Content area
Full Text
Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies. Edited by Sarah Franklin, Celia Lurg, and Jackie Stacey. London: HarperCollins, 1991.
Cultural Studies. Edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
The Cultural Studies Reader. Edited by Simon During. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. By Elspeth Probyn. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Feminism is, in Meaghan Morris's words, "minimally, a movement of discontent with the everyday and with wide-eyed definitions of the everyday as the 'way things are.'"(1) Minimally, feminism's discontent is gender inequality, but Morris's seemingly vague definition does not so much delineate feminism as mark its turn toward analyzing the cultural dimensions of gender. Although feminists have always been concerned with the problem of patriarchal ideology, the institutionalization of cultural studies has enlarged and deepened that concern. At the center of cultural studies' broadening of feminist scholarship are intellectual currents that transcend national boundaries. Although poststructuralism, deconstruction, antihumanist philosophy, and discourse analysis entered the U.S. academy through comparative literature and English departments, cultural studies has helped them spread to women's studies, ethnic studies, history of science, and other interdisciplinary programs.
In the process, the transnationalizing of North American feminism has changed its subject matter, methodology, and sense of political purpose. Feminism's object is no longer only patriarchy or male dominance but also society, consumption, interpretation, nature, and culture. Methodologically, cultural studies has pulled women's studies away from its multidisciplinary origins. Unlike multidisciplinarity which assumes the basic integrity of disciplines, cultural studies is aggressively antidisciplinary, breaking up that integrity by critiquing disciplines. This methodological transnationalizing has shifted the study of women to trends reviewed here: the theorizing of women's agency in the consumption of popular culture, the forging of a feminist critique of colonial representation, the rethinking of identity and experience in light of Michel Foucault's history of sexuality, and the New Right's use of cultural politics to gain political clout during a period of radical economic restructuring. Finally, the transnationalizing of North American feminism has changed its political purpose by joining it to a larger sense of felt crisis among leftist intellectuals internationally. A generation of academics who went to graduate school during the 1960s and developed professionally during the right-wing turn in the United States,...