Page 127 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

which the subject is interpellated as gendered. Writing in Screen, Laura
Mulvey argued that the general structure of conventional narrative
cinema, quite apart from the particular contents of particular films,
itself positions the male as active, the female as passive, or as she
herself succinctly summarized it: “Woman as image, man as the bearer
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of the look”. An analogously Althusserian understanding informed
Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements, for example, as also
much of the work of the Women’s Studies Group at Birmingham. 40
More distinctly post-structuralist thematics, deriving both from
malestream deconstruction and from the new French feminism, were
to become more prominent in both British and American feminism
during the 1980s. We shall return to this matter very shortly. For the
moment, however, let us proceed to a much more direct encounter
with French feminism.

French feminisms

In her “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” essay, Showalter identifies
four main models of sexual difference: the biological, the linguistic,
the psychoanalytic and the cultural. The implication here is that all
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four are practised both in France and in the United States. The explicit
judgement, moreover, is that: “They overlap but are roughly sequential
in that each incorporates the one before”. This latter judgement
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clearly functioned as a legitimation for Showalter’s own culturalism,
and was almost certainly false: cultural explanation had been
chronologically prior in the anglophone feminist movement, as Millett’s
1
work surely attests. So also, however, is the implication: the first
three models had each, in fact, been much more characteristic of
French feminism than of American. But Showalter was entirely right
to identify these as the four such models practically available to
gynocritics. Thus far, we have considered both culturalist formulations
proper and also those versions of Marxist-feminism which, though
redefining culture as ideology, nonetheless adopted a quite
fundamentally “cultural” model of difference. It is in French feminism
that we find the more persuasive instances of the biological, linguistic
and psychoanalytical models. 43
Much anglophone feminism had been desperately concerned to
refute that whole range of essentially conservative arguments which

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