Importing Feminist Criticism
Meanwhile we could do worse than try to identify the theories that are more
Bkely to help bring about their own destruction in a just social order.
This discriminatory exercise is a particularly relevant task for Brazikan
academics. Having followed the famihar structural path of former colony-
nowadays-peripheral-country, Brazil has always imported the ideas through
which we try to make sense out of our particular lot in the international
distribution of gains and losses. This need not be either good or bad but it is
certainly a historical fact of our intellectual Efe. We have witnessed both the
uncritical importation of ideas simply because they are fashionable and the fertile
recourse to foreign ideas to help Brazihans understand the peculiarities of life on
the periphery of capitahsm.
Among BraziHan intellectuals, Roberto Schwarz4 has come the closest to
explaining the complex of reasons that determine the flux of misplaced ideas
into Brazil. One of the things I have learned from his work is that there might
be a way of making productive use of our particular positionahty in Western
ideological Bfe: once the ideas we import - which may well be ideologies-as-
false-consciousness in their place of origin - fail to describe, even falsely, the
reahty they purport to explain, they can reveal more clearly their ideological
underpinnings. Thus there might be a way in which we can, by submitting the
ideas we import to critical scrutiny, and more crucially, by testing them against
our crude reahty, contribute to a clearer assessment of their possibihties. A blunt
way of putting this would be to say that walking the streets of Sao Paulo
nowadays and being exposed to the appalling contrasts of seeing a beggar
banging at the closed window of a BMW, it is very difficult to beheve that all
men/women are created equal. This ideology might have fared better when we
could still think of Brazil as the land of opportunity. Given the new globahzed
world order, this is no longer the case.
This is the frame of reference in which I want to examine the
importation of feminist theories to Brazil. As a teacher of EngBsh and American
Bterature and, lately, more and more, of theories to BraziBan graduate and
postgraduate students, it is part of my job to mediate between the ideas being
developed in the Anglo-American academy and Brazihan intellectual hfe. It is
then part of my job requirements to learn from the mistakes of the past and
discriminate among the ideas we import.
I am well aware that one has got to be very careful while conducting this
discriminatory exercise especially in times such as ours, when emancipatory
theories, and thus the social movements they aim to clarify and support, are
going through times of defeat and recoil, under siege either by the famihar
4 Schwarz, Roberto, Misplaced Ideas, LondonZNewYorkjVerso, 1992.
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