Quodlibet: Or, the Pleasures of Engagement
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA email: rdupless{at}temple.edu
F and W are beings more or less named Feminista and Womanne. They are sitting wherever it is comfy to imagine them, drinking whatever you’d be drinking. Quodlibet, meaning a musical medley, was, in Medieval times, a scholastic debate or disputation, but etymologically—and this is curious—it means "what pleases," or "what pleases you." The term "Quodlibet" thus implicates both genre and the desires of the participants for engagement with each other.
F. Feminist is what I am and what I have been for many a year, but what is that? I question or resist some notable, yet rigid political and cultural enactments of that position. That position which is not one.
W. Every day there is another news story about the current, contemporary oppression of women. And twice on Sundays. This could be the murder of a woman by her estranged partner—whether or not there was a restraining order. It could be the political assassination of a woman teaching in and sustaining a clandestine girls school thousands of miles from here. It could be rape as a tool of social control or the targeting of women as subjected to paternalistic laws about her body or her mobility. It could be economic (pay/benefits) inequalities that are sometimes subtle and hard to track, and sometimes shockingly open. I’m not kidding, nor, really, amused. I am actually enraged and sometimes frightened. This was not what we foresaw in 1968, just about forty years ago, when our wave of feminist activism became large and hopeful. I say this simply to set this journal and its first issues into this larger context—the time in which we live.
F. These kinds of stories—the revival of and reveling in social inequality, the specific unevenness of legal rights and economic potential for women, and the outright attacks on women as coequal and coeval in society, and as persons with agency and political status—prove once more that the "issue" of women's social and cultural position is fraught enough to continue to invite discussion of it—even into the twenty-first century. One would have thought these oldest griefs would have borne the fruit we struggled for (to paraphrase Rilke, of all people!), or at least that women's position in various societies would have been stabilized in a more liberatory direction. Since this is not so, our historical task—even our ethical-political duty—is to continue that centuries-long struggle for women's rights. In a general sense, this journal produces part of the discussion, is part of its analytic apparatus. Hence I would like to propose that this literary field—women's writing and its interpretations—is not only or solely part of a professional, career-building, curricular, and accreditation machinery but has real-world stakes and meanings. We are interested in "feminist knowledge production," and with an aura of necessity (Hawkesworth 1, et passim). It always had that necessity; it is Mary Hawkesworth's thesis that feminist scholarship and approaches have created analytic frameworks (like "intersectionality" and "gender as an analytic category") and have made critiques (like the "reconceptualizing of objectivity") that are vital for social as well as intellectual good.
W. How that goal of "feminist knowledge production" translates into textual scholarship is another story. And textual scholarship—that thing isn't one, either. But it's as if we need to see the literary field anew in some way. Such a sense as we’ve offered of the materiality, specificity, and weight of women's issues suggests that such a journal must be alert to the meanings and nuance of any text in any specific social and historical setting (of production, reception, and continuing dissemination). It suggests that a critic must both investigate and analyze, as well as respect, the ways writing is produced, disseminated, and used by different readers in different times and locations. This is a vast and interesting set of topics, generally passed over in some of the universalizing scholarship of the past, which assumed that all readers read the way a few did, and sometimes that all readers with any social stakes in a topic were deplorably interested and partial. Multiple audience uses of a text, or differential reception, even different physical reproduction and presentation making the text self-different—these are fruitful areas of investigation. Some of these attitudes help with pedagogy, too. So disaggregation of any overly-totalizing claims and meta-narratives about women or the texts of women is a goal.
W. Disaggregation goes with pluralization. A second way of seeing the field anew would be to acknowledge and discuss the plural array of women's writing across cultures, languages, and national settings. This may mean alertness to multiple genres of literary writing, to writing by women that may not be classified as "literary," or to uses of writing in different locations and for different social groups. It may be the pluralization of a diasporic view or a post-national view or a commitment to reading and bringing forth all kinds of contemporary writing by women from a variety of settings—the goal is notably global and trans-national, and the goal is breaking down hierarchic hegemonies of (supposed or putative) value. These hierarchies of value are often heavily invested in ideas of the nation state—that historically active entity, and as well, in our notions of the "literary." This comment echoes parts of Linda Hutcheon's proposal for a new literary history: "Any alternative literary historical model would ... have to account for the demographic and economic displacements and relocations of diaspora, important challenges to the easy nostalgia for the comforting totalization and teleology offered by the single national evolutionary narrative model [of literary history.]" (Hutcheon 2002: 26).
