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PDF file for Part 1 of Clare Hemmings’ Why Stories Matter is in the working directory.
library(pdftools)Warning: package 'pdftools' was built under R version 4.2.2Using poppler version 22.04.0hemProg <- pdf_text("hemmingsProgress.pdf")
hemProg [1] "Duke University Press\n\n\n\nChapter Title: PROGRESS\n\n\nBook Title: Why Stories Matter\nBook Subtitle: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory\nBook Author(s): CLARE HEMMINGS\nPublished by: Duke University Press. (2011)\nStable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1220mp6.5\n\n\nJSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide\nrange of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and\nfacilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.\n\n\nYour use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at\nhttps://about.jstor.org/terms\n\n\n\n\n Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to\n Why Stories Matter\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[2] " P A R T O N E\n\n\n\n\nThis content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[3] "This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[4] " P R O G R E S S\n\n\n\n\n ∞\n The following statement from Feminist Theory\n is as uncontroversial as it is typical of accounts\n that describe Western feminist theory’s devel-\n opment over time:\n There is no disputing that feminist theory, methodology\n and practice have undergone substantial change since the\n heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pressure from\n within and outside and rapidly changing contexts have\n resulted in a multiplicity of theoretical and practical ap-\n proaches to the issue of how to challenge and change the\n gendered nature of everyday life. (Feminist Theory 2003)∞\n\n It is self-evident—‘‘there is no disputing’’—that the\n last four decades of feminist theorizing, together with\n the uneven but tangible emergence of academic femi-\n nism, have resulted in an increased range of theoret-\n ical frameworks to draw on, as well as an increased\n number of feminist texts published. It is not only the\n proliferation of approaches and methods that we can\n be certain about, but, as the extract below makes\n\n\n\n\nThis content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[5] "32 clear, the displacement of one set of approaches by others, the move from\n natural, essential truths to the uncertain pleasures and dangers of post-\nChapter One\n\n\n\n structuralist approaches:\n As we all know, the study of gender and sexualities in the humanities and social\n sciences of the past 15 years has been characterized by the prominence of post-\n structuralist analytical approaches that challenge the biology-based naturalness of\n genders and sexualities, and emphasize, in different ways, the socio-cultural and\n discursive construction of sexual categories and identities. (Nora 2005)\n\n Further, not only do ‘‘we all know’’ that this trajectory accurately describes\n what has happened in the study of gender and sexualities, but we can also all\n agree that such theoretical transformations are in line with, in fact propel,\n transformations in the object of study—gender and sexuality—itself:\n Without question, certain historical developments, technologies and theoretical\n insights have forced gender’s slide from sexed bodies. Ranging from queer fantasy\n and transsexual surgeries to critiques of essentialism, these developments make it\n seem that there is little which is true, fixable or stable about gender meanings.\n (Feminist Theory 2003)\n\n Where we used to accept natural, biological givens, perhaps because\n things were simpler back then, we now need and have theoretical insights\n and practices that are more appropriate to the complex world we currently\n inhabit, one our theoretical insights have played their part in creating. As I\n hope is clear from the extracts I have introduced thus far, such assertions\n about the transformations understood to typify both theory and the world\n it engages (or produces) leave no room for doubt; indeed the more\n assertive the statement—‘‘without question’’—the more singular the story\n about the recent past of Western feminist theory appears to be.\n But what if we do not ‘‘all know’’ the same things about what has\n happened in Western feminist theory’s recent past; what if we were to\n understand the ‘‘we’’ of the address as inaugurated by rather than inaugu-\n rating this repeated certainty? What if we start to dispute that which there\n ‘‘is no disputing’’ and begin to query its relentless rhetoric? What if we ap-\n proach the question of Western feminist theory’s recent past with greater\n hesitancy and ask both what is missed in the certainty of such progress\n narratives and what some of the effects of the same certainty might be?\n What does such incontrovertibility tell us about the present and those\n ‘‘heady days’’ long past, beyond what we are already expected to know?\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[6] "How might the development of a sceptical relationship to what Megan 33\nJones characterizes as ‘‘the conceptual truth-claims of feminist thought’’\n\n\n\n\n Progress\n(1998: 118) provide insights into what these descriptions do and how they\ndo it? As indicated in my introduction, I want to start the analysis of\nWestern feminist storytelling here with a dual approach: on the one hand,\nholding in mind that such narrative insistence can never be entirely accu-\nrate, is always at least contested; and on the other, asking after the work\nthat this narrative momentum effects, what it inculcates, particularly in its\nauthoritatively descriptive guise. In this approach, I have been particularly\ninfluenced by Robyn Wiegman’s careful readings of the multiplicities that\nmake up U.S. academic feminism’s institutional history, and her insistence\nthat singular feminist narratives about that history actively work to de-\npoliticize the field (1999a; 2002; 2004).≤\n In this chapter I extend my line of inquiry by mapping, sceptically,\nWestern feminist progress narratives, with particular attention to how the\nmeaning and momentum of this aspect of Western feminist storytelling is\ntextually secured and mobilized. This first chapter will provide the build-\ning blocks of my subsequent analysis of loss and return narratives, which\nuse similar markers to complicate the story, and reinflect these to different\nends. Let me provide a range of initial examples from some of the journals\nI have analysed to get the discussion underway:\nOver the past decade, general theorists within feminism have developed in-\ncreasingly sophisticated responses to questions about how best to theorize power\nand subjectivity. . . . (Signs 2000)\n\nThe development of Women’s Studies occurs through crucial shifts in the theoret-\nical paradigms of feminism and the political preoccupations of the women’s\nmovement. These shifts have both deconstructed the founding premises of femi-\nnist theory and generated a greater depth to feminist thinking and research.\n(Feminist Review 1999)\n\nDuring the 1970s we could argue straightforwardly that women were margin-\nalized and subordinate—that women lived and suffered under patriarchy. This\nclaim now requires some urgent refiguring in order to move towards a more\nnuanced understanding of how and why marginalization and subordination con-\ntinue and how they were changed. (Feminist Review 2000)\n\nThe breadth of feminist issues is now much broader than ever before and inter-\nsects with a number of theories about gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, class,\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[7] "34 corporeality and popular culture, to name just some areas of current complex\n feminist discussion. (Feminist Theory 2002)\nChapter One\n\n\n\n\n First, the question of universal female subordination is set in focus, then the\n second phase, when eyes are opened for ‘‘the differences of the difference,’’ and a\n third deconstructivist phase where multiple genders, floating gender boundaries\n and the body become the key issues of interest. (Nora 2001)\n\n Identity politics has overcome the homogenizing tendencies of second-wave fem-\n inism by acknowledging the differences among women and, most significantly,\n attacking the hierarchy concealed in the category ‘‘woman’’. (Feminist Theory\n 2000)\n\n The most interesting and far reaching of the rethinking of theoretical frameworks\n and of feminism itself would be the rewriting of the mind-body split and the\n rethinking of the sex/gender distinction. These poststructuralist feminist argu-\n ments had radical consequences for the understanding of the gendered nature of\n knowledges, and even more significant consequences for the ways in which iden-\n tities came to be understood as multiple, unstable positions which could there-\n fore be negotiated and possibly changed. (Australian Feminist Studies 2000)\n\n I have included the above examples all together to give a sense of this\n narrative of progress told across journal sites on either side of the mil-\n lennium as one that is general and repeated. It is, I expect, a story familiar\n to many readers, and one that we are likely to reproduce ourselves in\n teaching or writing contexts. It is a story I was told as a student in the\n mid-1990s, and one I find myself telling students now, whatever my inten-\n tions. In one way or another, through curriculum design, through what is\n included in an ‘‘advanced’’ or ‘‘introductory’’ academic feminist class, or\n through the narratives we produce in lectures or in our readings and\n corrections of student work, we reproduce this understanding of Western\n feminist theory as having progressed, and in a particular manner. We have\n moved from a time when we knew no better, a time when we thought\n ‘‘woman’’ could be the subject and object of liberation, to a more knowing\n time in which we attend to the complexity of local and transnational\n formations of gender and its intersections with other vectors of power.