Feminism and Post-Feminism: An Introduction. Feminism and Post-Feminism Feminism Anglo-American...

Feminism and Post-Feminism: An Introduction

Feminism and Post-Feminism

• Feminism

• Anglo-American Feminism: 1960- 1985

• French “Feminism”: 1975-

• Post-Feminism: 1985-2000


• Feminism


• Kate Millett

•Susan Koppelman

• Cheryl L. Brown

• Karen Olson

• Ellen Moers

• Elaine Sholwater


• Feminisms


• Sandra Gilbert

•Susan Gubar

• Annette Kolodny

• French Feminism: 1975-

• Hélène Cixous

• Luce Irigaray


Post-Feminism: 1985-2000

Toril Moi

Chris Weedom

Judith Butler


Starting Points

1) Women demand equal access to the symbolic order. Liberal feminism. Equality.

2) Women reject the male symbolic order in the name of difference. Radical feminism. Femininity extolled.

3) Women reject the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical.


The Beginning

Literary criticism was hardly a central factor in the early period of the new women's movement.

Much like any other radical critic, the feminist critic can be seen as the product of a struggle mainly concerned with social and political change.


The aspiring feminist critic, then, has apparently only two options:

to work to perform those criteria from within the academic institution, producing a judicious critical discourse that strives to maintain its feminism without grossly upsetting the academic establishment,

or to write off the academic criteria of evaluation as reactionary and of no importance to her work.


Like all other literary critics, the overwhelming majority of feminist critics in the 1980s worked within academic institutions, and are thus inevitably caught up in the professional struggle for jobs, tenure and promotion.


Kate Millet: Sexual Politics

The book established the feminist approach to literature as a critical force to be reckoned with.

Its impact makes it the 'mother' and precursor of all later works of feminist criticism in the Anglo-American tradition, and feminists of the 1970s and 1980s have never been reluctant to acknowledge their debt to, or disagreement with, Millett's path-breaking book.


Her criticism represented a striking break with the ideology of American New Criticism, which at the time still retained a dominant position within the literary academy.

In Sexual Politics, in courageous opposition to the New Critics, Millet argued that social and cultural contexts must be studied if literature was to be properly understood, a view she shares with all later feminist critics regardless of their otherwise differing interests.


Her definition of sexual politics is simply this: the process whereby the ruling sex seeks to maintain and extend its power over the subordinate sex.

Her rhetorical structured so as to demonstrate the persistence and pervasiveness of this process throughout cultural life.


As a literary critic, Millet pays little or no attention to the formal structures of the literary text: her is pure content analysis.

She also unproblematically assumes the identity of author, narrator and hero when this suits her case.

Sexual Politics, then, can hardly be taken as a model for the later generations of feminist critics.

In the late 1970s, three major studies appeared on women writers seen as part of a specifically female literary tradition of 'subculture':

As a literary critic, Millet pays little or no attention to the formal structures of the literary text: her is pure content analysis.

She also unproblematically assumes the identity of author, narrator and hero when this suits her case.

Sexual Politics, then, can hardly be taken as a model for the later generations of feminist critics.

In the late 1970s, three major studies appeared on women writers seen as part of a specifically female literary tradition of 'subculture':


Ellen Moers, Literary Women (1976),

Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (1977),

and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979).

Taken together, these three books represent the coming -of-age of Anglo-American feminist criticism.

For these critics, it is in other words society, not biology, that shapes women's different literary perception of the world.


Anglo-American critics have been mostly indifferent or even hostile towards literary theory, which they have often regarded as a hopelessly abstract 'male' activity.


French Feminism: 1975-


From Simone de Beauvoir to Jacques Lacan.

Simone de Beauvoir and Marxist feminism. French feminism after 1968. (The Second Sex, 1949).

The new French feminism is the child of the student revolt of May 1968 in Paris, which almost toppled one of the more repressive of the so-called Western democracies.

The concern with psychoanalysis signals a central preoccupation in the Parisian intellectual milieu.


Whereas the American feminists of the 1960s had started by vigorously denouncing Freud, the French took it for granted that psychoanalysis could provide an emancipatory theory of the personal and a path to the exploration of the unconscious, both of vital importance to the analysis of the oppression of women in patriarchal society. END


Hélène Cixous


Hélène Cixous: an imaginary utopia

It is largely due to the efforts of Hélène Cixous that the question of an écriture féminine came to occupy a central position in the political and cultural debate in France in the 1970s.

Between 1975 and 1977 she produced a whole series of theoretical (or semi-theoretical) writings, all of which set out to explore the relations between women, femininity, feminism and the production of texts.


Cixous flatly declared that 'I am not a feminist'.

Accusing feminist researchers in the humanities of turning away from the present towards the past, she rejects their efforts as pure 'thematics'.

