Page 125 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

These British feminist appropriations of the Marxian notion of
ideology took on a surprisingly uniform Althusserian coloration.
Michéle Barrett, herself a member of the Marxist-feminist Literature
Collective, explained in the first edition of her Women’s Oppression
Today that any such appropriation required the postulate: either that
gender differences are separate from class divisions, but that Althusser’s
method is nonetheless applicable to both (in effect, that sexist ideology
reproduces patriarchal relations of dominance); or that gender divisions
can be analytically integrated into the class structure and can therefore
be explained in terms of the substance of Althusser’s position. Both
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strategies were pursued, and Barrett herself was often acute on the
strengths and weaknesses of each. But in 1980 at least, she still had
no real doubts as to the fundamental adequacy of the Althusserian
notion that ideology is somehow integrally related to the relations of
production—which for her, as a feminist, involved not only a class
division of labour but also a sexual division of labour. 32
Barrett’s own account of the process by which textual representations
reproduce gender ideology identified four central such mechanisms:
tereotyping; compensation, via the discourse about the supposed moral
value of femininity; collusion, that is, manipulation of consent; and
recuperation, that is, the negation of challenges to the dominant gender
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ideology. It is not at all difficult to recognise each of these at work in
both canonical and popular cultural texts. But the danger with such
heavily structuralist accounts was that they so very easily conjured
up the impression of a self-sealing, functional system of oppression, a
system which, were it indeed such, would be effectively unchallengeable.
If the world is changeable, rather than merely changing (as Althusser
supposed), then it can be changed only by the agency of some human
subject. But Marxist-feminism appeared to inherit from Althusserianism
a deep antipathy to the notion of the subject. So much so, in fact, that
another member of the Collective, Cora Kaplan, came to define the
opposition between socialist and liberal (actually, the term she uses is
“humanist’) feminisms almost entirely in such anti-humanist terms:

literary texts…centre the individual as object and subject of
their discourse… The problem for socialist feminists is…the
romantic theory of the subject so firmly entrenched within the
discourse. Humanist feminist criticism does not object to the
idea of an immanent, transcendent subject but only to the

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