F. Yes, an appropriate move for our literary scholarship is certainly the re-articulation of feminist literary histories. But to do this, we’d have to think of ways of putting fruitfully together these three concepts or practices (feminist, literary, and history). I suppose this is a task that was somewhat sidelined or postponed by the intricacies of post-structuralist theorizing—but it certainly can't occur without an absorbed attention to deconstruction. Also without idealizing Three Guineas, let's remember that Virginia Woolf has already made a post-national analysis of women's socio-political position; I say idealizing because that's the move that Woolf makes in suggesting women could have an allegiance that automatically floated free of or was unmired in dogmatic citizenship. Poignant, that.
W. Actually one practical question occurs to me—would the journal proposed here be prone to analyze writing by women that resisted the liberation of women? Or to publish a critic who resisted that generally feminist position?
F. Yes, I assume yes, in responding to the first of those questions; not all women writers have written for "liberation" (whatever we imagine that might be), nor are all senses of liberation equivalent or historically lively in a given period—there has to be continuous debate about this topic! Not all writers are feminists, and certainly "feminist" writers need not pledge allegiance to precisely the same feminism, nor to the same kinds of liberatory projects.
W. Plus some persons also dislike and reject any thought that they are "women" writers—they have clearly seen some glimmer of potential cultural inequality in femaleness and reject their vulnerability to inequality by dissociating from such a "damaging" group. What any given women writer actually thinks about gender materials, how gender and sexuality and sexual politics are depicted in her work, with what idea-systems in play, for what historical justifications and rationales—these topics are surely central to the project here. Arguing along those lines, it's vital to figure out the ideological packaging of resistance to women's rights, the arguments used, the imagery deployed, the appeals made. Often such writing is a clue to specific social and cultural contradictions that need to be understood, contradictions that are part of the historical record, that may even return to haunt. In fact, once we understand that women are not "one" and that women are "constructed" variously, we may analyze whatever tempers and tropes and socializations fill the spot called "women" at any period, in any country—and in any mode of writerly practice.
F. Disaggregating is a way of opening many doors. Once we want to see how women are formed differently in different geographies and at different times, by differential forces and matrices (and yet still have some version of a gender status in common), the topics that can be covered have multiplied and pluralized wonderfully, and the debates that may ensue have also multiplied. The way is open for a historically and locationally nuanced literary criticism, one that deploys with verve social and material markers (like class, ethnicity, region, religious culture, sexualities, language and linguistic register). I’m using the term "locational" from Susan Stanford Friedman's Mappings, a brief for "positional analysis" and "geopolitical literacy." She states: "Locational feminism thus encourages the study of difference in all its manifestations without being limited to it, without establishing impermeable borders that inhibit the production and visibility of ongoing intercultural exchange and hybridity" (Friedman 1998: 5).
W. I guess I already know the answer to my second practical question: a critic who is polemically and intellectually opposed to rights for women and to gender analysis is unlikely to want to publish here. If you aren't convinced of the interest of gender as a category—you surely won't use it, right? And by gender issues in literature we seem to mean at least ideas and representations of maleness and femaleness, manhood, womanhood, femininity and masculinity, ideas of queering or destabilizing gender binaries and gender materials. We mean the analysis of normative sexuality and its sustaining institutions, of uses of female, male and ambiguous figures as speakers or characters in texts, of gender ideologies and their social and theoretical resonance. We seem to mean the scrutiny of debates around gender claims and female rights in political and legal and economic realms. We include issues of representation of gender and sexuality by genre (polemic, jeremiad, and so on) and language registers. The history of gender ideas, the materializing of gender materials in texts, the pluralizing of concepts around gender—this we understand as necessary; if you don’t, then you won't use this journal.
