Page 138 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 129

The cultural politics of difference

SEX, GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Historically, the first of the new movements to generate its own
distinctive cultural theory was ‘second-wave’ feminism. Women’s
resistance to patriarchal oppression is very probably as old as
patriarchy itself, and certainly long predated the various types
of cultural theory and cultural politics that concern us here.
A recognisably feminist political vision can be traced back at least
to the French revolutionary period: witness Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Women or Olympe de Gouges’s Décla-
ration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Wollstonecraft, 1975;
MacLean, 1990). But contemporary feminism remains essentially
a product of the 1960s. Like the New Left, this second-wave
feminism had aspired to a level of theoretical articulacy and
sophistication unimagined by previous radical movements. Like
the New Left, this second-wave feminism also came increasingly
to define cultural theory itself as a matter of both particular
interest and peculiar political relevance. This was so, in part,
because many feminist intellectuals happened to be already
employed in teaching in the humanities, especially in literary
studies, in part because they perceived women’s oppression as
having cultural, rather than biological, roots, and in part because
they saw women’s cultural production as central to ‘conscious-
ness raising’, and hence to social change.
All intellectual movements have their pre-histories, however,
and second-wave feminism acknowledged both Virginia Woolf
(1882–1941) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) as major sources
of intellectual inspiration. Woolf had initiated an enduringly
feminist concern with the material constraints on women’s
cultural production, while also registering the possibility of a
peculiarly female type of sentence, ‘of a more elastic fibre . . .
capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest
particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes’ (Woolf, 1979, p. 191).
In her criticism and fiction she had forged a more or less delib-
erate connection between women’s consciousness and literary
modernism, which fascinated later feminist intellectuals (cf.
Gilbert & Gubar, 1988). For de Beauvoir, the central philosophi-
cal conundrum had been that of how woman, ‘a free and

129