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NWSA Journal 14.1 (2002) 198-201



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Book Review

Feminist Consequences:
Theory for the New Century

Provoking Feminisms


Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century edited by Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kava. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 468 pp., $49.50 hardcover, $19.50 paper.
Provoking Feminisms by Carolyn Allen and Judith A. Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 282 pp., $39.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper.

Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka, the editors of Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, and Carolyn Allen and Judith A. Howard, the editors of Provoking Feminisms, view the turning of the century as an opportunity for stock taking. Neither the editors nor the authors represented in these anthologies suggest that the advent of the new century marks a new era of feminist thought and practice. The third wave is still with us. They do, however, register the movement of this wave and allow us to understand it as still struggling with the loss of innocence that ended second wave feminism.

What distinguishes these anthologies is not so much the issues they address or authors they identify as crucial, but the way in which they structure their portraits of the current state of feminist thought. Both volumes speak to the continued vitality of feminism. Both share a commitment [End Page 198] to self-reflexivity and an aversion to dogmatic thinking. Both indicate that the self-criticism and internal struggles that moved feminism to confront the biases of the second wave are now at work unsettling third wave feminism's secure positions. Both anthologies face the challenge of providing us with a structure through which to access the current scene without imposing a grid that would turn the tumult of the wave into the placid flow of a stream.

Carolyn Allen and Judith Howard, the editors of Provoking Feminisms and the editors of the academic journal Signs, identify four crucial feminist issues: epistemology, the role of psychoanalytic discourses, the matter of gender, and the problem of privacy. They then chose four essays previously printed in Signs—Susan Heckman's "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited," Rita Felski's "The Doxa of Difference: Working Through Sexual Difference," Mary Hawkesworth's "Confounding Gender," and Debra Morris's "Privacy, Privation, Perversity: Toward a New Representation of the Personal"—to anchor a conversation where authors are asked to respond to the representation of their work. Sometimes the conversations are cordial; sometimes they are not.

Setting an agenda for the future, claim the editors, is the purpose for these conversations. They identify this agenda by a question: Who is the we of feminism? Howard and Allen find that the commitment to contribute to a more just world is what holds the contentious feminist field together. However, they avoid attending to the tensions of the volume's exchanges and gloss the most disputed issue of the anthology: the purpose of feminist theory and the proper relationship between theory and praxis. The fractious debates surrounding this issue are especially evident in three of the anthology's four sections. Contributors Nancy Hartsock, Patricia Hill Collins, Sandra Harding, and Dorothy Smith, for example, reject Heckman's turn to Max Weber's ideal type to solve the political impasse created by standpoint theory's logic of particularization. They accuse her of misrepresenting standpoint theory, of failing to attend to its Marxist grounding, and of missing the point that analysis of the relationship between power and knowledge is central to standpoint theory. Similarly, when Rita Felski proposes amending the doxa of difference and rejects the opposition between equality and difference, her respondents, Rosi Briadotti, Drucilla Cornell, and Ien Ang question her interpretations and suggest that she pays inadequate attention to the question of power. Finally, Patricia Boling finds Morris's privacy argument to be apolitical, and suggests a re-evaluation using D.W. Winnicott's category of transitional space. Jean Elshtain faults Morris for ignoring that private space, while not always political, is always social.

The most contentious discussion of the volume centers on Hawkensworth's claim that current critiques...

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