0 N E

Feminist Studies/Critical Studies:

Issues, Terms, and Contexts
Teresa de Lauretis

"It is by now clear that a feminist renaissance is under way ... a shift
in perspective far more extraordinary and influential than the shift
from theology to humanism of the European Renaissance." 1 Like fem-
inism itself, these words of Adrienne Rich, written in 1973, bear reev-
aluation; not so much, perhaps, to discuss the validity of their as-
sessment or the extensiveness of its claim as to examine the manner
of the shift, to analyze, articulate, address the terms of this other
perspective.
For just such a purpose was a conference held, in April 1985, at
the Center for Twentieth Century Studies of the University of Wis-
consin-Milwaukee on the topic "Feminist Studies: Reconstituting
Knowledge." This volume may be read as one record of that confer-
ence, or better, as one text of many that could have been written or
heard from it.* The conference focused on feminist work in the fields
of history, science, literary writing, criticism, and theory, with the re-
lation of feminist politics to critical studies (and thus also to each and
all of these disciplinary areas) as its general and overarching concern.
Its project was outlined in a letter to participants, as follows:

The intellectual presence of feminist studies has been felt in the acad-
emy for well over a decade. The work of feminist scholars in literary
and social criticism, theory, and history has significantly altered the
configuration of critical studies in this country. But while the results of
feminist scholarship-ranging from the (re)discovery of forgotten writ-

*All the contributions to this volume are revised and/or expanded versions of papers
presented at the conference, with the exception of the essays by Modleski, Moraga,
and Martin and Mohanty. These contributors, however, were also invited to participate,
and, but for Moraga, who was unable to attend due to prior commitments, did take
part in the conference.
I wish to thank Elaine Marks, who generously and graciously shared with me the
task of opening and directing the three-day conference.

T. de Lauretis (ed.), Feminist Studies/Critical Studies

© The Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 1986
2 FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES

ers, artists, and cultural figures to the revision of the canon and the
"rewriting" of history-are acknowledged as an important achievement,
there are a general uncertainty and, among feminists, serious differences
as to what the specific concerns, values and methods of feminist critical
work are, or ought to be.
If it is true, as many claim, that feminist studies have proposed new
ways of thinking about culture, language, morality, or knowledge itself,
then it is timely and necessary to arrive at a more precise understanding
of the epistemological framework and critical foundations of feminist
studies. Or if it is true, as some feminist critics maintain, that feminist
theory has reached an impasse, notably on the issue of essentialism
(the idea of an innate femininity, an essential nature of woman, whether
biologically or philosophically defined); or if it is true that feminist thought
is stalemated in the debate concerning culturalism vs. biologism, then
it is vital that we look around the room and ask: are there any new
faces, any different perspectives, any possibilities of theoretical break-
through?
At a time when the women's movement is being both integrated and
quietly suffocated within the institutions, when the feminist critique is
partially accommodated within some academic disciplines and emar-
ginated otherwise, when feminism is nudged into the pockets of the
economy with one hand, and of the intelligentsia with the other, it
seems important and even crucial to assess the intellectual and political
role of feminist studies in the production, reproduction and transfor-
mation of social discourses and knowledges.
Focusing mainly on three areas-social history, literary criticism and
cultural theory-speakers will seek to identify the specificity of feminism
as a critical theory, its methods, goals and analytic framework(s), its
epistemological and ideological foundations. The approach will be
speculative and theoretical, rather than empirical or quantitative. Par-
ticipants will include leading scholars both within and outside feminist
studies, younger scholars whose training was influenced by Women's
Studies programs, and scholars who are also active in professional fields
such as publishing, psychotherapy, and community work. The sessions
will consist of papers and responses, in the manner of a dialogue, deal-
ing with areas of study where the feminist discourse has articulated
specific issues, themes or questions: papers will survey those areas of
research and outline critical concepts, problems and directions; re-
sponses will focus on one or two aspects of those areas, giving a sharper,
if narrower, critical view of the issues involved and sketching out further
directions for analysis. The panels will address areas and problems not
yet sufficiently articulated within feminist theory, questions that arise
at the boundaries of feminism and other critical practices or mark the
limits of current feminist thought.

The project of the conference was conceived in the awareness of

the very differences, contradictions, even impasses that-precisely-
made it necessary, that made such a meeting crucial, as well as timely.
One of those contradictions was purposely inscribed in the title of
Issues, Terms, and Contexts 3

