CI, Winter 1999, vol.25 no.2
Robyn Wiegman, "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion"
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In "Murder without a Text," Amanda Cross (better known to academics as Carolyn Heilbrun) offers a tale of feminist generational fury and murder that might be of interest to readers of Susan Gubar's "What Ails [formerly "Who Killed"] Feminist Criticism?"1 Cross's murder mystery features a seasoned feminist scholar accused of bludgeoning a student to death. The murder takes place during a highly contentious women's studies senior thesis seminar, in which Professor Beatrice Sterling, an early Christian history specialist, has difficulty convincing students of the importance of academic research and canonical texts. To these students, as Sterling explains, "All history, all previously published research, was lies. They would talk to real sex-workers, real homeless women, real victims of botched abortions. . . . When I suggested some academic research, they positively snorted."2 The students' refusal of the kind of scholarly apparatus most familiar to Sterling constitutes, within the narrative, a generational betrayal: "They spoke about early feminists, like me, as though we were a bunch of co-opted creeps . . . they never talked to me or asked me anything. . . . It was the kind of rudeness that is close to rape. Or murder" ("M," p. 130).

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?

These questions draw attention to the issues that motivate this dissenting opinion, foregrounding my critical interest in feminist knowledge production, institutional histories, intersectional and interdisciplinary analysis, and the necessary rearticulation of white feminist political subjectivity. In crafting this dissenting opinion, I hope to demonstrate that the critical anorexia lamented in "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" arises from an undernourished narrative of feminism, one that replaces, in strikingly anorexic fashion, a powerful body of scholarship with a fainting sister too weak to partake in feminism's life-sustaining internal critique.

A History of Manners

It is perhaps no overstatement to say that feminist scholars in the 1990s have been preoccupied with narrating the history of feminism as both a political movement and an intellectual discourse. For those of us, junior and recently tenured faculty, who benefitted from the ascendancy of feminist knowledge in our undergraduate and graduate training, the "fact" that feminism could be a legitimate object of study has had a transformative effect not only on the ways in which scholarship can be imagined but on the meaning of the university as a site of political intervention. To speak of generation, as both "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" and "Murder without a Text" rightly suggest, is not simply to produce an essentialist discourse about age and life cycle so much as to define the historical institutional conditions under which feminism has attained and sustained its status as knowledge. This is not to say that the contestatory nature of feminism in the academy has been superseded by its wholesale acceptance, but it is to explain why both fictional and academic narratives about the history of feminism bring so much generational anxiety and tension into play.

In "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" the anxieties that accompany generational transformations in feminist knowledges are located in a collectivizing gesture that links U.S. ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, and poststructuralism as the "after" generation -- "after" the initial heady days of feminism's radical incursion into the university. This critical linkage provides a new twist on the now familiar story of academic feminism's contemporary fall, creating a confederacy among knowledge formations that are not often seen as collaborative culprits. More frequently, poststructuralism's tie to European philosophical traditions engenders a narrative of its white and First World complicities, thereby setting postcolonial and U.S. ethnic studies in an oppositional role to the domain of "high" theory. How, then, do these critical discourses come together to undo academic feminism in "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Unfortunately, the answer to this question does not lie in an exploration of the political and intellectual content of the critical projects of ethnic, postcolonial, and poststructuralist studies. Instead, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" launches its critique by focusing on the emotional and aesthetic rhetorical idioms employed by key figures in these fields. "I hope to show," Gubar writes, "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" (p. 880).9 Thus, the epistemological and disciplinary, not to mention political, differences among the scholarly archives of postcolonial, U.S. ethnic, and poststructuralist feminisms are diminished as "debilitating rhetorics. . . . that made us cranky with one another," unpleasant idioms that ruined feminism's good mood (p. 902).

Because of this focus on rhetorical good manners, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" misdescribes the very archive it hopes to historicize, providing a narrative of academic feminism that fails to render coherent the differential impact of ethnic, postcolonial, and poststructuralist knowledge on academic feminism in recent years.10 To begin to resurrect the critical projects of postcolonial, U.S. ethnic, and poststructuralist feminisms requires undermining a number of Gubar's governing assumptions, not the least of which is her assertion that gender alone organized the initial influx of feminism into academe. In defining the first two periods of feminist literary criticism, Gubar cites the work of a number of black feminist scholars, including Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, and Mary Helen Washington. But instead of reading these texts as evidence of an ongoing and always present critique of feminism's universalization of white women as woman, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" assimilates them to a gender rubric that defiantly refuses the intellectual imperative of an intersectional articulation; that is, it subordinates African American literary legacies to a second tier analysis -- a "subtradition" (p. 884) -- thereby insuring that the first two stages of critique and recovery are free to figure "woman" as their primary organizing principle.11 This strategy allows Gubar to construct a seemingly multicultural list of scholars for the first and second stages without articulating the critical or political intervention of their work, which more than supersedes the recovery of a generic woman.12 Indeed, to take the lessons of the third phase as critical ones concerning the always implicit racialization of gender requires deft attention to those traditions (linguistic practices, symbolic systems, and textual predecessors) that give Bambara, Christian, and Washington their scholarly force.

