Feminist Theory’s Itinerant Legacy: From Language Feminism to Labor Feminism

Abstract

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, feminist theory was booming, even hegemonic. In a particularly potent position for activating and further developing many of poststructuralism’s most vibrant insights, particularly in its engagement with the production of subjects, feminist theory was in the front-line of paradigm-shifting narratives being constructed about how language worked, what was the relationship between language and subjectivity, how language and subjectivity engaged with the social and the symbolic, and how language produced new identities in its encounters with new needs, broader recognition, and redistributive claims. Feminist theory was a project that bridged academic thought and activism by integrating humanities’ practices and social science research (and also, at times, the hard sciences and the history of science) while focusing on how to construct new rationalities and consciousness with a view to emancipation. Many of its innovations emerged out of a critical theory tradition as it intersected with psychoanalysis and language theory (structural linguistics and ordinary language theory, in particular), and so it was principally concerned with a critique of philosophical systems and a moving-beyond them on the tailspin of literary experimentalism.1