[In the following essay, Nussbaum discusses the historical significance of the term “Anglo-American feminist criticism” nearly twenty years after the publication of Sexual/Textual Politics.]

That the history of Anglo-American feminism's conflict within and without itself is being written and rewritten testifies to its power as an originary moment for feminism in the 1990s. The nostalgia for the apparent solidarity of Moers and Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar, Ellmann and Millett, Jehlen and Kolodny, Chodorow and Gilligan, both celebrates Anglo-American feminism's significance and cautions us to reconsider the simplified narratives that have evolved about this early stage of feminism. While the work of these pioneering scholars cannot be ignored, the term “Anglo-American feminism” has outlasted its usefulness and should only be invoked now as an historically coded concept. Evelyn Fox Keller aptly points out, “A focus on the supposed coherence of seventies feminism obscures the fact that, from its earliest days, feminist theory was in fact characterized by a marked multiplicity in its goals, and in its stated functions.”¹ The extent of that multiplicity has not yet been fully analyzed, recorded, and assimilated into feminism's history.

As is well known, Toril Moi in 1985 found it useful to describe a cross-national group of English and North American feminists as bourgeois anti-intellectuals, author-centered empiricists, and liberal humanists in order to contrast them with “French” feminists. The ire that Sexual/Textual Politics aroused in setting up this binary may have been in part because Moi was among the first to destroy the illusion of a unified feminism by categorizing and thus reifying feminism's divisions. The subsequent debate among the leading feminist imperial powers encouraged theory wars between two or three nations, distracted attention from feminism in the rest of the world, and produced the uncanny effect of largely erasing class, race, and sexuality from the debates. Certainly differences existed between English and American feminism in its second wave, and linking the two together elides these distinctions. We may isolate different historical markers for each nation: in England, the History Workshop Conference in the mid-sixties, the founding of New Left Review and the Marxist-Feminist Literary Collective in the seventies, and the Greenham Common Peace Camp in 1981; in the US the civil rights and anti-war movement of the sixties and seventies and the defeat of the ERA in the eighties. But here I am much less concerned with distinguishing between English and American feminist practices (though that too has its purpose) than with questioning what significance raising the issue of Anglo-American feminism may have at this historical moment. Rereading histories of feminism (with the benefit of hindsight) reveals their telling silences.

Sexual/Textual Politics has been justly criticized for claiming a materialist feminist position while failing to theorize Marxist and socialist feminism as challenges to “Anglo-American” or “French” feminism. For example, England's Marxist-Feminist Literary Collective in the 1970s is barely mentioned, and influential feminists such as Michèle Barrett, Rosalind Coward, and Juliet Mitchell merit only a page or two. More recently Betsy Draine, while carefully contesting the “rhetoric of mutual de-legitimation” of Anglo-American and French feminism and exposing “each as a myth in need of interpretation and change,” slights the more political and racially self-conscious materialist feminism.² Draine's attention to materialist feminism is confined to a discussion of Jane Miller's Women Writing about Men (1986) in spite of the fact that she finds that approach most “promising for the future of feminist discourse.”³ Because materialist feminism remained largely unaddressed and unassimilated into hegemonic feminism in the mid-1980s, especially in the US, this third kind of feminism lost a crucial opportunity to intervene in “national” debates as a methodology with global implications. By largely excluding the Marxist/socialist/materialist position, Moi and others missed an opportunity to revitalize its arguments and contribute to its international dissemination at a crucial moment in feminism's history. I take these omissions and editorial decisions to be indicative of the prevailing ideology of the (white) feminist movement rather than these critics' intentional invocation of racial or class privilege, but the effect has been to reinscribe liberal and poststructuralist feminisms.

