Page 120 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

TYPES OF FEMINISM

fact occupied a highly salient position within second wave feminist
discourse. Michéle Barrett insists that she “can find no sustained
argument as to why feminists should be so interested in literature”. 11
Perhaps so. But parts of the answer are provided: firstly, by the fact
that feminist intellectuals have happened to be already employed
disproportionately in teaching in the humanities, and especially in
literature; secondly, by the widespread feminist perception of women’s
oppression as having cultural, rather than biological, roots; and thirdly,
by the way in which feminists have very often seen women’s cultural
production as central to “consciousness raising”, and hence to social
change.
Despite the occasionally “separatist” ambitions of certain types of
feminist politics, recent feminist cultural theory has been far from
self-contained. K.K.Ruthven may indeed be “the Crocodile Dundee
of male feminism”, as Elaine Showalter describes him, but he is right
nonetheless to stress the extent to which feminist thought has been
influenced by Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism. We
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might add, moreover, as Ruthven does not, that much other feminist
writing often remains covertly indebted to kinds of culturalism much
more traditional to literary studies. To recognize as much is not to
detract from the originality of the central feminist argument: that all
hitherto existing societies, except perhaps the very early gynocentric
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societies discussed by Merlin Stone, have been patriarchally
organized around the oppression of women by men; and that the
dominant cultures of those societies have therefore been necessarily
androcentric, that is, male-centred, and quite possibly positively
misogynist. It is, however, to recognize the versatility and the
eclecticism with which feminism has rifled through the patriarchal
cultural legacy, in search of theories, methods and concepts that
might be put to new, gynocentric, use. Hence the way in which
feminist cultural theory has proved able to recycle concepts of
ideology, of signification, and of culture.
We should, then, alert ourselves to the influence of Marxism on
socialist feminist writers, such as those associated with the British
Marxist-feminist Literature Collective; and to that of structuralism
and post-structuralism, and especially the work of Derrida and Lacan,
on many of the writers associated with what was once the “new French
feminism”. We should also, of course, note the often unacknowledged
influence of culturalist notions of tradition and disinterestedness in

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