SOURCE: Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Relational Epistemology and the Question of Anglo-American Feminist Criticism.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 12, no. 2 (fall 1993): 247-61.

[In the following essay, Friedman analyzes the dialectical implications of the term “Anglo-American feminist criticism” in Sexual/Textual Politics, surveying the American feminist/academic milieu.]

Is there an Anglo-American feminist criticism? The question of this forum contains a host of other questions about the meaning of the question itself. What does “Anglo-American” mean in the context of feminist criticism? Does it imply a “school,” with a coherent system of ideas, common project, and related methodologies? Or does it more loosely suggest a confederation of “family resemblances” based in two cultures whose dominant language is English? Does the term imply a specific body of critics who identify themselves as “Anglo-American feminists”? Or is “Anglo-American” a term applied to certain feminist critics after the fact, as descriptor of what has unself-consciously evolved? Who uses the term? In what context and for what purpose? Since categories inevitably highlight some and mute others in the pool to be described, who and what are emphasized or suppressed in this name, “Anglo-American”? In the context of the politics of location, what is the relevance to the question of my status as a white, middle-class American feminist critic who received a B.A. in 1965 and a Ph.D. in 1973, began teaching at Brooklyn College, CUNY, in the heady days of Open Admissions, and then in 1975 joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the English Department and the Women's Studies Program?

Toril Moi may well have been the first to foreground the term in Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), a book whose dialectical project and organization establish “Anglo-American Feminist Criticism” (Part I) as the thesis, “French Feminist Theory” (Part II) as the antithesis, and Kristeva (Chapter 8) as the implied synthesis that moves beyond the inadequacies of the prior positions and occupies the endpoint of the text's teleological progression. Moi—the Norwegian theorist who worked for years in the British academic system and recently moved to the United States on the currents of Britain's Thatcher-induced brain drain—uses the term “Anglo-American” not as a participant, but as an observer, as the one outside the system who will articulate its theoretical paradigms and historical evolution.¹

Moi's accuracy as summarizer and historian does not concern me here (both aspects of the book have been critiqued elsewhere). What interests me at the moment is how the term “Anglo-American” appears to have been born out of the necessity of dialectical contradiction and process—out of Moi's version of the agon between what she and many others have seen as a national and geographic schism in feminist criticism and theory. Most often, that split involves just two national paradigms: French and American feminist criticism. But Moi retains the binary at the same time that she introduces a third party, Britain. Three decidedly different cultures become two: French and Anglo-American. The Anglo in the Anglo-American is so severely elided in the book that Mary Ellmann's early Thinking about Women (1968) is made to stand for Anglo feminist criticism in general, a representation that is highly inadequate. “Anglo-American” comes into being in relation to “French” as a result, in other words, of the need to define an opposition in dialectical terms. Given Moi's condescension toward the (Anglo-)American and valorization of the French, her binary for feminist criticism reduces itself to “French” and “Not-French.” Borrowing from Irigaray, I might say that Moi sees only “one” where there are (many) more than “two.”²

This dialectical reductionism is rampant among critics who attempt to summarize the history and theory of feminist criticism. Distilling the complex history of feminist criticism into a narrative of two antagonists violates the historical specificities of feminist criticisms as they have developed in many parts of the world. Not only is “American” feminist criticism different from “French” and “Anglo” feminist criticisms, but the feminist criticisms in these three countries are not themselves monolithic—indeed, they are often bitterly divided. As a materialist feminist, Monique Wittig attacks the concepts of repressed femininity forged by Cixous and Irigaray. The Lacanian feminist slant of the British journal m/f is worlds apart from the feminist work in the New Left Review. The proliferation of methodologies and theories in American feminist criticism is dizzying (if not dazzling), where deep divisions among feminists often arise over issues of poststructuralist theory, race, religion, and sexuality. Feminist criticism in all three countries also regularly combines questions of gender with different critical methodologies—such as reader response, psychoanalysis, textual analysis, archival archaeology, deconstruction, new historicism, and cultural studies. Moreover, the narrative of “Anglo-American” and “French” feminist criticism in opposition erases the stories of vigorous feminist criticisms and literary movements that have developed in many other parts of the world: Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, the Caribbean, South Africa, Sweden, and so forth.

