Robyn Warhol
Feminist theory is an activist intervention that has thrived in the academic context. It has long been associated with feminist politics outside the academy; indeed, most academic feminists would claim their work as a form of activism in that it has transformed the institutions that have fostered it. Interdisciplinary since its origins in U.S. and British universities in the 1970s, feminist theory has had a lasting impact on the social sciences, arts, and humanities, most particularly on the objects of study associated with literature departments. Feminism has been partly responsible for the widening of the literary studies canon to include not just more female writers, but texts outside the boundaries of what was traditionally considered “literature.” Feminist theory has competed and combined with other theoretical approaches as it has moved from marginalization to incorporation in the discourse of literary and cultural studies. From the beginning, there has been no singular “feminism”; there are only feminisms inspired by different sets of theoretical and political priorities, as well as by the feminist embrace of “difference” itself.
“Feminism” has carried various connotations and denotations from the 1970s to today. At present, feminism signifies an interrelated set of theories and actions whose goal is to identify, analyze, and—through activist effort—overturn systematic oppression or discrimination that is based on assumptions about biological sex or culturally conceived gender. Feminists proceed from the observation that dominant social, cultural, and political attitudes and practices have worked to the disadvantage of people positioned as “Other” with respect to the straight, white, elite, abled, male norm. Simply identifying or analyzing systems of oppression is not adequate to making a theory or practice “feminist,” however: inherent in the movement is a mandate to take action toward rectifying inequities. Feminist activism may mean organized political activity, but it can also take the form of intellectual subversiveness in academia or the arts, thus uniting activists and theorists in feminism’s project of changing the world.1
“Anglophone feminisms” is an alternative to the older term “Anglo‐American feminism,” which was coined in the 1980s to distinguish the feminist theories developed in British and American contexts from “French feminism.” The French feminists writing in the 1970s and 1980s—Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, and others—were more psychoanalytic and more poststructuralist than the majority of their British and American counterparts of the period, mainly because they were participating in the same francophone philosophical milieu as Lacan, Lyotard, and Derrida before the foundational texts of postmodernist theory were translated into English. Feminists working in the United States on French literature (for instance, Shoshana Felman, Naomi Schor, Nancy Miller, Jane Gallop, Susan Suleiman, Barbara Johnson, and Gayatri Spivak) were ahead of their anglophone colleagues in bringing structuralist, Derridean, and Lacanian thinking to their criticism. What used to be called “Anglo‐American feminism” had its theoretical roots in Marxism (especially among British feminists) and materialist history, sociology of “sex roles,” structuralist anthropology and linguistics, standpoint epistemology, Foucauldian historicism, and a psychoanalysis that was more post‐Freudian and Jungian than Lacanian.
The genealogy of Anglo‐American feminist literary theory starts with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), moves through Kate Millet’s blistering critique of male‐authored literature in Sexual Politics (1969), and burgeons with such foundational texts as Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own (1977), which posited a women’s tradition in English literature and a method for recognizing the specificity of women’s writing called “gynocriticism.” Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1978) presented a spirited demonstration of how classic American fiction interpellates the reader as male. Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re‐Vision” (1979) was a manifesto for re‐reading male‐written literature through feminist eyes. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) was a monumental series of essays on the manifestations of repressed feminist impulses in nineteenth‐century women’s novels and poetry. Dale Spender’s Man Made Language (1980) exposed the intrinsic androcentrism of the English language itself. Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1981), called upon women to name and appreciate their own pleasure. And Judith Lowder Newton’s Women, Power, and Subversion (1981) proposed readings of a set of British women’s texts whose political disruptiveness had been overlooked in their categorization as domestic fiction. Francophone scholars writing in English—like Toril Moi (Sexual/Textual Politics, 1985)—were critical during the 1980s of British and American feminisms for their lack of poststructuralist sophistication and their tendency to “essentialize” woman, but those critiques (along with many of the insights associated with the French Feminists’ écriture féminine, roughly translatable as “writing that comes from the body of woman”) were soon incorporated into the feminisms being practiced in the English departments of the United States and U.K.
