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Feminist Theoryhttp://fty.sagepub.comTelling feminist storiesClare HemmingsFeminist Theory 2005; 6; 115DOI: 10.1177/1464700105053690The online version of this article can be found /115Published by:http://www.sagepublications.comdditional services and information for Feminist Theory can be found at:Email Alerts: http://fty.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsSubscriptions: http://fty.sagepub.com/subscriptionsReprints: ions: tations http://fty.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/6/2/115

01 053690 Hemmings (JB-D)15/6/052:43 pmPage 115115FTTelling feminist storiesClare Hemmings London School of EconomicsFeminist TheoryCopyright 2005SAGE Publications(London,Thousand Oaks, CAand New Delhi)vol. 6(2): 115–139.1464–7001DOI: stract This article identifies and analyses the dominant stories thatacademics tell about the development of Western second wave feministtheory. Through an examination of recent production ofinterdisciplinary feminist and cultural theory journals, I suggest thatdespite a rhetorical insistence on multiple feminisms, Western feministtrajectories emerge as startlingly singular. In particular, I am critical ofan insistent narrative that sees the development of feminist thought as arelentless march of progress or loss. This dominant approachoversimplifies the complex history of Western feminisms, fixes writersand perspectives within a particular decade, and repeatedly (anderroneously) positions poststructuralist feminists as ‘the first’ tochallenge the category ‘woman’ as the subject and object of feministknowledge. Rather than provide a corrective history of Western feministtheory, the article interrogates the techniques through which thisdominant story is secured, despite the fact that we (feminist theorists)know better. My focus, therefore, is on citation patterns, discursiveframings and some of their textual, theoretical and political effects. Asan alternative, I suggest a realignment of key theorists purported toprovide a critical break in feminist theory with their feminist citationaltraces, to force a concomitant re-imagining of our historical legacy andour place within it.keywords loss, postmodernism, progress, the seventies, WesternfeminismIntroductionHow does Western feminist theory tell the story of its own recent past?Despite feminist theory’s clear variety, both within and outside ‘the West’,when telling its own recent story a dominant narrative, albeit one with arange of affective or critical inflections, does emerge. That story divides therecent past into clear decades to provide a narrative of relentless progressor loss, proliferation or homogenization. Western feminist theory tells itsown story as a developmental narrative, where we move from a preoccupation with unity and sameness, through identity and diversity, and on toDownloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA on April 19, 2009

01 053690 Hemmings (JB-D)11615/6/052:43 pmPage 116Feminist Theory 6(2)difference and fragmentation. These shifts are broadly conceived of ascorresponding to the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s respectively,and to a move from liberal, socialist and radical feminist thought to postmodern gender theory. A shift from the naïve, essentialist seventies,through the black feminist critiques and ‘sex wars’ of the eighties, and intothe ‘difference’ nineties and beyond, charts the story as one of progressbeyond falsely boundaried categories and identities. A shift from the politicized, unified early second wave, through an entry into the academy in theeighties, and thence a fragmentation into multiple feminisms and individual careers, charts the story as one of loss of commitment to social andpolitical change.1 Which theoretical approaches are characterized asbelonging to the 2000s is largely dependent on which version of this storyone aligns oneself with. When the story is a celebration of difference, weare commonly invited to (re)turn to affect as a source of individual andcollective knowledge. When the story is one marked by grief, the contemporary call is instead for a return to the material contexts of women’s lives.Yet, however inflected, the chronology remains the same, the decades overburdened yet curiously flattened, and poststructuralism animated as thekey actor in challenging ‘woman’ as the ground for feminist politics andknowledge production.I take issue with this double story for a number of reasons. Firstly, itoversimplifies different areas of feminist thought and the contests overmeaning that characterize feminist debate at all points of its history. Inparticular, and as I explore further in this article, it either fixes racial andsexual critique of feminism as decade-specific, as a necessary but temporary stage in the movement towards a more generalized notion of difference,or it places the blame for feminist theory’s ills singularly at the house ofthe already beleaguered feminist academic. Neither tack can be satisfactory, surely. Secondly, within this story, feminist poststructuralist theoristsare repeatedly positioned as the first to deconstruct ‘woman’, and as eitherheroic in surpassing past mistakes, or responsible for the ills of feminismin general. I dispute this characterization of poststructuralism for thesimple reason that one of the abiding concerns for the majority of feministtheorists has always been, and remains, such a deconstruction.2 Thirdly,this story has rightly been critiqued as an Anglo-American trajectorywithin Western feminist thought, one that forces European or non-Westernfeminist theorists either to reposition themselves in line with the former’slogic, or to depict themselves as critical or transcendent, but neverthelessas responsive.3Perhaps, then, this double story needs to be more carefully characterized, not simply as ‘Western’ but as Anglo-American. I wonder, though, ifsuch a move fails to do justice to the story’s pervasiveness. Nationalnaming of this kind gives the mistaken impression that the problem ispredominantly one of exclusion, that what is needed to correct the story isclear – more non-Western and Continental European discussion andreframing. And this is certainly the case. Yet Continental feminist theorynot only differentiates itself from this ‘Anglo-American’ narrative ofprogress or loss, but also actively, if inadvertently, reconstitutes it. So, forDownloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA on April 19, 2009

