Excerpt from from Critical Response I: "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion" by Robyn Wiegman:

Rudeness as rape? Rudeness as murder? Cross's feminist betrayal scene foregrounds a tension emerging within academic feminism between one generation's critique of patriarchal masculinism and another's interest in a self-reflexive articulation of differences among women.3 In "Murder without a Text," these differences are simultaneously generational, methodological, and disciplinary, which is to say, they predict some of the most powerful anxieties that motivate "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" In both texts, divisions among women are cast in relation to issues of disciplinary rigor and authority: Sterling assumes the priority of archival over ethnographic methods, while Gubar stages her reading of academic feminism through the lens of feminist literary criticism. These disciplinary points of view not only define the questions asked of feminism but condition from the outset the way each piece conceives of feminist knowledge, its academic intervention, and all future relations between the "originating" generation and its unruly successors.

In Cross's short story, the mystery of this generational dysfunction can be addressed, if not cured, by returning to the sanctity of the textual, where traditional humanistic methodologies center the students' inquiries on what the professor has been trained to know. This solution absolves Sterling of her own murderous desire toward the unruly coed (and of the responsibility of learning oral history methodologies) while shifting the problem of generational tension to the middle-class domain of appropriate manners. "The young are rude today," Professor Sterling says. "The odd part of this is that the most radical students, those who talk of little but the poor and the racially oppressed, are, if anything, ruder than the others, courtesy being beneath them" ("M," p. 130). In defining the affective register of feminist institutional relationships as rudeness and implicitly positing race and class analysis as unrigorous and nonacademic, Cross's short story disturbingly deflects what are clearly important questions about the generational nexus of feminism, discipline, and method. What does it mean for feminism that the disciplinary structure of knowledge serves as the primary institutional form for producing feminist intellectual subjects? How does the political imperative of feminism work in tension, if not contradiction, with the critical and methodological demands of disciplines? And, perhaps most important, how can feminism productively negotiate the generational shift attendant upon its own institutional reproduction in the context of broader transformations in academic knowledge?

"What Ails Feminist Criticism?" offers a critical approach to these questions, even as its narrative of feminist literary criticism's fall from mirthful unity to spirit-murdering factionalism tends to repeat not only Cross's fictional reduction of these issues to bad manners but also her story's dismissal of the agents of race-based critical analysis. In Gubar's view, feminists of color have used "a curiously condemnatory vocabulary," directing a "barrage of diatribes . . . against white feminists" (pp. 888, 886). They have been "censorious about white thinkers engaged in purportedly antiracist and feminist meditations" (p. 888). They have "disparage[d] any feminist theory founded on equality" (p. 889). They have falsely and negatively essentialized white women, contaminating "feminist prose with self-righteousness," and using the language of antiracism, in Janet Todd's words, "'to denigrate the feminist enterprise'" (p. 891). At the same time, of course, Gubar's "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" takes aim at poststructuralists for creating a "language crisis" that not only obstructs affiliations with women outside the academy but performs a disservice to "libertarian politics and pedagogies" (pp. 881, 900). "Churlish or cultish, its politically or theoretically correct jargon stifles rather than nurtures thoughtful interchange" (p. 901). Taken together, feminists of color and poststructuralists have made "women an invalid word" (p. 886).

Where Gubar's first version of this paper, delivered as a talk, featured these advocates as the culprits of feminist criticism's murder, the milder version of the story, published here in Critical Inquiry, casts postcolonial, U.S. ethnic, and poststructuralist criticisms as life-draining carnivores intent on consuming academic feminism's historically robust flesh.4 By shifting from murder to illness as the reigning metaphor for characterizing relationships among academic feminists, Gubar attempts to soften her tale, seeking "more mirthful scholarly lexicons" (p. 902) in order to heal a feminism that, in her version of the story, has failed to effectively reproduce itself. This issue of reproduction is absolutely central to the tensions and anxieties that now accompany academic feminism, provoking further questions that carry deep generational weight: which feminism will be reproduced? by whom? and with what (indeed, whose) historical memory?5 In "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Gubar implicitly answers these questions by producing a narrative of feminism's institutional history that functions as the essay's primary argument. The narrative places feminism in an originary Edenic world where the triumphant transit from the street to the university signaled a powerful intellectual and political movement. But in its sojourn in the academy feminism lost its way, traveling through theoretical "darkness" as women of color and poststructuralists took women hostage. To counter this trajectory, Gubar calls for a return to those modes of inquiry, critical lexicons, and political affinities from which academic feminism began in her tale.

Gubar is not alone in lamenting the course of contemporary feminism, and readers, even the most critical among us, will no doubt appreciate her hope not to lend fuel to the popular fire that feeds on the rhetorical battles among feminists.6 And, yet, her essay's demand for a unified, originary, and uncontentious academic feminism yields to a popularly sanctioned narrative, one that sacrifices the complexities and discontinuities of feminism's institutional history for a plot formula that denigrates academic feminism's internal conflict while simultaneously refusing to cast its dynamically mobile and historically transforming intellectual and political formation in positive terms. In doing so, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" forfeits attention to the most important questions it might otherwise raise.7 For instance, what historical and political conditions have motivated the recent proliferation of identity forms and identifications, and why has theory been such a crucial site for feminist intellectual interventions? How has the imperative of intersectional analysis sought to link U.S. ethnic, postcolonial, and queer studies into a collaborative, if discontinuous, intellectual and political configuration, and what kinds of new and importantly interdisciplinary knowledges are currently being produced?8 If First World white feminist intellectuals have experienced these changes as a challenge to their self-representations and institutional relations, what ways of thinking about the formation of white subjectivity will better construct feminism as an inevitable site of struggle and engender a future no longer contingent on white women's subjective or epistemological centrality?