the conference: "Feminist Studies" are a kind of feminist activity that

takes place primarily within the academic institution, the university,
which is an institution of formal knowledge and an institution of the
state. Feminism, on the other hand, is not an institution, nor is it-or,
better, nor does it seem to be-a matter of formal knowledge. And to
the extent that pressure is exercised in the direction of "mainstream-
ing," to the extent that pressure is felt to yield to an increasing insti-
tutionalization of feminist knowledge and critical activity, the project
of the conference was to resist that pressure, to resist the institution.
The second phrase of the title also contained something of an am-
biguity, a double drift. In one sense, it demanded consideration of
whether and to what extent feminist studies have been "Reconsti-
tuting Knowledge"; whether they have produced new forms and
methods of knowledge, or, even more directly, have produced new
knowledges, and thus reshaped at once the field and the object of
knowledge, as well as the conditions of knowing. Read the other way,
however, the title suggested that the knowledges produced by fem-
inist studies have been reconstituting women-women as social sub-
ject, as subject of both knowledge and knowing; and consequently it
demanded consideration of whether and to what extent those knowl-
edges and epistemological frames have redefined what counts as
knowledge, and thus effectively resist the established canons.
The notion of resistance, however, is itself not unambiguous. It too
can mean-and has meant historically-rather diverse things, translat-
ing into different practices and strategies that must be assessed and
developed each in its concrete sociohistorical situation. Resistance
has been armed or unarmed, for instance (though never disarmed, if
it was really resistance). It can be socially organized in group action
or lived subjectively as a personal commitment, and often is both. But
by the very nature of power and of the mechanisms that harness power
to institutions, rather than individuals, resistance tends to be cast as
op-position, tends to be seen as locked in an opposite position, or
what the media call an "opposing viewpoint." Thus, it is not just
accommodated but in fact anticipated, and so effectively neutralized,
particularly by democratic institutions. That is the pressure, the move
to mainstream feminism to which I alluded earlier. But it would be
naive to think that only we, teachers and writers, are working within
and against institutional constraints, and other feminists are not. Even
a separatist commune of women living off the land, so to speak, has
to contend, though in more mediated ways, with the state.
The ways of resistance in feminism are many. In our own lives as
scholars, students, and writers, we know the complex mediations and
4 FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES

daily negotiations required of women who will not abide in silence,

and who will read and write. Women have written books, to say
nothing of diaries and letters and drawersful of words, about how
much it takes to be able to write, at best, and how many other women
do not have even that much. We have written books about our writing
and the suppression of our writing; we have written about silence and
madness, marginality and invisibility, negativity and difference. But we
have also written of femininity and feminine writing, of identities,
differences, and commonalities, affirming what Audre Lorde has called
"the interdependency of different strengths" in feminism. 2 In sum, it
is now possible, as Sheila Rowbotham put it, "to look back at ourselves
through our own cultural creations, our actions, our ideas, our pam-
phlets, our organizations, our history, our theory." 3 That is precisely
one of the aims of this volume.
It is not only possible, I believe, but necessary, for two reasons: one
internal to feminism, the other external. The first has to do with the
definition of feminism, which is certainly not a point of consensus;
the second with that pressure toward institutionalization that I already
mentioned and on which, I would think, there is a measure of con-
sensus. Obviously, the two are related, since there is no real boundary
between feminism and what is external to it; no boundary separates
or insulates feminism from other social practices or makes it imper-
vious to the institutions of civil society. There are, however, discursive
boundaries: not only specific terms, concepts, and rhetorical strategies
that distinguish feminist writing and speech from the others, but also
certain shared assumptions, interpretive paths, inferences drawn from
events and behaviors, and unstated premises-unstated because they
no longer need to be stated, having become, one might say, "part of
the discourse." These discursive boundaries-by which I do not mean
simply constraints but also configurations, discursive configurations-
delineate a set of possible meanings, or what I would rather call a
horizon of meaning (for example, the horizon of meaning or range of
experiential contents conveyed by the single English word mother-
hood has been significantly expanded and shifted by Adrienne Rich's
book Of Woman Born).
The notion of a feminist discourse, a configuration of rhetorical and
interpretive strategies, a horizon of possible meanings that may be
agreed upon as constituting and defining feminism at a given historical
juncture, is important in view of the tendency to equate women and
feminism to which most of us have acquiesced, feminists and not, if
for different reasons. As Linda Gordon states in her essay in this vol-
ume, femaleness and feminist consciousness are not equivalent terms:
Issues, Terms, and Contexts 5

"There are traditions of female thought, women's culture, and female

consciousness that are not feminist. ... The female is ourselves, our
bodies and our socially constructed experience. It is not the same as
feminism, which is not a 'natural' excretion of that experience but a
controversial political interpretation and struggle, by no means uni-
versal to women."
However, if we take seriously the implications of one of the original
insights of the women's movement (and one of the terms of the fem-
inist discourse), that the personal is political, that there is a direct
relation, however complex it may be, between sociality and subjec-
tivity, between language and consciousness, or between institutions
and individuals-in other words, if the political is also personal, then
the discursive boundaries of feminism must correspond for each and
all of us, according to our histories, to certain subjective limits. 4 Again
I do not mean just limitations, but rather configurations of subjectivity,
patterns by which experiential and emotional contents, feelings, im-
ages, and memories are organized to form one's self-image, one's
sense of self and others, and of our possibilities of existence. Thus,
to return and add to Gordon's statement, if feminism is not a "natural"
consequence of being female (and surely it is not), it nevertheless may
contribute, as a social discourse and a political practice, to the "socially
constructed experience" of women. The relation of experience to
discourse, finally, is what is at issue in the definition of feminism.
In this respect, going back to the semantic shift in the term moth-
erhood, I would offer as an example the further shift accomplished
by Alice Walker's essay "A Child of One's Own," as it resonates within
Virginia Woolf's Room of One's Own and expands it beyond the
confines of an alternative-either children or writing-that most women
not only are forced to make but deeply believe we are forced to make. 5
And Jessica Benjamin, in her essay in this volume, again reshapes the
configuration of feminist discourse as she answers the famous ques-
tion, What does the woman want? with "A Desire of One's Own."
Elaborating the relation of mothering to intersubjective space, Ben-
jamin proposes it as a nonphallic model of psychic organization in
which woman's desire may be more adequately accounted for. Of
course, one's possibilities of existence are not simply the effect of
one's subjective limits and discursive boundaries; but neither can they
be simply attributed to an immutable deployment of socioeconomic
forces that will be changed some day when conditions are right. The
change must occur now, indeed is occurring now, if we look to see
it; that is to say, if we consider the notion of change at certain levels
of abstraction and not others. And one way in which change can be
6 FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES

