possibilities of recovery. As important, when I point to individual thinkers whose stylistic strategies have made the practice of feminist criticism perplexing, I want not to berate the writers but rather to diagnose the disorders their idioms inculcate. At the risk of protesting too much, I need to add that the scholars on whom I focus were chosen precisely because their innovative work has played such an influential role in our discipline. The rhetorical complaints their prose exhibits concern me because they have proven to be catching (among some populations, in epidemic proportions).

In particular, I hope to show that a number of prominent advocates of racialized identity politics and of poststructuralist theories have framed their arguments in such a way as to divide feminists, casting suspicion upon a common undertaking that remains in dispute at the turn of the twentieth century. What does it mean that otherwise sagacious proponents of these two at times antagonistic camps -- African American as well as postcolonial materialists, on the one hand, and Foucauldian as well as Derridean theorists, on the other -- have produced discourses that in various ways hinder the tolerance and understanding needed for open dialogue? About the language crisis at which feminist theory has arrived, Nancy K. Miller notes the predicament related to pronouns of subjectivity:

In its most recent phase of metacritical dissension, rhetorical indictments of the feminist universal and the grounded subject constitute my major consideration because the maladies I treat -- what I will call critical election (with its analogue, critical abjection) and obscurantism -- threaten the relationship feminists within the academy have sought to maintain with one another and with women outside it. This will be the rather depressing substance of my speculations about the development of feminist criticism, which will conclude by historicizing its current contentiousness in order to hold out the hope that we might be emerging out of it. To return to the metaphor of my revised title: we may be in the process of clambering out of the sickbed to surmise the possibilities of hopping into more exciting berths.

Critique, Recovery, and the Engendering of Differences

Many Western narratives begin with Edenic scenes, so let me start the story of feminist criticism in the paradise of a roused, indeed, "raised," consciousness -- when we dead awakened, to recycle Adrienne Rich's famous phrasing.4 Since this part of the tale has been told so often and since happiness tends to be brief, if not boring (at least in the provenance of narrative time), I will keep this section to a minimum. During a series of moments in the seventies, as I tell my undergraduates (who were busy being born during this same decade), female academics brought the women's movement into such departments as English and history, anthropology and psychology, fine arts, film, religion, and education. Outside the field of literature, one thinks of the now classic works of Gerda Lerner, Gayle Rubin, Sherry Ortner, Juliet Mitchell, and Nancy Chodorow; of Linda Nochlin, Laura Mulvey, Mary Daly, Angela Davis, and Carol Gilligan. Imbued with the exuberance of pioneers, this group of scholars revised disciplinary-bound models generated to explain masculine ways of being. They examined how such paradigms excluded or marginalized female experiences and then reinvented them so as to account for the uniqueness of women's cultural situation.

The first stage of feminist criticism, which Elaine Showalter has called "critique," undercut the universality of male-devised scripts in philosophy as well as science, in intellectual as well as social history.5 Within the specifically literary context that is my subject, critique meant the proliferation of books about the uses to which male authors had put images of female characters and feminine imagery. From Kate Millett's Sexual Politics to countless interpretations of the gendered narratives at work in canonical texts by Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner, and Mailer, feminists produced fresh readings that stressed the manner in which the work of art participated in the construction of debilitating or liberating sexual ideologies, influencing or influenced by authors, publishers, and readers. Important volumes produced by such thinkers as Toni Cade Bambara (The Black Woman: An Anthology), Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (Woman in Sexist Society), Mary Helen Washington (Black-Eyed Susans), Lillian Robinson (Sex, Class, and Culture), and Tillie Olsen (Silences) were based on Simone de Beauvoir's insight into women's alterity and spawned numerous analyses of the images and stereotypes of "the second sex" in male-authored literature.6 The recovery of female literary traditions began in the late seventies with books whose bold, inclusive categories appear evident in their titles. Literary Women (by Ellen Moers) and Women Writers and Poetic Identity (by Margaret Homans), Black Women Novelists (by Barbara Christian) and Reinventing Womanhood (by Carolyn Heilbrun) sound upbeat, monumental in their generalizations about the previously neglected subject of female literary achievement.7 The images or themes or lexicons to which women writers appeared especially drawn, their uses of a recurrent cast of characters, their attraction to certain authorial strategies, gender-related standards at work in the publication or reception of their books, the distinctive reading patterns of female readers: all sustained the attention of feminist scholars.

