Importing Feminist Criticism



rhetoric of abuse or by the less familiar, and perhaps more dangerous because
more insidious, rhetoric of the impossibility of substantive change. I am not sure
how to deal with the latter, but I am positive that any contrary action will have
to be collective.

As for the abuse, it may also have the pernicious effect of making us stop
questioning and clarifying points among ourselves for fear of sounding like the
opposition. No feminist, indeed no seriously committed intellectual, would want
to align with the Hkes of a Dinesh D'Sousa who, funded by a right wing
foundation, wrote a nasty report on what he calls ‘The Illiberal Imagination’
describing feminist work OnAmerican campi as ‘esoteric, vulgar, dogmatic, so full
ofpohtical energy and yet ultimately futile’.5

For my part, I take the exacdy opposite stand. I believe it is the very
richness, variety and crucial relevance of feminist criticism that enables its critical
examination. The main thrust in this brief analysis is to see whether my
particular positionality in a peripheral country in the so called global village can
help illuminate those points in some recent feminist criticism that are more
Hkely to contribute to a more progressive practice. Of course this parameter of
the progress in practice is something I also learnt from feminism as it has surely
been ‘part of the feminist dream to make feminist agitation unnecessary’.6

When talking about trends in feminist criticism I suppose it has become
traditional (!) to fo∏ow the standard academic classification of feminist positions
as Hberal, radical or SociahstZmateriahst. But once they try to describe
Situationally specific positions, those labels mean shghtly different things in
different environments. At the risk of OversimpHfication - but then there must
sti∏ be a way of talking without introducing a thousand and one quafifications -
I have chosen to rete∏ specific encounters I had with those different trends and
how useful they proved to be to my own practice as a reader, as a teacher and,
of course, as a firm beHever in the potentiaUties and in the necessity of social
change.

Few positions can sound more attractive than the Hberal ones defended
by Annette Kolodny in her celebrated 1980 article ‘Dancing through the
Minefield’. Reviewing ‘the fast and furious pace of inquiry’ in the 1970s, she
avers that the ‘diversity of that inquiry easily outstripped aU efforts to define
feminist Hterary criticism as either a coherent system or a unified set of
methodologies. Under its wide umbre∏a, everything has been thrown into

5 D’Souza, Dinesh, Illiberal Education: the Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, NewYork, Free, 1991,
210.

6 Stuart,Andrea,‘Feminism: Dead or Alive?’ in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, Rutherfordj
Jonathan (ed.), London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 29.

175



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