seen to occur, though not necessarily in the direction one expected

or wants, is through discourses and representations, which actually
and concretely affect the lives of people.
In a paper delivered at the Modern Language Association in 1978
and subsequently published with the title "The Straight Mind," Mo-
nique Wittig argued that if the discourses of modern theory and social
science exert a power upon us, it is because they work with "concepts
which closely touch us."

These discourses speak about us and claim to say the truth in an apolit-
ical field, as if anything of that which signifies could escape the political
in this moment of history, and as if, in what concerns us, politically
insignificant signs could exist. These discourses of heterosexuality op-
press us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we
speak in their terms. Everything which puts them into question is at
once disregarded as elementary. Our refusal of the totalizing interpre-
tation of psychoanalysis makes the theoreticians say that we neglect
the symbolic dimension. These discourses deny us every possibility of
creating our own categories. But their most ferocious action is the un-
relenting tyranny that they exert upon our physical and mental selves.
When we use the overgeneralizing term "ideology" to designate all
the discourses of the dominating group, we relegate these discourses
to the domain of lrrealldeas, we forget the material (physical) violence
that they directly do to the oppressed people, a violence produced by
the abstract and "scientific" discourses as well as by the discourses of
the mass media. I would like to insist on the material oppression of
individuals by discourses. •

Wittig's lucid analysis makes altogether apparent why the definition

of feminism and the effects of institutionalization (both the pressure
and the resistance to it) are related and very important issues for
feminists to address. There are, of course, many other pressing issues
for feminists, and they are being addressed in other contexts (through
the courts, in the media, in the workplace, in communities and neigh-
borhoods), and they are being addressed with other tactics, with dif-
ferent forms of resistance to different kinds of pressure. But for those
of us who work with words, ideas, and other tools of formal knowl-
edge, who know both the high price and the negotiability of discourses
(that is to say, how discourses-including those of feminism or attrib-
uted to feminism-can be traded in the intellectual stock exchange),
for us, then, it is imperative that we confront these issues.
What are feminist studies, really? What constitutes a feminist critical
framework? Is feminism a mode of production of knowledge-social,
aesthetic, and formal knowledge, as well as personal or common
knowledge? Is there one feminist discourse, and if so, what charac-
Issues, Terms, and Contexts 7

terizes it, and can it too be materially oppressive to some women? Or

are there, rather, a variety of discourses, several "feminisms," as many
now prefer to say? But if so, the question still remains, What indeed
makes them feminist? And finally, how is feminist theory-a term that
is used both loosely and narrowly to designate several distinct views
and political positions-implicated in institutional discourses, power
relations, and ideology?
These are the larger questions under which come more specific
areas of debate: the debate on culturalism vs. biologism in the social
sciences, where nature and culture continue to up the antes on each
other; the issue of "identity politics" with the attendant problems of
racism and anti-Semitism in the representation and definition of fem-
inism; the difficult relation of feminist scholarship to the practice-
oriented component of the women's movement, a relation often
summed up (falsely, in my opinion) as an opposition of theory to
practice; or the even more insidious opposition between theoreticism
and empiricism, where accusations of jargon, bad writing, or elitism
from one camp are met with counteraccusations of essentialism and
unsophisticated thinking by the other.
These debates make us uncomfortable because they give incon-
trovertible evidence that sisterhood is powerful but difficult, and not
achieved; that feminism itself, the most original of what we can call
"our own cultural creations," is not a secure or stable ground but a
highly permeable terrain infiltrated by subterranean waterways that
cause it to shift under our feet and sometimes to turn into a swamp.
The conflicting claims that are made for feminism, no less than the
appropriation of feminist strategies and conceptual frames within "le-
gitimate" discourses or by other critical theories, make us uncom-
fortable because we know and fear what they signal to us beyond a
doubt: the constant drive on the part of institutions (in which, like it
or not, feminists are also engaged) to deflect radical resistance and to
recuperate it as liberal opposition. And the proven most effective
means to that end is what Flo Kennedy, speaking in Milwaukee a few
months ago, called "horizontal violence," the in-fighting among mem-
bers of an oppressed group. Granted that, among women, such hor-
izontal violence is verbal rather than physical, and that the fine line
between in-fighting and critical debate is often too fine to know for
sure; nevertheless, Wittig's point on "the material oppression of in-
dividuals by discourses" must apply here, as well, and should be kept
on the front burner of a feminist political consciousness in one with
the issue of power/
8 FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES

