CI, Summer 1998, vol.24 no.4
Susan Gubar, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?"
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What Do You Mean, Woman?

To certify the Derridean assumptions upon which thinkers like Spivak draw, many poststructuralists sought to use the race-based interrogation of the term women undertaken by African American and postcolonial scholars, even though a number of prominent black intellectuals criticized the elitism of what Christian called "the race for theory" undertaken by the followers of white, male philosophers.34 For if early feminists exposed humanism as a euphemism for masculinism, if some African American and postcolonial critics went on to exhibit feminism as a code word for a privileged white women's movement, then poststructuralists could delegitimate any generalizing, abstract appeal to "women" as propagating a phallogocentric metaphysics of presence.

However, just as the language of critical election and abjection contaminates feminist prose with self-righteousness, obscurantism undermines the writing of feminist poststructuralists who rely on counterintuitive maxims recycled as fiats, a logic at odds with normative syntactic procedures, and utopian ontological paradigms.

When in 1985 Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics pitted Anglo-American empiricists against French theorists (to illustrate the purported naivety of the former and the supposed sophistication of the latter), Julia Kristeva emerged as an exemplary figure whose antiessentialist pronouncements challenged any stable definition of selfhood. "To believe that one 'is a woman' is almost as absurd and obscurantist as to believe that one 'is a man,'" Kristeva proclaimed, and, even more famously, "woman as such does not exist."35 In her attempt to denaturalize gender, Kristeva can represent many poststructuralists in the nineties who mapped the ways in which the subject (no longer a self or a subjectivity) was constructed through a range of linguistic as well as psychological, social as well as political discourses. To the extent that feminism depends upon a stable notion of sexual identity, it degenerates into a form of romanticism, according to Kristeva.

For those thinkers employing deconstruction in the service of feminism, therefore, the term women transmutes infinitely by virtue of the discursive relations within which it is located.36 One of the most prominent poststructuralist thinkers in the nineties, Judith Butler analyzes gender as a performance producing the delusion of an abiding self that is always already constructed through discourse and thus neither an originating given nor a volitional agent. Butler set out to demonstrate that sex -- just as culturally constructed as gender -- is made to seem natural or real or fixed through regulatory practices that set in place the "heterosexualization of desire":37

Possibly because of its difficult task of dislodging commonly held assumptions, possibly because of the influence of Foucault and Derrida, recondite abstractions characterize postmodernist feminist theory in general and Butler's books in particular.39 The consequence for criticism of a linguistic model deriving from philosophy has been to divorce feminist speculations from literary texts or to subordinate those texts to the epistemological, ideological, economic, and political issues that supplanted literary history and aesthetic evaluation as the topics of writing about women. Given poststructuralist assumptions about the undecidability of meaning, the death of the author, the nonreferentiality of language contaminated by hegemonic power structures, and the contingency of evaluative judgments, it is not surprising that the aesthetic got marginalized and the first three stages of feminist criticism sidelined.40

One especially revealing feature of Butler's style is the preponderance of subject-verb disagreements. I want to speculate that this penchant, by reflecting the difficulty of sustaining a Foucauldian critique of the singular self and the biological body, reveals the tensions continually at play in efforts to combine poststructuralism with feminism. Since my argument depends on a pattern of mistakes in agreement, I will cite four examples here from Gender Trouble, its sequel Bodies That Matter, and an essay entitled "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," placing the location of eighteen others in a footnote:

Importantly, the erotic redeployment of prohibitions and the production of new cultural forms for sexuality is not a transient affair within an imaginary domain that will inevitably evaporate under the prohibitive force of the symbolic.41

For psychoanalytic theorists Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Ruth Leys, however, identification, and, in particular, identificatory mimetism, precedes identity and constitutes identity as that which is fundamentally "other to itself." ["I," p. 26]
Note how prone Butler's prose is to a compound subject with a singular form of verbs that eschew action and instead denote a condition or stipulate a mode of existence.42 Her dual subjects often involve not persons but abstractions, which are treated as if they have combined in her mind into a single force that therefore requires the singular verb. (This tendency to make conceptual processes the subject of sentences explains the prevalence of ity words in current theory: irresolvability, performativity, postcoloniality, generativity, locationality, historicity, citationality, etcetericity.) In a curious way, the reliance on intangible subjects and (often) the verb to be replicates Butler's Foucauldian rejection of humanism, her conviction that discursive "regimes of power" speak through individuals whose very conceptions of their identity are thereby constituted and regulated (GT, p. 18). That the result is so often a grammatical lapse, however, hints at a conflict between what Butler seeks to argue and the terms available to her.

