Some Proposals for Feminist Literary Criticism

Abstract

����� The investigation of gender relations remains a central concern of feminist scholarship, though feminists have often vigorously debated how best to define them. Almost all American feminist scholars now agree that gender relations are social constructions. They define gender as a social category that must be distinguished from sex, the biological substratum on which gender rests and which allows various societies to define masculinity and femininity as opposite, if dialectically related, terms. In the 1970s and early eighties, particularly under the influence of poststructuralism, much academic feminism in the United States concentrated on defining the nature of women's difference from men. But in the course of the 1980s, as a consequence of developments within academic feminism as well as external political pressures, feminist scholarship in the United States moved from an emphasis on women's difference from men to an exploration of differences among women. Now, in the nineties, feminist scholars confront the problem of how to refine the concept of women's difference—both from men and from other women—and to move beyond it. Here I want first to outline four major areas of debate within feminist scholarship in the United States that are also of particular relevance to feminist literary criticism. Then I would like to suggest a number of areas in which feminist literary criticism might respond concretely to questions raised by feminist theory.1 1. Throughout the 1980s feminist scholars increasingly came to recognize that, if femininity was a social construction, it was no longer possible to speak simply of without specifying which women one meant, since definitions of femininity were dynamic and constantly changing, varying historically, culturally, racially, ethnically, by class and religion and for many other reasons. Feminist scholars thus began to investigate the multiple and shifting relationships of any culture's categories of femininity to their categories of masculinity, other symbolic categories, and other modes of cultural, political and economic organization and experience. Some feminists argued that femininity was internally as well as externally unstable:2 because gendered subjects within any particular culture inhabit a variety of subject positions simultaneously, the discourses (on gender and on other issues) that call them into being are