A Feminist Scholarship You Can Bring Home to Dad?

Abstract

I make these comments from a position which entaA¼s humUity, irony, and discursive dA©jA vu. The humUity comes from being caUed to comment on two complex and sophisticated papers, both drawing upon post-structuraUst theory to construct histories of feminist discourse, both proposing creative strategies for dealing with some of the more vexed issues in feminist theory and poUtics today.1 My comments, however, wA¼l not directly engage the arguments or strategies advanced by Newman's and WiUiams's papers. Rather, it will pay them the potential compliment of attempted imitation. I too wA¼l sketch a discursive history in which I feel the implidt, as opposed to offidal, histories constructed by these papers can be placed. In first reading these two papers, which mark but also address the entry of post-structuralist discourse into feminist work, I was struck by a sense of irony that is historical in several ways. As someone once trained to be a Uterary critic, I witnessed the entry of post-structuralist discourse into what I thought of as my field some fifteen years ago. I experienced its rise to hegemony in that field, and some ten years later I observed, with no small relief, the beginnings of a widespread feminist critique. Those who advanced the critique were often feminist critics or theorists who had been and were even yet deeply immersed in post-struc- turalist discourse.2 Thdr criticism focused on the tendency of some non- feminist, usually male-authored, post-structuraUst theorizing to deny the possibility of subjectivity, meta- or even large-scale theory, human agency, and progressive social change. These denials, it was usuaUy taken note, emerged just at the moment when women, white women and women of color, and men of color, too, had begun reconstructing subjec- tivity, large-scale theory, agency, and sodal change for their own purposes.3 In the wake of feminist critique and of neo-marxist critiques as weU, the hegemony of post-structuralist discourse in literary studies has decUned. Indeed, the last few years have seen the rise of a orthodoxy or at least fashion, widely referred to as new historicism.4 The latter, largely in reaction to the studied focus of much post-structuralist practice on isolated prides itself on situating the literary work in relation to other cultural texts, such as institutions and events. It goes so far in fad as to identify itself with a turn or return to history. IronicaUy, of course, the disdptine of history is in some sense no longer there to be returned to, being itself in the process of moving on—toward Uterary criticism, post-