As Deborah Cameron and Marilyn Butler both suggest in this forum, national “tags” for feminist criticisms become convenient geographical tropes for differences that are fundamentally theoretical, methodological, and political.³ The categories “Anglo-American” and “French” for feminist criticism not only obscure differences within each country, but also suggest national culture as the shaping force when politics, theoretical paradigms, methodologies, and disciplinary backgrounds might be just as or even more significant. The schism Moi, among others, identifies is more usefully understood as a split between poststructuralist and various other paradigms, representatives of which exist in Britain, France, and the United States. Not only do some American and British feminists use poststructuralist ideas originating in France, but many self-consciously weave poststructuralism with other theories and methodologies to construct a negotiated, hybridized criticism.⁴

This is not to say that the specific historical and cultural circumstances of production, dissemination, and consumption are irrelevant to the variations of feminisms. Any criticism contains within itself the story of its own production and use that is inseparable from its historical conditions. Pedagogically speaking, even national stereotypes can sometimes serve as a useful beginning for mapping feminist criticism in the United States, Britain, and France: the American interest in the self; the British emphasis on class; the French focus on sexuality and style. (Young British and American girls have been warned for centuries to beware the dangers and dissolution of “French novels” and “French kissing”; is the resistance to “French” feminism from some “Anglo-American” feminists a new strain of the puritanical and work-oriented Anglo response to “foreign” ideas?) But national identities, however convenient as tags or stereotypical beginnings, should not substitute for more precise and complex narratives of the production of theoretical, political, and methodological similarities and differences in specific places and times in the history of feminist criticism.

What these thoughts add up to so far is a deep suspicion of the category “Anglo-American feminist criticism.” Its creation and use are linked to the problematic narrative of the agon between “French” and “American” criticism, so patently inadequate and reductionistic as history. As it is used, it does not appear to signify a coherent and consistent theory or methodology; nor does it refer to a group of critics who identify themselves as “Anglo-American.” As Laura Doan notes in this forum, British and American feminists are frequently uninformed about each other's work. As a category, the definition of “Anglo-American feminist criticism” is imprecise. If it includes all those feminist critics practicing in the United States and Britain, then it has no theoretical coherence since the feminist criticisms in both countries are quite diverse. If it includes all those feminist critics who are not “French”—that is, poststructuralist—then the national tag is misleading since many American and British feminist critics are poststructuralist. The historical conditions of American and British academia are so different—as Marilyn Butler and Cora Kaplan have ably described in this forum—that the category appears seriously ahistorical. And given the absence of a direct and material coalition between American and British feminist critics, “Anglo-American feminist criticism” seems to be dead in the water as a useful category.

However, if we work with a relational notion of what a category is, “Anglo-American feminist criticism” may begin to take on some coherence. In the politics of definition, the usefulness of a category depends on the vantage point of its formation and use. Categories are potentially fluid sets rather than essences, sets that can be deployed differently depending upon the politics of location and positionality. For example, if we regard “white people” in relation to each other, then the term means little, obscuring the differences of class, gender, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, and so forth. But in relation to people of color in the United States, the category “white” has real, material meaning as racial privilege. Conversely, the term “women of color” in relation to African American, Asian American, Native American, or Chicana, is a category that threatens to obscure the very real differences among women of these cultures. But in relation to “white women,” the notion of “women of color” has a reality based in racial difference and potential coalition. In relation to each other, Asian Americans are Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Filipino Americans (and so forth); but in relation to African Americans and European Americans, they are Asian Americans. In relation to non-Indians, Leslie Marmon Silko and Paula Gunn Allen are Native Americans; in relation to Native Americans, they are members of the Laguna Pueblo; in relation to each other, they are individual women who characterize the Laguna Pueblo culture in startlingly different ways.

