Kavka Misha - Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century

Feminist Consequences

GENDER AND CULTURE

CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN AND NANCY K. MILLER, EDITORS

GENDER AND CULTURE

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Feminist Consequences

THEORY FOR THE NEW CENTURY

EDITED BY

Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka

Columbia University Press New York

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright 2001 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53014-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feminist consequences : theory for the new century /

edited by Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka.

p. cm.(Gender and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 023111704-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 023111705-1 (pbk : alk. paper)

1. Feminist theory. 2. Feminism.

I. Bronfen, Elisabeth. II. Kavka, Misha. III. Series.

HQ1190 .F444 2000

305.4201dc21 00060141

A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

Designed by Audrey Smith

CONTENTS

Feminism aint what it used to be. Perhaps with some nostalgia, many of us who call ourselves feminists look back to the peak of the second wave in the 1970s, to a feminism that in retrospect seems to have had a clear object (women), a clear goal (to change the fact of womens subordination), and even a clear definition (political struggle against patriarchal oppression). Such clarity is a trick of memory, no doubt, which reflects more on the pluralized, diversified state of feminism at the turn of the new century than it does on the actual agreements among the theorists and practitioners of the second wave. Nonetheless, the feminist work of the long 1980s (read late 1970s to early 1990s), in refining from ever-proliferating positions the objects, goals, and definitions of feminism, has had the effect of splintering what had been a recognizable feminist project into unrecognizability, even into a paradoxical state of visible invisibility. It is as though the more that feminism has become a publicly visible term, the less sense both its practitioners and its detractors have of what it is about.

Clarity about the object, goal, and even definition of feminism now seems no longer possible or even desirable. What feminist consciousness-raising groups may once have considered the common object of feminismwomen who share certain common experiences by the fact of their sexhas been exposed as a normatizing concept that performs a range of exclusions at the levels of class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality. If the putative object of feminism has turned out to be a fantasy of commonality, then the notion of a singular goal was already problematized from the outset by a disagreement between those (Marxist and materialist feminists) who strove for radical equality, or the goal of ultimately erasing the social effects of sex difference, and those (radical American feminists as well as the French theorists of criture fminine) who strove for radical difference, or the goal of maintaining sex difference without social detriment. Inherent to this problem of a common goal is the larger battle between feminist praxis and feminist theory (itself a debatable division), which separates feminist activists who seek to improve the social/living conditions for women through modes of direct action and feminist theorists who seek to understand and affect the structural constraints on female subjectivity. Most important, the very terms through which we might now seek to define feminism have been refined, pluralized, displaced, and/or deconstructed to the point where they hardly seem available anymore, certainly not if one claims to be defining feminism on behalf of women. Which brings us to the paradox of being involved in a political practice that can no longer define itself as a practice, let alone define its goals.

So feminism aint what it used to be, and the prefix post begins to rear its ugly head. Postfeminism implies, first and foremost, that there was once a time when feminists could say we and that that time is now gone. This is surely no more than a fantasy of retrospection, but it nonetheless threatens to mark our words on the subject with the anger, grief, denial, or resignation of those mourning at a graveside. Allow me, in light of a common readership, to adopt a provisional we at least in terms of those readers interested enough in feminist consequences to be thumbing through this volume. Allow me further to define we as those readers/writers/thinkers/doers, engaged in different projects and struggles, who have invested and continue to invest in feminism as an enabling term. For how can feminism be dead, if the term continues to enable work built out of previous work? Its not as though we turned our backs on a coherent project and returned to it only in time to discover that the heartbeat was failing. On the contrary, the notion of a collective project with a singular history makes up both the nostalgized past and the utopian future of feminism, kept in suspense by a present that consists of multiple, ongoing kinds of feminist activity. The change marked by post thus happened while we were