In fact materialist feminism is itself liable to a charge of omitting race and sexuality as categories of analysis, but it does offer a theoretical grounding, as yet largely unrealized, for discussing women's racialized, lesbian, and laboring bodies. Its mode of inquiry considers the relation between multinational economic and political structures and feminism, and it asks what feminism can do to alleviate the uneven material conditions among the world's unorganized laboring women as well as enable feminist intellectual production in whatever geographical location. Materialist feminism rejects the compatibility of advanced capitalism with feminism and thus moves Third World feminism (itself a contested term), embedded in other economic and social systems, toward the center of its concerns. As First and Third Worlds are increasingly interfused with each other, feminists committed to racial change need to heed challenges from every venue to the dominant paradigms of feminist thought.

Further, cultural imperialism continues to bear on feminism's history, and its complicity with racism has not yet been thoroughly examined. Part of the process of achieving a new collective identity for feminism involves recognizing the whiteness of feminist theory's tradition as it has been written. Most women of color already know this; many white feminists don't. As Chela Sandoval has written, “the U.S. women's movement of the seventies was officially renamed the ‘white women's movement’ by U.S. feminists of color, a re-naming which insisted on the recognition of other, simultaneously existing women's movements.”⁴

Perhaps instead of burying Anglo-American feminism once and for all, we might instead redefine its contributions, limitations, and contradictions in order to displace its centrality and begin producing an alternative narrative about it. For example, Moi's history from a mid-eighties perspective would have taken a distinctly different tack if she had responded to cotemporal work such as Hazel Carby's 1982 injunction, “White Woman Listen” or Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar's “Challenging Imperial Feminism,” or had she focused on the 1982 Combahee River Collective's statement, Angela Davis's Women, Race, and Class, bell hooks's Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, or the anthologies But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives, edited by Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, and This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, as indicators of feminist theory's stakes.⁵ These revisionary texts, in spite of significant theoretical content and in spite of having been written by Americans and Britons, were simply disregarded by those who have composed the history of Anglo-American feminism. The effect was to postpone (white) feminism's confrontation with its blindnesses. Even today, writes Michele Wallace, “there exists no critical discourse … no language specifically calibrated to reflect and describe analytically the location of women of color in US culture.”⁶

We might compile a similar list of lesbian theory available in the early eighties, including work such as Adrienne Rich's groundbreaking essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Carole S. Vance, or any of Audre Lorde's books.⁷ It was Moi's judgement that in 1985 “lesbian and/or black feminist criticism … presented exactly the same methodological and theoretical problems as the rest of Anglo-American feminist criticism.”⁸ Perhaps this is the reason that the lesbian content of Monique Wittig's theory was not discussed. In other words, for Moi in 1985 lesbian and black feminist criticism presented no challenge to US (white) feminists.

It is the whiteness, heterosexuality, and First World nature of that early feminism that we might now place in the foreground as part of its conception, just as we are now beginning to critique the Enlightenment feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft for its class-bound and racialized nature. What would an Afrocentric or non-Western (rather than AmerEurocentric) history of Anglo-American feminism look like? For example, white Anglo-American empiricism has not encountered and engaged with the appeal to experience voiced by women of color. Further, in the late seventies and early eighties, both African-and Anglo-American feminism displayed a commitment to archival work and to the idea of a uniquely female essence. Do these various forms of feminist theory share the same female body? A revised white/women of color feminist history might attempt to account for the different models of subjectivity presented within these groups while maintaining common cause. That common cause involves reimagining the current division of people by sexual organs and sexual preference, reconstructing the sexual division of labor and its connections to production and reproduction, and redefining gendered subjectivity. A revision of this history of Anglo-American feminism would topple white feminism as the standard against which all other feminisms are measured.

