Page 37 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

26 INTRODUCTION

nevertheless, this work has moved progressively towards its own distinctive
ways of conceptualizing the structural conditions of the labour process (for
example, Part 2 of Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour). Much of this research now
relates to women’s work, reflecting a more developed feminist perspective (see
below), but within this work both kinds of emphases are present. (This is
discussed in Women Take Issue.) In feminist research more generally the emphasis
on experience and consciousness (in, for example, Sheila Rowbotham’s work)
sharply contrasts with ‘Althusserean’ and Lévi-Straussean emphases (for
example, Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism or the Lacanian
positions of the journal, M/F). Yet another example: the Centre’s History Group,
which pursued the rationalist position on history and theory as far as it could be
taken, then went on to provide one of the most developed and formative critiques
of this position. Theoretical openness has by no means been easy to sustain
within the Centre, but the Centre has consciously attempted to undercut any
attempts to establish an ‘orthodoxy’ (in the sense of a s t of prescribed positions
to which everyone had to adhere).

The impact of the feminisms
We have traced the complex and uneven impact of ‘the structuralisms’. The most
profound challenge to any attempt to establish a Cultural Studies ‘orthodoxy’
has, however, undoubtedly arisen from the emergence of feminism within the
Centre’s work. In challenging the male-oriented models and assumptions and the
heavily masculine subject-matter and topics which for long constituted the
assumed terrain of Cultural Studies (in a profoundly unconscious and unreflexive
way), feminism has had an obvious impact on Cultural Studies. It has forced a
major rethink in every substantive area of work. But its impact can in no sense be
limited to these substantive reworkings. It is impossible, from a vantage point
inside feminism, to retain a reductionist theory of culture. In posing all those
areas and sites in any social formation which need to be rethought from the
perspective of the position and the oppression of women and the centrality of
patriarchal relations, feminism has provoked a break with any residual attempt to
give the term ‘material conditions’ an exclusively economistic or ‘productivist’
meaning. In raising the question of how to think of both the causes and the
effects of the contradictions of gender, it has displaced forever any exclusive
reference to class contradictions as the stable point of reference for cultural
analysis. All that is involved in thinking about the specificity of ‘gender’—
distinct from, even though it can be shown to be articulated with, ‘class’—has
moved Cultural Studies away from its tendency to a complex class
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reductionism. We have seen that the question of ‘determination’ has been one
of the principal theoretical motors of work in this area. But the attention to the
structuring principle of gender and to questions of sexual difference and
patriarchal relations has rendered it impossible to fall back behind the intrinsic
heterogeneity and necessary complexity of different kinds of contradiction,