By writing her history of feminist literary criticism from the celebratory vantage point of a gender-privileged approach, Gubar restages the way that some First World white literary scholars have claimed the origins of feminism in the academy as their own. Like many originating claims, this one has been met with a series of critical responses, and a whole tradition in feminist knowledge -- intersectional analysis -- can now be cited as dedicated to transforming the popular equation of feminism with the analytic singularity of gender.13 Much of the scholarly work that has emerged in the last twenty-five years has offered us a way to link women to a wide array of political projects, thereby refunctioning feminism as a term that can reference the community struggles and political labor of more than a select group of U.S. women. Where Gubar implicitly laments the move to intersectionality as the intellectual and political trimming of feminism, a more powerful interpretation would herald academic feminism's encounter with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nationality as a critical reason it continues to exist. To read academic feminism this way means forfeiting the Edenic narrative and citing the multiple histories of struggle by, for, and among women as necessary to the vitality of feminist critique.

Crucially connected to the resignification of feminism as a multiracial and multiply situated political enterprise is the way we conceptualize the academy as a site of feminist political labor. "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" is rather contradictory on this score. It applauds the move to the academy in feminism's halcyon years when new critical histories and unique women's traditions were being forged across the disciplines. In that context, the academy is imagined not as a barrier but as a conduit for "the women's movement," that idealized referent that bears the stamp of the real and justifies the intellectual labor of feminists asking a variety of questions about women. Yet, Gubar argues, the influence of poststructuralist theory on various disciplinary knowledges has undermined the academy's crucial role in extending the women's movement by questioning various standards of feminism's own identity politics. Thus, poststructuralism undermines the use-value of feminist knowledge, threatening "the relationship feminists within the academy have sought . . . with women outside it" (p. 881). Two problems arise here. First, Gubar assumes that feminist thought is valuable only when it responds to a scene of political production outside it. But why would the academy not be an important site for feminist transformation? At what cost do feminist intellectuals demean discussions about knowledge and power in the very institutions that patrol their intellectual labor? Most crucially, why abandon feminism's early recognition of the importance of challenging traditional forms of knowledge to produce not only new knowledge but also new ways of knowing and new knowing subjects?14

These questions turn us to the second problem, which concerns academic feminism's proper object of engagement.15 When "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" refuses theory and critiques the centrality of racial and national thought to academic feminism's project, it circumscribes what feminism is allowed to know. In essence, it asks feminism to turn against knowledge in order to protect its political claims. But the academy is not a place outside or separate from the political, nor is its dedication to intellectual labor insignificant in the reproductive practices of a whole host of social dominations. To accept the fashionable criticism that feminism has no necessary truck with abstraction -- that its political commitment must side solely with the concrete -- is to limit the many political agendas of feminism to a homogenized, instrumental function. This is not to say that academic feminism can or should reject the importance of being in the streets, but it is to insist that we concede too much by dismissing feminism's intervention in even the most abstract discourses of the contemporary academy. Feminism, I tell my introductory women's studies class, must resist the impulse to reproduce only what it thinks it already knows; it must challenge the compulsion to repeat.16 This kind of feminism is one that cannot be owned; its rearticulation does not mean that it has suffered and grown weak. Rather, it is a feminism that can be radically refunctioned in the present, which means that its past is always and by necessity incomplete.

The (Lost) Literary Object

While much of "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" is centered on the changing nature of feminism's academic self-fashioning in the late twentieth century, there is evidence that more than feminism is at stake in this essay penned by a Distinguished Professor of English. In the celebration of the first two stages of feminist criticism -- critique and recovery -- we witness admiration for feminism's critical rebuff of the disciplinary practice of canonizing fathers and their bawdy, brilliant sons. English as a discipline was thus forced to yield up a history of mothers, literary precursors who could take their place in a revised set of the world's finest texts; it was made to acknowledge the language of gender that motivated the narratological apparatus of the text; it was even compelled to consider, as a reasonable aspect of literary discussion, the social constraints on women's education and literacy. But not until the denigrated third and fourth stages was serious pressure put on the literary as such.17 While Gubar does not detail the 1980s assault on the disciplinary presumptions of literary study, it is significant how powerfully postcolonial and poststructuralist theory each questioned the British colonial worldview that organizes "English" and the priority accorded the literary as the object of critical concern.