01 053690 Hemmings (JB-D)15/6/052:43 pmPage 117Hemmings: Telling feminist storiesexample, in Italian Feminist Theory and Practice (Parati and West, 2002),a volume that challenges the dominance of French and Anglo-US feministtheory in the last three decades, the story of what has gone before is stillreiterated as comprising a familiar move from sex to gender, or from essentialism to deconstruction. The (Italian) future may be different, but the(Anglo-American) feminist past remains the same. As Domna Stanton andRosi Braidotti both warn us, the dominance of this story thus not onlystifles the particularities of different trajectories, but also sidelines themultiple differences within both Anglo-American and Continentalfeminist thought in the process (Stanton, 1985; Braidotti, 1997). NonWestern perspectives are also not absent from the dominant story feministtheory tells about its recent past. In fact, and as I explore below, the absorption of the work of non-Western identified theorists such as ChandraMohanty (1988), Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1989) and Uma Narayan (1997) into aWestern trajectory can easily function as a further indication of thattrajectory’s advancement. Finally, this story circulates so widely that fixingits origins as Anglo-American never quite captures the transitions andtranslations across English and non-English speaking feminist contextsthat mark its progress. So for now I want to stick with ‘Western’, aware ofthe omissions the term at once generates and demonstrates.The doubled story of Western feminist theory is, of course, not the onlystory we are told. Innovative and challenging accounts of feminist theoryare myriad. But, for my own part, despite the fact that I find my own readingof the recent feminist past at odds with this story, I also find myself repeating its logic in research and teaching contexts. And I have noticed otherfeminist theorists using this story as a kind of common-sense gloss enablingthem to move on to the more pressing concerns of their research. Its repetition alone suggests that it is worthy of more precise attention. My focus is,then, on how this dominant story is secured through our publishing andteaching practices despite the fact that we know it obscures the complexities we cherish. Which parts of this story are so consistently reproducedthat they are understood to ‘speak for themselves’ without further elaboration? How is a dominant narrative of a shift from 1970s sameness, through1980s identity, to 1990s difference within Western English speakingfeminist theory textually and rhetorically secured? What discursive andpolitical work does this narrative do, in terms of authenticating a particular feminist school or subject, or privileging a particular intellectualbiography or national location? In essence, I am interested in the technology of Western feminist storytelling – its form, function and effects.I focus on recent interdisciplinary feminist and cultural theory journalarticles, rather than textbooks or readers, to explore these questions. Whiletextbooks and readers provide clear evidence of the decade by decadeapproach to feminist theory I am interested in examining, they are not ashelpful for an examination of techniques of citation that secure a historyas a prelude to the author’s own particular insights. Textbooks are lessuseful for indicating a ‘common sense’ understanding of the recentfeminist past, because they seek to produce that past, rather than transcendit. As a way of reflecting my desire to focus on the technologies of feministDownloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA on April 19, 2009117

