Page 131 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

of textual jouissance are located neither in the female body nor in
female sexuality, but in the universally human experience of the pre-
Oedipal semiotic. Masculinity and femininity are constructed by way
of different routes out of this experience, and are thus in principle
negotiable.
Since for Kristeva masculinity and femininity are essentially social
constructs, it follows, then, that biologically male poets can in fact be
as marginal to, and as subversive of, the symbolic order as are women.
And, indeed, Kristeva’s revolution in poetic language—in effect, the
birth of the modern avant-garde—is a surprisingly male affair. Witness
the rôle of Mallarmée and Lautréamont. What is at issue here is a
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positive valorization, not of women’s writing as such, but of modernist
poetry. Cixous’s much more explicitly gynocentric écriture feminine
is similarly partisanly modernist and it too, surely more surprisingly,
can accommodate the occasional biologically male writer. Thus the
text of Genet has ascribed within it, according to Cixous, “a
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proliferating, maternal, femininity”. Male poets have certainly
subverted the phallocentric order, Cixous insists, adding significantly,
but “only the poets—not the novelists, allies of representationalism”. 59
Thus French feminism effectively consigns virtually the whole of
Showalter’s female tradition, a novelists’ tradition and an
overwhelmingly representationalist tradition, to the camp of patriarchy.

Feminism and cultural politics

In themselves, these variously cultural, biological, linguistic and
psychoanalytic models of difference remain compatible, and especially
so if culture is understood as ultimately determining, as it is,
paradoxically, both for Showalter and for Kristeva. Astonishingly,
what most clearly divided American culturalist feminism from French
feminist deconstruction, and what most clearly divided Marxist-
feminists against each other, as it had divided Marxists, was the question
of modernism. Where French feminism had tended to valorise modernist
linguistic subversion, American feminism had tended to valorize the
capacity of more representational forms to provide a more authentic
account of women’s experience. Drawing upon an analogy between
the women’s revolution and the colonial revolution, Showalter would
argue that: “The language issue in feminist criticism has emerged, in

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