Importing Feminist Criticism
Maria Elisa Cevasco
‘You are a feminist, aren’t you?’ It is surely a mark of the many achievements of
the post-60s feminist movement that this question has to be accounted for in our
practice as citizens and as academics in Brazil? However, as yet another sign of
our times, when it comes to defining what exacdy we should be doing as
Brazilian academic feminists in the late 90s the question becomes so complicated
that one feels like giving it up. And this difficulty is, I think, part of what
feminism has not been able to achieve.
It all began, we remember, in high hopes. Writing in 1970 in what came
to be considered the ‘first major book of feminist criticism’, Sexual Politics, Kate
Millett set the agenda thus: ‘As the largest alienated element in our society, and
because of their numbers, passion, and length of oppression, its largest
revolutionary base, women might come to play a leadership part in social
revolution quite unknown before in history’.2
As we know only too well, things have not happened quite like this yet.
And in our post-utopian moment, it doesn’t really look as if there is much hope
for radical change in the near future. But this is also another reason for us to be
more interested than ever in feminist theory. Like all emancipatory theory, the
aim of feminist theorists is to bring about a social reality in which their theories
will no longer be essential and, after a while, not even intelligible. As Terry
Eagleton puts it:
AU emancipatory theory thus has built into it a kind of self-destruct
device, and moves under the sign of irony. In the just society there would
be no need for theorists to engage in the laborious expositions of the
social mechanisms by which a group of individuals comes SystematicaUy
to dominate another, since people would be horrified or incredulous at
the very thought this could happen.3
1 For an overview of Brazilian feminist movements in English, see Sard, Cynthia, ‘The Panorama
OfFeminism in Brazil’, New' Left Review, 173,Jan. Feb., 1989, 75-90.
2 Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics, NewYork, Doubleday, 1970, 363.
3 Eagleton1Terry, Tlte Significance of Theory, Oxford and Cambridge, BlackweU, 1990,33-34.
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