In the final instance, however, within the discursive boundaries of

feminism, these debates seem to me ultimately productive, because
they sustain and nourish the practice of self-criticism, or better, per-
haps, self-consciousness, as the Italian feminists call what in the United
States we used to call "consciousness raising" and have now aban-
doned since that term, too, has been appropriated and devalued by
the media. But the practice of self-consciousness, which, according
to Catharine MacKinnon, is the "critical method" of feminism, its
specific mode of knowledge as political apprehension of self in reality,
continues to be essential to feminism. 8 It continues to be essential,
that is, if feminism is to continue to be a political critique of society.
Even more important, or more to the immediate point, the practice
of self-consciousness-of reading, speaking, and listening to one an-
other-is the best way we have precisely to resist horizontal violence
without acquiescing to institutional recuperation, the best way we
know to analyze our differences and contradictions even as we accept,
as we must, the liberal allocation of a tiny amount of "equal" time in
which to present our "opposing viewpoint."

As the history of revolutionary movements in this century has shown,

and as the most recent developments in feminist theory confirm be-
yond a doubt (developments that have been prompted by the writings
of women of color, jewish women, and lesbians, and that can be
sustained only by a serious, critical, and self-critical attention to the
issues they raise), consciousness is not the result but the term of a
process. Consciousness of self, like class consciousness or race con-
sciousness (e.g., my consciousness of being white), is a particular con-
figuration of subjectivity, or subjective limits, produced at the inter-
section of meaning with experience. (I have never, before coming to
this country, been conscious of being white; and the meaning, the
sense of what it means to be white has changed for me greatly over
the years.) In other words, these different forms of consciousness are
grounded, to be sure, in one's personal history; but that history-one's
identity-is interpreted or reconstructed by each of us within the ho-
rizon of meanings and knowledges available in the culture at given
historical moments, a horizon that also includes modes of political
commitment and struggle. Self and identity, in other words, are always
grasped and understood within particular discursive configurations.
Consciousness, therefore, is never fixed, never attained once and for
all, because discursive boundaries change with historical conditions.
Issues, Terms, and Contexts 9

In this perspective, the very notion of identity undergoes a shift:

identity is not the goal but rather the point of departure of the process
of self-consciousness, a process by which one begins to know that
and how the personal is political, that and how the subject is specif-
ically and materially en-gendered in its social conditions and possi-
bilities of existence. As it is articulated in the context of the debate
on identity politics, and most vividly in the essays by Elly Bulkin,
Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith in Yours in Struggle, this fem-
inist concept of identity is not at all the statement of an essential nature
of Woman, whether defined biologically or philosophically, but rather
a political-personal strategy of survival and resistance that is also, at
the same time, a critical practice and a mode of knowledge. As Biddy
Martin and Chandra Mohanty show in their "Feminist Politics: What's
Home Got to Do with It?", a close reading of Pratt's autobiographical
essay, the search for identity may be, in fact, a "rewriting" of self "in
relation to shifting interpersonal and political contexts": in other words,
a recasting of the notion that the personal is political which does not
simply equate and collapse the two ("the personal is the same as the
political," which in practice translates into "the personal instead of
the political") but maintains the tension between them precisely
through the understanding of identity as multiple and even self-con-
tradictory.
It seems to me that this notion of identity points to a more useful
conception of the subject than the one proposed by neo-Freudian
psychoanalysis and poststructuralist theories. For it is not the frag-
mented, or intermittent, identity of a subject constructed in division
by language alone, an "I" continuously prefigured and preempted in
an unchangeable symbolic order. It is neither, in short, the imaginary
identity of the individualist, bourgeois subject, which is male and white;
nor the "flickering" of the posthumanist Lacanian subject, which is
too nearly white and at best (fe)male. What is emerging in feminist
writings is, instead, the concept of a multiple, shifting, and often self-
contradictory identity, a subject that is not divided in, but rather at
odds with, language; an identity made up of heterogeneous and het-
eronomous representations of gender, race, and class, and often in-
deed across languages and cultures; an identity that one decides to
reclaim from a history of multiple assimilations, and that one insists
on as a strategy: "I think," writes Elly Bulkin, "of all the women [of
mixed heritage] who, told to choose between or among identities,
insist on selecting all."q Representing the conditions of existence of
those subjects who are muted, elided, or unrepresentable in dominant
discourses, this new understanding of the nature of identity actually
10 FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES

opens up the possibility to "set about creating something else to be,"

as Toni Morrison writes of her two heroines in Su/a: "Because each
had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male,
and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had
set about creating something else to be." 10
The emergent conception of a gendered and heteronomous subject
(subject in the two senses of the term: both subject-ed to social con-
straint and yet subject in the active sense of maker as well as user of
culture, intent on self-definition and self-determination), and of a sub-
ject that is initially defined by its consciousness of oppression (of
multiple oppression), is an instance of the epistemological shift ef-
fected by feminism. By epistemological shift I mean a new way of
thinking about culture, language, art, experience, and knowledge itself
that, in redefining the nature and boundaries of the political, at once
addresses women as social subject and en-genders the subject as
political.
Here is where, to my mind, feminism differs from other contem-
porary modes of radical, critical or creative thinking, such as post-
modernism and philosophical antihumanism: feminism defines itself
as a political instance, not merely a sexual politics but a politics of
experience, of everyday life, which later then in turn enters the public
sphere of expression and creative practice, displacing aesthetic hier-
archies and generic categories, and which thus establishes the semiotic
ground for a different production of reference and meaning. That we
see in feminist critical writings and other artistic practices, such as
women's filmmaking. I would argue, in this regard, that the feminist
critical text, the rereading against the grain of the "master works" of
Western culture and the textual construction (written, filmic, etc.) of
discursive spaces in which not Woman but women are represented
and addressed as subjects, possessed of both a specificity (gender)
and a history, is an original "cultural creation" of feminism; more,
perhaps, than a new genre of (critical/fictional) creative expression,
it can be thought of as a new aesthetic, a rewriting of culture. 11

