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Toward a MaterialistFeminist Criticism With Deborah RosenfeIt This essay, as I mention elsewhere, was begun in 1981 as a short talk on the relations between mainstream, largely white, feminist criticism and postMarxist literary critical assumptions and methodologies. In 1984 Deborah Rosenfelt and I recast the essay as an introduction to acollection of "materialist -feminist criticism." What had begun as an attempt to bridge mainstream feminist criticism and post-Marxist work became a different sort of intervention . It became an attempt to construct-through naming, defining, and citing it-a literary critical configuration that drew upon critical gender, antiracist, post-Marxist, and poststructuralist work without being positioned solely in any of these discourses or locations. Although the essay indirectly addresses some forms of poststructuralist feminist literary criticism, which we felt overprivileged gender division and public written representation, it is much more directly an intervention in mainstream, largely white, feminist literary criticism as much of it was practiced in the early 1980s. The essay focuses, for example, on the tendency of much mainstream feminist criticism to privilege literary texts, gender division, an undifferentiated women's nature, and an unchanging patriarchy . It evokes, instead, an approach or tendency that we choose to call materialist-feminist literary criticism, an extension of the term materialist feminism as employed by British cultural critics such as Annette Kuhn and Michele Barrett. This approach, as we defined it, focused, like much mainstream feminist work, on the interests at stake in the construction of social identities and knowledges, but it positioned its readings of literary texts in relation to other forms of public written representation and other forms of the material, such as (always constructed) social and economic relations. We evoked a criticism that worked along more than one axis of analysis-that worked with gender in relation to race, ethnicity, sexual and national identi- 2 Starting Over ties, and class-and that emphasized difference not just between women and men but among women and among men. We evoked a criticism, finally, that retained some notion of agency and of the possibility of progressive social change, and we defined the latter as change within interlocking oppressions, as change requiring broad, cross-gender, cross-racial, cross-class alliance. I have made very few changes either in the body of the essay or in the footnotes because I think it is of interest to see both the essay's historical limitations and the ways in which it prefigured contemporary articulations of materialist-feminist and feminist cultural studies work. Among the most central of its limitations are its essentially additive view of race, class, and gender and its lack of attention to the global and neocolonial scholarship (which was then emerging in the United States). Nonetheless, in its evocation of an ideology critique that focused on knowledge and power and that drew on critical gender, antiracist, post-Marxist, and poststructuralist work, it prefigured many current formulations of materialist feminism, materialistfeminist criticism, and feminist cultural studies work. Lillian Robinson once said that the most important question we can ask ourselves as feminist critics is "So what?" Implied in that question was a view that most of us shared-that the point of our work was to change the world. But to begin with the question "So what?" is to take on the task of asking other questions as well, such as what is the relation of literature and therefore of literary criticism to the social and economic conditions of our lives? Most feminist critics still work within a central insight of the women's movement-that gender is socially constructed and that its construction has enforced unequal relations of power. From that insight it is a relatively short step to the assumption that other products of consciousness, like literature and literary criticism, are also socially constructed and that they too are political. Like women's studies, generally, in fact, feminist criticism began with the assumption that we make our own knowledge and are constantly remaking it in the terms that history provides-and that, in making knowledge, we act upon the power relations of our lives.1 As feminist critics, for example, we speak of making our knowledge of history, choosing to see in it not a tale of individual and inevitable suffering but, instead, a story of struggle and relations of power. We speak of making our notion of literary texts, choosing to read them not as meditations upon themselves but as gestures to- [18.189.180.244] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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