01 053690 Hemmings (JB-D)11815/6/052:43 pmPage 118Feminist Theory 6(2)storytelling, I have cited the publishing arena rather than the individualauthor in my analysis. This both looks and feels odd, but my aim is toindicate that a journal article is the material result of an author’s work,editorial practice and broader disciplinary and institutional conventions.Which aspects of an article are flagged by peer reviewers as in need of morework, which teleologies pass unnoticed and so on are collaborativedecisions. In addition, since I am particularly interested in which assertions do not need to be evidenced, which histories are told as a matter ofcourse, I am including passages that reflect that tendency rather than theargument of a given article as a whole.4Historiographic approachesMy approach to feminist storytelling here, then, is historiographic in thatI am concerned with the contested politics of the present over the ‘truth ofthe past’. Historiography is in its broadest sense the name for historicalaccounts, or theories of history. Combined with the practice of genealogy,it has proven particularly amenable to feminist and queer work seeking toemphasize that all history takes place in the present, as we make andremake stories about the past to enable a particular present to gain legitimacy.5 Gayatri Spivak cites Hayden White’s ironic attack on the historianwho searches for the absolute truth ‘buried in the archives, hoping to findthe “form of the reality” that will serve as the object of representation inthe account that they will write “when all the facts are known” and theyhave finally “got the story straight”’ (White, 1978, in Spivak, 1999: 202–3).For Spivak, as for White, wanting to ‘get the story straight’ is an act ofdisavowed epistemic violence, which prevents attention to the politicalinvestments that motivate the desire to know, and that generate a writer’sepistemological and methodological practices.6 In a feminist context,which stories predominate or are precluded or marginalized is always aquestion of power and authority.That there is no single historical truth does not mean that history issimply a matter of individual opinion, that all truths are somehow equal.Wary of the accusation of relativism (an accusation productive of a depthof shame second only to that produced by an accusation of essentialism),feminist historiographers are keen to highlight the ways in which thechallenge to a single truth allows for increased rather than decreasedpolitical accountability in the present. Queer feminist historiographerJennifer Terry, for example, builds on Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique ofhistorians as ‘jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge’, suggesting thathistory is useful to the extent that it makes us aware of the power relationsat play in the past and present (Terry, 1999: 25). In her work on the racialization of sexology and homosexuality in An American Obsession, Terrypays close attention to how inequalities in the present allow certain storiesto flourish and not others, allow certain alliances to be made and notothers. A historiographic insistence on the politics of the present in themaking of the past more precisely still foregrounds the location of thehistorian or teller of tales. Spivak emphasizes that ‘the past is a past presentDownloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA on April 19, 2009

