The literary politics of feminist theory

Abstract

Common sense assures us that feminist politics and feminist theory are intimately related. Any agitation on behalf of women's rights involves some sort of critique of the dominant order, some kind of “theory” of women's oppression in a patriarchal society. This is true even of feminist activisms that consciously present themselves as immediate expressions of women's experiences, emphatically privileging women's voices and committed to grass roots political action. It is necessary (though not sufficient) to observe that such a “presentation” of necessity involves a rhetoric, a strategy of representation and an argument, in which the model of direct action rooted in experience is set against other models and presented as the proper ground for authentic feminist activism. While all of this is true, when I suggest that any agitation on behalf of women's rights involves some theory of women's oppression, I mean something more essential or specific to feminism's project as such, to feminism as a way of thinking, writing, and acting. The very possibility of any political action against patriarchy or masculinism requires an account of that masculinism’s flaws, a dissent from the way in which it seeks to situate and dominate femininity. In the exposure of such a masculinist “narrative of femininity,” stereotypes of woman and women appear as the effects of patriarchy, including, of course, of patriarchy’s many stories. The disclosure of some such patriarchal narrative of femininity is the sine qua non of feminist agitation.