Summer 1998
Volume 24, Number 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 demaded by its major narrative competitor. Yet, clearly, feminst 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 woman's studies have made in higher education? And why would I be so ungenerous as to castigate individuals whose extaordinary intellectual achievements have profoundly enriched my own thinking?1

For Full Text

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

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 practices of feminist criticism perplexing, I want not to berate the writer but rather 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 radicalized 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 Foucaultian 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:

Between the indictment of the feminist universal as a white fiction brought by women of color and the poststructuralist suspicion of a grounded subject, what are the conditions under which as feminists one (not to say "I") can say "we"?3

1. Important, too, would be the concern of politically savvy academicians who might urge me to cease and desist from such speculations, which could themselves contribute to the problems feminists face today in the profession (and so I hasten to add parenthetically that I risk these thoughts on my own behalf only--not with the usual G & G trademark). Fears that any approach to the problems of feminism within the academy will give aid and comfort to the enemy are explained by the publications such as Christina Hoff Sommers's Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York, 1994). The most recent of these--Jean Curthoy's Feminist Amnesia: The Wake of Women's Liberation (New York, 1997)--views the evolution of women's studies and nonhumanistic forms of feminist criticism as "the unrecognized betrayal of [radical] earlier principles" promulgated during the rise of women's liberation (p. ix). Needless to say, I write as part of the enterprise, not from outside it, in the hopes of strengthening feminism within the academy.

2. Obviously, I cannot fully disengage myself from the generational argument. As Marianne Hirsch has pointed out,

>there is a certain generation of feminist theorists who have really gotten it from all sides: Elaine Showalter, Nancy Chodorow, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Carol Gilligan . . . . When you go to a conference and get attacked by other feminists--and I don't just mean criticized, I mean trashed--the whole tone and range of the project changes and certain work gets disallowed. [Jane Gallop, Hirsch, and Nancy K. Miller, "Criticizing Feminist Criticism," Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Hirsch and Evelyne Fox Keller (New York, 1990), pp. 364-65]

Susan Gubar is Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University. With Sandra M. Gilbert, she is coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) as well as its three-volume sequel, No Man's land: the Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1988-94), and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Her most recent publication is Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (1997).