Page 141 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

more generally socialist and feminist emancipatory project, and much
more interested in the meanings and effects of postmodern popular
culture than with the textual resistances of the high modernist text.
Meaghan Morris’s work is similarly indebted to French post-
structuralism, and as much to malestream thinkers like Barthes as
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to the new French feminism itself. For Morris, a post-structuralist
semiotics enables not the discovery of the truth of some deep structure
inherent in the text, but rather the production of new readings, that
is, of new strategic rewritings; such rewritings can be of value in her
view only by virtue of their relationship to the political discourses of
feminism; but nonetheless, there can still be no appeal beyond
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signification to the supposed reality of a referent. Like Williamson,
Morris retains a more than residual commitment, to the notion of a
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left which is socialist as well as feminist. Politically engaged and
engagingly writerly, her work also often runs directly against the
apparent drift toward apolitical academicism within post-structuralist
feminism. Indeed, much of the creative dynamic in Morris’s writing
seems to derive from its own unresolved tensions between the aspiration
to a subversively postmodernist cultural politics on the one hand, and
a more generally post-structuralist theoretical framework on the other.
There is a happy eclecticism at work theoretically in Morris which
surely derives in part from her obvious discomfort at the more sectarian
intellectual habits not only of the left but also of the academy. Hence,
her declared antipathy to Felperin’s proposed post-structuralist rationale
for the literary canon, as also her parallel enthusiasm for “the kind
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of ‘mixed’ public to be encountered at events organized on thematic
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or political, rather than purely professional, principles”. Hence,
too, the characteristically defiant insistence that: “it doesn’t follow
for one moment that I consider the activity of ‘transforming discursive
material’ as sufficient to, or coextensive with, the tasks of feminist
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political struggle”. Interestingly, Morris’s usage of the Foucauldian
notion of the “specific intellectual” is quite deliberately broadened in
scope so as to preclude the “myth of institutional and discursive closure
which may emerge from the…academic attempt to ‘know your
limitations’”. Quite unlike Tony Bennett, Morris remains a cultural
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critic in an almost fully culturalist sense of the term. She insists, for
example, on the need for a “critical vocabulary available to people…to
theorize the discriminations…they make in relation to…popular
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culture”, thus simultaneously rejecting both the kind of “fatalistic

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