Imagined Identities: Recent Work in Feminist Criticism

BOOK REVIEWS Imagined Identities: Recent Work in Feminist Criticism Anne Howells Occidental College Rethinking conceptions of identity and the subject, rethinking sexuality and sexual difference: here are two projects central to current feminist theory and literary criticism. They are large projects and, as those familiar with current literary theory will recognize, implicated in most of its branches. Following them as they are variously pursued in the present sampling of feminist criticism from the last three years has been an experience of political and personal engagement, sometimes of bafflement and frustration (because the writing here emerges from a network of ongoing debates, how much at home the reader feels at any moment can depend on how familiar one is with this particular point in the network), and of excitement at new illuminations and clarifications of history and of particular texts. Not only is "knowledge," in several senses, being "reconstituted"; in some respects it is being constituted for the first time. A few years back, I and my women-in-literature students sought, mostly in vain, models of what we called "autonomous women." We're not supposed to be doing that any more; if we do, most of the writers considered here would agree, we are seeking to represent ourselves with what Teresa De Lauretis calls "the imaginary identity of the individualist, bourgeois subject, which is male and white" (9). "Imaginary" in that phrase should be underlined. Instead we should be working with, to use De Lauretis' words, "the notion of a gendered, heterogeneous, and heteronomous subject" (10). Understanding how changing historical conditions change the "discursive boundaries" within which we grasp self and identity, we may come to understand identity not as "the goal but rather the point of departure of the process of selfconsciousness , a process by which one begins to know that and how the personal is political, that and how the subject is specifically and materially en-gendered in its social conditions and possibilities of existence" (9). The angle of vision represented by this sort of argument is poststructuralist, but with a feminist difference. De Lauretis rejects not only the imaginary individualist subject but the "flickering" posthumanist Lacanian one, the " T continuously prefigured and preempted in an unchangeable symbolic order," which she calls "too nearly white and at best (fe)male." The emerging feminist identity is "multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory, a subject that is not divided in, but rather at odds with, language; an identity made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of gender, race, and class, and often indeed across languages and cultures" (9). That such an identity is also "imaginary" need not, I think, matter: it is a politically and personally useful strategy with which we begin again to read literary texts, history, and our own lives. 69 70Rocky Mountain Review On sexuality and sexual difference, De Lauretis notes that though this is one of the areas of least consensus among feminists, it is also one of the issues most readily taken up by (or appropriated by) "other current discourses on sexuality and subjectivity" which "with amazing facility .·. . lump women together with children and slaves, madmen and poets, and go so far as to include in such chaotic typology the entire 'Third World' "(11). And if "philosophical antihumanism's" abstractness obscures multiple experienced (but not well understood) differences, so too has a common oversimplication of feminist thinking, the posing of sexual difference in terms of a difference between nature and culture. For De Lauretis, saying that sexual difference is "cultural" rather than "natural" doesn't get us far in understanding women's subjectivity and women's real differences, because we continue to start from the assumption "that sexual difference is . . . the difference of woman from man — man being the measure, standard, or term of reference of all legitimated discourse" (12). This, then, is another reason why the "multiple subject " argument is so important. A "feminist frame of reference . . . cannot be either 'man' or 'woman,' " but rather we must try to see the female subject as "a site of differences; differences that are not only sexual or only racial, economic , or (sub)cultural, but all of these together, and often enough at odds with one another...