Feminism, Institutionalism, and the Idiom of Failure

Essays that come into being in the utopian idiom of contemporary cultural critique often take a great risk when they arrive at the moment of producing proper evidence. Instead of approximating the language of disciplined knowing, they tend to turn to coincidence and conjecture; instead of taking refuge in method and procedure, they make their cases according to ideals of political success and failure. Critical activity of this kind is born in disjuncture, if not disidentification: the present time of writing is never the future the critic strains to think. What, then, serves to guarantee knowledge as political progress? The nothing that persists as the haunting answer to this question makes legible the anxiety at the heart of academic feminism's chief rhetorical strategy, the critical claim, which generates value by promising to carry thought beyond the failure of the present. In its function to transport feminism into the future, the critical claim generates for academic work a positive political use value, and in this the anxiety over knowing and doing--over politics and academic production--is seemingly eased.

Throughout the 1990s, the opposition recorded here has settled most contentiously in debates about the category of women and its saliency as a guarantee for knowledge and political movement. For such feminist scholars as Judith Butler, Joan Scott, and Denise Riley, it is the refusal of women as a foundational referent that gives to feminism the internal critique necessary to rethink its own historical emergence within modern forms of liberal governmentality. Such rethinking functions to revise accepted notions of power, politics, and subjective agency, thereby challenging the foundational assumptions of certain activist agendas common to feminism's earlier practices. It is this challenge that numerous scholars--Susan Gubar, Susan Bordo, and Martha Nussbaum, for instance--find unproductive if not damaging for feminism, as theoretical considerations are seen to overwhelm the imperative for a public political voice, and feminism's ability to define and inhabit social change is jettisoned in favor of academic insularity. These debates have constituted much of the claim-making in academic feminism in the 1990s, and there is no good reason to think that a resolution is necessary; surely its end is not in sight, as Rey Chow's contribution to this volume quite powerfully suggests.

For women's studies, that institutional domain that first named the imperative toward interdisciplinary feminist analysis, the debate over the category of women has been particularly momentous, in part because of the field's distinct function in establishing woman as a legitimate object of study and in fighting for the legibility of "her" epistemological importance in knowledge production more widely. To the extent that "academic feminism" as a term describes this historical project of challenging the university by institutionalizing new knowledge formations, it indicates something quite profound about the indivisibility of politics and academic institutional intervention. And yet, to conjoin academic to feminism today is almost always a distinct insult, an accusation that draws its blood precisely because politics and academics have come to be so firmly opposed. It is this opposition between the political as a set of social movement ideals and the institutional as a project of academic transformation that underlies to a great extent the mood swing in academic feminism in the 1990s, where feminist articulations of the political agenda that impelled it into the academy have been held in check by a diagnostic analysis that seeks to understand the tenor of bad feeling (and hurt feelings) of feminism's current institutional success. Witness Biddy Martin's title, "Success and its Failures," in the special differences issue "Women's Studies on the Edge." The edge that here signifies the dynamic of error and achievement, of cutting edge and over the edge, evokes a mood among many women's studies practitioners that might best be described as post-exuberant despair.

I use the language of mood and feeling to indicate the...