[In the following review, Slawy-Sutton praises Sexual/Textual Politics, asserting that Moi's ideas are brilliant, thought-provoking, and well-documented.]

In this stimulating and well-documented introduction to feminist literary theory [Sexual/Textual Politics], Moi posits as a core idea that no reading of literary texts is politically “innocent” and, therefore, that the political implications of feminist critical study should be made clear. She proceeds to a detailed examination of the best known Anglo-American and French theorists, and, after bringing the reader to a full grasp of their arguments, she cleverly moves on to a deconstruction of their underlying assumptions. She is particularly critical of the Anglo-American feminists who, she thinks, have largely ignored the form of the texts, thereby reducing female literature to realist autobiographies. Moi attempts to show how their aesthetics are really inherited from the values and canon defined by bourgeois patriarchy. Elaine Showalter's reading of Virginia Woolf, for instance, overlooks the novelist's “theory of the relations between sexism and fascism,” and Kate Millett's rejection of Freud ignores the power of the unconscious. Other flaws of such theorists are: 1) they assume that patriarchal ideology is homogeneous, and 2) they posit ‘woman’ as an essentialist, homogeneous category. Most feminists have therefore failed to thoroughly challenge the aesthetic categories of patriarchy. Moi's object is to deconstruct both the dichotomy between feminine and masculine and the recurring opposition between the political and the aesthetic.

In spite of some of the same contradictions and of their “uncompromising intellectualism,” the French theorists have made powerful contributions. Moi exposes how Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva are indebted to Lacan's reading of Freud and to Derrida's analysis of patriarchal binary logic. Cixous's belief in the bisexual nature of humans places her in an anti-essentialist vein, and yet her evocations of female writing as a poetic song related to the pre-Oedipal phase do suggest a homogeneous concept of woman. Luce Irigaray's view of women's oppression as philosophical is not entirely satisfactory. Kristeva's contributions as a linguist seem to provide some answers to Moi's recurring question about the reasons why women still have managed to write while oppressed. Kristeva rejects politics based on any absolute form of identity. She refuses theories of “femaleness,” “femininity” or of a “feminine” form of language. Her truly non-essentialist view, as well as her theories of “marginality” and of language as a “complex signifying process,” represent a breakthrough for future criticism, and Moi concludes: “We all use the same language but … we have different interests. … The meaning of the sign is thrown open—the sign becomes ‘polysemic’ rather than ‘univocal.’ … The power struggle intersects in the sign” (158). However, Kristeva's investigation of language in the individual “speaking subject” leads Moi to find the linguist's poetics politically ineffective, for it overlooks any analysis of the relationship between the subjective and the social.

This brilliant, concise essay will bring about fervent discussions. Toril Moi's intellectual quest for a feminist analysis that would show how the language of literature disrupts the social and aesthetic categories of conventional thought might seem to suffer from some of the same drawbacks that it sets out to attack. First, one has to wonder how valid she would find a political interpretation that did not agree with her own politics. Second, at times one fails to understand how a political reading, coupled with references to Marx, Freud, Barthes, Lacan and Derrida as authorities, is less patriarchal in orientation than the approaches she criticizes. But her primary request is for the sort of research that would show how nonconventional forms of writing prefigure social revolution. Moi implies that a combination of Kristevan and Derridean theory would do just that: expose the subversive elements of signs in a given context.

It is not only in its call for a study of female tradition as an “urgent political necessity,” but also in the process of provoking thought that one will find this book very useful.