Page 137 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

Left and of second wave feminism respectively: their more or less
contemporaneous emergence during the 1960s; their attainment to the
status of near mass-movement by the early 1970s; their characteristic
subversively postmodernist initial cultural politics; their later extensive
and creative use of various kinds of imported European theory; and
their protracted decline and degeneration into an academic theoreticism
during the 1980s. As Kipnis summarizes the process: “This recourse to
psychoanalysis…in both Marxist and feminist theory seems to take
place at a particular theoretical juncture: one marked primarily by the
experience of political catastrophe and defeat. The political appropriation
of psychoanalysis appears to signal, then, a lack—of a mass movement
or of successful counterhegemonic strategies…the current rearticulation
of modernism by feminist theorists working at the intersections of
deconstruction and psychoanalysis…suggests a repetitive tendency
toward cultural modernism in marginalized vanguard political
movements”. 86
There is an important implication here that feminist post-
structuralism represents, in some significant sense, a kind of theoretical
false consciousness distinctive to the women’s movement in retreat.
The possibility that this might be so is posed both more directly and
more philosophically by those (often socialist) feminists who have
insisted that feminism remains unavoidably involved in precisely that
broader (liberal, socialist, rationalist) Enlightenment project against
which post-structuralism has chosen to define itself. Thus, where post-
structuralist feminists have come to understand Enlightenment reason
as inherently patriarchal, others have insisted to the contrary that
feminism is itself a part of the rationalist programme:
“feminism…aspires to end the war between men and women and to
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replace it with communicative transparency, or truthfulness”. The
same writer continues: “The idea of subjectivity as socially (or
discursively) constructed…opens up a world of possibilities… But if
feminism disowns…the impulse to ‘enlighten’, it will be at a loss to
speak the wish to make these possibilities real. Subjectivity can be as
fluid as you please, but this insight—once decoupled from the feminist
ambition to reconstruct sensibility in the interest of women—will no
longer be of any specifically political interest”. 88
Doubtless, the historical Enlightenment was indeed often “gender
blind” or gender exclusive (just as it was also often class specific). But
Enlightenment carries with it at least the promise of some more general

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