Importing Feminist Criticism
Looking back from the vantage point of the late 90s, after the impact of
post-structurahsm, this does not seem to be the fundamental problem in her
enticing defense of pluralism. We have been taught to despair of any overall
perspective guiding our inquiry. Indeed we have been theoretically forbidden to
have a totahzing stance. However the main problem in retaining this pluralistic
stance is not the fear of chaos but the false assessment it entails of the concrete
socio-historical conditions of the womens movement and, more to the point
here, of feminist literary criticism as one of its ‘many academic arms’. No one
would want to defend reductionism or dogma, or, as Kolodny puts it, a ‘party
line’, but surely both Stimpson and Kolodny seem damagingly to underestimate
the real structures of the world we Eve in. This has of course consequences for
their evaluations of criticism. They fail to take into account the fact that like all
types of secular criticism, feminist Eterary criticism is in the world and in our
world so far, be it in Kolodnys and Stimpson’s first world or my own and my
students’ third, the concrete socio-historical conditions preclude plurahsm which
demands we reach some sense of equahty - plurahsm among non-equals has
historica∏y meant, at its worse, capitulation to the most powerful and, at its best,
the endless prohferation of diversities.
This is already the case in some of the responses to Kolodny s essay where
women criticized the absence, in her pluraEstic sisterhood, of black and of
lesbian feminist criticism.10 This endless prohferation Ofdiversities seems to be a
characteristic of our fragmented and fragmentary times, one that seems to
corroborate the impossibihty of radical change. The plea for one way of reading
for each sub-group seems more conducive to disjunction than to any sort of
co∏ective action that might lead to change - as such it is one of the most suitable
ideologies at the service of maintaining the status quo. If, as a teacher, I failed to
point this out to my students I would certainly be stimulating them to
contribute one more variety to this pluraEstic fantasy land, namely BraziEan
feminist criticism, StruggEng for its place among the equivalent varieties.
I would of course want BrazE to develop a body of feminist criticism
concentrating on the Iocahzed manifestation of gender trouble in BrazE. It is just
that unless we learn how to think of the national in terms of its Interconstitutive
relation to the international, of gender oppression as another instance of an
oppressive social order, we risk turning feminist criticism into another item in
the current marketplace of theories, into one more optional reading code among
many equivalent others.
The main ‘attraction’ of this liberal position is that it turns our eyes from
unpleasant reality and enables us to speak as if we lived in the best of worlds, as
10 See Showalter, Elaine,’The Feminist Critical Revolution’ in The New Feminist Criticism, 13.
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