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Contemporary Cultural Theory

impress within ideology of the mode of material production.
As the Marxist-feminist Literature Collective had announced at
Essex University in 1977: ‘Literary texts are . . . ideological in the
sense that they cannot give us a knowledge of the social forma-
tion; but they do give us...an imaginary representation of real
relations’ (Marxist-feminist Literature Collective, 1978, p. 185).
This is almost exactly the Althusserian formulation of the theory
of ideology. It should come as little surprise, then, that the Collec-
tive’s preferred reading strategy, deriving from Macherey, was to
‘analyse the incoherences and contradictions in... texts’ (p. 186)
and relate these to historical developments in the social formation.
Michèle Barrett, then a member of the Collective, now Professor
of Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary College, Uni-
versity of London, later developed a detailed account of what
she identified as the four key mechanisms by which textual
representations reproduced gender ideology: stereotyping;
compensation, via the discourse about the supposed moral value
of femininity; collusion, that is, manipulation of consent; and
recuperation—the negation of challenges to the dominant gender
ideology (Barrett, 1988, pp. 108–12).

Feminist post-structuralism
Thus far, we have considered both properly culturalist form-
ulations and those versions of Marxist feminism which, though
redefining culture as ideology, still adopted a fundamentally
‘cultural’ model of difference. In French feminism, by contrast,
we find persuasive instances of biological, linguistic and psycho-
analytic models. This is not to suggest that there were no
Anglophone instances of any of these (cf. Spender, 1980; Daly,
1978; Mitchell, 1974), only that they were much less representa-
tive of Anglophone feminist discourse during the 1970s and 1980s
than of French. In the work of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray,
for example, female difference was at once both a cause for
celebration and also irretrievably biological in origin. In Cixous,
a quasi-Derridean antipathy to the dualisms of logocentric
thought was combined with de Beauvoir’s strong sense of woman
as subordinate term to produce a kind of feminist deconstruction.

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