According to Cixous, such feminist critics will inevitably find themselves caught up in the oppressive network of hierarchical binary oppositions propagated by patriarchal ideology.


Her refusal to the label 'feminism' is first and foremost based on a definition of 'feminism' as a bourgeois, egalitarian demand for women to obtain power in the present patriarchal system.

For Cixous, 'feminists' are women who want power, 'a place in the system, respect, social legitimation'.


Ecriture féminine: Masculinity, femininity, bisexaulity

Cixous's concept of feminine writing is crucially related to Derrida's analysis of writing as différance.

For Cixous, feminine texts are at 'work on the difference', as she once put it, strive in the direction of difference, struggle to undermine the dominant phallocentric logic, split open the closure of the binary opposition and revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality.


However, Cixous is adamant that even the term écriture féminine or 'feminine writing' is abhorrent to her, since terms like 'masculine' and 'feminine' themselves imprison us within a binary logic, within the 'classical vision of sexual opposition between men and women'.

So far, Cixous's position would seem to constitute a forceful feminist appropriation of Derridean theory.


Anti-essentialist and anti-biologistic, her work in this field seems to displace the whole feminist debate around the problem of women and writing away from an empiricist emphasis on the sex of the author towards an analysis of the articulations of sexuality and desire within the literary text itself.


Cixous: Binarism: Where is she?

Thought has always worked by opposition: Speech/writing, High/Low.

And the movement by which each opposition is set up to produce meaning is the movement by which the couple is destroyed.


The hierarchization subjects the entire conceptual organization to man.

Traditionally, the question of sexual difference is coupled with the same opposition: activity/passivity.

In philosophy woman is always on the side of passivity: kinship structures; family model, etc.

You can even fail to notice that there is no (subject) place at all for women in then operation.

Either the woman is passive or she does not exist.


She does not enter into the oppositions, she is not coupled with the father (who is couple with the son).

She does not exist, she may be none existent; but there must be something of her.

Of woman, upon whom he no longer depends, he retains only this space, always virginal, matter subjected to the desire that he wishes to imprint.


The challenge to his solidarity of logocentrism and phallocentrism has today become insistent enough to threaten the stability of the masculine edifice which passed itself as natural;

by bringing froth from the world of femininity reflections, hypotheses which are necessarily ruinous for the bastion which still holds the authority.

What would become of logocentrism, of the great philosophical system, of the world order in general if the rock upon which they founded their church were to crumble?


Then all the stories would have to be told differently, the future would be incalculable, the historical force would, will, change hands, bodies; another thinking as yet not thinkable will transform the functioning of all society.


We are living through this very period when the conceptual foundation of a millenial culture is in process of being undermined by millions of species of mole as yet not recognized.

What does one give?

The (political) economy of the masculine and feminine […] produce sings, relationships of power, relationships of production and of reproduction, an entire immense system of cultural inscription readable as masculine or feminine.


I am careful here to use the qualifiers of sexual difference, in order to avoid the confusion of man / masculine, woman / feminine, for there are men who do not repress their femininity, women who more or less forcefully inscribe their masculinity.

Freud and Jones […] starting from opposite points of view, came to support the awesome thesis of a ‘natural’, anatomical determination of sexual difference-opposition.

And from there on, both implicitly support phallocentrism’s position of power.


The sexual difference is not determined by the fantasized relationship to anatomy, which is based to a great extent, upon the point of view, therefore upon a strange importance accorded [by Freud and Lacan] to exteriority.

It is at the level of sexual pleasure [jouissance] that the difference makes itself most clearly apparent in as far as woman’s libidinal economy is neither identifiable by a man nor referable to the masculine economy.


How do I experience sexual pleasure? What is feminine sexual pleasure, where does it take place, how is it inscribed at the level of her body, of her unconscious? And then how is it put into writing?

Only phallocentrism has been inscribed and written, base on ‘anatomy is destiny’ and therefore on nature.

There is no such a thing as destiny, nature or essence […] and is still difficult to think or even imagine something else.


In a general and profound transformation of society […] that which appears as feminine or masculine today would no longer amount to the same thing.

The general logic of difference would no longer fit into the opposition that still dominates.

A reflexive contamination: There is no invention of other I’s, no poetry, no fiction without a certain homosexuality (interplay therefore of bisexuality) making in me a crystallized work of my ultrasubjectivities.


Luce Irigaray


Luce Irigaray

One way of disrupting patriarchal logic in this way is through mimeticism, or the mimicry of male discourse.

In reply to Shoshana Felman's questions what one might well claim that Irigaray, in Spéculum, is speaking as a woman miming male discourse.


She cannot pretend to be writing in some pure feminist realm outside patriarchy: if her discourse is to be received as anything other than incomprehensible chatter, she must copy male discourse.