Rather than establishing “Anglo-American feminist criticism” as a fixed entity with a set definition, we can test its usefulness by thinking relationally. The category “Anglo-American” is not very useful for an examination of British and American feminists in relation to each other because the differences seem overwhelming. In relation to French feminist criticism, the term “Anglo-American” begins to take on some meaning, albeit an imprecise one because so many British and American feminists use French poststructuralist theory. But in relation to the “Third World” (itself a category useful only in a relational sense),⁵ the categories Anglo-American and Western gain viability because of the material and ideological differences in First and Third World intellectual arenas. This I took to be the great lesson of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1981 essay “French Feminism in an International Frame.”⁶ Within the West, in 1981 the schism in feminist criticism between the poststructuralists and the non-poststructuralists was in its early, most bitter phase. But in relation to the subaltern—the women Spivak invokes, such as the Sudanese women who undergo material, not textual, clitoridectomy and the washerwomen on her grandfather's estate in India—the division that was tearing apart Western feminist critics was greatly overshadowed by the commonality of their textual and academic projects. Similarity and difference are not fixed categories. Rather, they are relative to the position of the observer. The very point of Spivak's essay doubles back into a relational self-critique. In relation to Western feminists, Spivak is a Third World woman; in relation to the washerwomen on her grandfather's estate, Spivak is an upper caste and class woman trained and working in the First World. Within a fluid epistemology, all sets of relations must be suspended and held simultaneously as potentially useful in different situations.

Within the context of this relational epistemology, I find myself asking anew, is there an “Anglo-American feminist criticism”? If I try to keep in mind the vast differences in feminisms around the world, I notice some immediate “family resemblances”⁷ between British and American feminist criticisms that suggest important commonalities. First, Western culture—with its privilege and contradictory status for women—forms the primary arena in which we both work. Second, English is overwhelmingly our native language (with the exception of some native and immigrant feminists in the U.S. and some immigrant feminists in Britain). Given English's status as the lingua franca of the globe at this moment in history, this native language is an important privilege we share. Third, British literature still forms the core of the graduate curriculum for those with Ph.D.'s in English literature in both Britain and the United States, a foundation metonymically evident in the nearly universal requirement of a course in Shakespeare as part of the undergraduate English major. Obviously, many feminist critics in both countries work in non-English languages; and many, particularly in the States, specialize in American literature. But most feminist critics write and teach about literature written in English, a canon within which British literature is still the privileged field. (Like the formation of an American literary tradition in the nineteenth century, American literary criticism—including feminist criticism—exhibits many of the defensively independent, inevitably entangled, and deeply ambivalent patterns of postcoloniality.)

As a fourth basis for family resemblance, American and British feminists share Virginia Woolf, whose A Room of One's Own is arguably the single most important text in the formation of “Anglo-American” feminist criticism. No doubt, the Americans and the British have read Woolf differently: in the United States, Woolf was from the beginning widely revered and taught; in Britain, according to Jane Marcus,⁸ the Marxist imprint on feminist criticism often led to her dismissal as an elitist snob—so much so that her centennial went virtually unmarked in Britain, while it was widely celebrated with conferences and volumes in the United States. For American feminists, Woolf's materialist analysis of “genius” in A Room of One's Own justified their early resistance to the formalism of New Criticism and the reintroduction of historical, political, and biographical analysis into the study of texts. It provided as well the occasion for Alice Walker's famous 1974 extension of Woolf's class and gender analysis into the arena of race, in “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens.”⁹ By the end of the 1970s, Woolf's formalist propositions about a materially based feminine aesthetic and an androgynous creativity had spawned vast numbers of gynocritical readings. (The irony of Moi's opening attack on American feminist criticism in Sexual/Textual Politics is that she assumed that Elaine Showalter's sharp critique of Woolf in A Literature of Their Own was characteristic of American feminist criticism in general, when in fact Showalter's attack shocked most American feminists by its vitriolic idiosyncracy.)¹⁰

A fifth commonality that suggests the viability of the category Anglo-American feminist criticism is that both British and American feminist critics experienced the influential waves of poststructuralist theory emanating from France in the mid- to late-1970s and gathering momentum in the 1980s. In the U.S., this changed the map of feminist criticism dramatically and threatened to dissolve the sense of a common feminist project that had loosely held together (not without conflict) the different types of feminist criticism and feminists during the 1970s. On the one hand, poststructuralist feminists—whose initial or primary fields were often French literature—found the problematizing of language and subjectivity exciting and richly suggestive for feminism because of its critique of phallo(go)centrism and the unitary (male) subject. In relation to their European masters (Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, et al.), their non-poststructuralist colleagues seemed mired in naive, unsophisticated, and regressive essentialisms.

