The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism

Sarah Gamble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134545612
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Approachable for general readers as well as for students in women's studies related courses at all levels, this invaluable guide follows the unique Companion format in combining over a dozen in-depth background chapters with more than 400 A-Z dictionary entries. The background chapters are written by major figures in the field of feminist studies, and include thorough coverage of the history of feminism, as well as extensive discussions of topics such as Postfeminism, Men in Feminism, Feminism and New Technologies and Feminism and Philosophy. The dictionary entries cover the major individuals and issues essential to an understanding both of feminism's roots and of the trends that are shaping its future. Readers will find entries on people such as Aphra Behn, Simone de Beauvoir, Princess Diana, Courtney Love and Robert Bly, and on subjects such as Afro-American feminism, cosmetic surgery, the 'new man', prostitution, reproductive technologies and 'slasher' films.

II
A–Z OF KEY THEMES
AND MAJOR FIGURES

A

ABJECTION

In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), the French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva argues that to take up a position within the symbolic order, the individual subject must define itself as independent, and reject anything which threatens that sense of autonomous, unique self-hood. Abjection, however, testifies to the fact that such control is only ever partial. Because it draws attention to the precariousness of identity, the abject is associated with all that the subject perceives as being unclean and potentially polluting: food, bodily wastes, and vomit, for example, all of which serve to remind the subject that it cannot escape basic biological drives over which it has no influence. Kristeva aligns the abject with the semiotic order, and thus with the female, an implicitly essentialist assumption. However, modern feminist artists such as Jo Spence have produced work that appropriates the monstrosity of the abject in order to challenge conventional representations of the feminine.

ABORTION

One of the cornerstones of the feminist movement has always been a woman’s right to control her own reproductive processes through recourse to such reproductive technologies as contraception, sterilisation and abortion. Abortion is clearly the most emotive item on this list, since it involves the termination of a foetus. Campaigns around abortion formed a focal point for second wave feminism, and it continues to be a contentious issue.

Ranged against the feminist position are followers of the pro-life movement and various religious organisations which argue for foetal rights. To the fore in such campaigns are iconographic representations of the gestating foetus which render the containing body of the woman invisible, and which thus depict in graphic form the pro-life belief that the embryo is a person whose existence must be preserved, regardless of the wishes of the potential mother.

Although not all feminists would condone a simple ‘abortion on demand’ policy, a feminist point of view would put the mother first, arguing for woman’s right ‘to undertake her maternities in freedom’ (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex). For radical feminists such as Adrienne Rich, abortion is an instrument of male domination, allowing men to control the produce of women’s labour.

ACKER, KATHY: PROSE WRITER AND ESSAYIST

(1945–1997) Kathy Acker was an innovative and controversial novelist, whose efforts to render female experience in prose brings her close to a radical kind of écriture féminine. Often accused of pretension, illiteracy and immorality, she saw her writing style as rooted in ‘conceptualist’ technique, stating that form is determined not by rules but by intention. She read Williams Burroughs’ The Third Mind, and taught herself to write in a similarly experimental manner, and under Burroughs’ influence she became an expert at manipulating text in place of conventional narrative. In works such as Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978) and Blood and Guts in High School (1984) Acker repeats several pages of text throughout the same novel, fuses countless literary forms within the same page, breaks up the text with illustrations and uses a blend of autobiography and historical and literary allusion in place of ‘story’ (characters in her novels include Rimbaud, Toulouse- Lautrec and Georges Bataille). Her favourite themes include identity, gender, sexuality, myth and corruption.

Acker’s deconstructionist impulses extended out of the body of the text to encompass the physical body itself, which she regarded as another text, a story to be written. She was a fanatical bodybuilder, and had many piercings and elaborate tattoos. At the first appearance of breast cancer in 1996, she voluntarily underwent a double mastectomy. She turned completely to alternative medicines, but died on 27 November 1997 in New Mexico.

ACTIVISM

Feminist activists believe that change will not come about through simple negotiation: it must be forced. This is achieved through the staging of activities or protests that will draw attention to issues in a dramatic way, such as the exhibition of bra-burning at the 1968 Miss America beauty contest. A more recent example of activism at work would be the Greenham Common protest in the 1980s. Although the campaigners themselves were widely derided in the popular press, they were nevertheless successful in creating a dramatic anti-war statement.

ADVERTISING

Simply stated, advertising is the process by which people are persuaded to buy things, and are thus transformed into consumers. In order to be effective, however, advertising must surround the product with meanings which extend beyond its simple function. Advertising thus becomes both an expression of dominant ideological assumptions within culture, and a means by which such assumptions continue to be perpetuated. Feminists argue that advertising is innately sexist, presenting its audience with conservative female stereotypes which limit the ways in which women are depicted elsewhere in culture. Moreover, the fact that its aim is to create a perception of lack means that women themselves are duped into trying to live up to unattainable ideals to do with appearance and lifestyle: as Naomi Wolf says in The Beauty Myth, ‘Advertising aimed at women works by lowering our self-esteem.’ Although in her later work Wolf has gone on to claim that there has been a shift in advertisers’ depictions of women that feature images of female dominance, the issue remains disputed.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN FEMINISM

