Page 68 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

62 CULTURAL STUDIES

in the 1960s has been hijacked by what has passed under the sign of ‘cultural
feminism’. Segal’s forthright repudiation of conspiracy theories—combined with
a hint of attraction to such explanations—is, I want to suggest, typical of the
fraught relationship between academic and popular feminism.
There are several reasons for the repudiation of conspiracy theories by academic
feminists. In Mica Nava’s recent reassessment of theories about advertising, she
notes how ‘current theories of culture and subjectivity take much more seriously
notions of personal agency, discrimination and resistance, as well as (drawing on
psychoanalysis) the contradictory and fragmented nature of fantasy and desire’.
This ‘new, more nuanced understanding of subjectivity’, Nava goes on to
explain, is crucial to

recent critical refutations of the notion that the media and advertising have
the power to manipulate in a coherent and unfractured fashion and
represent a move away from the notion of mass man and woman as duped
and passive recipients of conspiratorial messages designed to inhibit true
consciousness.
(1992:165)
Feminists like Nava who are sympathetic to cultural studies have begun to
employ the language of desire, fantasy and identification in place of conspiracy
theories of, say, mass culture or Freudian psychoanalysis. Instead of a paranoid
fear of infiltration, contamination and indoctrination by external forces, emphasis
is placed on the way that people use culture to create meanings, as much as those
meanings are imposed on them from above by the culture industry. These
‘refutations’ of conspiracy theories, I would suggest, have been integral in
shaping the kind of feminist cultural studies performed by critics such as Nava.
Furthermore, feminisms informed by psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity
and poststructuralist theories of language position themselves precisely in
opposition to the notions of psychology, agency and causality on which
conspiracy theories rely. For example, in her reassessment of Sexual Politics,
Cora Kaplan draws attention to the way that Millett’s analysis amounts to a
conspiracy theory of Freudian analysis. Kaplan argues that

Millett…had to reject the unconscious, the pivotal concept in Freud, and
something common to both sexes, because she is committed to a view that
patriarchal ideology is a conscious conspiratorial set of attitudes operated
by men against all empirical evidence of women’s equal status in order to
support patriarchal power in office.
(1986:21)

Kaplan’s accusations are doubly significant because, in her view, what popular
feminist conspiracy theories of patriarchy fail to provide is any account of the
workings of the unconscious and desire in social formations. Conspiratorial