On the other hand, non-poststructuralist feminist critics continued to find challenges in the analysis of representations of gender and in the gynocritical task of recovering, reassessing, and forging a female literary tradition, interpreting women's texts in their historical, literary, and biographical contexts.¹¹ Women of color confronted white women, and lesbian women challenged heterosexual feminists with the exclusions of their traditions, much as women in general had confronted men about the male canon. But in relation to poststructuralist feminists, they shared the task of deformation and reformation of a literary canon. In relation to a tenuously shared feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic political practice, their post-structuralist colleagues seemed mired in incomprehensible, elitist language that (re)marginalized women and fostered an ahistorical, utopian, and regressive essentialism that ignored differences among women and the political urgency of feminism.¹²

In the culture wars among feminist critics in the American academy of the early 1980s, the sense of a common feminist agenda seemed to be shattered. To non-poststructuralist feminists, poststructuralist feminists seemed to have more in common with their Lacanian or deconstructionist male colleagues than they did with other feminists. To poststructuralist feminists, non-poststructuralist feminists seemed resistant to new ideas and riddled with a traditional form of American anti-intellectualism. By the mid-1980s, however, poststructuralism had so pervaded the American academy that many American feminists became active negotiators between post-structuralist and non-poststructuralist paradigms and methodologies. The Americanization of French poststructuralist feminism accelerated to produce what I see as a vibrant and richly complex American feminist critical scene.¹³

From what Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler suggest in this forum, similar tensions and patterns have accompanied the introduction and Anglicanization of French poststructuralism into British feminism. Where the American tendency to insist on concepts of the self, identity, and agency reconfigured Derridian deconstruction, for example, into a strategy for reading the author's deconstruction of patriarchal binaries, the British focus on class and materialist analysis has led to the foregrounding of the Foucauldian and Althusserian poststructuralism evident in the work of critics such as Michèle Barrett, Catherine Belsey, Chris Weedon. Annette Kuhn, Griselda Pollock, and Rozika Parker.¹⁴ In both Britain and the United States, the influence of ideas from France has produced narratives of resistance, anxiety, excitement, conflict, adaptation, and appropriation. (In contrast, the influence of American and British feminists on the French poststructuralists seems relatively negligible or unacknowledged.)

In relation to feminist criticisms in other parts of the world—not only in France, but even more so in places like Hong Kong, New Delhi, or Lagos—the category “Anglo-American feminist criticism” becomes meaningful. Depending upon one's point of reference, the five continuities I have identified above can be supplemented by many more family resemblances. But in relation to each other, British and American feminist criticism reflect the specificities of their different locations. As Kaplan and Butler demonstrate in this issue, the conditions for the production and consumption of feminist criticism in Britain and the United States are significantly different and consequently inflect the work itself in important ways. They have briefly described aspects of the British academy, influenced as it has been by the British Marxist intelligentsia and Thatcherism; I would like to conclude with contrapuntal references to the conditions in the American academy—as I have experienced and observed them—that have marked American feminist criticism differently.

