[In the following review, McCallum outlines Sexual/Textual Politics, praising the work as illuminating and provocative.]

Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics takes as its theme “the methods, principles and politics” (xiii) that inform contemporary feminist literary theory. This provocative and wide-ranging book is not concerned with a conventional survey of contributions to feminist critical practice. Rather, it is concerned with a critical reexamination or decoding of the numerous theoretical models and political strategies that underpin received feminist discourse. Moi argues that both the theoretical and practical limitations of feminist criticism derive from a weakening of critical discussion within the women's movement. Once subversive emancipatory slogans such as “sisterhood” and “being a woman” have been unexpectedly co-opted and neutralized by a homogenizing humanist/essentialist discourse.

The first section of Moi's book—a lucid and concise account of Anglo-American empirical studies—will be quite familiar to readers of Signs. Rather less familiar is her close reading of the new French feminist texts in the second half of the volume. She begins by emphasizing that an empirically minded methodology has stood in the way of a more complex and self-reflexive theoretical discourse in Anglo-American feminist criticism. Ample confirmation of this is to be found in Ellen Moers's Literary Women (1976), whose organizational framework does not go beyond the usual boundaries of Anglo-American empiricism. A similar difficulty occurs in Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977), which privileges a “realistic” mimesis over Virginia Woolf's modernism. In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar provide what appears to be a somewhat different approach. To a surprising degree, however, they reintroduce a slightly modified empiricist position in the form of an unself-conscious “genetic” historicism. Their nostalgia for origins and preference for narrative homogeneity turns out to be symptomatic of “the desire to write the narrative of a mighty ‘Ur-woman’” (67). Although Moi sees the solid and important accomplishments of Anglo-American feminist texts, she wishes to question the unacknowledged empiricist assumptions that inform them.

For Moi, what distinguishes new French feminism is that it is based on a particular theoretical discourse. Like poststructuralist thinkers (Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, et al.), Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva conceive of the literary work of art as textuality, or écriture, and not as a simple organic unity. However, the theoretical awareness of the French feminists does not blind Moi to the shortcomings of their writings—on the contrary, she aims at a critique and reevaluation of their texts in the light of a more committed sexual/textual politics. Cixous's euphoric desire to exalt woman's writing as an exercise in sensory intensities and unbounded flux culminates in a return to an “original” primordial mother. Such mythological and elementary archetypes ultimately reduce the heterogeneity of her utopian texts to the bad immediacy of the Imaginary. Much the same elimination of disturbing rifts and discontinuities is to be detected in other new French feminist texts. While Irigaray is able to show that the specular structure of patriarchal discourse systematically downplays woman's voice, she makes “power … a question of philosophy alone” and patriarchy “a univocal, non-contradictory force” (147). This metaphysical essentialism turns away from a materialist analysis of power; it also turns away from a concrete historical/political analysis of patriarchal authority. But matters are quite different with Kristeva's more promising semiotics. Struck by Kristeva's poststructuralist critique of the centered subject, Moi awards pride of place to the unsettling disruptions and breaks of her sujet en procès (though not without some hesitations about the later phase). Here the polysemic “free play of the signifier” disrupts “the hierarchical closure imposed on meaning and language” (172). Thus, unlike the empiricism of Anglo-American feminism and unlike the essentialism of new French feminism, the decentered subject of Kristevian semiotics would appear to offer a way out of the impasse of contemporary feminist literary theory.

One may quarrel with some of Moi's assumptions (might not an overemphasis on a disrupted subject run the risk of relinquishing the moment of female subjectivity altogether?), but it cannot be denied that her theoretical defense of a modified Kristevian semiotics is extraordinarily suggestive. She sheds much light on various problems unarticulated or elided in feminist literary theory—particularly the essentialist conception of the female subject as a substantial “I” supposedly unmarked by history. That is a considerable achievement.