As we look back on the history of feminism over the past two

decades, then, we can trace the permanence of certain critical terms,
such as the emphasis on subjectivity and the centrality of gender to
any account of social processes, but we can also see developments
or shifts in them, as well as other, equally fundamental concepts.
Identity and consciousness are being redefined substantially, as I have
briefly indicated. The notion of a gendered, heterogeneous, and het-
eronomous subject, which has been worked through initially in re-
Issues, Terms, and Contexts 11

lation to questions of spectatorship (in feminist film theory) and of

reading and writing as women (in literary theory and criticism), is
achieving definition in the retelling of stories: retelling well-known
stories in order to destabilize the literary and scientific myths of origin,
as Gilbert and Gubar do in The Madwoman in the Attic, for example,
or as Donna Haraway does in her critique of primatology; and in the
telling of new stories so as to inscribe into the picture of reality char-
acters and events and resolutions that were previously invisible, un-
told, unspoken (and so unthinkable, unimaginable, "impossible"). 12
Another crucial point of revision in the history of feminist thought
is, of course, the notions of sexuality and sexual difference, which
have been all along the basis of the critique of representation, not
just in the media and the visual arts but also in scientific discourses,
jurisprudence, and so forth. Currently, the question of sexuality and
the terms in which the question should be posed are one of the areas
of least consensus among feminists. While I shall not attempt to outline
this particular debate, as it is not directly addressed in the volume,
still a couple of remarks may be in order. First, among the many critical
issues raised by feminism, sexuality or sexual difference and subjec-
tivity are the ones that other critical discourses have more readily
engaged or taken up-not to say appropriated, which I suspect is the
correct way to put it. I will suggest, in a moment, that proper distinc-
tions should be maintained. Second, I strongly feel that even within
the discursive boundaries of feminism, the notion of sexual difference
needs to be seriously reconsidered. And this second point is in part
a consequence of the first.
The specificity of feminism as a political-theoretical project be-
comes apparent as we compare it with other current discourses on
sexuality and subjectivity, from the Foucauldian notion of the "tech-
nology of sex" to the various antioedipal desiring machines, libidinal
economies, and postmodern antiaesthetics: discourses that, not unlike
traditional Marxist humanism, regard "the woman question" as merely
one moment of a broader movement for "human" liberation. But
much less rigorously than the latter, and indeed with amazing facility,
these discourses lump women together with children and slaves, mad-
men and poets, and go so far as to include in such chaotic typology
the entire "Third World."
My guess is that, if antihumanism so badly needs to claim feminism
in its ranks, it is because of that epistemological priority which fem-
inism has located in the personal, the subjective, the body, the symp-
tomatic, the quotidian, as the very site of material inscription of the
ideological; that is to say, the ground where socio-political determi-
12 FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES

nations take hold and are real-ized. That, in the last instance, is what
is at stake in the critique of humanism, liberal or Marxist, a stake that
both feminism and antihumanism have in common. But for feminism,
and for women, the centrality of subjectivity and sexuality is not merely
the sign of a crisis of reason, a proof of the failure of instrumental
rationality in late capitalism; nor is "the end of politics" a useful fem-
inist conceit. On the contrary, while it may be served by the critique
of humanism and of its institutions, from metaphysics to metadis-
course, feminism differs from philosophical antihumanism in that it
remains very much a politics of everyday life. The edge is there: the
sense of struggle, the weight of oppression and contradiction. The
stakes, for women, are rooted in the body-which is not to say that
the body escapes representation, but quite the opposite.
The body is continually and inevitably caught up in representation.
It is, of course, the supreme object of representation for the visual
arts, the medical sciences, the capitalist media industry, and several
related social practices from organized sports to individual jogging;
even the unconscious and its drives cannot be grasped except in their
particular processes of representation through the body. But, again,
what is at stake for women in the received representations of the
body, no less than in representations of the subject or subjectivity, is
the definition of the pivotal notion that supports them all, the defi-
nition of sexual difference.
In the view currently popular, the meaning of sexual difference is
posed in terms of an opposition-nature or culture, biology or so-
cialization-that seems progressive or "liberated" but is, in fact, only
inches away from the infamous anatomy-destiny idea. For merely to
say that sexual difference is "cultural" allows no greater understanding
of female subjectivity, and of women's actual and real differences,
than to believe it to be "natural." And that is so since all accepted
definitions of cultural, social, and subjective processes start from the
same assumption: that sexual difference is the difference from man,
the difference of woman from man-man being the measure, standard,
or term of reference of all legitimated discourse. See, in this regard,
Mary Russo's discussion in this volume of recent theories of mas-
querade, carnival, and performance which, on the one hand, hinge
on the idea of femininity and the representation of the female body,
while, on the other, they either disregard the social implications of
gender or claim femininity as a mask, style, or support of male sub-
jectivity. Put another way, even as they assert that sexual difference
is culturally produced, the discourses of science, philosophy, and lit-
Issues, Terms, and Contexts 13

