Page 145 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

Grosz, now Professor of Women’s Studies at Rutgers University
in New Jersey, had defined 1980s feminist theory, as distinct from
the feminism of the 1960s, in terms of a set of quite specifically
‘French’ and post-structuralist thematics: as aspiring to autonomy
(difference) rather than equality; as engaged theoretically not with
‘Marx, Reich, Marcuse’, but ‘Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Derrida,
Deleuze, Althusser, Foucault’ (Gross, 1986, pp. 190–3); and as
contesting singular or universal concepts of truth so as to ‘encour-
age a proliferation of voices...a plurality of perspectives and
interests’ (p. 204). Such feminisms were often uncompromisingly
‘intellectual’ in character. Hence the not uncommon activist doubt
that an intellectual practice centred on the deconstruction of male-
dominated academic knowledges, rather than on the empirical
reality of women’s life in patriarchy, might prove both elitist
and unfeminist. Grosz herself confronted the objection head on:
‘feminist struggles are . . . occurring in many different practices,
including the practice of the production of meanings, discourses
and knowledges... This struggle for the right to write, read and
know differently is not merely a minor or secondary task within
feminist politics’ (Grosz, 1989, p. 234).

Queer theory: Butler and Grosz
One important line of development from feminist post-
structuralism has been the kind of ‘queer theory’ developed by
writers such as Grosz herself, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Teresa de
Lauretis and Judith Butler, Professor of Rhetoric at the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley. ‘Queer’ here has the semantic force
both of ‘homosexual’, as in the old homophobic jibe, and of
‘deconstructive’, as in unsettling and strange. Queer theory
has been concerned above all with the identity claims of non-
normative sexualities. It proceeded from a more generally
post-structuralist sense of the contingency of identity towards a
radical deconstruction of the categories of ‘gender’ and ‘sexual-
ity’ themselves. For Butler, gender was not merely cultural, but
something close to a cultural fiction, almost entirely socially
constructed, albeit in part out of materials provided by bodies:
‘Gender is the repeated stylization of the body’, she insisted, ‘a

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