F. Well, people have been known to use gender assumptions as an ideological infusion in their writing without knowing they are doing so—invoking Woman in various guises, even in the subterranean threads of metaphor and allusion. But that's a writing strategy or an intellectual element for us to analyze in this journal; unconscious use of gender assumptions does not open gender as a category. In fact, the journal demands self-conscious, self-aware uses of gender materials, not the banal repetition of gender topoi. So you are counting on self-selection by critics? It might be better to make the intellectual position more explicit. I think it shouldn't go without saying that we want analysis of writing by women set in a thought-provoking gender context and in the context analyzing other, related social locations. Just analyzing women's writing as such is banal.
W. Is it really? What do you mean "as such"! Please—save me from any hint of "premature post-feminism"—as Janet Todd called it with a prescient elegance in 1988 (Todd 1988: 12). I won't recite the history of feminist scholarship, but just recall for you the moment not so far in the tragically recurring past when it was thought that women's writing as such was automatically forgettable, inconsiderable, dismissible. The recovery of women writers has been one of the scholarly and critical triumphs of the past forty years, as these were writers thought in rapid succession (a) not to exist at all, particularly in certain historical periods or certain social groups; (b) if existing, not to be any good formally, intellectually, thematically, and thus, by definition, just chatter and clutter; (c) if such a witer somehow having written one good book, not to have real literary careers, so who cared? (d) if somehow (who knew?) she managed to scrounge up a full career, not to have had real cultural impact over the long term, and therefore MINOR (another the kiss of death that needs critical suspicion). Damn, I think I just paraphrased Joanna Russ—but her position and rhetoric are fine enough to be worth saying again (Russ 1983: 76). Have we swung so far into another version of this space that you of all people are able to say we don't need concerted attention to the writing of women?
F. Well, you know I remember those days all too well. And I have long been interested in the different relationship (than many men have) to culture and to authority, authorization and authorship that women writers, grosso modo, seem still to have: "different circumstances and constraints," often "discrimination, oppression and repression" as Todd reminds us (Todd 1988: 138). So I think what I meant by "women's writing as such" puts the emphasis on the "as such" or women/gender alone and text in a vacuum. Instead, findings need to weave and braid gender within and among many materials. We do need a new version of feminist criticism; that's what I am actually proposing—disaggregating women (in awareness of differences among them), but using gender as a category, ready to read with a strongly historical and socio-political analysis, and attentive to a world-wide writing.
W. But, by the same token (as someone suggested to me), rearticulating the term "women" for this journal might allow a critic to examine all the social locations in which women are constructed—you are the one limiting women to gender, no?
F. It's plausible that a focus on "women" instead of "gender" allows actually for greater attention to intersectionality, multiple mediating factors of the socio-political and social location. But for me it's the term "gender" that does that. It's an interesting debate, presumably to be continued. Then there is the vocabulary of "trans-gender" which—except in certain specific cases of actual gender change—seems to me to be a useful utopian hope and a performative enactment in propitious circumstances rather than a consistent lived experience.
W. Remember "androygyny"? Well, maybe we’re just old.
F. Which is not a crime! (It's even a social location ...) If thinking in trans-gender terms is one contemporary form that certain gender hopes take—so be it.
W. And one wants questions of the cultural work done (so far as we can assess it) by any textual intervention. I agree that analyses of women's writing as such have now to be buoyed and extended into many filiations of history, multiple uses of a text, complications and contradictions among both author's and critic's subject positions.
F. Do you really mean that? Opening the question of the critic's subject position would certainly be revolutionary for literary criticism—what are our investments, problematics, and so on. There is the critique of objectivity and of that cool, "professional" third-person, apparently "uninvested" critic. How good is that!
W. Come to think of it, this would certainly change the tone and manner of our writing. And it might also lead to problems in our reception. Worlds within worlds ...