Concern about individual authors previously neglected or out of print invariably drew scholarly attention to the narrative of literary history with its interest in aesthetic evaluation and periodization. Therefore, books began appearing about the specificities of women's cultural situation within, say, the Renaissance or the modernist period. In East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, in Spanish and German departments, as well as in English and in American Studies, the methodologies of recovery continue to produce major publications.8 The heady influx of French feminist thinking may have appeared more epistemologically glamorous, less dowdy than some Anglo-American empirical studies; however, two of its major proponents relied on comparable strategies of critique and recovery. Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray decried Western culture's identification of masculinity with rationality and vision, femininity with emotionalism and embodiment. To such speculations they appended meditations on a recoverable and empowering écriture féminine or parler-femme.9

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. Among people occupied in critique, more attention began to be paid to images not only of femininity but also of masculinity, not only of heterosexuality but also of homosexuality in historically specified sites in the past and in popular media of the present, including the electronic forms that saturate contemporary culture. Among people absorbed by recovery, the evolution of a series of distinctive subtraditions generated research and classes on Native American, Chicana, Asian American, and, especially, African American literary legacies. I use the verb engendering for the third stage because it engaged feminists in the activity of bringing gender to bear upon other differences: sexual and racial differences primarily, but also economic, religious, and regional distinctions. Antithetically, it also included thinkers bringing sexual and racial identifications (as well as economic, religious, and regional affiliations) to bear upon gender, thereby accentuating dissimilarities among women, divergences among men.

Notable in the emergence of scholarship on lesbian and gay topics, critics like Teresa de Lauretis and Terry Castle, Diana Fuss and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explored such subjects as the social construction of heterosexuality, psychoanalytic models of lesbian desire, and the representational repercussions of homophobia. Prominent in the rise of ethnic studies, African American feminists like Nellie McKay and Hortense Spillers, Deborah McDowell and Akasha (Gloria) Hull analyzed such issues as the links between racial and sexual stereotyping, the distinct inflections of African American women's literary history, the impact of a racist past on depictions of maternity or the relationship between the sexes. Under the influence of thriving postcolonial research, the historically unprecedented number of self-defined lesbian and black intellectuals publishing from within higher education investigated the interaction between heterosexual and homosexual, white and black cultural phenomena in manifold national arenas.

In the face of this vigorous growth, why do I even consider the dire possibility that feminist critics suffered a series of debilitating bouts of dis-ease? One answer is encapsulated in Barbara Johnson's witty point, "Nothing fails like success."10 Maybe critique and recovery have become so much a part of the interpretive way we behave in the literature classroom that their ubiquity leads us to take both approaches for granted. Just as important, while many scholars still pursue work in all three phases, the methodological moves they make might now seem somewhat predictable.11 Another reason, as powerful as that of ennui, relates to a sense of vulnerability experienced by some early practitioners of feminist criticism in higher education, produced by the intense attacks they received from their successors or by the perceived fragility of their enterprise.12 While critique, recovery, and the engendering of differences continue to play significant pedagogical roles, I believe all three became eclipsed by interventions performed within areas of scholarship ratified as theoretical.

Perhaps inevitably, since the engendering of differences foregrounded disparities among women, it set the stage for a questioning of the categories that the concept of gender itself proposed. Self-reflexive theorizing about criticism undermined the term women upon which feminist literary practice previously depended.13 Because I am distressed about the debilitating effects of this fourth phase of metacritical dissension, I will examine its dismantling of the category women in two arenas populated by scholars not always allied. On the one hand, feminist criticism was disparaged by African American and postcolonial thinkers as universalizing a privileged, white womanhood; on the other, it was maligned by poststructuralists as naively essentialist about the identity of women. Needless to say, the powerfully subtle methodologies provided by African American, postcolonial, and poststructuralist studies have greatly enhanced the ways in which we think about culture and society, race and gender. Needless to say, too, one cannot conflate African American with postcolonial studies because they have had quite different histories, just as one should not consolidate the poststructuralism generated by one philosophical approach with that produced by another. Taking these widely accepted points for granted, my analysis deals with one bewildering consequence that qualifies the linguistic practices these approaches have occasionally sponsored. Although feminists of racial identity politics and of poststructuralism did not always agree with one another, together their words combined to make women an invalid word.

What Do You Mean "We," White Woman?

