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233 READING BACHMANN IN 1987 This essay was written in summer 1987 and published in the spring 1988 issue of German Quarterly. Clearly, since writing the Wittgenstein essay two years before, I had found my way back to feminism, and this essay bears the marks of the methodological transition in which feminist literary scholarship, and literary analysis in general, was then engaged. Within my own experience, that transition did not occur without struggle. At the time I believed (of course) that I was on the “right” side of the contestation, though the position I assumed then now seems methodologically quite naive. At mid-decade, the response of some U.S. academic feminists (including me) to the dire political circumstances into which Reaganism had thrust women (and the world altogether) took the form of a repudiation of forms of high theory that seemed to have no application to practice : they looked at systems of signification, but we focused on “real women.” In her essay “Zwischenbilanz der feministischen Debatten [Interim assessment of the feminist debates]” in Frank Trommler’s Germanistik in den USA, Biddy Martin captured this moment within the organization Women in German (WIG): “Many articles in the [Women in German] Newsletter of 1986–87 construct a division between West German and American feminist Germanists that reproduces . . . the opposition between political engagement, democratic process, and empirical reality on the one hand and theory, textuality, and fashionable trends on the other. This perspective threatened to obscure the specificity of the work of West German and American feminists by judging them solely on the basis of whether they were compatible with ‘our’ work or merely derive from the French” (170). As Martin goes on to observe, that divide never really existed even within WIG, whose members were in fact located on both sides of the debate, yet for a time the consequence for the organization was denunciations , hurt feelings, and tears on both sides. Within the Five College academic feminist community, too, the dispute was very apparent, crystallizing in a struggle over the meaning of “difference” like the one June Howard described, as we attempted to organize a series of five symposia on women and difference in connection with a faculty development project. In the last of the symposia, held in October 1987, “my” group took as its focus “Feminism and Activism: The Last Twenty-five Years”; the “theorists ” invited Gayatri Spivak to hold a series of seminars for local academic feminists. This is Ann Rosalind Jones’s account of a meeting preparing for Spivak’s visit: Another incident, in 1986, brought the conflict to a head for me. Several organizers of the Five College seminar on women in the Third World decided to begin by reading Gayatri Spivak’s dense commentary on the short story “Draupadi” by a Bengali writer, Mahasetv Devi; at the last minute, we threw in an article by Mark { 234 } a history of reading bachmann Cousins purporting to explain deconstruction. The meeting was a catastrophe. Women from various fields, some of them activists in their fifties, others new arrivals in the area, objected violently to the opacity of all three texts. . . . One women, an African-American literary critic, said, “I don’t mind difficult reading, but isn’t this approach finally just a way of focusing on the oppressor all over again?” Others asked, less temperately, how any of this theory was relevant to clitoridectomy in Ethiopia or the blindness of women working on assembly lines in “free” trade zones in the Philippines. Finally a woman who’d been a member of the previous study group [a feminist study group of the late 1970s in which Jones and I had both participated] stood up, declared, “Deconstruction is an empty yuppie theory; we need to read Fanon, not Derrida,” and left the room. (75) I recall the event somewhat differently, and I hope I wasn’t the seminar participant whom Jones remembers stomping out of the room, but I fear I might have been. In October 1986 I elaborated my negative assessment of the state of contemporary feminism in a paper called “‘Is That All?’ Whatever Happened to the Women’s Liberation Movement? Reflections on the Course of American Feminism ,” repeating my talk at the 1987 MLA (and making many feminists mad at me, except for some old-time lefties: I was honored and pleased that Tillie Olsen came up after my talk to tell me how much she liked it). Like the Nation, though (which perhaps had influenced...

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