Importing Feminist Criticism
It is at this point that one has to divert one’s students’ attention to
materialist feminists, the very ones who insist that we should always attend to the
material conditions in which any activity, verbal or non-verbal goes on. This
holds equally true for literary criticism. As Catherine Belsey puts it:
Since culture is a material practice, and since literary criticism is itself a
component part of culture, it follows that feminist criticism is itself a
cultural phenomenon. Feminist criticism cannot in these circumstances
be defined in advance, identified in its essential nature eternally and
universally, sought out in earlier epochs and recognized in its unchanging
correctness. Feminist criticism takes a position at and in relation to a
specific cultural and historical moment. And in that sense it is necessarily
a product of its own present.16
This is no doubt a less inflated role than inaugurating a playful pluralism or
deconstructing patriarchy along with the rest of Western metaphysics. And yet
this may be one of the strengths of materialist feminism. Whether or not they
use what Belsey wryly calls the ‘unspeakable’, ‘unacceptable’ adjective Marxist,
materialist feminists start from an awareness that being a feminist is not a
universal or essential category, but as all categories, it is determined by social and
economic location. Thus there is httle hope ofchanging the situation of women
and leaving all the rest in place. As Teresa Ebert puts it: ‘To disrupt, undo, or
exceed the gender binaries requires a collective social struggle not on the level
of ideological constructions but, more importantly, against the systematic
socioeconomic relations requiring and maintaining the specific forms of gender
and sexual difference.’17
In the most interesting materialist feminist interventions, this awareness
does not lead to a defeatist attitude, something like: ‘since what we really need is
a revolution, there is no point in doing anything right here.’ On the contrary, to
recognize that the pressures and processes of gendering are social and historical
in character amounts to recognizing that they are open to reversal and resistance
by women’s and men’s actions here and now.
Nonetheless a materialist has, by definition to take into account her own
positionality. This means she is very unlikely to believe she can effect change on
16 Belsey, Catherine, ‘Afterword’ in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of
Shakespeare, WaynetValerie (ed.), NewYork, HarvesterZWheatsheaf, 1991, 261.
17 Ebert5Teresa L.,,Ludic feminism, the Body, Performance and Labor: Bringing Materialism Back
into Feminist Cultural Studies’, Cultural Critique, 23, 1992-93, 39.
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