Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism

564 Pages·2009·2.866 MB·English

by  Robyn Warhol-Down, Diane Herndl, Diane Price Herndl

AUTOBIOGRAPHY i
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FEMINISMS REDUX
ii AUTOBIOGRAPHY
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY iii
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FEMINISMS
REDUX
an anthology (cid:1)
e d i t e d b y
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of literary
(cid:1) robyn warhol-down
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theory and
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criticism diane price herndl
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rutgers university press • new brunswick, new jersey
iv AUTOBIOGRAPHY
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Feminisms redux : an anthology of literary theory and criticism / Robyn Warhol-
Down and Diane Price Herndl, editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8135-4619-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-4620-9
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Feminist literary criticism. 2. Feminism and literature. 3. Women and
literature. I. Warhol-Down, Robyn. II. Price Herndl, Diane, 1959-
PN98.W64F367 2009
801'.95082--dc22
2009006168
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Brit-
ish Library.
This collection copyright © 2009 by Rutgers, The State University
For copyrights to individual pieces please see pages 541–542.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100
Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohi-
bition is “fair use” as defi ned by U.S. copyright law.
Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Manufactured in the United States of America
AUTOBIOGRAPHY v
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CONTENTS

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About Feminisms Redux, by ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN and
DIANE PRICE HERNDL ix
Acknowledgments xix
CANONS 3
SANDRA M. GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR, “Infection in the Sentence:
The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship” from
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination (1979) 9
ANNETTE KOLODNY, “Dancing through the Minefi eld: Some
Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a
Feminist Literary Criticism” (1980) 21
BONNIE ZIMMERMAN, “What Has Never Been: An Overview
of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism” (1981) 40
JOANNA RUSS, “Aesthetics” from How to Suppress Women’s
Writing (1983) 61
PAUL LAUTER, “Caste, Class, and Canon” (1981/1987) 70
ELAINE SHOWALTER, “A Criticism of Our Own: Autonomy and
Assimilation in Afro-American and Feminist Literary
Theory” (1989) 92
JULIANA MAKUCHI NFAH-ABBENYI, “Introduction” from
Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality,
Difference (1997) 113
READINGS 131
JUDITH FETTERLEY, “Introduction: On the Politics of Literature”
from The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to
American Fiction (1978) 136
JANE GALLOP, “The Father’s Seduction” from The Daughter’s
Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1982) 146
vi CONTENTS
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CATHERINE BELSEY, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing
the Text” (1985) 164
EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Introduction” from Between Men:
English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) 181
EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic
Triangles” from Between Men: English Literature and
Male Homosocial Desire (1985) 198
BARBARA JOHNSON, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” (1986) 206
BIDDY MARTIN and CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, “Feminist
Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” (1986) 220
BARBARA CHRISTIAN, “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist
Criticism” (1990) 238
LAUREN BERLANT, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” (2002) 244
HISTORIES 277
PAULA GUNN ALLEN, “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three
Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale”
from The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine
in American Indian Traditions (1986) 284
GLORIA ANZALDÚA, “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a
New Consciousness” from Borderlands/La Frontera:
The New Mestiza (1987) 303
JANE TOMPKINS, “Me and My Shadow” (1989) 314
LINDA S. KAUFFMAN, “The Long Goodbye: Against Personal
Testimony, or an Infant Grifter Grows Up” (1992) 328
SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories
in Asian American Literature” (1993) 345
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, “Four Women’s Texts and a
Critique of Imperialism” from A Critique of Postcolonial
Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999) 365
SANGEETA RAY, “Introduction” from En-Gendering India: Woman
and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (2000) 390
BODIES 411
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) 416
LAURA MULVEY, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) 432
HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe:
An American Grammar Book” (1987) 443
JUDITH BUTLER, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions”
from Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity (1999) 465
DIANE PRICE HERNDL, “Reconstructing the Posthuman
Feminist Body Twenty Years after Audre Lorde’s
Cancer Journals” (2002) 477
CONTENTS vii
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ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON, “Integrating Disability,
Transforming Feminist Theory” (2002) 487
ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN, “The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy,
and Feminist Ambivalence” from Having a Good Cry:
Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (2003) 514
About the Authors 525
Alternative Arrangements for Feminisms Redux 533
Author/Title Index 539
Permissions 541

CONTENTS ix
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ABOUTFEMINISMS REDUX