\n Further, in the extracts above, this is a familiar account of the institutional-\n ization of feminist knowledge and thus describes the development of\n ‘‘Women’s Studies’’ (from the second extract) as well as feminist theory\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[8] "more generally. Indeed, in both progress and loss narratives, academic 35\nfeminism is often understood as an agent, one that has acted upon and\n\n\n\n\n Progress\ntransformed Western feminist theory and practice.\n I will return to some of the more intricate themes represented in the\nabove extracts later in the chapter, but for now I want to outline some of\nthe more striking features of a progress narrative. First, it is clearly a\npositive account, one told with excitement and even relish. It is a narrative\nof success and accomplishment and positions feminist theory, and its\nsubjects, as attentive and dynamic. Second, it is a narrative with a clear\nchronology: we are taken from the past—in one extract explicitly the\n1970s—via key shifts in politics, theory, and feminism’s subject, and to-\nwards a complex feminist present. The shifts represented are from sin-\ngularity of purpose and perspective to understandings that emphasize\nmultiplicity, instability, and difference. The enthusiasm for these shifts\nis enacted through the use of terms describing current approaches as\n‘‘interesting,’’ ‘‘far reaching,’’ ‘‘complex,’’ generative of greater ‘‘depth’’ and\nnuance, ‘‘increasingly sophisticated,’’ and so on. Indeed, the epistemologi-\ncal shifts referred to are consistently rendered as possessing the urgency\nand eye-opening capacities of a new political moment. Third, these shifts\nin time and approach are not represented as an inevitable flowering of\ndifference and multiplicity, but are the outcome of that critical energy,\ndirected explicitly at older approaches seen as lacking. In the extracts cited\nabove, ‘‘founding premises’’ are ‘‘deconstructed,’’ assumptions about wom-\nen’s subordination require ‘‘urgent refiguring,’’ and ‘‘homogenizing tenden-\ncies’’ must be ‘‘overcome.’’ Feminist theory has moved away from, indeed\nhas directly distanced itself from, earlier preoccupations with ‘‘patriarchy,’’\n‘‘woman,’’ and ‘‘female subordination,’’ focusing instead on intersections of\npower—‘‘gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, class’’—the ‘‘gendered na-\nture of knowledges,’’ and the limits of earlier approaches. Thus, a Western\nfeminist progress narrative transforms rather than merely adds to existing\napproaches, deconstructs and moves beyond as well as forward. The story\nis one of change brought about through displacement: of feminist objects,\nepistemologies, and subjects. Integral to the momentum in the above\nextracts is the enthusiasm about these transformations in both object of\ninquiry and methodology. Western feminist progress narratives position\ntheir subjects as energetic and analytically astute, as generative of and\nresiding in a well-earned state of positive affect.\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[9] "36 How do these common glosses work to persuade their reader that the\n shifts they describe are both accurate and desirable? How do they produce\nChapter One\n\n\n\n the enthusiasm we are likely to want to share? We can already see that the\n work is not achieved by direct citation of particular theorists, or by ana-\n lytic attention to debates over any of these issues. Instead the narrative\n certainty is textually achieved by techniques of comparisons that propel\n the momentum described above, that combine time and critique to create\n the appealing endorsement outlined above. We can see this textual tech-\n nique already in the above extracts, which describe a trajectory from\n sameness to difference, singularity to multiplicity, or simplicity to com-\n plexity. Further, these relationships are temporally secured, where the\n former term belongs to the past and the latter term to the present. The\n shifts are complete; the past is over. Neither is the move from sameness to\n difference a neutral one occurring gently with the passing of time. Same-\n ness is consigned to the past precisely because of the critical efforts of\n those who occupy the present position of difference, as indicated above.\n Thus the characterization of feminist sameness or singularity is as not only\n over but as necessarily over, dusted as well as done. In this respect, a\n critical as well as temporal hierarchy is established between textual com-\n parisons between terms. Laying claim to being the subject of this Western\n feminist progress narrative, laying claim to being on the side of complexity\n and multiplicity, enthusiasm rather than nostalgia, one thus adopts a\n shared past, and crucially, one that is displaced through that very enthusi-\n asm in the present. In narrative terms, one is not given the opportunity\n to choose homogeneity or singularity instead, because we will want to be\n on the side of sophistication not homogenization, proliferation not uni-\n dimensionality, intersectionality not intractability, and thus belief not de-\n featism. We will want to take up the opportunities these narratives provide\n to be an optimistic subject of Western feminist theory.\n To take up the desired position of subject of this critical displacement,\n the required shift is not only from one set of objects or concerns to\n another, but also from one set of perspectives, approaches, or methodolo-\n gies to another. These reveal and effect the displacement necessary to\n produce the present narrated in progress narratives. Shifts are not only\n from sameness to difference, then, but also from the epistemological and\n ontological assumptions central to their logic. As the above extracts em-\n phasize, instead of an emphasis on and investment in female experience as\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[10] "the ground of feminist knowledge and action, we must insist on the 37\nirreducibility of gendered experiences, and thus on the instability of expe-\n\n\n\n\n Progress\nrience as a term and ground for Western feminist inquiry. And instead of\nan investment in sex/gender as a critical tool to reveal kinship norms and\nsocial structures, we insist on deconstruction as the primary tool for\nrevealing sex/gender’s exclusions. In contrast to asserting women’s univer-\nsal subordination and the importance of its transformation into action, we\nfocus on power as diffuse and changing, and the subjects and objects of\nviolence or marginality as not fully known in advance. These shifts do\nmore than describe the terms sameness and difference themselves. They\ndescribe shifts in critical investments and methodologies that transform\nwhat we mean by the key terms—and related terms such as power, subjec-\ntivity, and agency—as well. In effect, in charting moves from sameness to\ndifference, and singularity to multiplicity, Western feminist progress narra-\ntives also chart a move from one set of schools of thought—radical or\nsocialist—to another—poststructuralist or postcolonial.≥ As an attempt to\nrepresent the complicated relationship between sameness and difference\nand other related textual pairs, I often denote this as sameness Ø differ-\nence. I do so to highlight the epistemological and temporal direction of\nthe comparison, in which the latter term critically transforms rather than\nmerely comes after the former.