Importing Feminist Criticism
There has been a lot of discussion on the potentialities of an alliance
between Poststructuralism in general - and deconstruction in particular - and
feminism. Of course the aim here is not to tell the whole story, but to try to see
which parts of the story are more relevant to the practice of committed academic
feminism in Brazil in its inevitable dialogue with Anglo-American feminism.
I suppose it would not be too ‘centered’ to consider Gayatri C. Spivak’s
work as paradigmatic of mainstream radical feminism. Her name is certainly
often quoted in Anglo-American, as well as in Brazihan, criticism in discussions
of deconstruction and feminism, as proof of the success of such a marriage. An
examination of the main characteristics of her work, however superficial, may
help us gauge the potentialities of this ‘other’ of liberal feminism. No sparer of
words, Spivak herself tells us the advantages she sees in deconstruction: ‘My
attitude to deconstruction can now be summarized: first deconstruction is
illuminating as a critique of phallocentrism; second, it is convincing as an
argument against the founding of a hysterocentric to counter a phallocentric
discourse; third as a ‘feminist’ practice itself, it is caught on the other side of
sexual difference’.12
This vigilance over the substitution of one ‘centrism’ for another has
certainly been beneficial in pointing out the deadlock of merely aiming to trade
one form of domination for another. This has made it easier for us to recognize
the dead end of posing, for instance, a separatist feminism. The insistence of
deconstructive readings on the impossibility of fixing meanings once and for all
has contributed to a much-needed work of carefully worded conceptual
innovation and to the blurring of long established boundaries. It is useful to
remember that the early feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ aimed at giving
the he to the ideological separation of pubhc and private, and, by exposing it,
contributing to its deconstruction.
In Spivak’s written work one can trace a similar movement. There is a
deliberate fusion and confusion of the ‘accepted’ limitations of the roles of an
academic feminist: the essays collected in her In Other Worlds present no
hierarchic separation between theory - Spivak’s own and the ones she discusses
- and her practice both as a teacher and as a literary critic. She thus helps us
recognize the fact that the separation of these three activities in our practical lives
as academics is impoverishing and reifying, part and parcel of the fragmenting
tendencies feminists set out to oppose. And yet, in spite of her liveliness and her
impeccable (always a plus in our times of crisis of representation and of the
assertion of identity politics) personal credentials - she describes herself as a
12 Spivak, Gayatri C,‘Displacement and the Discourse ofWomen’ in Displacement: Derrida and After,
Krupnick, Mark (ed.), Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1983, 184.
180