Recent Studies of Gender
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Abstract
These two anthologies provide startling examples of just how far feminist literary criticism has come in the last twenty years. In its earliest U.S. incarnation, feminist literary criticism either took on men's fantasies about women, as did Mary Ellmann's 1968 Thinking about Women, or else explored the achievements of women writers, seeking, as Patricia Meyer Spacks did in 1972, a Female Imagination, or constructing a tradition of Literary Women, as Ellen Moers did in 1976. These early examples of the genre were all resolutely about women (even when their explicit subject was images of women). With the excitement of pioneers discovering virgin territory, these critics helped make writing about women academically respectable, then, as the number of volumes and articles about women exploded during the 1970s, critically central to their discipline. After Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977) and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), no one disputed the existence of a literary history of women writers. After Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land (1975) and Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader (1978), fewer eyebrows were raised when one argued that male writers' attitudes toward women materially affected their conceptions of the self-authorized subject, or their readers' conceptions of the reading subject. By the end of the 1970s, sex had come to stay in the critical vocabularies of literary scholars. Something that was previously invisible was suddenly impossible to overlook. But by the end of the 1970s, "sex" had already been complicated by "gender." Gayle Rubin's pathbreaking exploration of the "sex/gender system" directed the attention of many feminist literary writers to the cultural construction of sexual attitudes and sexual difference, to the way that sex was "written" in representational systems. Detaching gender from sex opened new doors for feminist criticism. Some feminist literary historians, for example, turned in the 1980s from the celebratory recovery of women writers to uncover traces of gender ideologies in the works of male and female writers. Others focused on general concepts, like "domestic individualism" or "feminine authority," seeking to understand how the gendering of these concepts shaped configurations of power and determined the ways that women and men could participate in cultural formation. Feminist literary critics interested more in the formalist study of literary dynamics than in history used the concept of gender to map the play of textuality in literary language. The concept of gender has helped bring feminist literary criticism into the same orbit as poststructuralist theories originating in France, for gender is a positional term. The "feminine" is given its identity not by its mimetic or natural relation to something outside language but by its relation to something else within a signifying system of differences (the "masculine"). For female and male critics, the act of naming or assuming the "feminine," as the position of otherness, has opened the possibility for identifying and enacting the