F. But this said (and unresolved!), here's another issue—why doesn't a new version of feminist criticism include discussions of maleness and gender issues in literature by male writers? Women are, after all, not the only gendered creatures, no more "the sex" than any other denizen of our species. Thus I actually do wonder about the word women in the title CWW. And that's probably really the source of my "women's writing as such." Not because I want to deconstruct the term woman yet again, but because the goal of the journal seems so mono-gendered.
W. I’d offer a simple explanation for this: that the generation of women founding this journal are trying, in the most open and above-board manner, to continue the possibility of access to this material. They have made a decades-long investment in this scholarly task; the task is not finished; they are founding a journal so that the study of contemporary women's writing arcs into the next generation. A materialist, historical, critical, and revisionist literary scholarship about women is a precious resource. This journal is an intervention in dissemination.
F. So it's a strategic intervention is what you’re saying. Dissemination/reception need to be worked on. They can't be taken for granted.
W. Think about any given women writer from that perspective. How is her work treated in anthologies and syllabi? Does her writing get discussed in journals? What are some of the dissemination accidents and advantages that have befallen particular woman writers? And, in terms of agency, how does she help to construct a readership for her work? In what institutions of dissemination does she participate (journals; editorial work; poetic or literary groups; making manifestos; writing in poetics; distributing approval and disapproval via reviews)? What helps and hinders the reception and dissemination of women's writing in specific cases?
F. Well, over the long term, there's no doubt that simply her "woman-ness" has done some significant hindering—so you’re arguing for vigilance in maintaining dissemination at a usefully woman-saturated level. The journal then makes a lot of sense for the strategic sustaining of dissemination. And insofar as reading for one kind of thing (for all the aspects of women as a gender in literature) is a kind of over-reading, one can gleefully invoke the defense of over-reading made by Jonathan Culler, proposing that excess in interpretive strategy is "the best source of the insights into language and literature that we seek, a quality to be cultivated rather than shunned" (Culler 2007: 182). That one's worth remembering—it is charmingly deployable, although, in context, it was not particularly a defense of feminist reading, but of the same kind of wayward, dare I say "feminine," boldness that one sometimes sees in male critics.
W. Besides, don't you think there is danger in treating male writers yet again—danger, that is, that such attention will push the work of women into the ever-ready category of dismissed or forgotten? That is, after all, where we began, and culture seems not unwilling to do it again. Look, twice in the past days (is this a motif?), I’ve been involved with reader's reports on prospective articles for another journal. About one submission someone said it is "feminism without feminists"—that is, a gender-oriented investigation was done, but no women critics, no feminist critics were cited, although such critics had emphatically worked on the (male) writer being discussed. (I think this report echoed Tania Modleski's phrase "feminism without women"—certainly, for me, as problematic as women without feminism!) In another reader's report, it was said that a male critic working on some women writers "repeated the silencing gesture" that the writers under consideration had talked about, by failing to cite any feminist critics who had worked on these particular women writers—and there were plenty who had done so! These examples are not, I think, just epiphenomenal or accidental quirks, although, granted, these exclusions implicate the work of women critics and their feminist positions, not women writers of literary texts.
F. Well, if there's "danger"—this is a loaded term, really!—still one must accept that danger as part of one's cultural responsibility. Any critic writing about male writers from the perspective of feminist reception is hardly that force which keeps women down. One might argue that since we live in, work, and ingest art products in a world that lives with genders in the plural, men have to be part of our audience and part of our topic as well. This is just one of the many cultural tasks necessarily undertaken by a feminist critic. If you can acknowledge that, I can accept a journal concerning contemporary women's writing "under erasure"—better under erasure than finding ourselves erased!
W. And of course, no one is barring male critics, teachers, and students of literature from reading this journal. It is not a self-segregating enterprise. But as soon as this gets said, the same kinds of issues about power and attention that we know so well, thirty-five to forty years worth of those issues, re-emerge to make one suspect the impact of such a pious statement as "men should read us." Of course, things have to be worth reading. Still and yet, even when they are, sometimes the denizens of the male gender still cannot be bothered. I don't so much care about HERstory as a polemical term, la la, but what about the ouroborean herMENeutic circle!