Though it might appear, in retrospect, to refer to a racist shortcoming in feminist theory, the term “Anglo‐American feminism” was not originally intended as a criticism of British and American feminism for pertaining only to white women. Indeed, the theoretical work being done by Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, bell hooks, and other Black feminists writing in the 1980s was crucially important to the development of so‐called Anglo‐American feminism. At the same time, many feminist scholars in that period were exclusively researching white nineteenth‐century or Modernist British and American women authors, and influential books like The Madwoman in the Attic did not engage with issues of race. The term “Anglophone feminisms” is preferable for being more inclusive, for covering important work being done in the last quarter of the twentieth century by U.S. and U.K. feminists of color. Anglophone feminisms also refers to the plurality of approaches coming from lesbian and queer feminists whose contribution was not at the center of projects like Showalter’s, Gilbert and Gubar’s, or Newton’s, as well as to English‐language feminisms developing in Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Australia, India, and elsewhere in the world.
Anglophone feminisms are frequently described as having gone through a “first wave” with the women’s suffrage movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a “second wave” following the sexual revolution of the 1960s and extending into the 1990s, and a “third wave” comprised of a later generation of women who rejected second‐wave feminism as being insufficiently diverse. “Second wave” (like “politically correct”) is not a term that feminists working between 1975 and the 1990s used to describe themselves. For one thing, the period that stretched between Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women (1968), Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and Kate Miller’s Sexual Politics (1969) was too long to look, from their perspective, like a singular first “wave” preceding their own work. The contributions of earlier theorists were understood as forming a feminist tradition carried on by “foremothers” of the later twentieth‐century women’s movement, continuous since the eighteenth century and becoming stronger after “women’s liberation” in the 1960s. The later generation of scholars who named it the “second wave” read their own foremothers ahistorically, finding racism, homophobia, classism, and even misogyny in the work of their feminist predecessors, as one can always do in a symptomatic reading of previous generations’ progressive texts. But third‐wave feminists overlooked the importance of the Black feminists cited above as well as Hazel Carby, Hortense Spillers, Deborah McDowell, and Valerie Smith; lesbian feminists such as Gayle Rubin, Bonnie Zimmerman, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde; Latina feminists like Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa; and postcolonial feminist critics like Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty to the theories that emerged from the 1980s.
These voices were entirely justified in calling for feminist analysis to move their own identity positions “from margin to center” (as bell hooks so resonantly put it), thus decentering the white female liberal subject. The impact of their contribution to the larger conversation about feminism in the 1980s cannot be overstated. Critics speaking from outside feminist theory and criticism saw it as a mono‐vocal movement prescribing a narrow, “politically correct” position then as now, but that has never been an accurate characterization of the multiplicity and diversity alive within anglophone feminisms. Today, “third wave” refers to the feminist values embraced by the generation of feminists writing in the mid–late 1990s, including sex‐positive, pro‐feminine, multicultural, gender‐fluid, and communitarian ideals. All of these are also present among feminisms of the so‐called second wave.
In its earliest phases, anglophone feminist criticism introduced a set of interrelated conversations into literary studies. Critiquing conventions and clichés of representation in high‐ and low‐culture texts, feminists like Rosalind Coward and Kate Millett looking at “images of women” in the late 1960s drew attention to the stereotyping and the “either/or” logic (“either she’s a Madonna or a whore”) at work in canonical representations of women going all the way back to the Middle Ages, while also celebrating proto‐feminist heroines in classic literature (such as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Shakespeare’s Beatrice, or Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet). At the same time, feminist critics were recovering lost or undervalued texts written by women. Archival research unearthed works that had long been out of print like Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1961) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). Presses dedicated to publishing women writers emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1970s and 1980s, such as The Feminist Press, Third Woman Press, Aunt Lute Books, and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in the United States, and Virago, Pandora, and Persephone Presses in the U.K.; many of them are still in business.
Series like Henry Louis Gates’s Schomburg Library editions of African‐American women’s writing and collections like Shirley Lim, Mayumi Tsutakawa, and Margaret Donnelly’s The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian‐American Women’s Anthology (1989) made available paperback editions of texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were all but forgotten. Genres of writing that had been practiced through the centuries by women authors—such as letters, diaries, and bestselling novels—became objects of critical analysis, as feminist historians pointed out the obstacles to women having had the education or leisure necessary to producing canonical poetry, drama, and fiction. Works written through the ages by exceptional women like Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen, whose writings had been excluded from the “great tradition” of English authors, began to command more attention and to make their way onto college syllabuses. More celebrated women writers like Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson underwent new readings that teased out feminist and lesbian meanings previously overlooked. Contemporary women of color authors like Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Alice Walker, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Maya Angelou emerged as subjects of critical study. Since the 1970s the subject of “literature” has altogether become more gender‐diverse, although standard literary anthologies and survey courses still overwhelmingly include more authors who are male than female.