\n The binary relationships described and instantiated here not only an-\nchor theoretical, political, and temporal shifts, but disciplinary ones too. If\nwe have displaced experience as the ground of feminist knowledge pro-\nduction, we have also displaced empirical observation as a primary femi-\nnist method for accessing and transforming the social world. If instead we\ncelebrate the possibilities opened up by a focus on what was excluded in\nthese former accounts, then we come to prioritize textual deconstruction\nas a method too. How we understand power will thus also determine what\nwe think comprises an effective intervention. This next, rather early, ex-\ntract is particularly explicit about the methodological underpinnings of\nthe Western feminist progress narrative:\nEmpirical studies conducted from a range of theoretical perspectives (radical,\nsocialist and liberal feminist) have all in some way affirmed the existence of\nwomen’s experience as a source of privileged understandings, if not the basis of an\nalternative social science. Now, however, the deconstruction of ‘‘women’’ is having\nprofoundly destabilising effects upon feminist theorising and research. . . .\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[11] "38 With the turn to post-modernism many of the certainties of a feminist research\n practice have been dislodged. This has liberated a plethora of exciting philosophi-\nChapter One\n\n\n\n cal, political and cultural endeavours that tackle the essentialism around women\n embedded in both feminist and non-feminist texts. At the same time, however,\n feminist social analysts find themselves confronting an ironic impasse as what\n have been seen as the unifying objects of our research dissolve before our eyes.\n (Gender, Place and Culture 1994)\n\n Empiricism, women’s experience, and essentialism are fused in this ac-\n count, such that a change in methodology and an interdisciplinary ‘‘post-\n modern’’ perspective can be framed as uniquely able to ‘‘tackle the essen-\n tialism’’ and the ‘‘certainties of a feminist research practice’’ of the past.∂ In\n the process the objects of inquiry also alter; a focus on ‘‘culture’’ rather\n than ‘‘social reality’’ references these overlapping epistemological transi-\n tions. As indicated in the final line of the above quotation, uncertainty\n about this move from the social sciences to the interdisciplinary humani-\n ties becomes an important rallying point for Western feminist return\n narratives that stress the need to recover not only lost objects of feminism\n that seem to ‘‘dissolve before our eyes,’’ but lost disciplinary methodolo-\n gies as well.\n\n\n WHEN IS THE PAST?\n\n To return to the chronological aspect of this story, temporal transitions are\n combined with assumptions about the theoretical, epistemological, meth-\n odological, or political shifts discussed above to ensure that the latter can\n be assumed to have happened once and for all. Western feminist progress\n narratives produce a clear sense of what comes when in feminist theory,\n what is displaced, what takes place in the present, and what the future\n holds. What takes place in the past is cast as irredeemably anachronistic, in\n order that the present can represent the theoretical cutting edge.∑ A key\n concept for the chronology of Western feminist progress narratives is\n ‘‘essentialism,’’ which is both that which has been transcended and the\n political and intellectual reason for that transcendence. Essentialism is, as\n we know, never a good thing; its negative characteristics are so self-evident\n that uncovering evidence of it in any school of thought or text has the\n potential to consign it to an intellectual backwater from which it can-\n not return.∏ In progress narratives, essentialism and anachronism are fre-\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[12] "quently tied up with each other, mutually constitutive of the need for 39\ndifference, the very opposite of what constitutes theoretical rigour and\n\n\n\n\n Progress\naccountability in the present.\n But to say that essentialism is anachronistic, or that it is over, does not\ngive us a very precise sense of when these essentialist ills are assumed to\nhave taken place, or when they were critiqued and overcome. In the series\nof extracts I introduced above, only one names a precise decade—the\n1970s—as the site of this particular anachronism. The overwhelming ma-\njority of progress narrative glosses do not name the 1970s directly; instead\nchanges are more euphemistically temporalized, as is the case in this\nextract from Feminist Theory:\nThere are, undoubtedly, some feminist (and other) approaches which take abso-\nlutist and essentialist approaches to questions of difference and social location.\nYet, one of the heartening developments in feminist theory and practice over the\npast few years has been the increasing take-up of positions which are concerned\nto build temporary, strategic alliances across differences. (Feminist Theory 2000)\n\n‘‘The past few years’’ remains obscure, the phrase’s function less to explore\nthat past than to reassure its reader that the present is a time of prolifera-\ntion. So accepted is this view that neither the past nor its transitional\nphase need citation or discussion: once the business of reiterating the\ncredentials of the present is out of the way, we can move to more contro-\nversial considerations. Yet despite this lack of direct decade naming, we do\nknow that it is the 1970s that carries the weight of essentialist anachronism\nin Western feminist progress narratives. Intertextually and imaginatively,\nthe 1970s is consistently marked as thoroughly unified in its aims, unreflex-\nive in its theorizations, yet bold in its ambitions. By intertextually, I mean\nthat texts outside of the glosses I am analyzing here often do explicitly\nname the 1970s as ‘‘already composed in a fairly fixed way, and this with\nparticular effects’’ (Bashford 1998: 51). Megan Jones notes that ‘‘the femi-\nnisms of 1970s Australia are often perceived as a unitary, simplistic and\npredominantly uncomplicated whole . . . [that] constructs an unsophisti-\ncated feminism at its beginnings in the 1970s and progresses to the suppos-\nedly sophisticated feminisms of the 1990s—feminisms of plurality, multi-\nplicities of meaning and complex specificities’’ (1998: 117). By imaginatively,\nI mean that ‘‘the 1970s’’ as a decade may be referred to through its presumed\nessentialist dimensions in part because this fits with our broader sense of\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[13] "40 what has happened in Western feminist theory and our attachment to not\n being essentialist any longer. I should note here that I am not contesting the\nChapter One\n\n\n\n idea that many 1970s texts might be deemed ‘‘essentialist’’ and that essen-\n tialism all too frequently has problematic effects; indeed it does. But I am\n struck nevertheless by the textual containment of essentialism in the 1970s\n in progress narratives and in ways that this (irredeemable) ill attaches to\n the 1970s as a decade.\n More than through intertextual or imaginative modes, however, our\n knowledge that the 1970s is ‘‘the essentialist decade’’—whether or not it is\n named—is secured in Western feminist progress narratives through other,\n more precise, decade naming. Thus, we often know that the 1990s (or\n later) is the site of difference and multiplicity, both because this is often\n the time of writing and because it is directly cited as representing these\n self-evidently good things. But this naming of the 1990s is patchy too and\n heavily reliant on the role of the 1980s. In Western feminist progress\n narratives the 1980s is the most directly named decade, burdened with the\n responsibility for moving feminist theory from a generalized, generalizing\n past to a differentiated, differentiating present. The following example\n from Women’s Studies International Forum is typical:\n During the 1980s there was another, compelling, reason for questioning the\n category ‘‘women,’’ in that it served to conceal differences among women and to\n privilege definitions of womanhood framed from White Western viewpoints.\n Once this ethnocentrism was exposed it became clear that ‘‘women’’ has never\n been a unitary category (Brah, 1991). (Women’s Studies International Forum 2001)\n\n The 1980s takes on a kind of explanatory role in progress narratives,\n temporally anchoring the growing realization of difference, bringing to\n light the problems of unity, acting as a stepping stone to postmodernism\n or poststructuralism, however understood. The transformation of feminist\n theory is serialized, with the 1980s acting as the pivot or transition point\n for the emergence of a fully realized focus on difference. The direct men-\n tion of the 1980s, more consistently than any other decade in progress\n narratives, ensures that anachronistic essentialism belongs to the 1970s, as\n suggested, but it also ensures that it too is transcended by what comes\n afterwards. Thus, we see that contemporary approaches to difference were\n unquestionably ‘‘shaped by a post-1980s pendulum swing within feminist\n theory and research’’ (Feminist Review 1999) and that,\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[14] "By the eighties, changes were taking place that laid the groundwork for the third 41\nphase of feminist criticism, which I will call the engendering of differences.