When the subject gets multiplied into two, and when these two speak together, alas! -- they end up sounding just like one. The singular verb keeps giving the lie to grammatical subjects that assert their doubleness, bearing witness paradoxically to Butler's own confession at the end of Bodies That Matter that "the temporary totalization performed by identity categories is a necessary error" (B, p. 230). Telling in this regard, too, is a passage in which she explains, "I use the grammar of an 'I' or a 'we' as if these subjects precede and activate their various identifications, but this is a grammatical fiction. . . . For there is no 'I' prior to its assumption of sex" (B, p. 99).43 Like Butler's frequent use of lists of unanswered questions, her subject-verb disagreements hint that this professor of rhetoric remains haunted by the "necessary error[s]" and "grammatical fiction[s]" that shape "the unstable and continuing condition of the 'one' and the 'we'" which she studies quite brilliantly in the shifting allegiances of feminists, lesbians, and gay men (B, p. 242). Even for those to whom Butler's syntactic penchant appears a legitimate extension of the rule that a singular verb may be used when nouns form a compound word or convey a singular notion, the pattern bespeaks a quandary, for it demonstrates how often the most vigilantly antitotalizing theorist of poststructuralism relies on stubborn patterns of totalization (two treated as one). This, in turn, may lead some readers to hypothesize that the concept of the subject itself totalizes all subjectivities as passive products of discursive power-knowledge regimes (often assumed to be totally malign).44

If nominalism teaches us that the self and women are illusory categories of nonexistent entities, perhaps only a newly imagined image of "our bodies, our selves" can help human beings out of the "necessary error[s]" and "grammatical fiction[s]" of "the temporary totalization performed by identity categories." As influential in the nineties as Butler, Donna Haraway provided such a figure in the cyborg. Founded on a thoroughgoing rejection of biologism joined with a skeptical foregrounding of the ways in which power pervades and thus implicates the conceptual apparatus used by critics, Haraway's cyborg stands out as the character best exemplifying the valorization of fragmentation, indeterminacy, marginalization. Haraway would repopulate feminism with cyborgs since "Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women's dominations of each other."45 Breaching, confusing, and thereby confounding the boundaries between organism and machine, animal and human, male and female, cyborgian consciousness rejects the need for unity as the totalitarianism of totalizing, calling instead for partial identities, contradictory standpoints, and shifting affinities.

Because biology and, in particular, women's unique capacity to give birth served historically as powerful explanations or even influential justifications for debilitating gender roles, Butler and Haraway attempt to debiologize such roles. Yet, according to Rosi Braidotti, who understands that the cyborg "announces a world 'beyond gender,'" Haraway claims "that sexed identity is obsolete without showing the steps and the points of exit from the old, gender-polarized system."46 In fact, the cyborg dwells in what Haraway herself terms "a postgender world," a domain not inhabited by contemporary women who, when they experience its features -- the breaching of boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, or female bodies as mechanically engineered -- know it in the form of interventions like breast implants, estrogen therapy, mood-altering or birth control or fertility drugs, and anticancer chemo- and radiation therapies whose positive effects have often been matched by equal or greater negative ones.47 The disjunction between the nowhere of the cyborg's utopian fluidity and the everywhere of ordinary people's embodiment (with all its attendant ills) calls to mind Butler's "necessary error" of "temporary totalization" (which in turn might recall Spivak's "strategic choice of a genitalist essentialism in anti-sexist work today").48

Taken together, poststructuralist publications suggest a fissure between deconstruction of the subject, on the one hand, and feminism's dependence on the collective word women, on the other. The terms of the impasse impel Butler and Spivak to resort to formulations that they themselves characterize as inadequate, while Haraway invents a nonce identity that no one will see when she looks in the mirror. Susan Stanford Friedman, after endorsing the problematization of subjectivity undertaken by poststructuralists, deduces their logical perspective on feminist criticism: "more fluid and flexible critical practices are needed that do not regard sexual or gender differences as an a priori, fixed, primal, or primary assumption to be grasped in pristine isolation."49 Even a "provisional privileging of gender" remains suspect for Friedman since "gender is only one among many axes of identity" ("BG," p. 32), and so feminist critics -- accused now of "blindnesses" in their foregrounding of gender -- should be terminated so that practitioners in the new field of "Identity Studies" can be hired ("BG," p. 14).

