Page 251 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

240 ENGLISH STUDIES

this country, given a smaller and male-dominated higher-education sector.
Consequently, the principal mode of British feminist work has been in
collectives, either outside or in a self-consciously problematized relation to the
traditional ethos of academic work. Such collectives, still few in number and
often based in London, are a response to the isolated position in which feminists
have found themselves. Among the better known are the Women’s Research and
Resources Centre, the Feminist Archive, the Women’s Arts Alliance, the
Feminist Theatre Group, the writing collectives which produced Tales I Tell My
Mother and Licking the Bed Clean and the Marxist-Feminist Literature
Collective, a study group which organized a workshop in 1979 aiming to
stimulate contact between women working on or interested in literature through
conferences and a newsletter. In addition, there are local study groups and a
growing number of women’s study courses.
Feminist criticism now takes as its critical object women’s writing rather than
the identification of sexism in male writing, which had been a politically useful
starting-point. Only recently, with a developing interest in the representation of
sexual ideologies involving work on masculinity as well as femininity, have
feminist critics begun to look again at male writing. The most consistent concern
has been with recovery—the rediscovery or rescue of individual works and
authors through work that aims to establish women’s presence in particular
genres, to the current situation in which whole traditions of women’s writing are
being recovered. Women’s writing has also been read as giving access to or
illustration of historical processes in which women have been central, and this
work has sometimes used biographical material in an interesting way to mediate
the distance between history and the literary text. This is important in providing
positive self-images for women, but the celebration of these literary women can
also draw out more general social and historical shifts concerning women. Last,
women’s writing has been read for its thematic representation of particular
systematic concerns: patriarchy, androgyny, domesticity, feminism and others.
This approach often appears in conjunction with a reading which locates
thematic ideas in their social and historical context. It can also be used as part of
an argument against historical definitions of women’s subordination. Heilbrun 47
48
and Spacks argue respectively that ideas of androgyny and the presence of a
female imagination exist across time, outside historical determinations, and can
be discerned in women’s writing.
In addition to the development of feminist critical approaches to women’s
writing, there have been recent moves towards a more theoretical work of
feminist criticism. Three areas should be considered: work following Julia
Kristeva in the psychoanalytic and semiotic account of sexed subjectivities;the
relation to writing of feminist theories of kinship and reproduction; the
theorization of gender determination, predicated on gender difference as socially
constructed and ideologically maintained, as it affects the writing and the reading
of fictional texts.