\n\n\n\n\n Progress\n(Critical Inquiry 1998)\n\nThese last two quotations make clear that in progress narratives (within\nand beyond interdisciplinary feminist journals) the 1980s functions as a\ncatalytic decade rather than as a decade of arrival: the changes taking\nplace then pave the way for something else; a pendulum swing finds its\nlevel only after several swings back and forth. It is consistently ‘‘identity’’\nthat is positioned as that which moves Western feminist theorizing away\nfrom universal claims about ‘‘woman’’ and sisterhood (see citation from\nFeminist Theory 2000 above), but also as that which itself needs to be\nmoved on from for fragmentation not to result in reification. Identity, as I\nexplore below, is thus rather strangely located as poststructuralist ally, and\nsimultaneously as difference’s antonym.\n The combination within Western feminist progress narratives of textual\npairings and chronological ordering that assumes the essentialist past\nbelongs to and resides in the 1970s, with difference proper taking place in\nthe 1990s and beyond, means that we can tell this story without needing to\ninclude all of its component parts. Thus, in very general glosses of Western\nfeminist theory’s development, even those that contest some of its pre-\nsumptions such as the those below, utilize familiar markers:\nI reject the argument that there are insuperable chasms between the knowledges\nof different communities, and am against settling for the defeatism and isolation-\nism of forever partial and situated knowledges. (Feminist Theory 2000)\n\nWhat [remains] . . . unexplored are questions of how to formulate in explicit terms\nthe relation between female subjection and multiply positioned, unstable female\nsubjects, between patriarchal power and the regulation of female self-difference.\n(Feminist Studies 2001)\n\nWhile both extracts make the case for bridging the gaps between different\nschools of thought and do not prioritize one framework over another, they\ndo nevertheless reinforce the temporality I am discussing here. In the first\nquotation, ‘‘knowledges of different communities’’ are counterposed to\n‘‘partial and situated knowledges’’; in the second, ‘‘female subjection’’ is\ncompared to ‘‘regulation of female self-difference,’’ mirroring the tech-\nniques of singularity Ø multiplicity, sameness Ø difference that underpin\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[15] "42 the chronology I am interested in unpacking. In fact, these general state-\n ments only make sense insofar as we understand them as already tied to a\nChapter One\n\n\n\n chronology comparing the 1970s with the 1990s. In considering the tech-\n niques that make up the political grammar of Western feminist progress\n narratives, then, I am also struck by the fact that not all parts of the chain\n of associations that make up the narrative as a whole need to be present in\n a particular gloss for the others to become resonant. Indeed, this is how\n the different components signify, as standing in for the narrative overall\n and as concomitantly reliant on that whole for singular meaning.\n\n\n DIFFERENCES A DECADE MAKES\n\n If the 1980s is the decade of transition in these narratives, it marks a very\n particular kind of transition. In Western feminist progress narratives the\n 1980s is marked as the decade of critique of universal categories and\n essentialist presumption as we have seen, but it is also marked as the\n decade of located critique. The 1980s offers an interrogation of 1970s\n exclusions from particular positions, and with particular, and often multi-\n ple, differences in mind. The following two extracts are typical of the\n ways in which a variety of subjects and critiques come to occupy this\n overburdened decade:\n Perhaps the most important legacy of 1980s feminism is the crucial concern with\n difference: differences between women in race, class, sexuality, and nation; and\n differences within particular women, with gender conceived as one of a number\n of social categories that are coarticulated in female subjects. (Feminist Studies\n 2001)\n\n Since the early 1980s, lesbians, feminists of color, postcolonial critics, and queer\n theorists, as well as postfeminist and antifeminist women, have exposed the\n ethnocentric conceits and consequences of the foundational categories of West-\n ern feminist thought—women, gender and sex. (Signs 2000)\n\n In both excerpts the 1980s is marked as the decade where proliferation and\n interrogation coincide. The ‘‘crucial concern with difference’’ in the first\n extract emphasizes gender’s ‘‘coarticulation’’ with ‘‘other’’ axes of differ-\n ence, typically ‘‘race, class, sexuality, and nation,’’ while the second extract\n focuses on the subjects articulating these critiques, namely ‘‘lesbians, femi-\n nists of color, postcolonial critics, and queer theorists.’’ In this respect, the\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[16] "1980s is represented as the decade in which critical mode and subject of 43\ncritique coincide. Thus, differences of ‘‘race, class, sexuality, and nation’’\n\n\n\n\n Progress\nare exposed by subjects whose identities are formed through their mar-\nginal locations. In other words, it is ‘‘lesbians . . . and queer theorists,’’ and\n‘‘feminists of color . . . [and] postcolonial critics’’ who reveal ‘‘ethnocentric\nconceits and consequences’’ of ‘‘women, gender and sex.’’ This is a com-\nmon pattern across the journals. As part of a Western feminist progress\nnarrative, the 1980s is heralded as the decade of emergent black feminist\nand lesbian critique in particular, both in terms of what constitutes the\nappropriate object of analysis and of its speaking or writing subject. Yet as\nI indicate later, these subjects and objects of inquiry are not positioned\nentirely equally. Although most work identifying the 1980s as the site of\nthe emergence of complex Western feminist analysis frames this period as\none of attention to multiple differences, what is overwhelmingly focused\non is the critical assessment of white, Western feminism as endeavoring to\nrepresent all women. The extract from Signs above is instructive in this\nrespect as it includes a range of subject positions making critiques of ‘‘the\nfoundational categories of Western feminist thought,’’ but what is cri-\ntiqued by all of them is the same problem: ethnocentrism, rather than, say,\nheterosexism and ethnocentrism.\n The 1980s attention to racism and ethnocentrism in prior feminist work\nconstitutes a dominant theme in progress narratives. Progress narratives\nthus reflect the importance of critiques of white, Western feminism and\nreiterate the significant damage caused and privileges maintained when\nfeminists assume that white, middle-class women are the de facto subjects\nof feminism. The critique provided, as progress glosses make particularly\napparent, precipitates feminist analysis into a more enlightened era of\ninterrogation of Western feminism from within. The two following ex-\ncerpts give a flavour of how these glosses scan:\nDuring the 1980s . . . the notion of ‘‘woman’’ that had been the focus of feminist\nstudy was recognised as colour, class, and nation specific. The result of this\ncritique was a new or increased emphasis on differences among women. (Austra-\nlian Feminist Studies 2000)\n\nFor example, the writings of black women in the 1970s and 1980s were concerned\nto get difference debated by white as well as black feminists (Bryan et al., 1985;\nMirza, 1997; Sudbury, 1998). (Feminist Theory 2000)\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[17] "44 As in the prior examples from Feminist Studies and Signs, a range of\n differences are brought forward in the 1980s to critique homogeneity, and\nChapter One\n\n\n\n a range of subjects are implicated as needing to shift their own critical\n attentions. Yet what interests me about these examples is the temporality\n that anchors the narrative and contains the critical direction it represents.\n In the Feminist Studies and Signs examples, difference is a 1980s ‘‘legacy,’’\n inaugurated after the 1970s and brought forward into the present of writ-\n ing. And in the above extracts, too, the 1980s marks a shift away from the\n problematic previous emphasis on ‘‘woman’’ as the singular object of\n feminist inquiry. As discussed earlier, this is a common technique of\n rendering the present more sophisticated and multiple than the past and\n a way of dismissing the 1970s as anachronistic and essentialist. This is\n straightforward in the first example. In the second, even though (un-\n usually) black women’s writings from the 1970s as well as the 1980s are\n mentioned, note that the citations included are from the 1980s and 1990s\n (reprints in anthologies rather than original publication dates are chosen\n here). The momentum is thus forward rather than backward even where\n citation practice is more ambivalent.