Page 139 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

autonomous being like all human creatures... finds herself living
in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the
Other’ (de Beauvoir, 1972, p. 29). Her understanding of femininity
as a masculine project to construct women as objects, with which
women themselves were nonetheless complicit (p. 21), anticipated
much subsequent feminist debate over the objectification of
women, as well as over the distinction between biological ‘sex’
and culturally constructed ‘gender’. That Woolf and de Beauvoir
were both novelists seems more than coincidental, given the
peculiar salience of writing about writing in second-wave
feminist discourse.

Culture, ideology and gender
Despite the occasionally ‘separatist’ ambitions of feminist
politics, feminist cultural theory was far from self-contained. As
Ruthven rightly noted, feminist cultural criticism drew on a
number of ‘discursive categories’ originally ‘marxist, structur-
alist, and post-structuralist or deconstructionist’ in character
(Ruthven, 1984, p. 26). Ruthven might have been ‘the Crocodile
Dundee of male feminism’, as Elaine Showalter described him
(Showalter, 1989, p. 366), but she had made much the same
point herself: ‘English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist,
stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially psycho-
analytic, stresses repression; American feminist criticism,
essentially textual, stresses expression. All, however, have be-
come gynocentric’ (Showalter, 1985, p. 249). She misrecognised
post-structuralism as psychoanalysis (it was both more and less),
but quite rightly drew attention to a ‘textual’ focus in American
feminist criticism, which actually bespoke the often unac-
knowledged influence of older culturalist notions of tradition
and disinterestedness. Showalter herself is Professor of English
at Princeton University and a longstanding opponent of depend-
ence on French or Marxist ‘masters’, but there was clearly a
parallel indebtedness to culturalist ‘practical criticism’ at work
in her own writing.
When Showalter referred to all three feminisms as having
‘become gynocentric’, she called attention to how second-wave

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