Page 250 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 239

on woman-centredness through the concept and practice of sisterhood has led to
the existence of what can now, with reservation, be termed a women’s culture.
By this we mean that some forms of organization (for study, creative and
cultural production, participation or for entertainment) are by, for and about
women and designed for their support and pleasure. Any reservations about
calling this a women’s culture arise because of the way certain tendencies within
the women’s movement exclude men from their lives, as a result of a political
analysis in which women’s oppression is seen to stem solely and directly from men
as the agents and bearers of patriarchy, and because of problems about the extent
to which an alternative or oppositional culture can be envisaged as flourishing
within a dominant culture which opposes or contradicts it. The relation should be
thought as one in which a feminist politics of cultural struggle can transform the
dominant culture.
Despite these reservations, there is still much to be said about the positive and
engaged situation of feminist cultural practice within which feminist criticism is
a dimension, particularly when compared with the characteristic situation of
male socialist literary critics. The most striking distinction between feminist and
other criticisms is that feminist criticism has created and has maintained an
active involvement with past and present women’s writing, which often takes a
celebratory form. This differs radically from mainstream criticism where the
critical object is increasingly given by theoretical questions deriving from
structural linguistics rather than by traditions of writing. But it also differs in
kind from some contemporary Marxist criticism, which exhibits aggressive
embarrassment at the text’s failure to dissolve itself as the consequence of its
own redundancy. Feminist criticism, in working against the marginalization and
misrepresentation of women’s writing, has a far greater investment in actual
writing than do other criticisms. This relationship with writing informs the
constitutive concern with the recovery and revaluation of women’s writing and
is, importantly, not restricted to the writing of critical and theoretical texts. Since
much women’s writing was (significantly) unobtainable and out of print, the
development of Virago and The Women’s Press has been of enormous
usefulness, not just in furthering critical work in the context of higher education
but also in the creation of a feminist reading public, demonstrating the active
interest which some forms of fiction have for women. In addition to feminist
presses publishing and republishing fiction by and for women, a feminist
distribution service has recently been established whose centre, Sisterwrite in
London, stocks British and overseas work by women. A similar enterprise,
though without the bookshop base, is the Women’s Liberation Bookbus which
(when money allows) tours areas of Britain badly provided by bookshops and in
which feminist work is hard to obtain. These developments clearly indicate that
traditions of women’s writing are being rediscovered, revalued and made available
in ways extending well outside the formally academic.
The model of feminist critical work offered by North America, that of an
individual, professionalized academic activity, has not been possible to adopt in