But enough of missed opportunities. Throughout feminism's history, its willingness to be openly self-reflexive can be extremely productive in resisting current patterns of thought and forging new paths. In fact, we might locate within Anglo-American feminism a radical aspect that could be reclaimed in the name of identity politics and that counters the diffusion of subjectivity characteristic of the postmodern moment. Anglo-American feminism often emphasizes the crucial use of women's experience as it differs from men's. From its contradiction in claiming at the same time a special relation to experience and a neutral knowledge, a demand to theorize experience and its relation to reality and to language has evolved. From its critique of the cultural construction of women, an appeal to the strategic uses of essentialism has been brought to bear. In rewriting feminism's history within these spaces of contradiction, non-US/non-us feminism may look to the Third and Fourth Worlds for culturally and historically specific models of subjectivity that remain very much to be articulated. (White) Anglo-American feminism when taken in tandem with these other colorings of feminism makes possible the recognition that even constructivism becomes essentializing if it is assumed to be a merely cognitive position that exists outside ideology and material structures. Not all essentialisms are alike. A new feminist history might make feminism less vulnerable to easy assimilation and help it escape the colonialist tendencies that contravene its oppositional politics.

At this historical juncture, the distinctions and connections between British and American feminism matter less in the 1990s than First World/Third World hybrids and intersections or connections with indigenous populations. But the fact that we are even raising the question of Anglo-American feminism gives US/us a chance to look at the connections between the late seventies and early eighties when it rose to prominence and our present moment, between the ushering in and flourishing of the conservative Bush/Reagan/Major/Thatcher climate and its uneasy moderation in Major and Clinton. We might ask what use the invoking of national identities by First World feminists served a decade ago. Is it possible that with the growing threat of multinational corporations in the seventies, an identity based on nation had considerable appeal and political force even in the First World? Or is it more likely, as I believe, that (white) feminism inadvertently found itself in collusion with US economic and geopolitical interests? A revisionary history of feminism would address the consequences for feminism of acknowledging different priorities for women around the world because of their various relationships to the concept of “nation” and its collusion in imperial and First World privilege.

This current decade will surely bring further First World consolidation and increasing power to multinational corporations. At this stage of feminist thinking, categorizing feminisms according to national identities may be a reactionary approach in the First World, while in the Third World it may contribute to the growth of feminism. Kumari Jayawardena argues that feminism was not imposed on the Third World by the West but is indigenous to it. She contends that establishing national identity was linked to challenging imperialism, and that nationalism in such a context may have a purposefulness for feminism.⁹ Similarly for Muslim or Hindu women, improvements in status may be associated with antireligious and pro-Western “concessions to the colonizer,” as Fatima Mernissi and Lata Mani have argued in different contexts.¹⁰ In contrast, the emphasis on First World national feminisms such as Anglo-American and French feminism tends to reinforce the “Eurocentric view that the movement for women's liberation is not indigenous to Asia and Africa, but has been a purely West European and North American phenomenon, and that where movements for women's emancipation or feminist struggles have arisen in the Third World, they have been merely imitative of Western models.”¹¹ In addition, nationalism in a postcolonial age may be, for the First World at least, an alignment with the desire to name, codify, and map that characterized the early phases of Euro-American empire and expansion. Though Thatcher was brought down in part because of her nationalist demands on the European Economic Community, Bush triumphed with his nationalist Gulf War cry. A revisionary history of Anglo-American feminism might attempt to address the problem that defining identity through geography raises.

Putting the most favorable construction on First World nationalism would allow US/us to conceptualize “nation” as feminist rather than to reproduce the usual associations of patriotism with militarism and masculinity. On the other hand, it might lead us to believe that a First World conceptualization of nationalism in feminist terms cannot counter the imperialist and militarist practices associated with it. Further, if we speak of feminist criticism's nationality, is it to be the nationality of the critic, her place of origin, or the place where she currently resides or works? Or is it to be the nationality of the work in question, of the object of study? We also have to reckon with the impossibility of occupying the position of authentic ethnic spectator, as Rey Chow, Gayatri Spivak, and others have pointed out.¹² Any position at the present time is a hybridization of tradition and modernity, of the native informant and the displaced Westernized woman. Rather than assume that these contradictions and split allegiances will demoralize and enervate feminism, we might welcome the contest.