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The introductions to the fi rst and second editions of Feminisms, published in 1991
and 1997, began with the statement that “self-consciousness is one hallmark of
contemporary literary scholarship, and feminist criticism is no exception. Indeed,
being explicit about the referents of one’s pronouns, the origins of one’s projects,
and the position from which one speaks has become very common among femi-
nists; beginning a book with a personal anecdote is practically obligatory. There
are good reasons for this: feminism holds that ‘the personal is political,’ and as
feminists we believe that the traditional academic boundaries between profes-
sional and personal experience ought to be undermined.”
In Who Stole Feminism, her 1994 diatribe against academic feminists, Christina
Hoff Sommers quoted from the second paragraph of our introduction: “‘We’ are
Robyn and Diane; we speak as white middle-class heterosexual American femi-
nist academics in our early thirties (to cover a number of the categories feminist
criticism has lately been emphasizing as signifi cant to one’s reading and speaking
position: race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, political positioning, educa-
tion-level, and age). Colleagues at the University of Vermont since 1989, we two
have found that we share passionate interests in fi ction, feminism and quilt mak-
ing.” Sommers quoted us in order to criticize the convention of self-disclosure in
feminist criticism, but a telltale mistake shows that she never bothered to read
past the fi rst page of our introduction: she calls the book “Feminism” instead of
Feminisms.1 The error is more than merely typographical; it reveals a fundamental
misunderstanding behind many attacks since the early 1990s on feminist theory
and criticism. Detractors like Sommers assume that “feminism” is a monolithic,
prescriptive, conformist stance—that it is singular. The purpose of this anthology
is, for the twenty-fi rst century as it was in 1991, to dispel that error by demonstrat-
ing the multiplicity of perspectives and approaches called feminist literary theory
and criticism.
Feminisms Redux is a third edition of Feminisms, appreciably shorter than the
fi rst two and more retrospective in its conception. Almost two decades after its
fi rst appearance, Feminisms has become something of an institution in feminist
criticism, having been adopted for many courses and consulted by many scholars
over the years. As was the case when we edited the fi rst edition, most collections
of feminist theory are either interdisciplinary (leaving little room for a diversity
x ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN AND DIANE PRICE HERNDL
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of approaches to literature and cultural studies) or are short, containing twelve
to fi fteen essays that either represent a particular methodology or are focused on
a specifi c subject. When such anthologies do attempt to represent a variety of
methodological approaches, their limited space prevents attempts at real compre-
hensiveness. Generally, it has been true that if an anthology focuses on French
feminist theories, it excludes Anglo-American approaches; if it brings together
work on writings by women of color, it leaves out “mainstream” subjects; if it as-
pires to represent a broad spectrum of perspectives, it usually saves room for one
or two voices to speak for “race” or “postcolonialism” and perhaps one or two to
speak for “sexual orientation” and “class.” Given the constraints of expense and
space in such books, these editorial decisions make perfect sense.
Since its fi rst appearance, Feminisms has remained the most comprehensive
collection of complete essays and book chapters representing feminist literary
criticism. In 2006, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar released Feminist Literary
Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, the logical extension of their classic Norton
Anthology of Literature by Women.2 Theirs is the fi rst book of feminist criticism to
rival Feminisms in its scope, and it differs from our project in that it includes a
substantial section of women writers’ commentaries on writing and case studies
of specifi c women’s texts, as well as excerpts from many infl uential feminist criti-
cal and theoretical books and essays. Many of those essays and book chapters also
appear in their entirety in Feminisms; this overlap confi rms the impression we had
in 1991 that we would be forming a canon of feminist literary criticism despite
our skepticism about the validity of canons. By their nature and function, critical
anthologies, like literary anthologies, create canons (as Jane Gallop has argued in
Around 1981 [1992]3); when they become the basis for syllabi, collections come to
defi ne the fi elds they seek to introduce. Although the canonization effect is prob-
ably to some degree unavoidable, we tried our best to subvert it. We hoped the
diversity of our selections and their organization into sections would emphasize
our assertion that Feminisms did not propose a totalizing defi nition of feminist
criticism, but rather presented various feminisms, a signifi cant number of voices
and approaches functioning alongside other feminisms in the academy.
Feminisms Redux maintains the plural approach to feminist theory and criti-
cism that inspired the original editions, but reduces the number of essays. This
book is an offering to those colleagues who asked for a shorter, more manageable
Feminisms that could serve as the basis for a course on feminist criticism or stand
alongside primary texts in courses on literature or cultural studies. Reducing the
number of entries by nearly two thirds, we have found the process of cutting pain-
ful. Many of our personal favorites—and many essays by dear friends—from Femi-
nisms do not appear in Feminisms Redux. Our principle of selection this time was
to choose those pieces that sparked dialogues that are still ongoing in academic
feminist discourse. Having taught the book repeatedly, we included as many as
we could of the pieces that still light a fi re under students. As we looked over the
previous tables of contents, we acknowledged that the debates sparking some
of the essays in the original volume have ended. Methodological disputes over
whether feminist criticism should have anything to do with critical theory more
generally, over whether “French” feminism or “Anglo-American” feminism is the
superior approach, and over whether feminists undermine their common goal by
disagreeing with one another are, for the most part, over. They have gone the way