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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 131

The cultural politics of difference

feminism had evolved from an initial critique of ‘androcentrism’,
or male-centredness, into a later celebration of ‘gynocentrism’, or
female-centredness. This probably wasn’t as uniform a trajectory
as she suggested, but it was very common, nonetheless, especially
in the English-speaking world. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, the
most important pioneering work of Anglophone feminist cultural
theory, had been concerned precisely to develop a critique of
sexist culture. The book had culminated in a sustained critique
of the work of three male novelists, ‘counterrevolutionary
sexual politicians’ (Millett, 1977, p. 233), as she termed them:
D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. So, for
example, she described how in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence
‘uses the words “sexual” and “phallic” interchangeably, so that
the celebration of sexual passion for which the book is so
renowned is largely a celebration of the penis of Oliver Mellors
. . . This is... the transformation of masculine ascendancy into a
mystical religion’ (p. 238). Millett’s work initiated a whole range
of studies into how androcentric cultures constructed persistently
negative images of women—these extended well beyond her own
focus on masculine high culture, to include both elite and popular
forms, produced by and for both men and women. This interest
in negative gender stereotyping also laid the groundwork for
an account of male pornography as representing women in
acutely misogynist form (Dworkin, 1974), which became increas-
ingly relevant to practical feminist politics.
The early critique of sexism moved quite quickly, however,
towards the recovery and celebration of women’s culture. The
term Showalter coined for this latter development was ‘gyno-
critics’, a translation of the French la gynocritique, to mean the
discovery of ‘woman as the producer of textual meaning’
(Showalter, 1985, p. 260). One important line of argument here
was the attempt to discover a female tradition, sometimes even
a female Great Tradition. Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own,
for example, and Ellen Moers’ Literary Women both explored such
notions (Showalter, 1978; Moers, 1978). But where many
American feminists had found culture, a female literary tradition
and female realism, many British feminists, working with
concepts drawn from Marxism, discovered ideology and the

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