American feminist criticism emerged out of a period of social and political ferment rooted in a broadly based, grass-roots feminist movement, which in turn arose out of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 1970s (movements that were themselves rooted in a longstanding American reform tradition). Other social forces converged to make the snowballing spread of feminist ideas possible, but in many ways, the powerful, ethically compelling discourse of the Civil Rights movement has dominated the progressive movements of the past thirty years. Itself not monolithic, this complex discourse shattered the veneer of American self-satisfaction intensified by the victory in World War II and a decade of prosperity and unprecedented American world power. The discourse of Civil Rights (in spite of its internal contradictions represented by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X) insisted upon the categories of liberty, equality, justice, self-determination, and opportunity—the categories of liberal humanism that progressive intellectuals in France and Britain were rejecting, especially as they were embodied in existentialism. As they had done in the nineteenth century, emergent feminists began (once again) to apply the discourse of Civil Rights to women. The emphasis on liberty and selfhood in the recent wave of American feminism may owe as much to the centrality of race in American culture and the significance of the Civil Rights movement as it does to the middle-class origins of the contemporary movement. (One could argue that the British Empire makes race equally important in Britain, but perhaps the distance of the colonies allowed for a greater displacement of the issue and a concomitant emphasis on class.) The anti-war movement, combined as it was with the Free Speech and educational reform movements on campuses, intensified the drive to question authority and the status quo.

Feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s was by no means limited to college and university campuses. But at least two factors contributed to making higher education a (not the) key site of feminist struggle. First, the political agitation of the 1960s had a strong generational component, with young people, congregated in large numbers on campuses, challenging the authority of their elders (the draft and the system of student deferments were key elements). Second, the United States has a tradition of mass higher education that goes back to the public land grant institutions established during the nineteenth century. After World War II, the percentage of Americans attending postsecondary schools went up and has continued to climb; postsecondary education has increasingly become a necessity for a minimal middle-class existence. The contrast with Britain is striking, where the more rigorous secondary schools, the specialized curriculum of higher education, and the dominance of an elite university system contributed to a much smaller proportional matriculation. (When I lived in Hong Kong in 1970, I was startled to see that none of the many upper middle-class British women I met had any postsecondary school education, a pattern that would have been inconceivable in the States.) The vast populations of American colleges and universities made the campus an inevitable site of transition and change for young adults and increasing numbers of returning women students.

Women's studies—of which feminist criticism is a part—developed widely on American campuses as the educational arm of the women's movement. However tenuous and vulnerable, women's studies programs and courses—interdisciplinary and discipline-based—proliferated rapidly, most often stronger and better funded at the less prestigious institutions. America's Oxbridge—the elite private institutions like Harvard—were (and to a great extent still are) highly resistant to women's studies; leadership consequently came often from feminists in public institutions. The history of my own university was not unusual.¹⁵ Pressured by a coalition of feminist faculty, lecturers, and students, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents mandated the development of women's studies in 1973, which resulted in the founding of women's studies programs at Madison and many other of the UW system campuses. During this period, many feminist academics were also involved in community activism off campus. But as women's studies programs were established, feminists increasingly found that instituting women's studies in an academic setting with enough legitimacy to attract students and warrant majors, faculty, and budget meant putting one hundred percent of their energy into their campus activism. The political work of academic feminists became ever more firmly centered in the institutions they sought to change: in the classroom, in the research that both fed the classroom and offered the possibility of job security, and in the administration of institutions that had marginalized and exploited women.

Here the different demographics of American and British academics seem particularly relevant. The sheer number of universities, four- and two-year colleges, and community colleges (many of them expanding) meant that jobs were available, however hard they had to be fought for. In relation to established disciplines, women's studies is still vulnerable, underfunded, and understaffed—and on some campuses under constant threat of erasure. But in relation to women's studies in other countries, American academic feminists have gained a stronger foothold, a genuine material base of operations in the academy that has had a major impact on the curriculum—through separate programs, discipline-based courses, and mainstreaming. American feminists have had a degree of access to vast numbers of post-secondary students that has not been possible in other countries. Community activists have also been engaged in feminist education outside the classroom. But various factors in the educational system and society at large have made it possible for (overworked, exhausted, and courageous) teachers to materialize a feminist mission inside the academy.