\n Such historiographic practices have several effects. First, they mark the\n 1970s (or before) as the decade that contains the problems highlighted in\n the 1980s. One effect of this I have already flagged is to code the essential-\n ism of the 1970s not only as a misplaced belief in sisterhood but also as a\n primarily racially exclusive one. The anxiety of being labeled essentialist or\n anachronistic within Western feminist theory is thus a more precise anxiety\n of being understood as racist; this historiographic narrative tactic more\n than any other ensures a Western feminist disidentification with its imag-\n ined past. Second, the temporality of such glosses fixes black feminist\n critique in the 1980s from the other side too, allowing Western feminist the-\n ory to represent itself as increasingly attentive to difference—particularly\n racial difference—as well as coding the past as notably inattentive to the\n same. In the above extracts it is feminist theory as an enterprise that has\n shifted as a result of these critiques, resulting in ‘‘increased emphasis on\n differences’’ in the first and debate about difference across racial locations\n moving into the 1990s in the second. In the first two examples the 1980s\n leaves a ‘‘legacy’’ for the present and inaugurates Western feminist theory’s\n increasing sophistication and attention to multiplicity. In this respect,\n black feminist critique is frequently inscribed in Western feminist progress\n narratives as catalyst to a more general focus on difference.\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[18] " This forward momentum from exclusion to inclusion is achieved by a 45\nvariety of techniques of comparison and citation that situate black femi-\n\n\n\n\n Progress\nnist critiques as essential to the transformation of Western feminist theory,\nbut ultimately as transcended. The following extract provides the typical\nchronology:\nInitiated by feminists of color who called attention to their exclusion and/or\nmisrepresentation by mainstream feminist accounts of ‘‘women’’, the focus on\nwomen’s differences was underwritten as well by poststructuralist feminism. Both\ncritiques have produced the most recent object of feminist theoretical inquiry:\nthe female subject who inhabits diverse cultural locations and for whom gender\nis dynamically engaged with numerous other social categories and discourses.\n(Feminist Studies 2001)\n\nIn this example the ‘‘focus on women’s differences’’ is once again framed as\na legacy, one that enables a fuller consideration of a different kind of\nobject, one who is not in fact named, but is ‘‘a subject who inhabits diverse\ncultural locations.’’ In this quotation the shift in emphasis is ‘‘initiated by\nfeminists of color’’ and ‘‘underwritten . . . by poststructuralist feminism’’; it\nis a combined move that leads to the present subjective mobility of our\nresearch focus. Note too that, by the end of the extract, ‘‘exclusion and/or\nmisrepresentation’’ have been replaced by a ‘‘dynamically engaged’’ female\nsubject. The transitions Western feminist theory has made have also trans-\nformed the object of inquiry into an agent rather than a victim of power.\nThis shift is essential in order that the present be a space of positive affect,\nof celebration at the accomplishments of Western feminist theory, rather\nthan a space of conflict or irresolution.π\n The next excerpt makes this framing of racial critique as a developmen-\ntal stage clearer still:\nTwo related intellectual debates provided the impetus for critical reflection on\n‘‘the subject’’ of feminist thinking. First, women of color and Third World women\nfeminists critiqued ‘‘the subject’’ implicit within most feminist thought at the\ntime, a subject that normalized the experience of white, middle-class, first-world\nwomen (hooks, 1984; Trinh, 1989). This critique stimulated greater interest in the\nmultiplicity of oppression and fractured the notion of ‘‘woman’’ and her experi-\nence(s). Second, a growing interest in post-structural psychoanalytical perspec-\ntives (e.g. those of Lacan and Derrida), as well as Foucault’s notion of power/\ndiscourse, also profoundly affected feminist theory. Feminists appreciated post-\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[19] "46 structural attempts to deploy an anti-essentialist world-view, reject totalizing\n ‘grand’ theory, and embrace multiplicity, difference and the ‘‘decentred’’ subject\nChapter One\n\n\n\n (Sarup, 1988). (Gender, Place and Culture 1999)\n\n While black feminism and ‘‘post-structural psychoanalytic’’ accounts are on\n one level represented here as of the same era (all citations are from the\n 1980s) and as having related concerns, the temporality I am tracing is\n reinforced through the ordering of critiques: ‘‘poststructuralism’’ comes\n ‘‘second.’’ Further, the ‘‘first’’ set of critiques is described as stimulating\n ‘‘greater interest in multiplicity,’’ rather than evidencing that interest tout\n court. This ordering of theoretical engagement is reinforced by the use of\n the past tense in describing the critiques of women of color and Third\n World feminists, while the ‘‘growing interest’’ in poststructuralism is lin-\n guistically active, allowing its proponents to continue to ‘‘deploy,’’ ‘‘reject’’\n and ‘‘embrace.’’ Thus, poststructuralism imaginatively spills over into the\n next decade, while the critiques of women of color and Third World women\n are temporally fixed by their frames of citation, becoming tropes in the\n service of a teleology they are no longer the subjects of. In the extract from\n Signs cited earlier (on page 42), the ordering of critics is similarly instruc-\n tive, though perhaps less immediately evident. Here, critical exploration of\n ‘‘foundational categories’’ has been occurring ‘‘since the early 1980s’’ from\n ‘‘lesbians, feminists of color, postcolonial critics, and queer theorists, as well\n as postfeminist and antifeminist women.’’ My analysis in this section has\n suggested that this ordering is pivotal rather than accidental, leading from\n identity politics to epistemological and ontological challenges to authen-\n ticity and further to the rejection of feminism altogether.\n It is not entirely accurate to suggest that these shifts to difference are\n always represented as occurring first in the 1980s, however, while this is\n certainly a common trend. Alongside narratives that directly highlight the\n transitional role of that decade in the achievement of a contemporary era\n of flexibility and difference in both feminist object and subject, there are\n others that locate this focus more firmly in the 1990s. Thus, to extend a\n quotation I included a fragment of earlier in this chapter:\n Over the past decade, general theorists within feminism have developed in-\n creasingly sophisticated responses to questions about how best to theorize power\n and subjectivity. . . .\n To this end, theorists such as Joan Scott (1988), Elizabeth Spelman (1990),\n Iris Young (1990), Chantal Mouffe (1992), Anne McClintock (1995), Leonore\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[20] "Davidoff (1995), Nira Yuval Davis (1997), and Ruth Lister (1998) have begun to 47\nformulate various ways of addressing the multiplicity of subject positions that\n\n\n\n\n Progress\nwomen, as bearers of classed, racialized, national, ethnic, sexual, and aged as\nwell as gendered identities, occupy in relation both to men and to each other.\n(Signs 2000)\n\nHere all citations of theorists attending to the ‘‘multiplicity of subject\npositions’’ are from the 1990s except Joan Scott, who is thus marked as\nrather precocious (as Haraway or Spivak often are in other contexts). A\nfurther example from the same journal suggests similarly that:\n‘‘Radical’’ feminists usually do acknowledge racism and economic marginalization\nas factors that render some women especially vulnerable to sexual and other\nforms of exploitation. However, they do not even begin to engage with the\ninsights of 1990s post- or neo-colonial feminist theory, which teaches that ‘‘race,\ngender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isola-\ntion from each other; nor can they simply be yoked together retrospectively like\narmatures of Lego. Rather they come into existence in and through relation to\neach other—if in contradictory and conflictual ways’’ (McClintock 1995, 5). (Signs\n2000)\n\nThere are several features of interest to me in this passage. The first is the\nroutine association of ‘‘radical’’ feminism with a focus on women’s oppres-\nsion and marginalization, which here can address racism and classism, but\nonly as what makes women vulnerable to ‘‘sexual . . . exploitation’’ (rather\nthan as agents). The extract then jumps straight to the failure of such an\napproach to reach the giddy heights of 1990s sophistication in theorizing\nintersections within and across differences. Again it is McClintock from\nthe 1990s who is cited. But what has happened to the 1980s in this formula-\ntion? Why is the 1990s credited with these insights when the dominant\nnarration of change in Western feminist theory locates the beginning of\nthese same insights in the previous decade?