Toward A "Marxist-Feminist Cultural Analysis"

77 howard June Howard Toward A "Marxist-Feminist Cultural Analysis" In considering what I might contribute to this special issue I have found myself thinking about just what the category "Marxist feminist cultural analysis" implies. After all, each element in that sequence designates a distinct, complex field— there are many "Marxisms," many "feminisms." And each pair of terms— Marxist feminism, Marxist cultural analysis, feminist cultural analysis— also designates a body of work and a set of controversies. For me, too, there is another element in the combinatoire: "literary criticism" would be a more conventional designation for my field than "cultural analysis," and it is only in the last few years that I have begun to think through the implications of using one term or the other. That the phrase suggests a series of intersections should not lead us to imagine that we can by successive subtractions locate some small space that falls within each of the boundaries invoked. We arrive at a Marxist feminist cultural analysis by working in and on those fields to produce a space which did not exist before. So the formulation chosen as the topic of this issue suggests to me not the image of a unified, stable method, but the memory of a series of political and intellectual transformations. It indicates not a simple choice of perspective but a long labor. And I think the most useful thing I can offer is a brief, informal retracing of those transformations, an overview of the texts and concepts that have shaped one person's current idea of what such a criticism is and what it could become. Certainly that account constitutes the only definition of "Marxist feminist cultural analysis" I would want to propose, the only description that can begin to be adequate to its vital and diverse practice, its still-emergent theory, and its tremendous potential . As I remember it, the first time I encountered an explicit statement of the issues raised by juxtaposing Marxism and feminism in the context of literature was when as an undergraduate I came across Lillian Robinson's "Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective," published in College English in 1971. I still possess the (now rather yellowed) xerox copy I made of the article, for Robinson's humorous but merciless critique impressed me greatly: "Feminist criticism, as its name implies, is criticism with a Cause, engaged criticism. But the critical model presented to us so far is merely engaged to be married. It is about to contract what can only be a mésalliance with bourgeois modes of 78 the minnesota review thought and the critical categories they inform" (3).1 1 remember vividly the sense of recognition I felt reading her exposure of the ahistorical and elitist tendencies of much feminist literary criticism, but I also remember feeling a certain resistance, feeling that I found something of value in my studies of women and literature that Robinson did not seem to acknowledge. As I reread the article, which has been reprinted with Robinson's other work of the seventies in her Sex, Class and Culture, my reaction is much the same. Her critique is salutary. One still sees these early essays quoted because they dwell so energetically on political realities that feminist criticism has indeed often forgotten. But, as Robinson herself now admits (xxiii), she underestimated the potential of feminist scholarship. Feminist literary criticism changed the way I, and many others, think about literature. Its polemic against sexism in literature and in criticism, its recovery and reappraisal of female authors and female traditions, its study of representations of women, seem to me indispensable preconditions for a Marxist feminist cultural analysis. Our work assumes what Annette Kolodny, looking back over the achievements of the seventies, describes as feminist literary criticism's "acute and impassioned attentiveness to the ways in which primarily male structures of power are inscribed (or encoded) within our literary inheritance; the consequences of that encoding for women— as characters, as readers, and as writers; and, with that, a shared analytic concern for the implications of that encoding not only for a better understanding of the past, but also for an improved reordering of the present...