To someone of my academic generation, this has meant that my main political work is inside the academy, not in the community, where it originally began. I do not feel the nostalgia that Cora Kaplan voices in this issue for the mixture of community and academic activism she experienced in Britain. As a community activist in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I often spoke to or with tiny groups of women who already agreed with me, unable to get an audience of the “unconverted”; I sat through endless meetings that led nowhere because of factionalization and leftist purism. I remember my shock when I stepped into my first women's studies lecture hall in 1975. I faced some 150 expectant women, most of them eager to hear what I had to say. Just for a moment, it felt like a rally. This sensation faded immediately because to be a successful teacher in the academy, I found that lectures cannot be rally speeches; teaching involves not exhorting, but challenging diverse people to question and think. For me, it means charting areas of new inquiry, not presenting students with a nugget of political truth. Within the academy, I learned to define my political work differently than I had in the community—not so much as advocacy for a specific cause as contributing to the deformation and reformation of knowledge and knowing. I don't long for the days when I futilely attempted to set up a women's health collective because I know that I have been much more effective in promoting societal change by working within the academy as an academic feminist. I see my efforts as complementary to those of many feminists outside the academy who have worked hard to institutionalize rape crisis centers, shelters for battered women, women's counseling centers, lesbian centers, and advocacy groups such as the Women's Equity League or the National Women's Political Caucus.

For myself and many feminists like me in the academy, the constant contradiction of our position is evident in our attempt to combine a radical analysis of culture with a reformist activism. Within this context, the split between “the political and the professional” that Kaplan found her American students lament contains for me both an element of unreality and a warning. The unreality resides in my experience of the split as an utterly false binary. Institutions of higher education in the United States are major socializing forces in American society. They are not ivory towers exempt from or irrelevant to the power relations of society at large (this was a major lesson of the anti-war movement). Consequently, to engage in the attempt to transform the academy is, for me, political work of material tangibility and importance. The warning, however, addresses a potential problem that always exists in tension with the commitment to change: that is, the slide into careerism. Success within the system one is trying to change inevitably contains the possibility of co-optation. Is the price of the institutionalization of American women's studies the loss of its political and moral direction, many ask? What, conversely, is the price of remaining outside the academic system? Leaving the educational institutions in the hands of traditionalists? I prefer to live and work within this contradiction, in a constant state of vigilance, where decisions about what I do, when, and for whom must be continually subject to scrutiny.

The success of American women's studies has also meant the development of generational differences and tension over these issues of the political and the academic. As I see it, two competing forces within academic feminism during the 1980s created a fascinating and richly productive crossfire. First, feminists of color pioneered in a major theoretical advance by insisting that gender cannot be isolated from other systems of oppression without reproducing racism, classism, and ethnocentrism. The emergence of “woman,” “women,” and “gender” as legitimate categories of inquiry in the American academy is a stupendous achievement whose difficult birth in the 1960s and early 1970s should not be minimized. But as an endpoint, these categories became inadequate. Women of color in the late 1970s and 1980s led the way in developing an integrated analysis of gender, race, class, sexual preference, ethnicity, and national origin. The moral and political discourse of the Civil Rights movement, so important to the rise of the second wave of American feminism, returned, intensified and newly configured, in the often angry, compelling analysis and intellectual activism of these women.¹⁶

At the same time that this discourse of race, class, and gender was reshaping the map of American academic feminism, poststructuralist feminism arrived from France to alter fundamentally the nature of theoretical feminist discourse. In the blend and clash with American feminist criticisms, particularly the experientially based and ethical/political criticism of women of color, French poststructuralism underwent a process of Americanization that accounts for some of the difference between British and American feminist criticisms.¹⁷

