Page 135 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

both élitist and unfeminist. Grosz herself confronts this objection
head-on: “feminist struggles are…occurring in many different practices,
including the practice of the production of meanings, discourses and
knowledges… This struggle for the right to write, read and know
differently is not merely a minor or secondary task within feminist
politics”. 76
As in the debates over multiculturalism and post-colonialism, the
appeal of post-structuralism for feminists owes much to its status as
somehow peculiarly “postmodern”. But, just as in the debates over
multiculturalism and post-colonialism, the relativizing logic of post-
structuralism threatens precisely to undermine the ground from which
any specifically feminist critique of patriarchal culture might actually
be mounted. Hence Showalter’s own determined insistence that:

Feminist criticism can’t afford…to give up the idea of female
subjectivity, even if we accept it as a constructed or metaphysical
one… Despite our awareness of diversity and deconstruction,
feminist critics cannot depend on gynesic ruptures in discourse
to bring about social change… The Other Woman may be
transparent or invisible to some; but she is still very vivid,
important, and necessary to us. 77

Barrett makes very much the same point, albeit with a rather less
assured sense of her own political certainties: “If we replace the given
self with a constructed, fragmented self, this poses…the obvious political
question of who is the I that acts and on what basis, …who is the I
that is so certain of its fragmented and discursively constructed
nature”. 78
A recent intervention into the feminist debates over popular fiction
serves nicely to illustrate the dilemma. As we have seen, whereas
early anglophone culturalist feminisms had sought to establish quasi-
realist criteria of literary value, the later French-inspired post-
structuralist feminism would privilege the subversively contradictory
modernist text. But as Yvonne Tasker rightly notes, such invocation
of the supposedly “feminine” text actually “stabilizes meaning once
more”, and illegitimately so, since “all texts are marked by
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contradiction”. Tasker follows through the logic of her own argument
thus: “This is …only the appearance of something radical, and feminist
cultural criticism needs to look beyond the terrain of this debate. …to

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