After diving into Susan Gubar's "What Ails Feminist Criticism" then swimming through Robyn Wiegman's "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion" I've decided that I don't like being in the water. The juxtaposition of these two articles is comparable to a college-aged girl criticizing her mother for not liking her new friends. That's not to say the articles should be reduced to the rantings of an old woman and the overzealous rebuttal of a college freshman. In fact they are far from it. Wiegman's piece addresses Gubar's argument point by point and aptly addresses shortcomings and hypocrisy. The problem I see with the works as a whole is a failure to convey feminism in a positive light.
As a fresh-on-the-scene student into the world of feminist literature and criticism, I have become my own prime example for illustrating the issues with Gubar and Wiegman's articles. Basically, my exposure to feminist criticism has been limited to a negative public view and these two internal attack and defense dialogues. While I admit some internal checks and criticism can be healthy, you can't expect much outward productivity when you can't even handle the battle from within. So what is feminism all about?
From what I've learned through Gubar, Feminism is a body being infected by bacteria (or factions of feminism) that don't sit well with the white blood cells (emphasis on white); and that feminism grows weaker by attempts to "slim down" the word woman or make it "disappear altogether." While my brain works to cram feminism into framework regarding postcolonial and poststructuralist ideas, I can't help but realize one of my few preconceived notions of feminism was that it delt with women. Now I have a feminist telling me that other feminists are compromising the word woman... it seems like I should get a second opinion.
Enter Wiegman's piece with talk of murder - a nifty attention grabber, but it doesn't sound like the diagnosis I was looking for. Sure enough, Weigman tells me that "Gubar is not alone in lamenting the course of contemporary feminism" and that she had a hope to not "lend fuel to the popular fire that feeds on the rhetorical battles among feminists." So what I gather is that there are plenty more people lamenting contemporary feminism, and there is a popular habit of forming battles among feminists. Sounds like an ailment to me, so what does the doctor order? A healthy dose of rhetorical fighting, despite Gubar's hope. While Weigman's piece addresses points that need to be brought up in retaliation to Gubar's piece, I can't help but notice a viscous cycle. An attack from within, a retaliation, a rebuttal on the retaliation, a criticism of the rebuttal on the retaliation, and so on.
Basically I'm just left to wonder, not where can feminism go from here, but how can feminism go from here?
Well to speak to your question, you might have to discover a means of feminist resistance within either gender theory of postcolonial paradigms. How might either framework allow one to 'pick out' gender-based oppression and issue forth critique? I mean, Gubar arguably thinks that feminist critique becomes complicated in the gender theory paradigm, but that does not imply that the gender theory paradigm cannot offer feminist critique. What it implies is that that mode of critique, whatever it turns out to be, cannot be that which Gubar is familiar with.
ReplyDeleteI found these two articles a little overwhelming. I've always felt I had a pretty strong grasp on what "feminism" is, but in the past few years I've begun to see that it's actually much more complicated. Who would have thought that even the very word "woman" would come under such close and debated scrutiny? Although I can see merits to both women's opinions, it does seem like there is a lot more internal rhetoric involved in the movement than I had known. Which I don't think is a bad thing... but it definitely makes things more complicated. I'll be interested to see how we expand on some of the discussion points in these articles as we continue to add additional layers like class, race, sexuality, etc into the mix...
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