Page 73 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 67

underground The backlash line blames the women’s movement’ (Faludi,
1991:xxii).
5 Recently in Britain Wolf and other celebrity feminists like Katie Roiphe have come
under fire not only for their media-hyped ‘Ivy League glamour’, but also for their
being another example of unwelcome American cultural imperialism. See, for
example, Linda Grant (1994), writing about a panel (sponsored by the Sunday
Times to debate Roiphe’s The Morning After), on which sat Roiphe, Wolf and Erica
Jong: ‘This is not about flag-flying and Buy British jingoism…. The problem is
that by marginalizing or even silencing our voices, a powerful message is sent to
young British women. Be a feminist, by all means, but if you want your words to
have any impact, be American.’
6 Bowlby (1992) likewise points out the blindnesses of a feminist criticism which
can on the one hand attack masculinist myths of progress, yet, on the other,
unwittingly reinscribe such narratives into an implicit teleological history of
feminist theory.

References

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Feminine Mystique’ in Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and
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Bromley, David G. and Richardson, James T. (1980) The Brainwashing/Deprogramming
Controversy: Sociological, Psychological, Legal and Historical Perspectives, New
York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen.
Brown, J.A.C. (1983) Techniques of Persuasion: From Propaganda to Brainwashing,
Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Originally published 1963.)
Brownmiller, Susan (1975) Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, New York: Simon
& Schuster.
Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London and
New York: Routledge.
Daly, Mary (1984) Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, London: The
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Dworkin, Andrea (1981) Pornography: Men Possessing Women, London: The Women’s
Press.
Echols, Alice (1989) Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–75,
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Faludi, Susan (1991) Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, New
York: Crown.
Friedan, Betty (1992) The Feminine Mystique, Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Originally
published 1963.)
Gallop, Jane (1992) Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Criticism, London and
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Grant, Linda (1994) ‘She swoops in to conquer’, Guardian, 26 January: 9.
Griffin, Susan (1970) ‘Rape: the all-American crime’, in Griffin (1979) Rape: The Power
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Hofstadter, Richard (1967) The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays,
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