JAC Volume 17 Issue 1

Women Writing Culture is a wonderfully rich collection of interviews with an impressive group of intellectuals—Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Mary Belenky, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Re-reading the interviews (for I had read most of them when they appeared in JAC and had published responses to the Belenky and Lyotard interviews in the journal's "Reader Response" section) was exciting. Gary Olson and Elizabeth Hirsh are to be congratulated for gathering these seemingly disparate conversations into a focused inquiry into ways in which women write culture. The book provides diverse contexts—philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies—and a wide range of issues. The volume is accessible enough to introduce feminist issues in a variety of fields to those unfamiliar with feminism yet provocative enough to satisfy those more familiar with feminist concerns. I'm pleased to have been asked to contribute to what Hirsh and Olson in their introduction call a polylogue.

As I was reading the very diverse conversations, I felt a need, though, to try to make connections among them, for their concerns seemed so disparate. The interviewers themselves, of course, helped considerably by consistently asking some questions about writing, literacy, and pedagogy that are of special interest to composition specialists. The insightful foreward by Haraway and afterword by Henry Giroux also helped. The questions I began asking, though, had more to do with how the various perspectives might be usefully related to discussions within contemporary feminism. All of the individuals interviewed are concerned with ways in which women write (and rewrite, and are written by) culture. But do they frame problems and solutions in the same ways or in very different ways? Do their perspectives complement or contradict one another or both? In the end, is consensus or dissensus achieved?

In some ways, the differences far outweigh the similarities. Haraway and Harding seem primarily concerned with theoretical matters such as elaborating upon feminist standpoint theory. Belenky seems primarily concerned with collaboration and its implications for women's intellectual development. Hooks seems primarily concerned with showing how gender and racial issues are inextricably connected. Irigaray seems primarily concerned with implications for feminism of the philosophical issue of the dialectic of subject and object. Lyotard seems primarily concerned with problematizing concepts such as the "feminine."

Despite these differences, I find it useful to situate the various perspectives in relation to two forms of feminism mentioned in the interviews, constructivism and postmodern feminism. Other constructions or situations, of course, are possible. I should make clear that there is little consensus, within feminist studies, on what these perspectives are, what they should be named, or how they relate to other perspectives. I attempt, therefore, as much as possible to use language and explanations contained in the interviews themselves.

Mary Belenky reiterates, in the interview, her commitment to what she calls constructivism. When asked if she sees her work as informed by social constructionism, she answers, "It is steeped in the very deepest roots of constructivism" (100). She explains that she and the other collaborators on Women's Ways of Knowing work in the area of social psychology, the starting point of which is the work of Piaget. She also mentions the importance of the work of Vygotsky, who provides an even deeper understanding of the social nature of language and thought (100). She sees that Peter Elbow and Kenneth Bruffee are compositionists who are constructivists. Feminists mentioned as doing work compatible with her own are Nancy Chodorow (90), Carol Gilligan (93), and Sara Ruddick (90).

Belenky is careful to distance herself and Carol Gilligan from essentialist positions that posit that differences between men and women can be explained by nature alone (93). She does not want to push too far the argument that there are differences in the ways in which women and men develop intellectually and address moral problems. She observes, for instance, that women are gendered but are also "just human beings" (93). She also makes clear that the authors of Women's Ways of Knowing do not claim that the developmental phases they describe are exclusive to women. She says, "Although we studied women and make these claims for women, we are not claiming that these might not also be men's ways of thinking" (84). Belenky does make some statements that suggest, nevertheless, that she thinks women's and men's ways of knowing (and behaving) are different. She speaks of women working better in collaborative situations (90), and of men "setting the standard and perpetuating a world where individualism and competition take precedence over relationships and connections" (92). She also speaks of a "maternal approach" to teaching which involves trying to understand students (99).

Belenky's vision is fundamentally an optimistic one that envisions collaboration, dialogue, and constructed knowing as alternatives to our present competitive approaches to learning and communicating. She sees constructed knowing as "more adequate and adaptive" (97) than the positions of silence, received knowledge, subjective knowledge, and procedural knowledge discussed in Women's Ways of Knowing. Belenky's perspective strikes me as in some ways different from the others in this collection: it is more optimistic, more certain, less worried, and less concerned about complexities and contradictions. The others, it seems to me, are postmodern rather than constructivist in orientation.