01 053690 Hemmings (JB-D)15/6/052:43 pmPage 119Hemmings: Telling feminist stories– a history that is in some sense a genealogy of the historian. What ismarked is the site of desire’ (1999: 207). For Spivak both a dominant anda corrective history are what allow ‘the willed (auto)biography of the Weststill [to masquerade] as disinterested history, even when the criticpresumes to touch its unconscious’ (1999: 208). Such critical historiographic accounts of power, history and authorship allow a different set ofquestions to be asked about the feminst past. Rather than asking, forexample, ‘What really happened in the 1970s?’ I want to ask ‘How doesthis story about the 1970s come to be told and accepted?’ And followingSpivak, ‘Why do I want to tell this story, and in telling it, what kind ofsubject do I become?’In line with the feminist and queer historiographic accounts I have beendiscussing, I am sceptical both of linear accounts of the recent feministpast, and indeed of the importance of correcting that record. Such a statement is rather disingenuous, however, because my very belief in theproblematic nature of the story of Western feminism arises from my ownrecognition of debates within the last three decades that complicate thatstory. So one reason why I find unsubstantiated claims about the essentialism of feminist writing in the 1970s so aggravating is that they ignore therich discussions about the relationships among gender, sexuality and racethat took place in that decade.7 And indeed you will find that in this articleI both gesture to the complexity of those feminist debates (as in note 7,above), and am hesitant to provide a corrective bibliography for thatcomplexity for the historiographic reasons that I have been discussing thusfar. To replace one truth with another suggests that the historical problemis simply one of omission, that once the error has been corrected the storywill be ‘straight’ in the way that Spivak is critical of, an objective representation untainted by bias. But even if we could fully correct the record,this does not account for the reasons why certain issues become part of anaccepted story, and others fall by the wayside, or at least not sufficientlyto allay my initial frustration at those exclusions. Since I concur withMichel Foucault’s inspirational observation in The Archaeology of Knowledge that ‘Discourse is not life: its time is not your time’ (1972: 211),suggesting that meaning is always multiple rather than singular though thesingular takes precedence, my primary aim is to open up future possibilities rather than dwelling on past omissions.In that spirit, this article focuses on what is going on in the present whenfeminist stories about the recent past are being told. What textual, rhetorical, exclusionary, inclusive or diversionary tactics are employed to securethis story and not that one, this present and past and not those ones? Ofcourse, the process is not simply one of mechanical deconstruction. Muchfeminist work is concerned with the emotional investment needed tosustain feminist work of a range of kinds. In particular, I cannot think ofthe terms ‘emotion’ and ‘feminist work’ together without thinking of theinspirational work of Audre Lorde in The Cancer Journals (1980), andSister Outsider (1984). Lorde’s passion and commitment to living ablack lesbian feminist life reminds her readers of their own values andembodiment. For Lorde, it is emotional investment and the community tiesDownloaded from http://fty.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA on April 19, 2009119

01 053690 Hemmings (JB-D)12015/6/052:43 pmPage 120Feminist Theory 6(2)that this produces that allow marginal narratives to be told and to survive.More recently, Lynne Pearce (2004) has indicated the importance ofthinking through the way feminist texts work to persuade at the emotionallevel, echoing my own experience that this is one way in which our owncommitments and writing practices are formed. Feminist emotion, then, iscentral to the feminist stories we tell, and the way that we tell them.Challenges to these stories, from within as well as outside feminism, arefrequently experienced and responded to at an emotional level, and as aresult an account of ways of telling feminist stories needs to be attentiveto the affective as well as technical ways in which our stories about therecent feminist past work. It hurts because it matters, when we are passionately invested in academic feminist practice.The role of the seventies8Of the recent decades we tell stories about in the Western feminist present,the 1970s emerges as the least diverse. In this section I begin to explore thespecific weight that the feminist seventies carries in the service of thegoverning feminist story I sketched in my introduction. The dominant andmost familiar attribution to the feminist seventies is of course essentialism,an accusation so frequently repeated, that it can actually stand as justification for not reading texts from the feminist seventies at all any more. Thisin itself should make us suspicious, of course, given the political andintellectual vibrancy of this era. Weaned on feminist theories of the 1990s,I was long convinced of the essentialist ills of early second wave Westernfeminist texts, many of which I did not read until a decade later. When Idid, I remember being shocked by the diversity of published feministmaterials from the 1970s, and in particular the depth and range of debateon issues of race, sexuality and class in the journals and newsletters of theperiod. It was this ‘shock’ that precipitated my early interest in the tellingof feminist stories.9 My interest here is not whether seventies feministtheory is or is not essentialist, but the means by which our contemporaryexpectation that it is necessarily essentialist is secured. How is such aseamless decade of essentialism produced and maintained? What form isthis essentialism assumed to take, what evidence is given for it, and howis it mobilized in the service of a broader narrative of progress or decline?My object of analysis here is journal articles, for the reasons discussed inthe introduction, but even a cursory analysis of feminist theory textbooksor readers suggests that there is interesting work to be done in this arenatoo, particu

example, in Italian Feminist Theory and Practice (Parati and W est, 2002), a volume that challenges the dominance of French and Anglo-US feminist theory in the last three decades, the story of what has gone before is still reiterated as compr

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