(Both giggle girlishly, laugh hysterically, gaffaw like fishwives, snort womanishly, and so forth.)
F. Yet here are some problems with a purely woman-oriented feminism, and, in this case, with a set of topics just in the realm of the woman writer. (Is she only in the female realm? Is her gender orientation necessarily or solely female?—so many complications could be proposed, but I’ll stick to the main questions.) I am interested (as apparently, is Rachel Blau DuPlessis) in a "feminism of reception," not a "feminism of production." In "production" certainly a women writer can produce whatever work she pleases, without any implicit political or social test of whatever opinions or ideas she puts forth; a critic will not reject any, although s/he may critique them. In fact weird gender ideas, and weird gender contradictions should be central to such a critic! They are surely something to be very curious about. A "feminism of reception" means attention to the legibility of all forms of gender materials in a text, the teasing out of those ideas, their internal conflicts, their formal manifestation, their implications for the writer, for her/his immediate communities, and in the long historical run. So if I treat male writers, I would discuss them under the rubric of feminist thinking, gender thinking. I will not ask for them to conform in their writing to a "feminism of production," and they may indeed not—though some do. However, I will analyze them using a "feminism of reception." These are feminist critical acts—why are they not in this journal? For example—would one want to exclude the extraordinary tour de force of reading Sylvia Plath and Charles Baudelaire in a motivated intertextual reading concerning their biographical relations with mothers and their urges to poetry, the reading undertaken by Barbara Johnson in Mother Tongues? (For both poets, "the mother functions as a default setting for the formulating of the I–you relationship in general. Their lives were structured by that address, and their poetry explores the complexities of it," Johnson 2003: 71.) Second, even if I treat only women writers, many of them had serious and productive, serious and destructive—all sorts of professional and cultural relationships with males, as mentors, epigones, rivals, partners, publishers, interlocutors. These relations do not even have to be either polarizing, exploitative, or binarist. In some of these relationships—according to the protagonists, gender issues, from critique to complicity, figure strongly. And even if the protagonists themselves denied the force of gender in these relationships, we don't need to believe that assertion and may scrutinize the data with our own tools and our own queries. Look at how many places males can exist in the female writing career. In family of origin. In contacts with an educational apparatus. In the gender of (not to be quaint) role models. In historical attitudes and possibilities around gender in a woman writer's childhood, adolescence, adulthood. In life choices, and their differential effects at different life stages. In choices of love(s) and their impact on her. In her chosen family in adulthood (companion, husband, partner, children)—with impacts on her and on her artistic career. In the presence of men and women, male friendship and female friendship patterns in poetic/artistic groups. In attitudes that those males are invested with and their dynamism and changes. In her mythologizing of gender relations, biographical and ideal. Are we to exclude this kind of discussion?—I should hope not.
W. I am going to beg that question by saying that this journal treats women writers; it does not necessarily exclude discussions of men, but these discussions will probably be organized as ancillary to the women and their careers. An article solely about male writers, like DuPlessis's "Manhood and its Poetic Projects" will be excluded, even if the issue of what the particular poets "do" with women is central to her findings. And I don't know what the journal will do if an article discusses that woman writer X was influenced by male writer Y—or male writer Y was influenced by female writer X. I think these perimeters of discussion will be decided on that infamous "case by case" basis. I’m going to back off (you know I don't like controversy much, more's the pity), and change the topic to the text in textual scholarship. After all, so far, with the terms disaggregate, global, historical, socio-political on the table here, we haven't yet discussed the term "literary" for feminist literary history—how do we get the literary into literary history? And are we sure that the "literary" is all we want?