The feminine can thus only be read in the blank spaces left between the signs and lines of her own mimicry.

A revolution must take place in order to change the system, and avoid to replicate it.


For her, power is something women are against: 'I for my part refuse to shut myself up in one single "group" within the women's liberation movement.’

‘Particularly if it falls into the trap of wanting to exercise power'.

Feminism is not simply about rejecting power, but about transforming the very concept of power itself.

To be 'against' power is not to abolish it in a fine, post-1968 liberation gesture, but to hand it over to somebody else.


On Sexual Difference

Sexual difference is one of the important questions of our age, if not in fact the burning issue.

According to Heidegger, each age is preoccupied with one thing, and one thing alone.

Sexual difference is probably that issue in our own age which could be our salvation on an intellectual level.

For the work of sexual difference to take place, a revolution in thought and ethics is needed.


It is man who has been the subject of discourse, whether in the field of theory, morality or politics.

For women, there remain the so-called minor art-forms: cooking, knitting, sewing and embroidery; and in exceptional cases, poetry, painting and music.

In order to live and think through this difference, we must reconsider the whole question of space (container of objects, external) and time. (time: perpetual, past, present and future)


The subject, the master of time, becomes the axis, managing the affairs of the world.

Beyond him lies the eternal instant of God, who brings about the passage between time and space.

Femininity is conceived as space and masculinity as time.

The transition to a new age in turn necessitates a new perception and a new conception of time and space, our occupation of place, and the different envelopes known as identity.


The transition to a new age coincides with a change in the economy of desire, necessitating a different relationship between man and god(s), man and man, man and the world, man and woman.

Our age will only realize the dynamic potential in desire if the latter is referred back to the economy of the interval, (liminality) that is, if it is located in the attraction, tensions, and acts between form (time) and matter (space).


To arrive at the constitution of an ethics of sexual difference, we must at least return to what is for Descartes the first passion: wonder (that which is not pre-defined; that what is mutually surprising because is not inscribed).

The feeling of wonder, surprise and astonishment in the face of the unknowable ought to be returned to its proper place: the realm of sexual difference.

The passion have either been repressed, stifled and subdued, or else reserved for God.


The sense of wonder […] is never found in the gap between man and woman .

This space was filled instead with attraction, greed, possession, consummation, disgust, and not with a wonder which sees something as though always for the first time, and never seizes the other as its object.

Wonder cannot seize, possess or subdue such an object. The latter, perhaps, remains subjective and free?


This has never happened between the sexes.

Wonder might allow them to retain an autonomy based on their difference, an give them a space of freedom or attraction, a possibility of separation or alliance.

The interval would never be crossed. There would be no consummation. Such an idea is a delusion.

One sex is never entirely consummated or consumed by another. There is always a residue.


In Cixous and Irigaray we have to accept women’s position as already inserted into an order that precedes them and from which there is no escape: patriarchy.

There is no other space from which we can speak: if we are able to speak at all, it will have to be within the framework of symbolic language.


• Post-Feminism: 1985-


• Judith Butler


Judith Butler: (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of Identity

The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centres and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.

The complexity of gender requires an interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary set of discourses in order to resist the domestication of gender studies or women studies within the academy and to radicalize the notion of feminist critique.


Judith Butler

The political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally, often accompanies the notion that the oppression of women has some singular form discernible in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination.


Judith Butler

That form of feminist theorizing has come under criticism for its efforts to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly Western notions of oppression, but because they tend as well to construct a “Third World” or even an “Orient” in which gender oppression is subtly explained as symptomatic of an essential, non-Western barbarism.

Is there some commonality among “women” that preexists their oppression, or do “women” have a bond by virtue of their oppression alone?


Judith Butler

Is there a specificity to women’s cultures that is independent of their subordination by hegemonic, masculinist cultures?

If there is a region of the “specifically feminine,” one that is both differentiated from the masculine as such and recognizable in its difference by an unmarked and, hence, presumed universality of “women”?


Judith Butler

My suggestion is that the presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constrains of the representational discourse in which it functions.

The premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category.


Judith Butler

Perhaps there is an opportunity at this juncture of cultural politics, a period that some would call “postfeminist,” to reflect from within a feminist perspective on the injunction to construct a subject of feminism.


Judith Butler

Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond

Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing concept of a masculinist sygnifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism.

The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.


Judith Butler

That the tactic can operate in feminist and antifeminist contexts alike suggests that the colonizing gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist.


• Chris Weedon


Chris Weedon: (1987). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory

One of the strengths of poststructuralist approaches is that they enable us to attend to the practical implications of particular ways of theorizing women’s oppression and to re-cognize that feminist politics are crucial in determining which existing theories might be useful in the fight for change.