Diagnosis/Prognosis

This effort to trace the sources of the language crisis at which feminist criticism has arrived during its fourth and most quarrelsome phase obviously leaves me open to charges that, first, I have demonized debate, ignoring the ways in which new insights that challenge received wisdom may have to emerge (or seem to emerge) as a threat and, second, that the contention is contagious since I have myself engaged in antagonistic infighting. To the first objection, I can only respond with my view that critical election, abjection, and obscurantism perform a disservice to the libertarian politics and pedagogies endorsed by many of those whose astute ideas play a justly prominent part in feminist thinking. The brouhaha this essay immediately roused as a talk -- causing me to be labelled an anti-intellectual racist, much to my shock and dismay -- testifies to the ways in which critical election, abjection, and obscurantism have contributed to an atmosphere of censorship that silences or polices our feminist debates. About the second objection, I would add that although I have enlisted in the conflict, I do so in order to draw attention to a divisiveness that plays into the hands of conservative elements all too happy to see the women's movement self-destruct. Perhaps because stylistic foibles are easier to catch than originality or subtlety of conceptualization, much of the prose provoked by the reflections of hooks, Carby, Mohanty, and Spivak as well as Kristeva, Butler, and Haraway either mimes their critical election and obscurantism or acquiesces with critical abjection -- without duplicating their remarkable discernment.

Undoubtedly, too, the economic forces that have worked to downsize the academy throughout the eighties and nineties escalated the pressure always exerted on humanities scholars to produce a reputation by engaging in arcane, agonistic maneuvers or by feverishly finding innovative vocabularies. For this reason, too, the language available to critics in general and to feminist critics more specifically has become less limber than it needs to be. Churlish or cultish, its politically or theoretically correct jargon stifles rather than nurtures thoughtful interchange. Were I tempted to answer the query of my revised title -- "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" -- in one diagnostic phrase summing up the net effect of rhetorics of dissension, I could call the problem a bad case of critical anorexia, for racialized identity politics made the word women slim down to stand only for a very particularized kind of woman, whereas poststructuralists obliged the term to disappear altogether.50 How paradoxical that during the time of feminist criticism's successful institutionalization in many academic fields it seems to be suffering from a sickness that can end in suicide.

But what of my promise to use the disease metaphor as a means of imagining some hope for recovery? Thinking dialectically about stage four, I wonder whether several symptoms of rejuvenation mean that dissension has functioned as a purgative period in a much needed (though painful) process of growth. Metacritical contention has recently spurred first, second, and third stage feminists to produce hybrid forms of autobiographical criticism more supple in their attentiveness to various kinds of distinctively structured difference. Just as important, many practitioners within the third stage of feminist criticism-- the engendering of differences -- have managed to highlight dissimilarities among women without squelching conversations about them. African American and postcolonial scholars are currently making such a transformative mark in our field that one could argue they have paved the way for a virtual "racechange" in feminist literary criticism.51 In addition, the arguments of poststructuralists that uncovered the presumptive heterosexuality of previous theorizing have forged highways from feminist criticism to the now burgeoning fields of lesbian studies and queer theory. But perhaps these more cheering subjects should be the topic of another (or someone else's) paper.

In accord with Susan Bordo's "feminist chauvinism," her efforts "to help restore feminism's rightful parentage of the 'politics of the body'"52 that she studies and of the bodies of literature that many others explore, I find myself echoing the words of Braidotti, who understands the word women as "a general umbrella term" and who exclaims, "I wish feminism would shed its saddening, dogmatic mode to rediscover the merrymaking of a movement that aims to change life."53 By contesting the debilitating rhetorics of critical election, abjection, and obscurantism, I would like to think I'm supplying food for thought about how to find more mirthful scholarly lexicons. What should be tried are not only nutritious but also delicious linguistic practices so that we can heal feminist discourse of the infirmities that made us cranky with one another. For a robust feminist criticism needs to get into training to assume the vital roles we will undoubtedly want it to play in the twenty-first century.

This essay has profited from the comments of a number of readers who probably do not want to be identified with the points made in it. In particular, I would like to thank Vereen M. Bell, Linda Charnes, Thadious Davis, Mary Favret, Johanna Frank, Donald Gray, Marah Gubar, Carolyn Heilbrun, Tricia Lootens, Alyce Miller, Andrew H. Miller, Nancy K. Miller, Mary Jo Weaver, and Robyn Wiegman. At Indiana University, I have benefitted from working with a group of students so well inoculated against routinized or mirthless languages that they continually delight, surprise, and instruct me.