To read "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" as a lament for the lost status of the literary means diagnosing Gubar's own rhetorical devotion to a literary idiom activated by metaphorical and narratological tropes. In her pained reaction to the textual aesthetics of poststructuralist prose, Gubar establishes a methodological practice that yearns for textual pleasure, substituting the critical protocols of literary study for the content of academic feminism's political concerns.18 Judith Butler's work, for instance, is reduced to "mistakes in agreement" (p. 896), as if the meaning, force, and productivity of feminist theory can best be discerned at the level of stylistic conventions and grammatical norms.19 So implicitly insistent is "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" on the modes of inquiry of English as a discipline that rarely does the essay feel pressured to address the subject head on. Only once does this issue move front and center:

While no further commentary is provided to detail the disciplinary shift from English to philosophy being decried here (or the relationship of such cross-disciplinarity to the academic feminist project as a whole), the passage nonetheless crystallizes the crucial fact of the centrality of the literary to Gubar's portrait of feminist criticism's Edenic early years. Why else would the scholarly turn to "epistemological, ideological, economic, and political issues" be cast as part of academic feminism's intellectual decline?

The perspective and priority of literary study cannot provide for academic feminism the point of view needed to negotiate the terrain of its own contemporary moment. This is not to say that Gubar's concern for the specific project of feminist literary criticism is not an interesting or important one, but it is to argue against the narrative production of the literary as the origin, source, and ultimate vitality of feminist knowledge in the contemporary academy.21 Taking English as the institutional location from which we assess the impact of postcolonial theory, in particular, is nothing if not ironic, given the incongruence of wagering feminism's effectivity from within a knowledge formation so finely tuned to the exigencies of the First World nation. "English" is, after all, the culmination and preservation of a distinct history of literature's privileged citation as "culture," defining, as David Lloyd and Paul Thomas have recently observed, the educated person within the nationalist discourse of the modern state.22 To the extent that postcolonial studies sees its intellectual project as a political engagement with decolonization, not only in terms of state practices and historical memories but also in terms of disciplinary formations, it is striking that so few departments devoted to literary study have been able to register what the postcolonial might mean to their disciplinary configurations.23 Even the hiring of postcolonial theorists tends not to inaugurate a reconsideration of departmental organizations of research and teaching, as Irish, South Asian, and Native American studies, to take only three examples, are forced to remain uncomfortably within the nation-bound rubrics of the British and U.S. literary traditions. For feminism to wed its academic worldview to the perspective of literary study in the context of the discipline's continued commitment to British intellectual and geopolitical colonialism is to forfeit from the outset feminism as a project that critically interrogates the institution's disciplinary management of culture, gender, and knowledge.

From my perspective, which is one situated within the interdisciplinary project of women's studies, feminism in the academy has for too long been owned by the disciplines and thereby disciplined, especially in the humanities, by the nationalist rubrics that identify Western European, British, and U.S. culture as the center and substance of inquiry.24 "Other" geopolitical sites of knowledge may be included, but these are "area" studies appended to a seriously truncated and idealized version of the West. That this idealized West is currently under assault on many campuses because of decreased student enrollments in courses that take Western culture as their center often means a reinvigorated claim to the historical hegemony of Western knowledges, not their rearticulation in the context of new migrations of capital, people, and cultures. To hunker ourselves down in the disciplines, to cast a nostalgic gaze at a past that now finds comfort in the sanctity of discipline-as-home, to reject the compelling possibilities of new knowledges and knowledge formations: these critical positions abandon academic feminism to an institutional framework that is already out of step with the kinds of issues that such a political project must confront. By engaging the antidisciplinary and postdisciplinary implications of postcolonial studies and linking this to the intersectional imperative that enables feminism to think beyond a solo gender paradigm that has never been comprehensive enough, we begin to make good on academic feminism's longtime goal of transforming, not simply individual disciplines, but the institution, its organization of knowledge, and the way in which we understand both the intellectual composition and possible histories of feminism itself.

Feminism after (White) Injury

In describing an academic feminist project that will fail to return to the literary to solve generational betrayal and metaphoric murder, I have been proposing a second opinion that finds a range of political and intellectual possibilities for feminism in the very postcolonial, U.S. ethnic, and poststructuralist practices that have been blamed for ruining feminist criticism's once vibrant health. But I have yet to adequately attend to the emotional level on which so much of "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" turns. I have deferred this discussion because of a certain trepidation. I have written elsewhere of the way that white women talk race to perform their antiracism for other white women, producing not new ways of understanding the construction of white subjectivities but highly symbolic burnings in which their own whiteness is essentially purified.25 Such a tactic may be personally gratifying but my use of it here would do little to make sense of the . . .

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