erary and critical theory concern themselves, finally, only with the
production of Oedipus (or anti-Oedipus).
That is precisely what Wittig, in the essay I cited earlier, refers to
as "the straight mind": the kind of thinking that "produces the dif-
ference between the sexes as a political and philosophical dogma."
The "heterosexual contract," in her terms, or what Adrienne Rich has
called "compulsory heterosexuality," is not merely a question of who's
sleeping with whom, but the deeply held and embedded assumption
that "what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality." 13 No matter
that in recent theories, Wittig writes, "there is no such thing as nature,
that everything is culture. There remains within that culture a core of
nature which defies examination, a relationship excluded from the
social in the analysis-a relationship whose characteristic is its ine-
luctability in culture, as well as nature, [and that is] the obligatory
social relation between 'man' and 'woman' " (p. 107).
A feminist frame of reference, therefore, it seems to me, cannot be
either "man" or "woman," for both of these are constructs of a male-
centered discourse, both are products of "the straight mind." If the
goal of feminist theory is to define sexual difference for women, to
understand how one becomes a woman, and what gives femaleness
(rather than femininity) its meaning as the experience of a female
subject, then the starting point can be neither "man" nor "woman":
neither the Man with the capital M of humanism, or the lower-case
man of modernism; nor, on the other hand, woman as the opposite
or the complement of man: Woman as Nature, Mother, Body, and
Matter, or woman as style, figure, or metaphor of man's femininity.
As the discourse on sexuality becomes institutionalized in the acad-
emy, in the literary critical disciplines, Hortense Spillers has observed,
the meaning of sexual difference "threatens to lose its living and palp-
able connection to training in the feelings and to become, rather, a
mode of theatre for the dominating mythologies." 14 Sexuality is a term
of power, Spillers says, and it belongs to the empowered. For this
reason, the (white) feminist discourse on sexuality "flirts with the con-
cealment of the activity of sex by way of an exquisite dance of textual
priorities and successions, revisions and corrections." For this reason,
it can ignore the compelling connection between sexuality and the
requirements of survival that is the perceived reality of those women
whom class and status do not protect. For insofar as we can speak or
think of sexuality as something in itself, "as an isolated ontological
detail" (in Spillers's phrase), we are to some extent protected. And it
is women so protected by class or white-skin privilege who have laid
out the terms of the critical discourse on sexuality along the tracks of
14 FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES

a single option: either to perform (and yield to) the seductions of the
father-text (in that "exquisite dance of textual priorities") or to stake
out a territory in the wilderness and colonize it as an "empire of
women." 15 For Spillers, neither of these models will do. I fully agree
with her.
What that amounts to saying, in effect, is that an all-purpose feminist
frame of reference does not exist, nor should it ever come prepack-
aged and ready-made. We need to keep building one, absolutely
flexible and readjustable, from women's own experience of difference,
of our difference from Woman and of the differences among women;
differences which, as the essays by Sondra O'Neale, Sheila Radford-
Hill, and Cherrie Moraga in this volume argue and document, are
perceived as having as much (or more) to do with race, class, or
ethnicity as with gender or sexuality per se. 16 However, if I am not
mistaken in suggesting, as I did above, that a new conception of the
subject is, in fact, emerging from feminist analyses of women's het-
erogeneous subjectivity and multiple identity, then I would further
suggest that the differences among women may be better understood
as differences within women. For if it is the case that the female subject
is en-gendered across multiple representations of class, race, language,
and social relations, it is also the case (and the essays document that,
too) that gender is a common denominator: the female subject is
always constructed and defined in gender, starting from gender. In
this sense, therefore, if differences among women are also differences
within women, not only does feminism exist despite those differences,
but, most important, as we are just now beginning to realize, it cannot
continue to exist without them.
Again I see a shift, a development, and I do hope I'm not mistaken,
in the feminist understanding of female subjectivity: a shift from the
earlier view of woman defined purely by sexual difference (i.e., in
relation to man) to the more difficult and complex notion that the
female subject is a site of differences; differences that are not only
sexual or only racial, economic, or (sub)cultural, but all of these to-
gether, and often enough at odds with one another. These differences,
which are no less intensely felt for being addressed or confronted, as
they are now beginning to be, remain concretely embedded in social
and power relations; they coexist concurrently with (though perhaps
no longer in spite of) the provisional unity of any concerted political
action or coalition. But once articulated and understood in their con-
stitutive power-once it is understood, that is, that these differences
not only constitute each woman's consciousness and subjective limits
but all together define the female subject of feminism in its very spec-
Issues, Terms, and Contexts 15

