Speaking of Gender edited by Elaine Showalter (review)

Book Reviews125 assertion that one of the reasons feminists turned to psychoanalysis was "the need to develop a critique of the view that patriarchy is a force that oppresses all women, at all times and in the same way." For although psychoanalysis may have illustrated "the complicated forms ofthe subject's resistance to, and complicity with, the imposition of symbolic law" (xvii), it has been notoriously universalizing and ahistorical and little help in determining why, how, and in what circumstances resistance overcomes complicity. But in general Penley takes the feminist opposition to psychoanalysis very respectfully and seriously, and her arguments are based upon a sincere belief that the insights ofpsychoanalysis will enrich feminist political struggles. This book is a "must" therefore, for those on all sides of the "feminism and psychoanalysis" debate, and for anyone interested in feminist cultural analysis. DIANE WALDMAN University of Denver ELAINE SHOWALTER, ed. Speaking ofGender. New York: Routledge, 1989. 335 p. Heralding a new phase in feminist criticism, Elaine Showalter presents a volume of essays, which, as a collection, narrates a shift from feminist critique and gynocritics to the more broadly based "gender studies." This step shows boldness on Showalter's part, since she recognizes the danger in opening the door prematurely to male critics who might "appropriate, penetrate, or exploit feminist discourse" (7). But Showalter sees a change from the early 1980s when hostility between men and women in the field of literary criticism was at a high—a time when male critics, who, after years of ignoring feminist discourse, saw it as their duty to "master feminist criticism and to correct what they saw as its shortcomings and flaws" (6), a time when "male feminism looked like the old misogyny dressed up in Woolf's clothing" (7). Showalter asserts the existence of a community of scholars who have transcended "male feminism" and have moved ahead to a gender theory which accepts the necessity for exploring the construction ofboth genders—a necessity for which Showalter argues convincingly. Not only has the isolation offeminist studies "ghettoized" them, but the failure to look at encoded gendering in texts by male writers has tended to universalize masculine experience. Thus male readers, writers, and their texts have retained privileged positions as the dispensers ofhuman experience in general, while feminist readers and writers and their texts are treated as special and different cases. In actuality, gender, which has previously been used in reference only to the female sex, is an ideological construct shaping both women and men, and, as such, it marks the reading and writing of both sexes. Leaving masculine gendering as a psycho-social construct unexplored is to leave a bastion of male appropriation of universality unchallenged. For Showalter, the term gender implies such ideological construction, as opposed to the term sexual difference, to which she objects. The two words are 126Rocky Mountain Review often used interchangeably, but incorrectly so, according to Showalter: sexual difference, a part of the language of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, bespeaks a separate-but-equal status for the sexes which disregards the hierarchy of the male power structure. In this objection and in her assertion that the term sexual difference reduces gender formation to the realm of language, Showalter restates her well known position in the ongoing debate between Anglo-American and French feminist critics. However unnecessary it may be to so realign herself, the concept of gender as an ideological construct rather than a linguistic one is crucial to Showalter's contention that gender studies can lead to disclosure of patriarchal inscriptions. The essays which follow Showalter's introduction, then, ought to fulfill that promise and generally do. Although all but one ofthese pieces were previously published (between 1979 and 1987), Showalter has presumably selected them to make a statement: that feminist criticism has moved into a brave new era of "gender studies," encompassing both male and female writers and critics. Hence, Showalter gives us a collection offifteen essays, five by men, a greater number examining male writers, and all exploring some aspect of gender theory. Showalter separates the book into two sections; the first, "Gender Subtexts," contains three essays revealing subtextual gender issues informing critical approaches. In "Reading Ourselves: Toward...