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Feminist Studies 14.1| issn:
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PREFACE
We begin this issue of Feminist Studies with art, poetry, and prose
that inspire our political engagement. The art works are by women
from southern Africa—the cover art calls us to join in the struggle
for Namibian liberation, the inside prints in the struggle against
apartheid in South Africa.
The poems are from a reading by women of color at the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley, in 1985. Janice Mirikitani, Paula
Gunn Allen, Cherrie Moraga, and Audre Lorde joined in this
historical multiracial protest against apartheid, lending their voices
to the demand that the regents of the University of California
divest holdings in companies doing business with South Africa.
The divestment a few months afterwards intimates the power of
women’s political culture, in concert with other initiatives, to ef-
fect genuine change.
Annette Kolodny’s "Dancing between Left and Right: Feminism
and the Academic Minefield in the 1980s," revisits the terrain of
her influential Feminist Studies essay, "Dancing through the
Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and
Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism," and finds that the mine-
field constituted by men’s fears of sharing power and influence
with women has not yet been safely detonated, notwithstanding
ten years of (ostensible) dialogue between feminist and male
critics. She demonstrates the ways in which male critics have ex-
propriated, misrepresented, and attempted to contain the radical
challenges posed by feminist criticism and calls for a renewal of
political commitment on the part of feminists in the academy. In
this disheartening political climate, when, as Kolodny suggests,
feminist scholarship and criticism have become for too many a
chic intellectual activity rather than part of a political practice, we
found her call both timely and courageous.
The essays that follow suggest some of the differences in
perspective and method that make contemporary feminist inquiry
so lively a project. Those by Mary Poovey, Jane Caputi, and Susan
Jeffords examine gender ideologies in various forms of public
discourse. They share an emphasis on the processes of representa-
tion as a site of struggle for the control of consciousness. Two of
these essays, those by Poovey and Jeffords, bring a materialist
feminist perspective to bear on their different eras and subjects,
reading their texts as inscriptions of ideological conflict shaped by
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their historical moment. Caputi's essay implies a radical feminist
vision, one in which contemporary mass culture manifests and
serves the interests of pervasive patriarchal power.
Poovey offers a complex analysis of gender and class ideologies
in Victorian England, as inscribed in family law and as articulated
in the contradictory polemics of one writer with a personal stake
in legal reform, Caroline Sheridan Norton. Poovey demonstrates
the power and consequences in legal and social discourse of the
ideology of natural difference between women and men, and its
corresponding allocation of equal rights to men in the public
sphere and of legal protection to (married) women in the private.
She suggests that the genre of melodrama provided some of the
roles and terms through which Norton paradoxically both chal-
lenged and confirmed the ideological status quo, although she re-
mained unable to perceive the political and economic interests
that might have linked her situation to that of working-class
women in a struggle, not merely for protection, but for equality.
While Poovey delineates the ideological tensions that shaped
both women’s and men’s discussions of women's legal status,
Caputi ascribes an essentially seamless masculinism to both con-
temporary mass culture and contemporary political discourse. She
accumulates a persuasive array of examples to argue that the logic
of militarism and male domination is facilitated by a blurring of
linguistic boundaries between the organic and the artificial. Her
radical feminist analysis, conflating the Nuclear Age and what she
elsewhere designates the Age of Sex Crime, treats current repre-
sentations of technology and war as analagous to pornographic
representations of male domination over women. Susan Jeffords's
discussion of Vietnam War films of the Rambo ilk historicizes their
militarism and masculinism by analyzing them as symptoms of an
effort to regenerate an American manhood challenged by
feminism, by changing relations of gender, and by the defeats in-
flicted in the war itself. For Jeffords, these films illustrate a
widespread antifeminist revisionism now pervading U.S. culture.
Unlike Caputi, who assumes an elemental and original “reality” in
the natural world, which she urges feminists to "re-member,” Jef-
fords is wary of “originary” myths. She attributes to these films
themselves a dangerous insistence on the myth of an originary
body, the ostensibly “healthy” body of American masculinity that
must be rediscovered by debriding it of its “unhealthy” accretions
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of effeminacy and defeat. This insistence, Jeffords argues, enables
American patriarchy to deny the construction of masculinity as
representation.
Three of the essays and reviews in this issue represent and ad-
dress recent feminist thinking on gender, science, and technology.
In reviewing three books on reproductive technology, Sarah
Franklin and Maureen McNeil urge us to beware the deceptive-
ness of individual choice as an ideal in an arena in which more
choices, even for those who can afford them, do not necessarily
guarantee women more power or more control over our own
bodies. They ask feminists to think beyond the liberal humanist
politics of individual choice to practices and policies that will gen-
uinely empower women in the crucial realm of reproduction. Our
second review essay by Helen E. Longino features books by Evelyn
Fox Keller, Ann Fausto-Sterling, and Sandra Harding on gender,
science, and feminism. Longino searches out their commonalities
and differences and raises important questions for future con-
sideration. She finds Harding’s book, The Science Question in
Feminism, the most controversial of the three, especially in its ef-
fort to subsume the natural sciences and the social sciences under
one philosophic rubric. Reflecting on these texts’ handling of cen-
tral questions of “objectivity” and "truth," Longino concludes that
feminist scholars must better distinguish a critique of the sciences
per se from a critique of a positivist philosophy of science.
Responding more joyfully to Harding's work, Donna Haraway
reads The Science Question in Feminism "in order to make it yield a
doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical
and critical feminist science projects." For Haraway, feminist ob-
jectivity means, as her title implies, “situated knowledges,” that is,
knowledges explicitly located in specific and partial perspectives.
Haraway's essay suggests a way out of the impasse of dichotomy
between, on the one hand, an ostensibly passionless empiricism
that claims to induce universal, objective truths or laws and, on
the other, postmodernist relativism and/or feminist hostility to any
claims for scientific objectivity. Haraway envisions liberatory
possibilities for both epistemology and politics in a science of "pas-
sion and position," derived from "webs of connection” that will give
us partial but cumulatively better accounts of the world.
The disagreements among these authors reminds us of the mul-
tiplicitous nature of feminist thought today. Given these differ-
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ences, book reviewing itself, from the assignment of a book to a
particular reviewer to the review’s reception by its audience (in-
cluding the book's author}, has proved highly charged politically
and emotionally. The editors of Feminist Studies thought our
readers might be interested in a forum on the subject of feminist
book reviewing. Accordingly, Natalie Zemon Davis, Julia
Penelope, Margery Wolf, Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, and Linda
Gardiner, familiar names as reviewers and book review editors,
have contributed their reflections. The consensus among them is
reflected in Davis's concluding words: “Whatever we do, let's do it
so as to advance a critical discourse that keeps our debates bub-
bling excitedly (and) keeps our changing community strong... ."
Deborah Rosenfelt and Claire G. Moses,
for the editors