The Theory Wars, or, Who's Afraid of Judith Butler?

Theory in Practice The Theory Wars, or, Who's Afraid of Judith Butler? Lisa Duggan Over the past two decades, feminist historians have struggled through the sex wars, the culture wars, and the science wars. There is a lot of battle fatigue, but also the camaraderie produced by being mostly on the same side. Another conflict that has divided our ranks, however, exposes a generational shift as well as a complex political divide: the "theory wars." The theory wars have shaped my development as a feminist historian , journalist, and activist since my days as a graduate student in the early 1980s in the history department of the University of Pennsylvania. I was trained there as a social historian primarily by Marxist-influenced New Left professors dedicated to a "bottom up" approach to reshaping the dominant narratives of U.S. history. My interest in women's history and lesbian and gay history fit easily within the "new social history" framework of making invisible populations visible, of allowing the silenced to speak. I had an inkling that something different was going on in many English departments and in the kind of feminist theory that was then reshaping literary criticism and film theory. My window on that world was the work of my dissertation director, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. Alone among the history faculty, she read widely across the disciplines and engaged feminist scholarship from the fields of anthropology, psychology, literary criticism, and film theory. The reception of her work in that department was, well, anxious. I began to understand that she was importing something called "Theory" into her historical work and that this was a controversial practice. It was not until the early 1980s, when the English translation of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, volume 1, appeared in Philadelphia bookstores and on university reading lists, that I figured out what the fuss was about.1 The theory wars as they appeared to me then pitted various strains of British-influenced Marxism, proceeding from the work of Raymond Williams or E. P. Thompson, against French-inflected theories, from the Marxist structuralism of Louis Althusser to the post-May 1968 post-Marxist poststructuralism represented in history departments in the United States primarily by Foucault.2 Lesbian and gay historians quickly gravitated to Foucault's work, which began to reshape the "social construction" theory then current—an © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 1 (Spring) 10 Journal of Women's History Spring amalgam of sociology (via Mary Mcintosh through Jeffrey Weeks), Marxist culturalism (via E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman), feminist theories from anthropology (e.g., Gayle Rubin), and history (e.g., Joan Kelly).3 Through Foucault, some historians of sexuality introduced themselves to the world of poststructuralist cultural theory and learned of the intellectual developments in literary theory and film studies, philosophy, linguistics, and communications that were revolutionizing f eminist theory in the humanities but had left history departments relatively untouched during the 1980s. A few feminist historians appropriated or commented on the uses of poststructuralist theories for historical scholarship (Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Judith Walkowitz, and Joan Scott among them), and a few lesbian and gay scholars produced Foucauldian historical studies (e.g., David Halperin).4 But a split began to develop. Most practitioners of women's history continued to work within the parameters of the social history framework, and most lesbian and gay historians took up Foucault from within social construction theory without adopting the broader theoretical tenets of poststructuralism. Such work continued to have much in common with feminist and lesbian/gay work in anthropology and sociology , sharing intellectual paradigms and social networks. Meanwhile, the study of gender and sexuality in English departments, media programs, and multiple interdisciplinary humanities sites in the academy proceeded through deep engagement with European critical theories, especially the work of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Foucault.5 By 1990, this split had developed into a war often framed in reductionist terms as social science versus the humanities, accessible populist scholarship versus jargonistic elitist obscurantism, or naïve empiricism versus sophisticated cultural analysis. But the most distorted framings appeared as Politics versus Theory from one point of view, and antiintellectual posturing versus engaged cultural critique...