[In the following essay, Cameron contrasts different feminist theories of language in terms of Moi's linguistic analysis in Sexual/Textual Politics.]

Since I am a linguist rather than a literary critic, I want to consider the term “Anglo-American” in terms of its application to feminist theories of language: theories that arguably hold a central place in the more general project of feminist criticism. So, is there an Anglo-American feminist linguistics?¹

Toril Moi, of course, implies that there is. She uses the phrase as part of a section heading in chapter eight of Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985), explicitly contrasting what she calls the Anglo-American empirical approach to language with the Lacanian approach as reworked by Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva.² She does not consider whether there is a further contrast between the Anglo and the American: in Saussurean terms she treats these as allophones of a single phoneme (and, one might add, the unmarked form of this phoneme is American, not British).³

Theories of language are different from phonemes. They are neither arbitrary nor devoid of substantive content. So it is neither senseless nor vulgar to inquire how they might be influenced by the traditions of the particular cultures in which they arise. Certain generalizations may indeed be pertinent here: for example, the fact that most British and American intellectuals draw their everyday assumptions about meaning and language from the traditions of analytic philosophy and speech act theory, whether consciously or not, rather than from “continental” philosophy; or—an institutional fact—that linguistics in America has its face turned more to the social sciences, being historically sister of anthropology rather than daughter of philology.

But foregrounding divergences based on differences of nationality may cause us to overlook other, equally important differences. For instance, some intellectual disagreements are not culture-related so much as field-related. As a matter of habit, training, and expediency, the literary critic and the linguist tend to view language differently. This holds true both within and across cultures.

Other disagreements, though, are fundamentally political ones. If I disagree with someone about what the project of feminist politics should be, I am also likely to disagree with her on what is a helpful theoretical paradigm for feminist scholarship. And for a number of reasons, some of which will be taken up later in this paper, I believe that the direction of causality is from politics to theory, not the reverse. It is time we acknowledged this political dimension more explicitly, rather than concealing it behind “cultural” labels like “French,” “Anglo-American,” and so on. Those labels obscure the fact that feminism is a highly contested term for every society in which it exists.

The linguistic paradigms named by Moi as “Anglo-American” and “French” actually coexist in each of the nations mentioned by the labels, as well as elsewhere (in Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, and Japan, to name only a few places I have detailed evidence about). It would therefore be less misleading and less tendentious to rename Moi's paradigms, using the alternative terms “sociolinguistic” and “semiological.”

I suggest these terms for two main reasons. First, they capture the fundamental difference between the two currents: one regards language primarily as a form of social action while the other regards it primarily as a system of signification. One produces accounts of behavior while the other generates readings of texts. This leads me to a second difference: the sociolinguistic paradigm is favored more by social scientists who take human behavior as their object of study, and the semiological paradigm is favored more by students of literature and of other forms of cultural representation (e.g., film, visual arts) whose concerns are essentially textual. A third and connected difference is in the underlying epistemology of each paradigm. While I reject Moi's pejorative use of the term “empirical” (meaning untheorized) for the sociolinguistic approach, it is true that sociolinguistic, including feminist ones, continue to be more influenced than their semiologically minded colleagues by Enlightenment assumptions about knowledge, truth, reality, and subjectivity. The kind of debate and doubt that postmodernism has prompted in literary studies has not reached the linguistics department—yet.

For feminists, these two paradigms generate different sets of questions. A feminist sociolinguist is interested in describing and explaining the similarities and differences to be found in the verbal behavior of women and men. Differences are of interest because they are taken to reflect and reproduce unequal gender relations—differing experiences, opportunities, material linguistic resources. In these terms, Virginia Woolf's well-known analysis in “Women and Fiction” of why women writers mostly write novels is a sociolinguistic analysis.⁴

A feminist semiologist finds this kind of analysis not so much false as superficial. She wants to destabilize categories like “experience,” “men,” “women,” and to focus on the way such categories are constructed through practices of signification. Cora Kaplan has argued, for instance, that the peculiar difficulties of early women poets—difficulties a critic can read in their texts—stem from something deeper than gendered social expectations and restrictions.⁵ These exist, but they proceed from a more fundamental linguistic prohibition internalized in the process of acquiring feminine subjectivity. In other words, rather than taking the speaking subject as given and studying how he or she speaks, this paradigm takes language as given (“always already there”) and asks how language positions its speaking subjects.

Another way of thinking about the difference here is to ask the following question, which has also been posed by Elaine Showalter: are women marginal to language or are they marginalized by specific linguistic practices and behaviors?⁶ Is the question about difference, or is it about power?

These are political questions, and perhaps it is not surprising that adherents of the two paradigms often differ in their political allegiances. Both radical and liberal feminists, though in different ways, tend to favor the sociolinguistic approach to language.⁷ That approach does not problematize the very existence of women and men as the other does. As Moi says, it posits rational and unified subjects who can use language to know and act on their realities. Moi sees this as a phallocentric fiction; and yet she has also acknowledged that it can be an empowering fiction for women,⁸ whereas the project of fragmentation and destabilization implied by the alternative paradigm seems to carry a real danger of political quietism. (I think of the pessimism exemplified nowadays by Julia Kristeva and Juliet Mitchell, and I wonder if feminism can afford it.)

