Page 144 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 135

The cultural politics of difference

As the 1980s proceeded, post-structuralist claims became
increasingly pressing upon Anglophone feminisms. When
Showalter herself came to produce an updated account of the
evolution of recent feminist theory, she would recognise the gyno-
critical moment as having been succeeded, though not
supplanted, by feminist post-structuralism, or ‘gynesic’ criticism,
as she termed it (Showalter, 1989, p. 359). In the United States,
new styles of feminist deconstruction had indeed acquired a
very considerable importance, especially in the field of literary
studies: obvious instances included the work of Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, for example, and of Barbara Johnson
(Spivak, 1987; Johnson, 1987). The enthusiasm for French post-
structuralism among Australian feminists went so far as to
prompt Barrett’s description of the synthesis between Lacanian
psychoanalysis and Barthesian semiology as the ‘New Australian
Feminism’ (Barrett, 1988, p. xxix). British feminists had also come
to celebrate the apparently happy marriage between post-
structuralist theory and feminist practice (Weedon, 1987). Barrett
herself would soon subject her earlier post-Althusserianism to a
rigorously post-structuralist critique, finally opting for a
Foucauldian ‘politics of truth’, as opposed to what both she and
Foucault termed Marxism’s ‘economics of untruth’ (Barrett, 1991,
pp. vii, 155). The politico-intellectual effects of the developing
union between feminism and post-structuralism were essentially
twofold: first, there was a shift in general feminist preoccupations
from political economy and sociology to literary and cultural
studies, what Barrett termed ‘an extensive “turn to culture” in
feminism’ (Barrett, 1999, p. 21); second, there was a shift within
feminist cultural studies, away from a characteristically struc-
turalist interest in how the patriarchal text positions women, and
towards a new interest in how women readers produce their own
resistant, or at least negotiated, pleasures from such texts.
The sheer scale of this Anglophone feminist enthusiasm for
French post-structuralism very nearly marginalised alternative
approaches within feminism. Such psycho-semiotic feminisms
were especially persuasive, moreover, to scholars working in
philosophy or in the more cosmopolitan areas of literary and
cultural studies. Indeed, the Australian philosopher, Elizabeth

135