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11 s I N G U l A R I T y, f e M I N I s M , A N d T H e P O l I T I c s O f d I f f e R e N c e A N d I d e N T I T y Sex isn’t a separate thing functioning away all by itself. It’s usually found attached to a person of some sort. Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night The moral issue also involves a confusion about the importance of power in human communities [and] the false deification of power as the sole deciding factor in events. . . . Wherever power does not limit itself, there exists violence and terror, and in the end the destruction of life and soul. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt In Chapters 3 to 6 we argue that when student writers are invited to exercise gendership as a rhetorical instrument and a means of expression and self-creation, they may discover, enact, and deepen their potentiality. True also of their singularity. For English professionals, to regard each student as singular is a moral necessity, since singular persons are what they actually face in the classroom and singular texts are what they and their students actually read and write. In this chapter we will measure our understanding of singularity and potentiality against the history of feminist discourse on gender during the last four decades. In those years the values embraced by feminist theory—difference, positionality, political empowerment—are rooted in a complex and, to a large degree, coherent debate marked by critical reflection and honest examination. At first glance, it would seem that the emergent values run contrary to those that affirm the individual writer and so advance acts of authoring. A wide variety of feminists debating the central issues of gender identity and difference seem to have journeyed away from 178 AU T H ORI N G personal singularity toward political collectivity, or away from innate potentiality toward scripted performance. But that would be to cut the historical journey short. While the dominant discourse of feminisms may still privilege difference and identity politics, there are subversive voices in the ranks advancing the cause of singularity: Samira Kawash, Seyla Benhabib, Gayatri Spivak, Adriana Cavarero, and others. As the following synoptic history makes clear, singularity may now offer a way out of a box that feminist theories have written themselves into. The feminisms of difference and identity politics seemed to solve the primary ill of early feminisms—binary essentialism —but brought with them losses that singularity may be able to recoup. Instead of an adversary, feminist theory is proving to be a tentative ally in our approach to authoring. T He J O URN ey O f T He feM I NI sT s For American scholars, feminist theory since the 1990s marks a radical break from feminist discourse of the 1970s and 1980s.1 As if to herald the new decade, Linda Alcoff described in 1988 what she saw as the “identity crisis” in feminist theory and offered a solution to that crisis (432). From Alcoff ’s perspective, female academics in the 1970s (following on the heels of the social upheaval of the 1960s) sought to articulate the principles of women’s liberation and the gender revolution . These early years enjoyed a sense of unity in terms of purpose: to resist male oppression endemic in a patriarchal society. Such a purpose assumed an oppositional dichotomy between male and female, men and women—a division that saturated all conceivable contours of culture and society. But it was far easier to identify what feminists were resisting than whom and what each woman wanted to be. With the influence of French feminists, American scholars turned the same critical lens focused on injustice and misogyny upon their own assumptions and distinctions. Should we speak of “females” or of “women” in our advocacy for equality? Is there a difference between sex and gender? Are women born determined by their biology, or must that biology be presented, understood, and played out socially and culturally as gender? Advocates of gynesis argued that the female, sexed 1. Our interest here is not to reconstruct the history of feminism, nor to trace the origins of certain views and lines of reasoning. Rather, we are interested in these two elements of contemporary feminism—difference and identity politics—and the discourse surrounding them (including exploration, dialogue, and debate). [3.133.147.252] Project...

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