The enthusiasm of so many British and American feminists for “French” theory has been said to represent many things: a superficial fascination with one's cultural Other; a retreat into formalism; a fundamental change in English-speaking intellectual culture. I do not fully accept any of these arguments. I think it marks a period of questioning and conflict within feminism whose ultimate outcome we cannot yet know. As intellectuals we are grappling with the challenges of postmodernism; as feminists we are reevaluating the successes and failures of the last twenty years and searching for a new politics of heterogeneity and difference. Whichever side of the Channel or the Atlantic we speak from, we do not speak with a single voice. All the more reason to acknowledge our political disagreements and find ways of discussing them that clarify what is at stake.

In the search for this kind of productive conversation, we will of course need to pay attention to the real differences of political culture and history that exist between British and American feminist critics, and the very significant differences (acutely discussed by Cora Kaplan in this forum) both in the positioning of U.K. and U.S. feminists within the academy and in the professional norms that constrain academics in the two countries. Although I would argue that competing feminist approaches to language are not most usefully considered in terms of nationality, I would not want to deny the relevance of national differences altogether. At the level of our practice, and of our understanding of one another's practice, such differences are noticeable, and sometimes they are troublesome.

At the MLA panel where this debate on Anglo-American feminist criticism began, there were a couple of telling instances. For example, introducing the panel, Laura Doan recalled the surprise she felt when a British feminist academic wrote to her to question the inclusion of one man's work in a collection of feminist scholarship. To the American feminist the British woman's objection smacked of essentialism and connoted a degree of gender separatism that placed the writer at an extreme. I, by contrast, would not have interpreted it as extreme or necessarily indicative of essentialism. British feminism still preserves more “women only space” than its U.S. counterpart, and concern with this is not seen as the province of extremists. On the contrary, I remember being amazed when I discovered there were male students in the Women's Studies class I taught at the College of William and Mary and more than amazed to find a man teaching one of the other sections. In the British institutions where I have taught (which are not, incidentally, known as hotbeds of radicalism), this inclusion of men would have provoked riots.

There again, I was startled by the hostility some speakers at the MLA panel expressed toward Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics. What I had read as vigorous polemic, couched in a tone appropriate to the author's polemical intentions, seemed to be read quite differently by colleagues from across the Atlantic: as unsisterly condescension and bad history.⁹

In its original context, it seems to me that each of these apparent transgressions of feminist norms would have a different and less charged meaning because the position of the writer would be more accurately placed in the spectrum of culturally possible political positions. In order to understand fully what someone is doing or saying, you have to be aware of all the things she is choosing not to do and what each of them would mean. This is a severe test of cultural knowledge, and it is one mark of the “alien” to be constantly failing it.

Of course, it should not be concluded from this discussion that all positions adopted by feminists are immune to criticism from outside their own traditions, whether “tradition” is defined in terms of nationality, academic discipline, or politics. I am arguing only that criticism is likely to be both less acute and less readily accepted if it demonstrates serious misunderstandings of the context in which the target of the criticism is operating. We are more aware of the need to contextualize and relativize when we are dealing with theories made from perspectives more obviously “Other” and with texts that require actual translation. But even on what passes for familiar cultural and linguistic terrain, there is a need for caution.

This too is at least partly a question of language. However we theorize language-in-general, we must surely remain alert to the nuances of languages-in-particular. If my sojourn in the U.S. taught me nothing else, it taught me that there's no such language as “Anglo-American.”

Notes

1. This paper was originally composed in 1989 when I was teaching at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. I thank Dale Bauer and Laura Doan for inviting me to participate in the MLA panel where it was first aired publicly; I also thank my U.S. colleagues, especially Meryl Altman and Colleen Kennedy, for their help over many months in sharpening my perception of what unites or divides British and American feminist critics.

2. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985).

3. Witness the problem with my use of “Anglo” in this sentence: in the U.S. the most obvious reading of that term is as a marker of (WASP) ethnicity, and not as a marker of (non-U.S.) nationality.

4. Virginia Woolf, “Women and Fiction,” in The Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 33-40. This essay originally appeared in The Forum, March 1929.

5. Cora Kaplan, “Language and Gender,” in Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 69-93.

6. See Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry, 8, No. 2 (1981), 193.

7. Another problem of translation here: my notion of what the term “radical feminist” means is grounded in the history of the British and not the U.S. women's movement. A more meaningful term for American readers is probably “cultural feminism,” but the two are not exact equivalents; the axes of contrast between different feminist tendencies are, to my mind, quite different in the two countries.

8. Conversations with Moi; but this is also implied by the way Moi has read Simone de Beauvoir; see, for instance, her essay “Existentialism and Feminism,” Oxford Literary Review, 8, Nos. 1-2 (1986), 91.

9. It is perhaps relevant to point out here that my seemingly greater tolerance for Moi's strong attacking strategy cannot be traced solely to the fact that her attack is directed mainly against American feminists; for although I am not American, I am a sociolinguist in the empirical tradition she excoriates, and thus I feel myself very much in her line of fire. Having participated in academic life on both sides of the Atlantic, I would provisionally explain my ideas about what is an acceptable level or kind of criticism with reference to differences in the norms of professional interaction to which British and U.S. academics are accustomed and indeed socialized, particularly in “traditional” institutions and fields of study.