Feminists also challenged the institution of literary studies itself, explicating how the androcentric standards of “quality” and “universality” had effectively excluded women’s works from the academic mainstream. One of the most incontrovertible (and entertaining) works on this topic is Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983), a pseudo‐guidebook for those who would keep women’s writing out of the category of great literature. Russ cites eleven ways to undermine a woman writer’s achievement, illustrating each with received wisdom she has derived from literary criticism, including denial of agency (“She didn’t write it,” but her husband or brother did), pollution of agency due to a work’s unfeminine content (“She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have”), isolation (“She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it”), and anomalousness. Projects like Janet Todd’s A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660–1800 and Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (1986) showed that a successful woman novelist like Austen was much less of an anomaly during the Regency period than anyone who accepted traditional literary history would have supposed.
Paradigm‐shifting work in this area came from nineteenth‐century Americanists Nina Baym, whose scholarship unearthed and challenged the long‐standing prejudice against what Hawthorne had called “that damned mob of scribbling women,” and Jane Tompkins, whose Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1986) painstakingly deconstructed the androcentric equation of literary “excellence” with “complexity.” These scholars, along with comparatists like Suleiman and Susan Sniader Lanser, argued that women writers’ efforts to change the world through literature had run afoul of the Modernist aesthetic privileging of “art for art’s sake,” a set of standards that was arbitrary at best, not to mention outdated in a multicultural post‐war world. Rather than asking, “Is this a good book?” feminist criticism began to ask, “What, or whom, is this book good for? Whose interests does it serve?” In this respect feminist theory was indebted to, and consonant with, the Marxist approach that had entered anglophone literary critical discourse in the 1950s and whose chief spokesperson in the 1980s was Terry Eagleton. Acknowledging that Marxist and Materialist Feminists had been working to identify the imbrication of gender and class in reproductive labor, Eagleton’s widely circulated Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), linked feminist critics with Socialist critics in their opposition to the theoretical goals of liberal humanism.
Enormously influential and informed by materialist and structuralist thinking, Gayle Rubin’s anthropological essay, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” established the sex/gender distinction that undergirds feminist analysis into the twenty‐first century, a period during which the conversion of binaries into spectra has expanded but not fundamentally altered Rubin’s definitions. Rubin’s essay exemplifies the interdisciplinary reach of anglophone feminisms in an era when literary theorists were beginning to read philosophy, social science, historiography, and scientific writing as they sought new paradigms for understanding culture and discourse. Rubin explained that sex (the physiologically determined difference between “male” and “female”) is not the same thing as gender (the set of attributes and actions considered “masculine” or “feminine”—which is to say, associated with one sex or the other—in a given culture). Important for all forms of feminist theory, the sex/gender distinction was especially fruitful for literary analysis. Focusing on gender as a cultural construction offered an alternative to making essentialist arguments about “women” that marginalized and excluded as many identity positions as they accounted for. What’s more, the study of gender was consonant with literary theory’s emphasis on textual representation, which emerged during the “theory revolution” as the disciplinary distinctness of literary studies. After the sex/gender model took hold, the business of anglophone feminist literary criticism was less to give an account of actual women and more to account for constructions and reconstructions of “woman” in literary and popular texts.
Nearly as foundational to anglophone feminisms in the 1980s as the sex/gender binary was the theory of the separate spheres. Feminists recognized the public realm—where politics, religion, commerce, higher education, and law are carried on—as a space that has excluded women until comparatively recently in British and American history, and as a territory where women still operate at a measurable disadvantage. The theory of separate spheres explains how and why middle‐class and upper‐class women in the United States and the U.K. have, at least since the eighteenth century, been relegated to the private sphere. For nineteenth‐century feminists, the home was woman’s domain, where she exercised her special power through her softening influence on her husband and children, but their embrace of what came to be called “domestic ideology” underwent severe critique in the 1980s. Some feminists of the so‐called first wave upheld the convention of assigning power to men and influence to women, reasoning that the man whose animal instincts propel him through the struggles of the public sphere will benefit from the moral and spiritual guidance he can receive from the wife at home who has been protected from the corrupting impact of business and politics. Anglophone feminist literary critics in the 1980s looked at representations of domesticity to find affirmations and subversions of domestic ideology in works by men as well as women.