ificity, its inherent and at least for now irreconcilable contradiction-

these differences, then, cannot be again collapsed into a fixed identity,
a sameness of all women as Woman, or a representation of Feminism
as a coherent and available image.
The image of feminism as a coherent ideology, a set of dogmas and
rules of conduct repressive to some and oppressive to others, has
currency inside, as well as outside, the discursive boundaries of fem-
inism. And this image, too, of a homogeneous, monolithic Feminism-
whether white or black or Third World, whether mainstream or sep-
aratist, academic or activist-is something that must be resisted. Very
importantly, for example, in their contribution to this volume, Martin
and Mohanty challenge the assumption "that the terms of a totalizing
feminist discourse are adequate [their emphasis] to the task of artic-
ulating the situation of white women in the West. We would contest
that assumption and argue that the reproduction of such polarities
[i.e., West/East, white/nonwhite] only serves to concede 'feminism'
to the 'West' all over again."
For one thing, that "feminism" is a facile, reductive, easily saleable
image, serving the purposes of those who stand outside or do not
stand to gain from feminism. For another, however, it is built in part
from ambiguities and actual conflicts internal to the women's move-
ment; from the personal disaffection of some women, who have
nevertheless remained politically active (black women such as Bell
Hooks, white women such as Sheila Delany, for example); and from
the writings of others who, keeping up with fashion, declare feminism
outmoded and themselves "postfeminists." And, lastly, it has been
buttressed by the self-complacency of the many feminists who would
seem to wish to avoid the emotional and intellectual pains of contra-
diction and confrontation by averting eyes and ears from the sur-
rounding world. 17
Another aim of this volume, therefore, is to resist that image of
Feminism by looking at the ambiguities, conflicts, and paradoxes that
distinguish and differentiate women from men and from ourselves,
and by articulating the various, interwoven strands of a tension, a
condition of contradiction, that for the time being, at least, will not
be reconciled.

The essays in this book are arranged in a sequence roughly following

the contributors' primary areas of research: history, science, literary
writing, criticism, and theory. Again, reflecting a marked emphasis of
16 FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES

the conference project, the political dimension of feminist studies is

an explicit concern throughout the volume, and, with regard to their
concrete results or their political effectiveness, the opinions expressed
vary from the more doubtful or cautionary to the more hopeful or
encouraging. Different stances are taken, and arguments develop
among essays within a single area, such as history or literary criticism,
white and black; but there is also productive interchange or borrowing
across disciplines, for instance, science from literary theory, literary
criticism from history, and vice versa.
The relation of feminism to other critical discourses is specifically
addressed in several of the essays. For example, what may distinguish
a feminist understanding of "reading as a woman" from the meaning
and ideological agenda the phrase has acquired in the discourse of
deconstruction, is forcefully argued by Tania Modleski's essay on in-
terpretation, itself a critical (one might say deconstructive) reading of
feminist and other readings. Again for example, the effects of a double
temporality of intellectual history, which unfolds concurrently-and
discontinuously-in "women's time" of feminist criticism and in "the
Eastern Standard time" of traditional scholarship, are keenly observed
by Nancy K. Miller in her dual-language reading (so to speak) of Roland
Barthes and Adrienne Rich. Or, again, the possibility that "psychoan-
alytic feminism" may have at last metamorphosed into a feminist psy-
choanalysis is not the least of the implications of jessica Benjamin's
painstaking review of that long-standing and uneasy relationship.
Whether or not the inscription of subjectivity in the text necessitates
modernist or avant-garde techniques, as Kristeva and others claim, or
whether realism is still alive in this postmodern age; how the scientific
text can be seen as an open book and yet hide the secrets of an
invisible voice; how language, class, and gender mutually affect one
another; how feminism can provide a model for social change by
redefining notions of home and family, community and liminality, self
and other; whether sexuality may be redeployed against its own social
technology (in Foucault's terms) for progressive political ends, or even
whether "women on top" may be a viable model (in the words of
Natalie Davis quoted by Mary Russo) of "riot and political disobedi-
ence for both men and women" -these are some of the other ques-
tions raised by the essays.
Rich and Barthes are by no means the only unlikely pairing to be
encountered in these pages. Other unwonted connections are made,
as well as references to names seldom indexed in volumes of critical
studies. Freud is here, to be sure, as is Lacan, and so is Mitchell, but
not at center stage; Bakhtin, on the other hand, has two curtain calls.
Issues, Terms, and Contexts 17

Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are cited more frequently than james
joyce, lrigaray more than Nietzsche, de Beauvoir (as might have been
expected) more than Sartre. More equal time is given Elaine Showalter
than jonathan Culler; Rosalind Franklin receives at least as much at-
tention as james Watson; and, rather unexpectedly, Derrida shares
the last laugh with Yvonne Rainer. No mention is made of Hegel,
Heidegger, or Althusser. That said, however, I want to conclude by
briefly pointing out what this book does for me, its editor, and now
reader.

