Ellen Rooney

Form and Contentment

polemic: [Gr. war] A. adj. of or pertaining to controversy; controversial; disputatious B. sb. 1. A controversial argument or discussion; argumentation against some opinion, doctrine, etc.; aggressive controversy; in pl. the practice of this, especially as a method of conducting theological controversy; opposed to irenics. 1638 Drumm. of Hawth. Irene Wks. (1711) 172 Unhappy we, amidst our many and diverse contentions, furious polemicks, endless variances, . . . debates and quarrels! —Oxford English Dictionary

A Semiprivate Room

Joan Scott titled the 2000 conference where the papers collected in this issue of differences were initially presented together “Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of Public and Private.” The work of the participants repeatedly stressed the uneven, wavering, mutable quality of those boundaries, the phantasmatic nature of our obsessive reinvestments in their regularity and regeneration, and the uncanny power that the binary public/private has to make things of interest simply disappear, as Judith Butler observed. The semiprivate room is one such lost site: though it insistently emerges in multiple forms, it repeatedly slips out of view as the powerful opposition of private to public is reinscribed. The semiprivate figures neither an inside, nor an outside, but the conscious practice of drawing boundaries in a field neither the private nor the public can anticipate or guarantee.1

Modernisms and feminisms

This essay investigates the tangled and often contradictory relationship between two notoriously complex ideological forms. Just as there are many feminisms, so there are many modernisms. A range of diverse, even incompatible aesthetic practices are commonly labeled modernist, including Futurism, Symbolism, Imagism, Vorticism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Attempts to define modernism, then, are often made with the broadest of brushstrokes. Modernism can be characterized as a set of “multiple revolts against traditional realism and romanticism.” Its preoccupations might include a commitment to paradox and ambiguity, a tendency toward aesthetic self-consciousness, an interest in techniques of montage and juxtaposition, or a fascination with the demise of the integrated individual personality. Or modernism can simply be labeled an art of crisis, a term Michael Levenson finds to be inevitably central in discussions of this turbulent cultural moment. Studies of literary modernism tend to focus on the period 1890 to 1930 as the years when a new kind of writing emerged, one characterized by new aesthetic codes, unprecedented experimentations with literary form, and radical transformations in social, philosophical, and cultural themes. This common definition of modernism as the art of a specific historical period in one sense evades the difficulties of defining the movement in other ways. Yet, importantly, it also emphasizes its historical coincidence with feminism. The period 1890 to 1930 was simultaneously a time of increasing feminist agitation, as women in various countries entered higher education and the workplace in unprecedented numbers, campaigned for the vote, and placed issues of sexuality and gender firmly on the political agenda.

The literary politics of feminist theory

Common sense assures us that feminist politics and feminist theory are intimately related. Any agitation on behalf of womens rights involves some sort of critique of the dominant order, some kind of “theory” of womens oppression in a patriarchal society. This is true even of feminist activisms that consciously present themselves as immediate expressions of womens experiences, emphatically privileging womens voices and committed to grass roots political action. It is necessary (though not sufficient) to observe that such a “presentation” of necessity involves a rhetoric, a strategy of representation and an argument, in which the model of direct action rooted in experience is set against other models and presented as the proper ground for authentic feminist activism. While all of this is true, when I suggest that any agitation on behalf of womens rights involves some theory of womens oppression, I mean something more essential or specific to feminisms project as such, to feminism as a way of thinking, writing, and acting. The very possibility of any political action against patriarchy or masculinism requires an account of that masculinism’s flaws, a dissent from the way in which it seeks to situate and dominate femininity. In the exposure of such a masculinist “narrative of femininity,” stereotypes of woman and women appear as the effects of patriarchy, including, of course, of patriarchy’s many stories. The disclosure of some such patriarchal narrative of femininity is the sine qua non of feminist agitation.

The predicament of differences without positive terms

When differences: a journal of cultural studies was founded, its editors, Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed, marked its theoretical orientation with an italicized s. To truncate radically what their insistent plural sought to extend, we can say that that orientation was to be theoretical, broadly poststructuralist; feminist, but not identitarian; and intent on critical reading practices, not abstract system-building. differences would interweave the play of difference that emerged from the linguistic turn in feminism with feminist insights into the differences within every position (especially within subjectivity: within femininity, within race, within nation). Today, we might be forgiven for reading in their script a sign of our own conundrum of differences, that is, their appropriation by a multitude of hegemonic forces; (in theory) these forces ought to be exposed, chagrined and perhaps even displaced by the heterogeneity, the asymmetries, the ‘impossibility’ of difference. Yet, whether we look to the academy and its disciplines, or to the world of practice nominally ‘outside’ the university, the critical force of difference as such appears to be diverted and dissipated. The relentless ‘commodification of difference’ is the most pervasive form of this diversion. For some critics, commodification refers simply to the use of difference to sell, to aestheticize commodities in a particular way, as when the New York Times Style Magazine defines ethnic as an adjective meaning ‘relating to a sizable group of people sharing a common and distinctive racial, national, religious, linguistic or cultural heritage; a fashion-world umbrella term for the exotic influences bushwacking their way through the season, e.g., “Ethnic is so-o-o chic, it’s the new black”’ (Silva, 2005). For others, difference itself, as an aspect of personal identity, is commodified when it is presented as a reified object to be acquired, if not literally R E V I E W S Y M P O S I U M

Feminism and popular culture

The study of popular culture addresses both media texts and cultural practices. This ever-expanding area of scholarship includes film, science fiction, television, romance novels, popular music, magazines: all the seeming ephemera in the public domain that through its popularity remains in production and circulation or has attained a place in cultural memory. As a field that encompasses and interrogates the production, distribution, and interpretation of all popular media forms, this much-maligned discipline demands particularly stringent intellectual and methodological rigor. Feminist interventions in the field have been both inspiring and infuriating. For example, Germaine Greers three and sixpence purchase of the two romance novels analyzed in The Female Eunuch does not actually misrepresent the genre, but her anecdotal discussion of their impact falls short of the systematic methodology expected in scholarly research in popular culture. Difficulties in studying popular culture arise from the scale of the mass media, its ephemeral nature, and the paradox of its apparent inconsequence. Feminist analysis of popular culture intensifies the debate over whether popular texts merely reflect society or act as part of the process of mediation in social life. The understanding that popular and mass media texts act as sites of cultural practice, which Greer acknowledges in her discussion, links popular culture directly to ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world. The status of these texts as shared cultural reference points that make visible ideologies, discourses, and values is a major topic of feminist analysis. Popular culture constitutes a space of exchange between dominant and subordinate cultures and provides a valuable area of study for those who hope to understand social change.

Feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism

Excitement In 1987 Janet Malcolm wrote an animated, enthusiastic review essay for the New Yorker on the recently published In Doras Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism : “The new writings – feminist, deconstructive and Lacanian, for the most part – have a wild playfulness and a sort of sexual sparkle that flicker through their academic patois and give them extraordinary verve . . . The New Critics of psychoanalysis worry Freuds text as if it were a metaphysical poem.” Rather than a metaphysical poem, the essays address, of course, Freuds notorious handling and mishandling of an early case of female hysteria. But if (with a few brief exceptions) literature is absent from the volume, literary reading practice is not. Of the seventeen contributors, thirteen are academic literary critics. Although the presence of literary practitioners does not guarantee the literariness of the readings, the volume has enough essays that do worry over the workings of the texts – their power and their treachery – to give it the flavor of a serious encounter between Freud and the literary deconstructionists.