Many anglophone feminists struggled with their relationship to “high theory” in the 1980s, sharing Audre’s Lorde’s conviction that “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Some, like Annette Kolodny, Barbara Christian, and Jane Marcus, asserted that the language and structure of literary theory developed by and in the interest of men was insufficient to understanding women’s texts. At the same time, other critics revised and responded to the dominant schools of literary theory to develop new methodologies for feminist critique. Lacanian feminists like Shoshana Felman and Jane Gallop adapted psychoanalytic theory to account for an otherness that does not have to be understood as abject, while Rosalind Coward and Mary Jacobus were revising structuralist semiotics and Freudian criticism for feminist purposes. Eve Sedgwick reconfigured René Girard’s Freudian‐oedipal love triangles with an eye to materialist history, showing how often the heroines in classic British novels actually function to triangulate personal and financial relationships between men. Although Sedgwick focused on the representation of homosocial rather than homosexual desire in those relationships, this work was to develop into her groundbreaking contributions to queer theory. Barbara Johnson and Catherine Belsey brought deconstruction as well as psychoanalysis to bear on literary writing, critiquing the “either/or” logic of binaries like male/female, sex/gender and public/private and proposing a mode of thought that would hold “both/and” in mind without resorting to essentialist assumptions about difference. Feminist narratology critiqued the androcentrism and binarism of narrative theory, as Susan Sniader Lanser and I called out structuralist narratologists for excluding forms associated with women writers from their universalizing models of storytelling. Turning the same critique back on anglophone feminisms, Paula Gunn Allen demonstrated the interpretive inadequacy not only of androcentric anthropological approaches to Native American narrative forms, but also of white feminist readings.
Postcolonialist anglophone feminist criticism made the combinations of theoretical orientations underpinning anglophone feminisms more explicit. Gayatri Spivak—who had translated Derrida from the French—described herself as a Marxist deconstructionist psychoanalytic feminist, and her postcolonialist readings of classic British texts moved freely among methodologies that theory purists would have seen as incompatible. In her influential 1985 essay, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Spivak showed how the development of the white liberal feminist subject in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) depends on the “worlding” or the othering of women in the so‐called Third World. For Spivak, The Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys’s 1966 postcolonial adaptation of Jane Eyre) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) better manage the perspective of the Other in service of a critical view on imperialism. The “so‐called Third World” is a phrase that Spivak popularized in feminist discourse with deliberate irony. Every generalized reference she made to colonized and postcolonial regions carried within it the critique of Western culture’s giving priority to the so‐called First World. For reasons she explains in Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), Spivak also introduced into anglophone feminisms the concept of “strategic essentialism.” Rejecting all positivist essentialisms through the principles of deconstruction, Spivak nevertheless suggested using essentializing categories like “woman” or “worker” in a highly self‐conscious, politicized way, in full recognition that though they have no unitary referent they may be necessary for mobilizing activism. Equally eclectic though less indebted to high theory in its approaches, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands: La Frontera (1987) blended memoir and analysis; Spanish, English, and Spanglish; formal and personal prose styles; and perspectives from both sides of the Mexican border to describe “the new mestiza” consciousness, a postcolonial identity occupying multiple positions simultaneously.