∫\n My reading of this apparent contradiction has to do with two issues\nmentioned earlier. The first is that in its role as the decade of theoretical\nand political catalyst, the 1980s is also historicized as concerned with\nidentity rather than ‘‘difference proper.’’ Thus its absence in such glosses\nserves as further evidence that these early attempts have been surpassed.\nThe second is that, in line with the narrative techniques linking sameness\nØ difference and singularity Ø multiplicity with empiricism Ø decon-\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[21] "48 struction, the 1990s has to be understood to address these issues of differ-\n ence in a fuller, more sophisticated manner, in order that the narrative\nChapter One\n\n\n\n remain one of progress rather than stasis. Reading across all the examples\n given in this section, the 1990s thus stands for an epistemological and\n methodological plurality begun but not achieved in the 1980s, whether or\n not the latter decade is explicitly mentioned. This temporality is rein-\n forced in the following fragment:\n Recent decades have seen the academic feminist discussion on decentring and\n pluralizing the (white, western, heterosexual, middle-class) categories of gender\n and woman by examining how other intersecting categories such as race, eth-\n nicity, nation, class, generation, sexuality and disability shape or constitute gender\n and women (see, for example Anthias and Davies 1992; Collins 1998; Crenshaw\n 1994; Lorde 1980; Oyewumi 2002; Young 1997). (Nora 2003)\n\n Once again, the 1990s and onwards are cited as the intersectional de-\n cade(s), moving us well beyond the ‘‘white, western, heterosexual, middle-\n class’’ past. The citation of Audre Lorde as a very early exception (it is so\n frequently Lorde) serves two functions here. It marks a threshold point\n that reinforces our knowledge that this exclusionary past comes before\n 1980 and positions her as notable exception, separated from her closest\n citational ally by over a decade. For me, it is particularly in these ex-\n cerpts that pass over the 1980s that one of the most problematic effects of\n ‘‘decade-fixing’’ of black feminist theory can be most fully appreciated: that\n it allows for its subsequent textual and historical erasure or tokenization.\n\n\n SEXUAL SUBVERSIONS\n\n In Western feminist progress narratives, the 1980s is not only represented\n as providing necessary critiques of white, Western feminism. This decade\n also frequently carries responsibility for inaugurating the critique of femi-\n nism’s heteronormativity. Where this is the case, the terms of the com-\n parison mirror those already discussed above, with the 1980s signalling a\n progressive move away from sexual as well as racial myopia. To return to\n two extracts cited earlier, we are reminded that the 1980s represents a\n transfer of attention in both object and subject of feminism:\n Perhaps the most important legacy of 1980s feminism is the crucial concern with\n difference: differences between women in race, class, sexuality, and nation; and\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[22] "differences within particular women, with gender conceived as one of a number 49\nof social categories that are coarticulated in female subjects. (Feminist Studies\n\n\n\n\n Progress\n2001)\n\nSince the early 1980s, lesbians, feminists of color, postcolonial critics, and queer\ntheorists, as well as postfeminist and antifeminist women, have exposed the\nethnocentric conceits and consequences of the foundational categories of West-\nern feminist thought—women, gender and sex. (Signs 2000)\n\nThe 1980s thus opens feminism up to a range of newly appropriate objects\nand draws previously marginalized subjects, including sexual subjects,\ntowards its centre.Ω As I discuss in more detail below, however, racial\ncritique will always be prioritized in contexts where more than one form of\ncritique is introduced or understood as competing, as the second extract\nabove implies.\n As with representations of black feminist critiques, the inclusion of\nsexuality in Western feminist progress narratives similarly pivots around\nthe 1980s and contrasts the singularity of the past with an increased open-\nness in the present. Thus, and typically:\nFrom the feminist ‘‘sex wars’’ of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the\n1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contem-\nporary theoretical, social, and political demands. In feminism’s sex wars of the\n1980s, pro-sex feminists argued, persuasively I think, that radical feminism’s repre-\nsentation of women as disempowered actors fails to see women as sexual subjects\nin their own right. . . .\n While radical feminists see ‘‘female sexuality’’ as repressed by ‘‘the patriarchy,’’\nthe pro-sexuality movement sees repression as produced by heterosexism and\n‘‘sex-negativity’’—cultural operations often seen as institutionalized in feminism\nitself. (Feminist Review 2000)\n\nIn by now familiar ways, here radical feminism implicitly occupies the\ndemonized 1970s and is imagined primarily in negative terms. While radi-\ncal feminists ‘‘fail’’ to recognize sexual subjectivity, reducing ‘‘female sex-\nuality’’ to repression, the pro-sex feminists of the 1980s are expansive,\nindeed are ‘‘at the forefront’’ of an impressive range of demands. Impor-\ntantly, pro-sex feminists see women as ‘‘sexual subjects in their own right’’\nrather than a patriarchal dupes. This emphasis on agency as marking\ntemporal transition in progress narratives is most marked around sexual\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[23] "50 subjectivity, in fact. It indicates a shift from a concern with oppression and\n violence (and the concomitant need for liberation) and towards a focus\nChapter One\n\n\n\n on agency and pleasure (and thus new modes of political engagement). If\n the placing of pro-sexuality concerns in the 1980s (and later) were not\n enough to remind the reader of the inadequacies of what has been left\n behind, we might notice that the radical feminist claims in this passage are\n all in scare quotes, while the pro-sex positions remain unqualified (with\n the exception of the ‘‘sex wars’’ that brings together both perspectives in\n antagonistic relationship), a technique that underlines the extract’s for-\n ward momentum. Again, however, as with the containment of black femi-\n nism, those pro-sex feminist positions themselves give way to the ‘‘queer\n theory and politics of the 1990s,’’ the ‘‘wars’’ of the 1980s having been\n resolved in the latter’s favour. Indeed, perhaps the scare quotes around the\n ‘‘sex wars’’ in the extract also signal precisely this inevitability: they are not\n really ‘‘wars,’’ because they can only be resolved in one direction in West-\n ern feminist progress narratives.\n This chronology of Western feminist sexual politics allows the specific\n steps that underwrite it to be easily passed over in much the same way as\n we saw in relation to black feminism. Thus:\n Whereas the earlier generation of feminist scholars challenged patriarchal ide-\n ologies that reduced women’s prime contribution to society to their ‘‘biological\n capacity’’ for nurturing and reproducing, the new gender theorists are fundamen-\n tally concerned with the historical subjectivity of sexed individuals and the em-\n bodiment of sexual identity, seen as indeterminate, ambiguous, multiple (Morris,\n 1995). For Judith Butler (1990, 1993), who argues that sexual identity is lived as a\n highly regulated performance, one is not female; one can only ‘‘do’’ female.\n (Theory, Culture and Society 1998)\n\n The excerpt represents the familiar opposition between the challenges to\n ‘‘patriarchal ideologies’’ of ‘‘the earlier generation’’ and the ‘‘indeterminate,\n ambiguous, multiple’’ focus of the 1990s. The ‘‘earlier generation’’ needs no\n direct reference in the above quotation, its response to those ‘‘patriarchal\n ideologies’’ locating it firmly in the 1970s as we have seen. The narrative\n skips over what we can only presume happens in the 1980s, with the ‘‘new\n gender theorists’’ and their focus on indeterminacy and multiplicity re-\n maining the only ones cited and temporally located in a direct way. In-\n deed, not only are Morris and Butler brought into the text, but Butler’s\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[24] "texts are also lent precision by their differentiation from one another. As 51\nwith black feminist containment in the 1980s, here ‘‘the sex wars’’ and\n\n\n\n\n Progress\nsexual identity have been displaced by a move into difference proper,\ndifference without fixed sexual object or subject.