Page 121 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

much Anglo-American, and especially American, feminist scholarship.
The obvious instance here is that provided by Elaine Showalter herself.
Showalter is Professor of English at Princeton and has been a declared
opponent of all such dependence on masters, a dependency she has
noted in French and British feminisms, but not in her own work. But
she nicely registers the differences in approach when she observes
that: “English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stresses oppression;
French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses repression;
American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression.
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All, however, have become gynocentric”. By this last remark, she
meant only to stress the way in which second wave feminism had
evolved from an initial critique of androcentrism into a later celebration
of gynocentrism. Doubtless, this wasn’t in fact a uniform trajectory,
but it was indeed very common, and more particularly so in the English-
speaking world.

Anglo-American feminism
Certainly, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, the single most important
pioneering work of anglophone feminist cultural theory, had been
concerned precisely to develop a critique of sexist culture. Millett
argued that the period between 1930 and 1960 had been characterized
by a sexual counter-revolution, a reactionary response to the protracted
sexual revolution of the previous hundred years, a response entailing,
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above all, a reassertion of patriarchy. She traced the presence of this
sexual counter-revolution in Soviet and Nazi family policies and in
sexually conservative ideologies such as Freudian psychoanalysis and
functionalist sociology. The book culminated, however, in a sustained
critique of the work of three male novelists, “counter-revolutionary
sexual politicians”, as she termed them: D.H.Lawrence, Henry Miller
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and Norman Mailer. Millett’s purpose here was to expose as deeply
patriarchal the fundamental images of male-female relations which
informed their work. Thus she wrote of Lawrence that in Lady
Chatterley he “uses the words ‘sexual’ and ‘phallic’ interchangeably,
so that the celebration of sexual passion for which the book is so
renowned is largely a celebration of the penis of Oliver Mellors…
This is…the transformation of masculine ascendancy into a mystical
religion”. 17

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