Page 144 - Decoding Culture

6 Gendered

Sub -ects,
}

Women's Texts

Few would deny the importance of feminism in the development of
modern cultural studies. The emergence of so-called Second Wave
feminism coincided with the growth of a distinctive body of post­
structuralist cultural studies theory, and both women's studies and
cultural studies - as Franklin et al. (1991: 1) observe in their intro­
duction to the tenth anniversary successor to the CCCS volume
W o men T a ke I s sue - 'have in common a strong link to radical poli­
tics outside the academy' as well as a powerful impetus toward an
inter-disciplinary focus upon culture, power and oppression. But
the relationship is not straightforward. Both traditions have tan­
gled histories of their own, histories which are driven by
characteristically different political and analytic concerns as well as
being variously and contingently intertwined.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, it is not easy to unpick (or even iden­
tify) the knots that have bound feminism and cultural studies
together. Those who have sought to do so have often found the
task to be one of charting differences as much as overlaps,
autonomous developments as much as reciprocal influences.

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