The earliest articulator of black feminism was the ex-slave Sojourner Truth, whose legendary speech at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio, questions the exclusion of black women within the feminist movement: ‘Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriage, or ober mudpuddles, or gibs me any best place! And a’n’t I a woman?’ Among other nineteenth-century black feminists were Mary Church Terrell, Amanda Berry Smith and Anna Cooper, who in 1893 gave a remarkably frank and powerful speech about the ‘unwritten history’ of slave women who suffered a ‘double slavery’. They were women in a patriarchal society (like their white counterparts) but as black slave women they neither owned their own bodies (and were therefore at the mercy of their master’s desires), nor had rights over their own children, who could be sold away from them. With the rise in political consciousness that took place at the end of the 1960s, many black activists came to national prominence, including lesbian poet and essayist Audre Lorde and most visibly Angela Davis, who brought a Marxist interpretation to bear on women’s oppression. The founding text of contemporary black feminism, however, is bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman (1981), whose title quotes Truth’s famous Akron speech on the marginalisation of black women within the feminist movement, which is hooks’s subject. Many scholarly works have been written about American slave women which was until the 1980s (in Anna Cooper’s prescient phrase) ‘unwritten history’ and which have in turn enriched black feminist discourse. As a critical voice in the heart of the world’s richest nation, African-American feminism has contributed significantly to the analysis of women’s oppression, and oppression generally.

ALTERITY

The term ‘alterity’ is closely related to the concept of ‘othering’ and Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘exteriority’ or marginality of the subject. Often thought of as synonymous with ‘Other’, the condition of alterity exemplifies the marginal or peripheral who do not have access to the centres of power. The centre (or centres) represent a point of origin in which meaning is fixed and validated as the determining norm. Those excluded from the centre by virtue of race, caste, gender or religion are categorised as irrelevant to normative conventions and designated ‘other’. Feminist theorists argue that patriarchy has conferred alterity on the experience of women by utilising biologistic and essentialist models of women’s identity. Thus female experience is homogenised, related to the margins and subjugated to the norm, i.e., male experience, in order to legitimise and naturalise the privileging of patriarchal power.

ALTHUSSER, LOUIS: CULTURAL AND LITERARY THEORIST

(1918–1990) One of the most influential French Marxist philosophers of the 1960s, whose work began to appear in English translation from 1965 onwards, beginning with For Marx. This was followed by Reading Capital (1970), Lenin and Philosophy (1971), Politics and History (1972), Essays in Self-Criticism (1976) and Essays in Ideology (1983). Althusser’s ideas concerning social institutions, and the place of the human subject within their structures, have influenced feminist deconstructions of patriarchy and capitalism. His essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy lays the foundation for a reconsideration of the female subject’s relationship to patriarchal ideology, and is famous for introducing the term ‘interpellation’, which describes the way in which an individual is identified and positioned within ideological structures.

Althusser’s use of the term ‘imaginary’ is also useful for feminist theory. In his work, the subject misrecognises his or her place in the social order through an ideology which posits as ‘natural’ a fixed relationship between social classes. What is at issue for Althusser is the way in which individual human subjects are constituted by an order which extends beyond the images through which that order is represented to them. In Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory the realm of the imaginary is contained within that of the symbolic order, and it is the function of psychoanalysis to uncover the ‘real’ relations which exist beneath this series of representations. In Althusser, however, the ‘mirror phase’ can be equated with ‘ideology’ in that this is the means through which individual human subjects misrecognise themselves and their positions in the social order.

ANARCHIST FEMINISM

Anarchist feminists identify church and state with the practice of patriarchal oppression. Therefore, for women to assume ‘equal’ status within existing structures will achieve nothing. Instead, anarchist feminists advocate a society which is non-hierarchical and antiauthoritarian, relying instead on mutual cooperation amongst equal individuals. The founding mother of anarchist feminism is the RussianAmerican agitator Emma Goldman, who argued that the family plays a key role in the oppression of women, since it is an institution that restricts them sexually, economically and socially. In its place she proposed a society founded on the principles of free love and self-determination. Indeed, it is self-determination that lies at the heart of the feminist anarchist project, since within an anarchist framework each individual must bear responsibility for their society’s functioning. As the science fiction writer Ursula K.Le Guin puts it in her short story ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ (1974), ‘What is an anarchist? One, who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.’ Some critics, however, see this stress on individual will as itself problematic, since it implies, as Alix Kates Schulman puts it in her essay on Goldman, that ‘a failure to change can be seen as a failure of individual will’ (in Dale Spender, ed., Feminist Theorists, 1983).

ANDROCENTRISM

Term coined by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her publication of 1911, The Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture, which denotes a system of thought centred around male identity and values. Within androcentrism, the female constitutes a deviation from a norm defined by reference to the male: a good example of this in language is the way in which ‘mankind’ is a term used to refer to all people regardless of their gender. In her introduction to Man-Made Language, Dale Spender discusses how the belief that man is the superior sex affects the organisation of social institutions, so that an androcentric system, which automatically rewards the ‘superior’ gender with more resources, becomes self-perpetuating. The French feminist Hélène Cixous makes a similar point when she argues that Western thought revolves around the dualism ‘man/ woman’, but that it is not an equal relat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge Companions
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• Contributors
• Part I Feminism: its History and Cultural Context
• Part II A–Z of Key Themes and Major Figures
• Index