Page 38 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 27

attributable in neither a ‘first’ or ‘last’ sense to the ‘economic’ in its simple
designation.
Feminism has thus been responsible not only for setting ‘reproduction’,
alongside ‘production’, as a key site for the elaboration of cultural structures, but
also for profoundly rethinking the concept of ‘production’ itself. Both Gramsci
and Althusser cited the school and the family as key instances in the construction
of ‘hegemony’. But neither school nor family can be seriously considered outside
the sexual division of labour, the construction of gender roles, identities and
relations and the principle of sexual difference. The institutions of state and civil
society are both ‘capitalist’ and ‘patriarchal’ in character, in their very mode of
operation: but capitalism and patriarchy have distinct histories, different
conditions of existence, different cross-cutting effects and consequences, which
make impossible any neat alignment or correspondences between them. A theory
of culture which cannot account for patriarchal structures of dominance and
oppression is, in the wake of feminism, a non-starter. But patriarchal relations
are not amenable to simple extensions, marginal qualifications or emendations to
other theories which—but for this question—retain their general validity. The
problematics of these theories have had to be profoundly recast, their premises
brought into radical question, because of the absence, in their very theoretical
structure, of the question of sexual difference.
Feminism has therefore radically altered the terrain of Cultural Studies. It has,
of course, brought whole new concrete areas of inquiry, new sites of
investigation into being within the Cultural Studies agenda, as well as reshaping
existing ones. But its larger impact has been theoretical and organizational—all
that has been required to think the whole field anew from the site of a different
contradiction and all that this has meant, in its consequences, both for what is
studied in the Centre and for how it is studied: the organization of a new
intellectual practice. The attempt really to take these questions into account—not
simply to nod, generally, in their direction—has been a painful exercise at times
(as those who have read the account by women in the Centre in Women Take
Issue will readily understand): 100 not so much a crisis of intent—which was
subscribed to at an early stage, though not without resistance—but rather of
bringing about a deep change in practice and in the modes of intellectual work in
the Centre. The resistances have been all the stronger because of the depth and
extent of what had been repressed, the hard-won certainties which, rightly and
necessarily, were challenged and undermined. In one area after another of the
Centre’s work feminism has sent certainties and orthodoxies back to the drawing-
board. It has redrawn the map of Cultural Studies, as it is slowly redesigning
every area of critical intellectual life. The transformations it has provoked are
profound and unstoppable.