It is no secret that there is a deep ambivalence concerning radical action in feminism. Hanging on to the umbilical cord of Anglo-American feminism has also supported its shrinking from revolutionary goals of feminism into a local and personal politics. The defeat of the ERA and the movement from street politics to individual achievement and institutional association have led many to characterize the present movement as lethargic and even defunct. US/us academic feminists in particular find themselves in collusion with the power structures, and the stakes have shifted significantly since the late 1970s. bell hooks describes the situation as “a kind of private property or ownership of certain categories” of feminism.¹³ This is not unconnected to the way that multinationals set First and Third World women against each other as consumers and laborers in an international division of labor. Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich have shown that in the decade of the 1960s, “investment in offshore manufacturing by U.S. firms mushroomed from ＄11.1 billion to ＄29.5 billion.”¹⁴ Women have much invested in recognizing their common interests across national, class, race, and sexuality boundaries.

In short, I am suggesting that the question “Is there an Anglo-American feminism?” may be used to reflect on the contradictions of our mentors and on their local participation in larger global predicaments that remained beyond their ken just as ours are not fully visible to US/us. This is also an opportunity to question US feminists' residual resistances to redefining that history. Rather than homogenizing these discordant effects, bringing these disagreements to the foreground may energize a divided movement.

Looking again at Anglo-American feminism reminds us to confront openly whether feminism is somehow inherently white, Western, heterosexual, and middle class. The “identity” of US/us feminism is changing from a singular identity to a collective identity, but at the same time the dominant political temperament is deeply conservative and profoundly individualistic. The current challenge is to reconfigure feminism as an incommensurable (but renderable) collectivity in which the Other engages in reading, writing, teaching, and other political activities in the presence of and along side the problematic “self.”¹⁵ A not altogether frivolous way of escaping national boundaries and the inadequacy of a First World/Third World frame is to move into another space to intercept feminism's “Star Wars” and create new galaxies. This extraterrestrial collectivity might be guided by those who recognize feminism's energy in less predictable non-US/us spaces and places. But for those who prefer a worldly domain, the current despair and pessimism about feminism and its theory might be reimagined as a redirection away from white feminism to a global feminism. Women of color and lesbian women of all “races” are already engaged in radical redefinition rather than in nostalgia for what once was, and they have recharged feminism's batteries. White feminism is in crisis, not feminism itself.

Notes

1. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, “Practicing Conflict in Feminist Theory,” Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 382.

2. Betsy Draine, “Refusing the Wisdom of Solomon: Some Recent Feminist Literary Theory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 15, No. 1 (1989), 145, n.3; 146, n.4.

3. Draine, p. 169.

4. Chela Sandoval, unpublished dissertation cited in Katie King, “Producing Sex, Theory, and Culture: Gay/Straight Remappings in Contemporary Feminism,” in Hirsch and Keller, p. 95, n.1. See also Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders, 10 (Spring 1991), 1-24.

5. Hazel Carby, “White Woman Listen,” in The Empire Strikes Back (London: Hutchinson, 1982); Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, “Challenging Imperial Feminism,” Feminist Review, 14 (1984); Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1982); Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, eds., Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (New York: Anchor Press, 1981); and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Massachusetts: Persephone Press, 1981).

6. Michele Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1990), p. 222.

7. See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs, 5, No. 4 (1980), 631-60. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).

8. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 86.

9. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London and New Delhi: Zed Books, 1986), p. 5.

10. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), p. vii, and Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique, 7 (Fall 1987), 119-56.

11. Jayawardena, p. 2.

12. See, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), and Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

13. The quotation appears in Mary Childers and bell hooks, “A Conversation about Race and Class,” in Hirsh and Keller, p. 66.

14. Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich, Women in the Global Factory (Boston: South End Press, 1983), p. 24.

15. For the concept of speaking along side, see Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 101.