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Some Proposals for Feminist Literary Criticism Sara Lennox The investigation of gender relations remains a central concern of feminist scholarship, though feminists have often vigorously debated how best to define them. Almost all American feminist scholars now agree that gender relations are social constructions. They define gender as a social category that must be distinguished from sex, the biological substratum on which gender rests and which allows various societies to define masculinity and femininity as opposite, if dialectically related, terms. In the 1970s and early eighties, particularly under the influence of poststructuralism, much academic feminism in the United States concentrated on defining the nature of women's difference from men. But in the course of the 1980s, as a consequence of developments within academic feminism as well as external political pressures, feminist scholarship in the United States moved from an emphasis on women's difference from men to an exploration of differences among women. Now, in the nineties , feminist scholars confront the problem of how to refine the concept of women's difference—both from men and from other women—and to move beyond it. Here I want first to outline four major areas of debate within feminist scholarship in the United States that are also of particular relevance to feminist literary criticism. Then I would like to suggest a number of areas in which feminist literary criticism might respond concretely to questions raised by feminist theory.1 1. Throughout the 1980s feminist scholars increasingly came to recognize that, if femininity was a social construction, it was no longer possible to speak simply of "women" without specifying which women one meant, since definitions of femininity were dynamic and constantly changing, varying historically, culturally, racially, ethnically, by class and religion and for many other reasons. Feminist scholars thus began to investigate the multiple and shifting relationships of any culture's categories of femininity to their categories of masculinity, other symbolic categories, and other modes of cultural, political and economic organization and experience. Some feminists argued that femininity was internally as well as externally unstable:2 because gendered subjects within any particular culture inhabit a variety of subject positions simultaneously, the discourses (on gender and on other issues) that call them into being are Women in German Yearbook 7 (1991) 92Proposals for Feminist Literary Criticism often not compatible with each other, and because of the enormous variety of forces to which any particular individual is subject, any individual woman is always traversed by multiple contradictions. Many American feminists were thus forced to concede that cross-culturally women may have little in common at all except biology—the meanings of which are always culturally mediated. It was thus not a priori clear what, if anything at all, makes similar or binds together the kind of people we call "women," and that, of course, raised significant problems for feminism, which has understood itself as a movement for the liberation of all women. These insights might have been impossible without poststructuralism , but the attempt to understand gender historically has also revealed poststructuralism's limitations, since it can view femininity as a site within discourse but has much more difficulty showing how the discourses of femininity change historically or how to theorize the relationship of discourse to non-discursive forces. 2.Related to American feminists' uncertainty about the category of gender has been their growing skepticism about categories and grand theory in general (also in part a consequence of the influence of poststructuralism ), an issue around which major feminist debates have raged. On the one hand, feminists have feared that their search for models, paradigms , or metanarratives that could describe all women's experience (like, for instance, patriarchy or the universality of motherhood) represented the kind of imperialist arrogance white men have displayed as they imposed fictive categories derived from their own experience on the heterogeneity of human existence. On the other hand, many feminists have argued strongly that if feminists wish to talk about women's oppression at all, to describe who structurally holds power over whom and why, they cannot do without "large historical narrative and historically situated social theory."3 To avoid the dangers of essentialism and relativism, some feminist scholars have argued...

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