In 1981, the landmark volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color signalled the start of a barrage of diatribes directed against white feminists throughout the decade. Attentive to what the editors term "a class and color war that is still escalating in the feminist movement,"14 the collection includes doris davenport's comments on the aversion of "black wimmin" not only to the bigotry and naivety of "white wimmin" but also to their very being:

Given a slave past that had set in place black women's subjection to white women and given the unconscious racism permeating the women's movement from its inception in the nineteenth century, davenport's acrimony is founded on comprehensible grounds. Yet though such a passage may be attempting to redirect racist formulae against those who historically have done the stereotyping, the writings in This Bridge Called My Back about racism in the movement -- originally meant "to make a connection with white women" -- actually function "more like a separation," as Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa conclude in their editorial speculations.16

If black women had served as a bridge upon which black men (in the civil rights movement) and white women (in the feminist movement) walked, a refusal to fulfill this role meant standing up to be made visible, a laudable step in establishing the rights and perspectives of women of color most powerfully urged by Audre Lorde.17 But when bell hooks published Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (also in 1981), she couched its excellent point about the propensity of feminists to use the word women to mean "white women" in a curiously condemnatory vocabulary directed against all other efforts of black and white feminists to expand the word women to encompass women of different colors. Held culpable, for instance, were black separatist activists like the members of the Combahee River Collective, whom hooks dubbed "reactionary" in their endorsement of the racism they supposedly attacked.18 And Michele Wallace, hooks's most famous contemporary in the African American feminist scene, was dismissed as the author of a book judged to be "neither an important feminist work nor an important work about black women" (AI, p. 11).19 Censorious about white thinkers engaged in purportedly antiracist and feminist meditations -- Catharine Stimpson, for example, and Rich -- hooks argued that "white women were not sincerely committed to bonding with black women and other groups of women to fight sexism," for they remained unwilling to admit that "the women's movement was consciously and deliberately structured to exclude black and other non-white women" (AI, pp. 142, 147). Harmful and hurtful as white exclusions have been, hooks universalized them as intentionally so.

Two smart articles -- one published by Hazel V. Carby in 1982 and the other by Chandra Talpade Mohanty in 1984 (and revised in 1991) -- extended hooks's insight into the implicit whiteness of the word women by questioning reductive images of "the" Third World woman, but the way in which they did so explains why white feminists began to feel beleaguered by blatantly imperative efforts to right the wrong of black female instrumentality. Employing the approaches of African American and postcolonial studies, Carby and Mohanty set out to show that all generalizations about "women's experience" perpetuated the negation of black womanhood. Carby's "White Woman Listen!" -- a title revising Richard Wright's White Man, Listen! -- makes explicit through its subtitle ("Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood") this scholar's argument with mainstream feminists who are accused of providing racially prejudicial analytical frameworks. Yet, Carby's claim that white feminists stereotype Africa as, for example, barbaric in the practice of genital mutilation ignored numerous feminist attacks on the mutilations carried out by gynecologists on nineteenth- and twentieth-century white women in England and America. Carby was primed to overlook such critiques, she was impelled to disparage any feminist theory founded on equality, by her conviction that "white women stand in a power relation as oppressors of black women."20

Like Carby, Mohanty attempted to undo the homogeneity of standard conceptualizations of women of color, but in the process she contributes to the essentializing of white women. According to Mohanty, Western feminism works hand in hand with imperialism because of the "ethnocentric universalism" informing contemporary scholarship.21 Carby's hostility -- as in her final query, "Of white feminists we must ask, what exactly do you mean when you say 'WE'??"22 -- finds expression in Mohanty's argument that Western feminists "discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world" ("UW," p. 174). A "homogeneous notion of the oppression of women as a group" buttresses stereotypes about the "'average third world woman'" as ignorant and poor, the object of scrutiny, the First World woman as educated and modern, the subject of history ("UW," p. 176). Part of the problem, not the solution, the white feminists pictured by Mohanty pursue projects that "tie into" economic and ideological modes of exploitation ("UW," p. 192). Thus, Mohanty's title -- "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" -- hints that the scopophilic gaze or imperial eyes of First World feminists scrutinize to wage war on Third World women.23

If we consider the rhetorical impact of hooks's, Carby's, and Mohanty's arguments, we can see why, though they sought to serve the interests of women of color, they promoted consternation among white women. Any number of examples could drive home this point.24 In her self-deprecating White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue, one quintessentially guilt-ridden author confesses that even though she was born a privileged, middle-class, Western European sinner, she has witnessed the evil of her colonizing ways. "Writing is never innocent," Nicole Ward Jouve concedes, and "white writing is less innocent than any other." Then she goes on to cite the requisite antiauthoritarian authority: "As Gayatri Spivak has said, every First World woman's book is typed out on a word processor made cheap by the low-paid labour of a Third World woman."25 In keeping with Jouve's stance, not only some faculty but many students these days make obeisance to the necessity of considering (without subordinating) race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation in litanies that often translate into depressingly knee-jerk essays rejecting out-of-hand the speculations of a given literary or theoretical work simply because it neglects to discuss x (fill in the blank -- bisexual Anglo-Pakistani mothers; the heterosexual, working-class, Jews-for-Jesus community of Nashville, and so forth). Too often, each text becomes grist for a mill that proves the same intellectually vapid -- though politically appallingÑpoint that racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia reign supreme.

