Page 143 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

politico-cultural logics of a society still not only deeply utilitarian
and deeply capitalist but also deeply patriarchal in character.
This is not to suggest that feminism has somehow become non-
adversarial. To the contrary: its attempt to challenge the cultural
legitimacy of, quite literally, millennia of patriarchy, represents as
grand an adversarial gesture as any in the intellectual history of the
West. But both second wave feminism and contemporary Western
Marxism inhabit peculiarly divided selves, torn between the claims
of their respective communities of the oppressed (women, the working
class) on the one hand, and those of the academic intelligentsia, to
which their intellectual representatives typically belong as a matter
of objective class membership, on the other. An earlier generation of
socialist and feminist intellectuals normally gained its employment,
as journalists, from the political movements they sought to serve. But
the expansion of the modern system of higher education, the central
institutional site of the powers and privileges of the intellectual class,
has provided an almost irresistible source of attraction for much of
the contemporary socialist and feminist intelligentsia. In the academy,
both Marxism and feminism can be much more fairly, and much
more reasonably, discussed and debated than elsewhere in the society.
But, without repeated and continuing exposure to the countervailing
force of some organized and non-academic counter culture, such
Marxisms and feminisms become perilously exposed to the dangers
of colonization by more conventionally intellectual forms of
oppositionism, be they culturalist, structuralist or post-structuralist.

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