To dismiss all theory as an elitist attempt to tell women what their experience really means is not helpful, but it does serve as a reminder of the importance of making theory accessible and of the political importance of transforming the material conditions of knowledge production and women’s access to knowledge.


Chris Weedon

It is the argument of this book that rather than turning our backs on theory and taking refuge in experience alone, we should think in terms of transforming both the social relations of knowledge production and the type of knowledge produced.

To do so requires that we tackle the fundamental questions of how and where knowledge is produced and by whom, and of what counts as knowledge.

It also requires a transformation of the structures which determine how knowledge is disseminated or otherwise.


Chris Weedon

Much French feminist writing, for example, which attacks traditional theory as a pillar of patriarchy and locates language as the site of political struggle, does so in the context of a psychoanalytic theory of meaning.

This is most apparent in the work of French feminists who have taken as their starting point Jacque Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of language and subjectivity, for example, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous.


Chris Weedon

It does not claim that a poststructuralist perspective can answer every question which feminists wish to ask, but that poststructuralism offers a useful, productive framework and the possibilities of change.

If Foucault’s theory of discourse and power can produce in feminist hands an analysis of patriarchal power relations which enables the development of active strategies for change, then it is of little importance whether his own historical analyses fall short of this.


Chris Weedon

Once language is understood in terms of competing discourses, competing ways of giving meaning to the world, which imply differences in the organization of social power, then language becomes an important site of political struggle.

The poststructuralist answer to the problems of the plurality of meaning and change is to question the location of social meaning in fixed signs. It speaks instead of signifiers in which the signified is never fixed once and for all, but is constantly deferred.


Chris Weedon

For Derrida there can be no fixed signifieds (concepts), and signifiers (sound or written images), which have identity only in their difference from one another, are subject to an endless process of deferral.

The effect of representation, in which meaning is apparently fixed, is but a temporary retrospective fixing.

Signifiers are always located in a discursive context and the temporary fixing of meaning in a specific reading of a signifier ‘woman’ varies from ideal to victim.


Chris Weedon

The Process of Misrecognition

This process relies on a structure of recognition by the individual of herself as the subject of ideology which is also a process of misrecognition.

It is misrecognition in the sense that the individual, on assuming the position of subject in ideology, assumes that she is the author of the ideology which constructs her subjectivity.

In Althusser’s formulation, the relationship between the individual and the subject position which she or he takes up in a specific ideology is imaginary.


Chris Weedon

The crucial point for the moment is that in taking on a subject position, the individual assumes that she is the author of the ideology or discourse which she is speaking. She speaks or thinks as if she were in control of meaning.

She ‘imagines’ that she is indeed the type of subject which humanism proposes – rational, unified, the source rather than the effect of language.


Chris Weedon

It is imaginary quality of the individual’s identification with a subject position which gives it so much psychological and emotional force.

Meaning and consciousness do not exist outside language.


Chris Weedon

We are neither the authors of the ways in which we understand our lives, nor are we unified rational beings.

For feminist poststructuralism, it is language in the form of conflicting discourses which constitutes us as conscious thinking subjects and enables us to give meaning to the world and to act to transform it.

‘Subjectivity’ is used to refer to the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world.


Chris Weedon

Against this irreducible humanist essence of subjectivity, poststructuralism proposes a subjectivity which is precarious, contradictory and in process, constantly being reconstituted in discourse each time we think or speak.

The political significance of decentring the subject and abandoning the belief in essential subjectivity is that it opens up subjectivity to change.


Chris Weedon

The position of the subject from which language is articulated, from which speech acts, thoughts or writing appear to originate, is integral to the structure of language and, by extension, to the structure of conscious subjectivity which it constitutes.

Language and the range of subject positions which it offers always exists in historically specific discourses which inhere in social institutions and practices and can be organized analytically in discursive fields.


Chris Weedon

Language as Discourse

Social structures and processes are organized through institutions and practices such as law, the political system, the church, the family, the education system and the media, each of which is located in and structured by a particular discursive field.

The concept of discursive field was produced by the French theorist, Michael Foucault as part of an attempt to understand the relationship between language, social institutions, subjectivity and power.


Chris Weedon

Discursive fields consist of competing ways of given meaning to the world and of organizing social institutions and processes.

Feminist poststructuralism, then, is a mode of knowledge production which use poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, social processes and institutions to understand existing power relations and to identify areas and strategies for change.


Chris Weedon

Language is not transparent as in humanist discourse, it is not expressive and does not label a ‘real’ world.

Meanings do not exist prior to their articulation in language and language is not an abstract system, but always socially and historically located in discourses.

It is for these reasons that this particular form of post-structuralism is a productive theory for feminism.

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