Reading the essays again, in the completed manuscript, I am com-

pelled to return to some of my earlier introductory statements, for in
the meantime, it seems, the ground has shifted, and the text I thought
I read from the conference has recomposed itself almost under my
eyes. Themes and motifs, phrases, quotations, references recur from
one essay to the others and resonate intertextually, insistently, taking
on new possibilities of meaning, sketching the boundaries of a the-
oretical horizon not quite the same as before.
Differences. Identity. Take those two terms mask and masquerade,
which reappear conspicuously and are both meant, worn as they are,
as weapons of survival. But the former is there to represent a burden,
imposed, constraining the expression of one's real identity; the latter
is flaunted, or, if not, at least put on like a new dress which, even
when required, does give some pleasure to the wearer. Mask and
masquerade are the terms of different demands (though I will not say
of different desires). Verisimilitude, realism, positive images are the
demands that women of color make of their own writing as critical
and political practice; white women demand instead simulation, tex-
tual performances, double displacements. That-considering that the
political, the personal, and the tension between them are fore-
grounded by each and all of the critics in question-is difference in-
deed. However, I would not say that mask and masquerade are terms
inscribing different desires; to me they both are signs of the same need
for, and a very similar drive toward, the representation of a subjectivity
that, however diverse its sociohistorical configurations and modes of
expression, has come into its own as political consciousness.
Thus, it may be sobering for some of us, and even reassuring, after
the topsy-turvy "carnival of theory," to be reminded that the signifier
does not endlessly rush on toward the abyss of nonmeaning, and that
there is a referent, the real world, after all. For others, perhaps, an
inside view of the division, contradiction, and internal constraints that
prompt the masquerade, or that make up even the images we may
18 FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES

perceive as positive, may be empowering in some way. Or so I hope.

That I would rather look, myself, to the kind of image of identity that
Martin and Mohanty see in Pratt's political autobiography is undoubt-
edly the effect of my personal history, of my own cultural, geographic,
social, and sexual displacements. And to the extent that I can see
beyond and through that history by knowing the ways of other(s')
histories, the project of this book has been, for me, empowering. It
is more than editorial correctness, therefore, that makes me end this
introduction with the words of others who have enabled me to see
beyond my history through them:

We don't have to be the same to have a movement, but we do have

to admit our fear and pain and be accountable for our ignorance. In
the end, finally, we must refuse to give up on each other.'"

N 0 T E S
1. Adrienne Rich, "Toward a Woman-Centered University," in On Lies,
Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1979), p. 126.
2. Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's
House," in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N. Y.: Crossing
Press, 1984), p. 111.
3. Sheila Rowbotham, Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 28.
4. I owe the terms discursive boundaries and subjective limits to Kaja Sil-
verman's analysis of the work of a West German feminist filmmaker. See Kaja
Silverman, "Helke Sander and the Will to Change," Discourse, no. 6 (Fall
1983), pp. 10-30.
5. Alice Walker's essay, in her In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (San
Diego: Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1983), responds not only to Woolf but
also to Tillie Olsen's analysis of writing and mothering in Silences (New York:
Dell Publishing Co., 1965, 1972, 1978).
6. Monique Wittig, "The Straight Mind," Feminist Issues 1 (Summer 1980):
105-106.
7. A good example of how fine that line can be is the volume produced
from the 1982 Barnard conference, "Towards a Politics of Sexuality," and
appropriately titled Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Car-
ole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
8. Catharine A. MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State:
An Agenda for Theory," Signs 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 515-44. This particular
point is made on p. 535.
9. Elly Bulkin, "Hard Ground: jewish Identity, Racism, and Anti-Semitism,"
in Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three
Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (Brooklyn, N. Y.: Long
Haul Press, 1984), p. 106.
Issues, Terms, and Contexts 19

10. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), p. 44.
11. I have begun developing these ideas, so far only in relation to feminist
filmmaking in "Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women's Cinema,"
New German Critique, no. 34 (Winter 1985), pp. 154-75.
12. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1979); Donna Haraway, "Teddy-Bear Patriarchy," Social
Text, no. 11 (Winter 1984-85), pp. 20-64. As for the telling of new stories,
suffice it to mention recent feminist fiction, such as Alice Walker's The Color
Purple, autobiographical essays such as those of Yours in Struggle, or Audre
Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and, of course, the feminist science
fiction of Joanna Russ or Alice Sheldon (alias James Tiptree, Jr.).
13. Wittig, "Straight Mind," p. 105. Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Hetero-
sexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631-60.
14. Hortense J. Spillers, "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words," in Vance,
Pleasure and Danger, p. 79.
15. Spillers, "Interstices," p. 81. The latter project is outlined, for example,
in Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry
special issue: Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel, vol. 8, no. 2
(Winter 1981 ), pp. 179-205.
16. See also Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts
in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books,
1981 ); This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed.
Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of
Color Press, 1983); Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, ed. Evelyn Torton
Beck (Trumansburg, N. Y.: Crossing Press, 1982); All the Women Are White,
All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies,
ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N. Y.:
Feminist Press, 1982); E. Frances White, "Listening to the Voices of Black
Feminism," Radical America 18, no. 2-3 (1984): 7-25; and Chela Sandoval,
Women Respond to Racism, Occasional Paper Series "The Struggle Within,"
published by the Center for Third World Organizing, 4228 Telegraph Avenue,
Oakland, CA 94609, n.d.
17. For Bell Hooks, see chap. 1 of Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
(Boston: South End Press, 1984); for Sheila Delany, see chap. 1 of Writing
Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature, Medieval to Modern (New
York: Schocken Books, 1983). The last category is too large for this footnote,
but some references will be given in the following essays. As for "postfem-
inists," the reference would hardly be relevant to a volume such as this.
18. Cherrie Moraga, Julia Perez, Barbara Smith, and Beverly Smith, quoted
by Elly Bulkin in Bulkin, Pratt, and Smith, Yours in Struggle, p. 151.