In the intersection of these two vital advances to feminist thinking in the 1980s, a whole generation of feminist students grew up in the academy under the tutelage of the feminist teachers who had fought to hire more women and establish women's studies in the 1970s. Unlike their teachers, many of these students had no activist experience at all, either inside or outside the academy. Particularly for many graduate students, the introduction to feminism was often intellectual. Instead of fighting to bring feminism into the academy as the earlier generation had done, many of the younger women had to struggle to bring feminism to their personal lives. Many believed that this was a “postfeminist” era, with feminism an (embarrassing) anachronism. The heady domain of poststructuralist theory proved particularly attractive for budding feminist critics, as a source of undeniable excitement, prestige, and career advancement. Poststructuralist theories of the non-referentiality of language, the undecidability of meaning, the impossibility of agency, the death of the author, the irrelevance of identity reinforced the tendency of the younger generation to engage in intellectual “play” with feminist ideas. In the inevitable tensions of intergenerational relations, the older feminist faculty often felt themselves pushed aside by the more theoretically sophisticated younger generation. The younger feminists in turn sometimes felt urged to a false “sisterhood,” infantilized, denied the space to grow and be different from, even surpass, the elder generation.¹⁸

Reaganism and the rise of the New Right was relatively slow to hit the academy, which had remained an enclave of steady, if conflicted and uneven, change in comparison to the rest of society. By the late 1980s, the civil rights of women and minorities were under severe attack, as were the progressive changes within the academy. Combined with the influence of women of color, this attack has dramatically changed the stance of young feminists in the academy. For some ten years, I seldom heard a peep from my students—especially graduate students—about “the political.” By the early 1990s a whole generation of feminist students awakened to the reality of reactionary change—the potential loss of such fundamental rights as abortion, the dismantling of affirmative action, the reinstitution of traditional curricula, the threat to women's studies.¹⁹ This is the context into which I would put the question that Kaplan, when newly returned from Britain, heard from her Rutgers students and reports in this issue: “How can I be political and professional?” My answer to my own students asking similar questions is not based on nostalgia for the American 1960s nor on longing for the British left experience. I see instead my undergraduate women's studies majors often responding to their teachers' academic/political activism in the classroom by volunteering at the shelter for battered women, organizing for Indian treaty rights, planning careers as feminist lawyers, doctors, social workers, and therapists. I try to communicate to my graduate students a sense of urgency about the political nature of all teaching. Professional work can be political/feminist work, especially if the temptation toward individualistic careerism can be resisted.

The purpose of this quick survey of the American feminist/academic scene has been to outline, in reference to other essays in this forum, some of the historically specific conditions that make American and British feminist criticism different (the precise nature of that difference belongs to a different essay). This narrative of difference raises the question once again of what meaning “Anglo-American feminist criticism” could possibly have. In answer, I return to the concept of a relational epistemology. Giving up the notion of a fixed identity for the category “Anglo-American feminist criticism” frees us to recognize the term in its multiple, flexible, permeable, and relational meanings that on the one hand can point to difference, on the other to continuity, depending upon the point of reference. And as Holly Laird writes, “no matter what its problems, ‘Anglo-American feminist criticism’ has become meaningful … because [among other reasons] critics have used the term over and over again—it means what has been said both for and against it and ‘lives’ because of what it has ‘done’ for various critics.”²⁰

Notes

1. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985). The chapter on Kristeva concludes Part II on French criticism, but is the text's privileged theory. Moi's special affinity for Kristeva is evident in her identification of both Kristeva and herself as “strange women”: Kristeva as Bulgarian in France; herself as “a Norwegian teaching French literature in England” (pp. xiv, 150-51). However, I agree with Holly Laird (letter to author, 24 July 1992), who suggests that Moi's materialist critique of both Anglo-American and French feminist criticism represents another implied teleology in the text.

2. In “This Sex Which Is Not One,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 23-33, and Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), Luce Irigaray critiques phallogocentric theories of sexual difference as ideological constructions based on the presumption of a single sex.

3. I refer in this paper to early versions of papers that Laura Doan sent me in our first correspondence about this forum: the 1989 MLA papers by Marilyn Butler, Deborah Cameron, and Cora Kaplan and a paper by Janet Todd submitted subsequent to MLA. While these papers have been revised and expanded since the 1989 MLA, they still address the issues that drew my attention in the earlier versions and to which I allude in this paper.

4. See, for example, the historicized psychoanalytic criticism of Margaret Homans's Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); the deconstructive African-American gynocriticism of Valerie Smith's “Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the ‘Other,’” in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 38-57; the materialist narratology of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); and the Bakhtinian gynocriticism of Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition,” in Wall's Changing Our Own Words, pp. 16-37.