Anglophone feminisms’ anti‐essentialist concept of gender found a powerful articulation in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Butler adapted structuralist linguist J. L. Austin’s idea of performative speech acts as an analogy for the ontological status of gender. Just as a speech act such as “I promise” or “I now pronounce you” brings into being the thing that it is saying, so do the gestures, postures, and styles that a given culture calls “manly” or “womanly” bring gender into being when a person performs them. For Butler, gender is not an inner state existing prior to its enactment in behavior: an effeminate person does not wear make‐up or speak with fluid hand gestures because he or she is intrinsically feminine. The behaviors themselves are constitutive of femininity in Western culture, part of the performance of feminine gender identity. Performance in this sense is not (only) theatrical or spectacular, in that the taking on and off of gender identities is not always a conscious act. Performativity is less about acting than actions. Deconstructionist feminists had already dismantled the binarism placing males and females, masculinity and femininity, and men and women in strict opposition to each other, and the theory of performativity further clarified the idea that all humans exist on a broad and fluid spectrum of gender identity. Along with Eve Sedgwick’s groundbreaking Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Gender Trouble marks the division of anglophone feminisms into feminist theory (or “Women’s and Gender Studies”) and queer theory (or “Sexuality Studies”), fields that in the beginning tended to clash over lesbian feminism’s emphasis on lived experience and queer theory’s dematerialization of “queerness” and “queering.” Methodologically speaking, however, both Butler’s and Sedgwick’s works in queer theory have had a profound and lasting impact on feminist criticism’s treatment of gender and sexuality.
Equally influential upon feminist methodologies was critical legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, which she proposed in a 1991 essay on violence against women of color in The Stanford Law Review. Crenshaw posited that every person inhabits a long list of identity positions—including race, class, gender, and sexuality—and that understanding the situation of any particular person requires attention to the intersections of all those identities. Intersectionality provides a model for recognizing what women‐of‐color feminisms had been saying throughout the 1980s: there are degrees of marginalization and oppression that have different kinds of impact on different women. A working‐class woman’s experience of oppression will be profoundly different if she is white or a woman of color; if she is straight, bisexual, lesbian, or trans; if she lives in the United States or Europe or the so‐called Third World; if she is disabled or not disabled. Intersectionality moved the straight, white, upper‐ or middle‐class, cisgendered British or American woman who had been at the center of most Anglophone feminist projects in the late 1970s and early 1980s into an identity position of her own, only one among countless others that feminisms must account for. For literary criticism, this meant locating authors and characters at the intersections of their identity positions, but also identifying the mechanisms of representation that stereotype, highlight, or obscure identity difference.
As anglophone feminisms have become increasingly global in their focus, intersectionality has revealed its political and methodological limitations. Rey Chow points out that the poststructuralist subject of feminism always already begins as straight, white, Western, and bourgeois, so that all other identity positions are still defined as other; an intersectional identity assigns an endless series of differences to the woman who does not stand at the center of liberal feminism’s norm. In this way, intersectionality re‐inscribes the marginalization it seeks to overturn. Feminist theorists like Elizabeth Grosz emphasize the materiality and liminality of the body object to intersectionality because it does not account for the body’s instability and indeterminacy, which cannot be pinned down into fixed identity positions, no matter how multiple. Jasbir Puar has joined Grosz and other posthumanist feminists in advocating for the Deleuzian model of “assemblage” to take the place of intersectionality.
Eschewing the linear implications of the metaphor of the intersection, assemblage theorists move beyond identity politics to conceive of the body as an amorphous conglomeration rather than a stable entity. Assemblage theory recognizes the body as not exclusively human (every person contains other bodies, such as microbes, within) and not impermeable. In this way it links up with the posthumanist feminism pioneered in the early 1990s by Donna Haraway who posits woman as cyborg, “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 1991: 149).2 For Haraway, there is no “natural” body in a world of technological and scientific modifications of the human, and just as the machine/organism dichotomy breaks down in her analysis, so does the human/animal. Though her manifesto announces itself as “ironic,” Haraway’s reconfiguration of woman as cyborg joins with the theories of performativity and of assemblage to undo the essentialisms implicit in earlier feminist criticism.
Anglophone feminisms are by no means over, although alliances with queer theory, animal rights activism, ecocriticism, empathy studies, posthumanism, and transnationalism have rendered feminist theory and criticism less distinct as a field in the twenty‐first century. As literary theoretical movements, all these approaches are partly grounded in feminist theory’s exemplification of a politically or ethically committed critical practice. The social and political goals of feminists are still elusive, more than thirty years after feminism began making inroads into literary theory and criticism. As an ever‐more inclusive set of feminisms emerges, one can only hope that the institution of feminist literary criticism and theory can have a greater impact on the material conditions that women inhabit worldwide.