F. I know. It's hard to avoid the observation that much (though not all) critical work that has a social torque, that asks for the analysis of social location and ideology (like much feminist criticism) can be dim or flat on what one might call, in tautological desperation, the textiness of the text. Issues of convention and its torquing, genre and genre mixage, modes of representation, imagery, connotation and denotation in language, styles of depiction, linguistic registers and their impact, transmission issues (translation, for example, or the material presentation of a work in versions), the structural divisions of a text, its pace of disclosure, its multiple subject modes, its possible use of the page as canvas—are often scanted. It's as if analyzing the social aspects of texts made people forget about the motivated manipulation of the medium and choices in the zone of fabrication. Some people call this attention to the medium by the term "the aesthetic"—and that's, unfortunately, become a prim little self-congratulatory term right now. I say "yes" to the aesthetic, without question, yes, yes, yes, but in fact that term is too easy and unconvincing—it is crudely idealizing and puts us back to "higher planes" (like form) and "lower things" (like society or content). It reasserts a hierarchical binary for literary study. Everything on this list of "texty" features has a social and historical dimension—there is no "pure" or ungrounded aesthetic. Literary conventions have historical resonance and information; allusions to canonical works and deturning of them has social meaning; imagery can give condensed information about social debate; linebreaks in poetry can call attention to key words; rhythms evoking canonical works can make certain strange ideas acceptable and sound normal, genres do serious social work—this list could go on. I want questions of mediation put back on the table!
W. I thought we were talking about nothing but mediation—socio-political mediations (history, politics, geography) and other axes of mediations (race, class, religious culture) ...
F. I want as well to attend to linguistic/formal mediations. It's been my contention that condensed moments of historical debate or the practices of ideology appear in (let's say) clashes of image in a poem as well as in staged confrontations between allegory-laden characters in a novel. It has depressed me that the materialist/feminist reading of texts is only pallidly interested in the materiality of the text itself, the materiality of the signifier. Language uses (plus convention and structure and genre) are not nice clean windows to look out of—they are part of what is there, part of the view. They construct the view! Some would even say that they are the view, that there's no "outside." Be that as it may, one would think, for sure, that textual materiality would be understood as part of what needs discussion from a social/gender perspective. Thus "Form is never more than an extension of content," to echo a famous (and infamous) manifesto—which really means that form is a kind of content (Olson 1997: 240). So some recent critics keep offering a social poetics, a socio-poesis, a social philology, a cultural poetics, a social formalism among other terms that have recently come into play (DuPlessis 2001: 11–17). Representation takes shape as the enunciation (the signifier), and is not limited to opinions in the enounced (the signified) or of the author (we can call her writing agent, or "the announced"). There's no formula or preset scheme for this kind of social formalist reading—it is alertness to how form and content intersect and helix, with the critical commitment to articulate this helix as a necessary and not a decorative part of feminist literary study. So I want to add the demand to "textualize" to our other suggestions—to disaggregate, to globalize (this doesn't mean totalize!) and to socio-historicize.
W. An annunciation and announcement. We’ll see how it plays out.
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Works Cited |
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 Top Works Cited |
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DuPlessis Rachel Blau. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (2001) Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
—. "Manhood and its Poetic Projects: The construction of masculinity in the counter-cultural poetry of the U.S. 1950s." [on Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley] Jacket Magazine 31 (2006).http://jacketmagazine.com/31/duplessis-manhood.html (Accessed 10 May 2007).
Culler Jonathan. The Literary in Theory (2007) Stanford: Stanford UP.
Friedman Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998) Princeton: Princeton UP.
Hawkesworth Mary. Feminist Inquiry: From Political Conviction to Methodological Innovation (2006) New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.
Hutcheon Linda. "Rethinking the National Model." In: Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory—Linda Hutcheon, Mario J. Valdés, eds. (2002) Oxford: Oxford UP. 3–49.
Johnson Barbara. Mother Tongues. Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (2003) Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP.
Modleski Tania. Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (1991) New York: Routledge.
Olson Charles. Collected Prose—Donald Allen, Benjamin Friedlander, eds. (1997) Berkeley: University of California Press.
Russ Joanna. How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983) Austin: University of Texas Press.
Todd Janet. Feminist Literary History: A Defence (1988) Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell.
Woolf Virginia. Three Guineas (1938) New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
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