\n While the role of sexual critique in Western feminist progress narratives\nmirrors that of racial critique in many ways, its taken-for-granted subjects\nare rather more ambivalently positioned. Thus in the extracts from Femi-\nnist Review and Theory, Culture and Society discussed above, we might also\nwant to call attention to the fact that lesbian feminism and lesbian femi-\nnists are nowhere directly mentioned. They are not named in relation to a\n‘‘pro-sex’’ feminist turn in the 1980s, despite the centrality of debates about\nlesbian sexual practices to those ‘‘sex wars,’’ for example, in contrast to black\nfeminists who are assumed to carry racial critique in the same era. And\nthey are clearly not part of the 1990s, with its focus on indeterminacy and\nperformance, rather than named identity. Perhaps we might find a lesbian\nresting somewhat uncomfortably under the term ‘‘female sexuality’’ in-\nstead? Or perhaps one can hear echoes of lesbian identity through its\nimplicit challenge in the statement ‘‘one is not female; one can only ‘do’\nfemale’’? If this is the case, lesbian subjects may be more associated with\nthe 1970s than their superficial inclusion in the ‘‘turn to difference’’ of the\n1980s might lead one to believe. Certainly this dynamic is true of the\nfollowing example, in which the 1980s is imagined as both the time of\nlesbian critique and the time of its undoing:\nIn 1980, Monique Wittig challenged lesbians and gay men to deny the divi-\nsive power of heterosexuality by refusing to think of themselves as women and\nmen. More recently, postmodernists and queer theorists have questioned the two-\nfold divisions of gender, sexuality and even sex, undermining the solidity of\na world built on men/women, heterosexuals/homosexuals and male/female\n(Butler, 1990; Garber, 1992, 1995; Sedgwick, 1990). (Feminist Theory 2000)\n\nAgain, the extract produces a familiar chronology in which the 1990s\nfigures as the bold inheritor of previous perspectives. But here Monique\nWittig’s role is ambiguous. As a lesbian theorist her citation marks the\n1980s as a time of lesbian critique, yet her challenge is to ‘‘lesbians and gay\nmen’’ to move beyond dualism. Both her injunction and the deconstruc-\ntive call of the 1990s take sexual identity as their target, as that which must\nbe surpassed, even while providing it with a history that crosses over\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[25] "52 several decades. More candid critiques of the accuracy of this picture of\n ‘‘redemptive inviolate lesbian feminism’’ as ‘‘something invented about the\nChapter One\n\n\n\n 1970s during the major sex wars of the 1980s’’ (Feminist Review 1999)\n nevertheless retain dominant assumptions about where the 1990s has\n taken us that retrospectively code previous decades as stages in the devel-\n opment of a taken-for-granted multiplicity and fluidity. This point echoes\n the one I make in the introduction that reformist histories do not neces-\n sarily attend to the problematic politics of the present, and thus offer\n revisionist rather than radical challenges to accounts of the feminist past.\n Any ambivalence about the temporal, epistemological or political loca-\n tion of lesbian feminism is resolved when brought directly into compara-\n tive tension with black or postcolonial feminism, however. While both\n sexual and racial critique give way to ‘‘difference proper’’ in the 1990s and\n beyond, and while both lesbian and black feminist subjects give way to\n radical postmodern or poststructuralist indeterminacy, so too is their own\n encounter temporally and hierarchically ordered. When brought together,\n black feminists or ethnocentrism/racism as subject and object of critique\n take priority over lesbian feminists or heteronormativity/homophobia.\n We saw this in the example from Signs cited earlier, in which all manner of\n subjects expose ethnocentrism, rather than a range of exclusions produced\n by ‘‘the foundational categories of Western feminist thought.’’ Here is the\n passage again as a reminder:\n Since the early 1980s, lesbians, feminists of color, postcolonial critics, and queer\n theorists, as well as postfeminist and antifeminist women, have exposed the\n ethnocentric conceits and consequences of the foundational categories of West-\n ern feminist thought—women, gender and sex. (Signs 2000)\n\n Further, when a direct critical relation is expressed chronologically, it is\n lesbian identity or politics/theory that is surpassed by black feminists or\n critical race feminism. This example from Signs demonstrates that rela-\n tionship quite clearly, I think:\n Beginning in the 1980s, the scholarship of feminists of color in the United States\n challenged lesbian studies as monolithic . . . (Moraga 1985; Lorde 1984; Anzaldúa\n 1987). (Signs 2003)\n\n In the above excerpt, ‘‘feminists of color’’ are familiarly positioned in the\n 1980s (more explicitly than usual, indeed), as underlined by the chosen\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[26] "citations. But here this scholarship is pitted against lesbian studies rather 53\nthan radical feminism more generally, a move that reinforces the ways in\n\n\n\n\n Progress\nwhich ‘‘radical feminism’’ and ‘‘lesbian feminism’’ often come to stand in\nfor one another in Western feminist progress narratives. Thus although in\nsome versions of the progress narrative, feminist essentialism of the 1970s\nis rendered as both racist and heteronormative, in others lesbian essential-\nism is critiqued for its own racially marked exclusions. At no point did I\ncome across a progress narrative gloss in which lesbian critique in the\n1980s is represented as challenging prior black feminist exclusion; where\nthe two are framed in sequence rather than coextensive, black feminism is\nalways the one challenging exclusion and holding the temporal as well as\nmoral high ground.∞≠ The above excerpt is interesting for another reason,\ntoo. The challenge to lesbian studies that takes place in this gloss is\ninaugurated by ‘‘feminists of color,’’ but importantly the authors cited are\nall well-known lesbians of color. On the one hand, that would indicate a\nmore complex relation and temporality than I have suggested here, one\ninternal to rather than displacing of lesbian studies. But on the other, I am\nstruck by the fact that their scholarship is textually represented as that of\n‘‘feminists of color’’ and precisely not ‘‘lesbians of color,’’ again prioritizing\na singular, racialized, aspect of critical identity. In the process, these au-\nthors are utilized to effect their own erasure from their participation in\nfeminism in the 1970s (‘‘beginning in the 1980s’’ the text insists), in order\nthat ‘‘lesbian studies as monolithic’’ signals a racial exclusion subsequently\ncorrected.\n A Western feminist progress narrative that moves from lesbian femi-\nnism to black feminism and on to postmodernism or poststructuralism\nchimes unnervingly with some of the broader cultural representations of\nlesbians, and of second wave feminism as anachronistically lesbian, that I\noutlined in my introduction. We are familiar with the stereotype of a 1970s\nfeminist as an unfashionable, angry, man-hating lesbian. From tracing the\nrelationship between black and lesbian feminists and feminism in Western\nfeminist progress narratives, we can also see how this stereotype finds\nintertextual, intercultural validation in representations of that figure as\nwhite and/or racist as well. In the progress narratives I have been tracing\nhere, in other words, the character of the lesbian feminist is not only\nanachronistic, but the very essentialism that she represents is also coded in\nracial terms. As Victoria Hesford notes in her astute essay on ‘‘feminism\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[27] "54 and its ghosts,’’ ‘‘as the ‘flannel shirt androgyne, close minded, antisex\n puritan humourless moralist racist and classist ignoramus essentialist uto-\nChapter One\n\n\n\n pian’ [Zimmerman 1997: 163], [the lesbian feminist] often stands as a\n symbol for the limits of cross-class and cross-race alliances in second wave\n feminism’’ (2005: 228). I want to argue that this linear account of feminist\n development also provides the perfect alibi for implicit or explicit homo-\n phobia in both feminist and postfeminist accounts, marking lesbian femi-\n nist politics as particularly inattentive to racial exclusion historically, and\n therefore as ignorable on those grounds. This is one of the ways in which\n Western feminist progress narratives uncomfortably reinforce postfemi-\n nist accounts of ‘‘an earlier generation’’ as inattentive to the complexities of\n contemporary social, political, and interpersonal life, as dated, as nothing\n to do with the present. It is this kind of amenability—of one form of\n feminism narrative with another—that makes the political grammar of\n Western feminist stories significant both within and outside feminist\n theory.