5. See Chandra Talpade Mohanty's argument that “Third World women” represents not a constituency but rather an “imagined community,” in “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 4-5. My formulation of relationality was drafted before I saw Mohanty's “relational” analysis of Third World women (see especially pp. 12-13); her use of the term emphasizes her call to see Third World women's struggles in relation to their other oppressions based on class, (post)colonialism, religion, national origin, etc.

6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 134-53.

7. I am adapting Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of “family resemblances,” his metaphor for categorical continuities, in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). My thanks to Eric Rothstein for introducing me to the term in relation to literary history and to Heather DuBrow for alerting me to Alastair Fowler's adaptation of the term in Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 40-44. What I mean by “family resemblances” is the tendency of some “traits” to (re)appear for cultural and historical reasons at the same time that individual differences remain important.

8. Conversation with author.

9. Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens,” in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), pp. 230-43.

10. See Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, pp. 2-8, where she associates Elaine Showalter's discomfort with Woolf's abandonment of realism with “Lukács' Stalinist views of the ‘reactionary’ nature of modernist writing” (p. 6); Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 263-97.

11. I am dissatisfied with the categories of poststructuralist and non-poststructuralist feminist criticism because they imply a binary where a multiplicity of theory and practice exists. But I am even more dissatisfied with the common opposition between poststructuralist feminism and liberal humanist feminism (see Moi, for example) because this formulation almost always privileges poststructuralism as sophisticated and revolutionary in opposition to a naive and regressive humanism. Moreover, this binary (sometimes also termed poststructuralism vs. cultural feminism) erases the degree to which various non-poststructuralist feminisms also began in critique of a totalizing, androcentric humanism and remained tied to other kinds of radical tradition and analysis.

12. For a sampling of texts authored or edited by American critics that variously narrate, debate, and/or perform the history of these interactions, see Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics; Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Shari Benstock, ed., Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Spivak, In Other Worlds; Wall, ed., Changing Our Own Words; Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (London: Routledge, 1989); Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Conflicts in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Jane Gallop, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1991).

13. See, for example, the hybridized texts mentioned in note 4; Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and my extended discussion of the Americanization of French poststructuralist theory in “Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the Author,” in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 146-80.

14. See, for example, Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980); Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); and Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988).

15. For two overviews of the early development of women's studies in the United States, see Florence Howe, Myths of Coeducation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), and Marilyn Boxer, “For and about Women: The Theory and Practice of Women's Studies in the United States,” Signs, 7 (Spring 1982), 661-95.

16. A sampling of particularly influential texts includes Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (1977), in Showalter, The New Feminist Criticism, pp. 168-85; Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back (Watertown, Massachusetts: Persephone Press, 1981); Gloria T. Hull, et al., eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1982); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1984); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens; Alice Yun Chai, “Toward a Holistic Paradigm for Asian American Women's Studies: A Synthesis of Feminist Scholarship and Women of Color's Feminist Politics,” Women's Studies International Forum, 8, No. 1 (1985), 59-66; Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Spivak, In Other Worlds; and Mohanty, et al., eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Many influential white feminists responded quickly to the call of women of color; see, for example, Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (New York: Norton, 1986).

17. I address this process of Americanization in “Post/Poststructuralist Feminist Criticism: The Politics of Recuperation and Negotiation,” in New Literary History, 22 (Spring 1991), 465-90.

18. For discussion of intergenerational feminist conflict, see, for example, Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen Moglen, “Competition and Feminism: Conflicts for Academic Women,” Signs, 12, No. 3 (1987), 493-511.

19. As I write in November of 1992, I am eager to see what happens to this campus-based feminist activism with the defeat of George Bush and the promise of reproductive control for women with access to health care in the Clinton presidency. Scarce economic resources and the political volatility around issues of the family, sexuality, and reproduction suggest a need for continued activism.

20. Letter to author, 24 July 1992.

I would like to thank Laura Doan for asking that I write this essay and, for their insightful criticisms of an earlier version, Holly Laird and Heather DuBrow.