Albeit a crucial goal, the raising of feminism's racial consciousness has instilled an impossible, inhibiting dream of innocent rectitude in numerous white scholars keenly aware of America's and England's long intellectual history of prejudicial thinking about people of African origins. White feminists' fear of saying the wrong thing, of sounding racist, means that they often silence themselves on racial matters altogether, or -- in thrall to a fantasy of finding the correct antiracist stance -- they become ventriloquists, echoing the words of a handful of "specialists" whose color somehow certifies them as experts on race (as if whiteness itself were not a racial category). Yet, Sara Suleri quite reasonably wonders, how effective can it possibly be to require all critics to be matched to their subjects through a string of hyphenated adjectival qualifiers? The claim to authenticity -- only a black can speak for a black; only a postcolonial subcontinental feminist can adequately represent the lived experience of that culture -- points to the great difficulty posited by the "authenticity" of female racial voices in the great game that claims to be the first narrative of what the ethnically constructed woman is deemed to want.26

To the extent that white critics deprived of their assumption of white privilege take refuge in critical abjection (the silence or ventriloquism of white deference and deferral), the politics of racial authenticity may be experienced as an attack on feminism's endorsement of all women's right to self-expression. As Janet Todd has observed, "since anti-racism commands more general assent than feminism ever did, it is often used in a curious way to discredit women and women's endeavors. Or, to be more specific, the language of accepted anti-racism is frequently used to denigrate the feminist enterprise."27

That Spivak became the most often cited authority on the matter of white feminists' racism may be related to the ways in which she combines an attention toward racial identity politics with the poststructuralist methodologies to which I am about to turn.28 According to Spivak, the "disenfranchised" woman who cannot recognize herself as the subject of feminist theory teaches us "that the name of 'woman,' however political, is, like any other name, a catachresis" and therefore she asks that we "name (as) 'woman' that disenfranchised woman whom we strictly, historically, geopolitically cannot imagine, as literal referent."29 Engaged in a project as ambitious as it is complex, Spivak valiantly seeks to make deconstruction and feminism answerable to the colonized; however, at times the process leads her to set herself up as a righteous representative of subordinated peoples (the honorable Third World spokesperson) who remains quite distinct from empowered and therefore degenerate readers (perverted First World citizens).30 For example, Spivak castigates "highly privileged women [who] see their face in the mirror and define 'Woman' -- capital w -- in terms of the reflection that they see there: sometimes they look at their face, sometimes they look at their genitals, and in terms of that, they adjudicate about woman as such. I have very little patience with that."31 Yet about herself she claims, "the word 'woman' is not after all something for which one can find a literal referent without looking into the looking glass. And . . . what I see in the looking glass is not particularly the constituency of feminism."32

In other words, unlike narcissistic, affluent feminists who gaze at themselves in the mirror and then project their image onto others, Spivak looks simply because she seeks a referent, all the while understanding not only the disparity between her self-image and the constituencies of feminism but also the necessity of postponing indefinitely an identification that effaces subalterns, proletariats, and peasants. The aggression Jacques Lacan locates at the mirror stage in the rivalry between which image is deemed "self" and which "other" surfaces in Spivak's competing for perceptual supremacy over First World feminist critics. What undermines these deliberations -- like those of hooks, Carby, and Mohanty -- is a posture of critical election, the counterpart of critical abjection. An assumption of moral superiority on the part of scholars convinced of their ability to speak for those despised and rejected by everybody else, critical election holds sway, I suspect, to conceal the uncomfortable contradiction between claims to a radical politics genuinely opposed to hierarchical power structures and venues of writing inevitably configured by such structures (as, for example, they brace career advancement in the academy or the intellectual scaffolding of First World philosophizing). What else can explain why -- while defining the colonized woman we should "name (as) 'woman'" as one "whom we strictly, historically, geopolitically cannot imagine" -- Spivak inserts the remark, "I know the kind of woman I am thinking about. And I also know that this person is not imaginable by most friends reading these words"?33

Next page