\n\n\n CITATION TRACES\n\n Representations of Judith Butler’s work are key to securing the Western\n feminist progress narrative I have been mapping in this chapter. As is no\n doubt clear from many of the extracts above, Butler is frequently credited\n with being the first to move feminism on from the political and intellectual\n traps of both an exclusive prioritization of ‘‘woman’’ as the ground of the-\n ory and activism (through her critique of the sex/gender distinction, in\n particular) and the related problems of identity politics, however multi-\n plied. While not taking issue with Butler’s importance for feminist theory,\n in conducting the research for this book I could not help but be struck by\n the repetition of Butler as responsible (occasionally alongside others, often\n on her own) for the most extraordinary range of transformations in and of\n feminist theory. Importantly, for this point in the analysis, it is Butler who\n is consistently understood to move Western feminism beyond both essen-\n tialism and identity reductionism in ways that often precipitate her to a\n location outside feminism itself.∞∞ The following examples are typical of\n the position Butler’s work occupies in the glosses I am interested in here:\n It is difficult to overestimate the extent to which Butler’s compelling reformula-\n tion of these theoretical impasses [between theorisation of the psyche and the\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[28] "social] has succeeded in pushing feminist thought on gender identity on to new 55\nconceptual terrain. (Theory, Culture and Society 1999)\n\n\n\n\n Progress\nFor such feminists as Judith Butler, Joan Scott, and Denise Riley, it is the refusal of\nwomen as a foundational referent that gives to feminism the internal critique\nnecessary to rethink its own historical emergence. Such rethinking functions to\nrevise accepted notions of power, politics, and subjective agency, thereby chal-\nlenging the foundational assumptions of certain activist agendas common to\nfeminism’s earlier practices. (Differences 1999/2000)\n\nJudith Butler’s (1990, 1993) deconstruction of the strategic division of gender\nfrom sex rejecting the notion of prediscursive materiality . . . (European Journal of\nWomen’s Studies 2004)\n\nAt least since Judith Butler’s seminal book Gender Trouble, published in 1990,\nfeminist and gender studies have been concerned with how new conceptions of\nthe body affect and reform disciplinary questions in the humanities, as well as to\nsome extent in the natural and social sciences. (Nora 2002)\n\nButler ‘‘pushes’’ feminist thought forward, ‘‘refuses’’ to get caught in the\ntraps of a focus on ‘‘women’’ that mark earlier periods of feminist theoriz-\ning and politics, rejects an essentialist view of the body or the social as\noutside discourse, and carries academic feminism into a new era. Because\nof Butler, feminist theory now has the epistemological and methodological\ntools to deconstruct or ‘‘revise’’ previous understandings of ‘‘power, poli-\ntics, and subjective agency’’ and to take its own history as object of inquiry.\nIn such accounts, Butler is positioned as critiquing both the ‘‘foundational\nassumptions’’ of earlier activism (1970s) and identity claims (1980s) in\norder to take feminism into a broader realm of relevance too (1990s and\non). In this respect, citation of Butler, accompanied by a striking lack of\nengagement with anything she writes, performs Western feminist theory’s\nmove fully into deconstructive approaches to the subject and the social\nworld, and away from assumptions about feminist sameness and the re-\nification of difference. More specifically, citation of Butler marks essential-\nism and identity as in the past, and the subjects of a feminist theoretical\npresent as different from and opposed to these earlier approaches. In the\nprocess, iterations of her threshold role in a Western feminist progress\nnarrative erase any previous challenges to ‘‘womanhood’’ as an unqualified\nground of feminist knowledge.\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[29] "56 Looking more closely at how Butler signifies as this threshold figure in\n Western feminist progress narratives highlights many of the central prob-\nChapter One\n\n\n\n lems I have already indicated attend Western feminist progress narratives.\n In discussing how black and lesbian feminisms and feminists are posi-\n tioned in these narratives, I identified two main modes through which\n identity politics (associated with the 1980s) are represented as an impor-\n tant stage in Western feminism’s development. The first mode cites these\n interventions as important, but ultimately and necessarily as surpassed;\n the second skips straight to the 1990s or later without direct citation of\n what has been transcended. In the former, identity politics is separated out\n from 1970s feminism; in the latter the previous two decades are folded into\n one another, and the past is more euphemistically referred to. Both modes\n allow postmodernism, poststructuralism, or deconstruction to variously\n emerge as more concerned with difference than what has come before and\n thus as heroic in the celebratory tone of these narratives. Citation of\n Butler, as indicated in the above extracts, tends to reinforce the second\n mode, moving us beyond generally ‘‘accepted notions of power, politics,\n and subjective agency’’ through a critique of ‘‘certain activist agendas’’ that\n remain unspecified. In the process, the specific contributions of black and\n lesbian feminists are not simply transcended, but entirely erased, as But-\n ler’s critiques appear to emerge out of the blue. Such citation of Butler\n allows poststructuralism to emerge as both more concerned with gender,\n sexuality, race, and class and as less dependent on feminist theory in\n general to explore power relations, since feminism can be represented as\n the worst of the essentialist offenders left behind.\n Western feminist progress narratives are not neutral about the transfor-\n mations Butler inaugurates. Progress narratives inflect their achievements\n positively, of course, expressing these shifts enthusiastically and as some-\n thing we should all celebrate. This positive affect is achieved through the\n emphasis on newness, transformation, and proliferation; the present is an\n exciting time of possibility, and we are invited to explore this ‘‘new con-\n ceptual terrain’’ with appropriate attitude. Such positive affect is also\n achieved through the combination of narrative tactics I have been explor-\n ing throughout this chapter. Any potential discomfort at the generational\n logic that homogenizes the past in order to discard it is allayed by the\n particular framing of what we are being encouraged to leave behind. We\n are being enjoined to leave behind homogeneity and essentialism, which\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[30] "we now know are racist and homophobic as well as anachronistic. To be 57\nethical subjects of feminism, we must leave the past behind, then. All that\n\n\n\n\n Progress\nis narratively required is to bracket out specific reference to what has\notherwise been assigned to the 1980s, namely the black and lesbian femi-\nnist epistemologies and ontologies whose absent critiques haunt the theo-\nretical present. Feeling good about where we are can also attach to Butler\nin other more precise ways, because citation of her obliquely references\nthe rejection of lesbian identity in favour of strategic mobilization of\nsexual alterity: a queerness that has no a priori subject. In this respect, I do\nnot think it is too much of an over-reading to suggest that citation of\nButler brings both the general temporality of progress narratives into\ntextual play, as well as a temporality that will abandon lesbian feminism\nmore easily than black feminism.∞≤ I hope I have been able to illustrate that\nthese problematic figurations of race and sexuality are key rather than\ntangential to how feminist progress narratives operate and that erasure of a\ncomplex past is a necessary condition of their positivity. Our celebrations\nhave historiographic and political consequences that are not always imme-\ndiately visible, then, ones that fold us into narrative logics that figure race\nand sexuality in particularly problematic ways. These historiographic rep-\nresentations imagine an anachronistic feminism in singular terms that\nresonate with postfeminist or antifeminist accounts, and provide ‘‘differ-\nence alibis’’ we should be exceptionally wary of.\n\n\n\n\n This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"
[31] "This content downloaded from 128.119.168.112 on Sat, 24 Sep 2022 22:07:13 UTC\n All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms\n"