For several of those interviewed, especially bell hooks and Luce Irigaray, this claim might seem problematic. In the hooks interview, Olson and Hirsh observe that she criticizes postmodernism in "Postmodern Blackness" for its exclusionary strategies (135). Hooks makes clear, though, that her complaint is not a complaint against postmodernism per se but against its divorce from radical political practice (135). She criticizes Foucault, in particular, for being unable to "conceptualize a radical political agenda within a framework that affirms postmodern experience and the kind of critical thinking that's coming out of postmodernism" (136).

Most of hooks's comments suggest, though, that her perspective is a postmodern one in that she problematizes binary conceptions of gender, insists that gender must be considered in relation to other factors such as race and class, and seems uninterested in questions of gender difference. Hooks criticizes either/or and hierarchical thinking (118) as well as dualistic thinking (116), so it is not surprising that she seems uninterested in exploring differences between males and females. She emphasizes that feminist revolution will come about only if men become mutual comrades in struggle in the movement (134). She prefers the word "solidarity" to "sisterhood," emphasizing positionality rather than gender per se (121). She is disturbed by some feminist work, such as Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, that makes no attempt to think about differences of race, class, and gender. Hooks sees that such work threatens feminist movement because it privileges the experiences of a certain class of white women (123). She is concerned about issues of power and domination and speaks of a "situational pedagogy" that would be appropriate for the multicultural classroom but warns that multicultural pedagogy is "fraught with chaos" (106).

Irigaray's perspective might seem to have some affinities with constructivism because she seems, at times, to accept a dichotomous conception of gender. She speaks of men and women as "two generically different subjects" (153) who need to engage in dialogue, and she refers to "feminine subjectivity" (152) and a "masculine subject" (147). Her description of the different relationships between little boys and little girls and their mothers (158) sounds much like Nancy Chodorow's description in The Reproduction of Mothering, a work that Belenky mentions.

Irigaray explains, though, that her work consists of three phases. It is the third phase, her attempt to construct "an intersubjectivity respecting sexual difference," to define a "new model of possible relations between man and woman, without the submission of either one to the other," that strikes me as most resembling a postmodern one (145). Her first phase, which emphasized that the masculine subject constructed the world and interpreted it according to a single perspective, is what I would call radical feminist in orientation (145). Her second phase, which defined "mediations that could permit the existence of a feminine subjectivity," seems similar in some ways to Belenky's constructivist one and to what is often called cultural feminism (145). It becomes clear, though, that her conception of sexual difference is in important ways different from Belenky's.

Irigaray distinguishes between feminists of equality (what I would call liberal feminists) and feminists of difference, arguing that feminists of equality are primarily interested in becoming equal to men while feminists of difference are interested in changing argumentation in order to deconstruct a discourse (149). She then subdivides feminists of difference into two "parties," those who claim that women are different from men and those who are interested in changing the relationship of difference between the two genders (154). The former are no doubt what Belenky calls constructivists; Irigaray, however, clearly associates herself with the latter. She wants to construct an objectivity that corresponds to an "I" that is sexed feminine. Doing so necessitates remaining both objective and subjective and remaining in a dialectic between the two (153).

Lyotard's orientation, in contrast, is unquestionably postmodern, and to the extent that it is feminist, it is postmodern feminist. He is wary of binary conceptions of gender that posit a belief in feminine and masculine principles (183)"Feminist Theor. He says, "[S]ex difference is not only biological difference, not social studies difference; it's something else, quite mysterious, which is incorporated in each of us, women or men, a difference which is internal, a capacity" (183). He does think there are feminine and masculine tendencies and that the "feminine" is an openness to the unknown without any project to master it (183). But he argues that "There's presumably unbalanced repetition of this femininity with masculinity in women and men, but I know women who are more male than I am" (184). He also emphasizes that "The enormous, extreme, huge importance of the question of gender is precisely that this question has no answer, and that's the only way we can continue to think about it" (186).

Lyotard's orientation is postmodern in that he questions and problematizes modernism without rejecting it completely. He says he does not want to replace rationality with absurdity but, rather, with another kind of rationality and claims that he is a "completely rational thinker" (190). He also says that he likes the sciences and likes to work with scientists. He thinks that the "absurdity" of recognizing that god is dead and that humans must continue to build a rational, consistent representation of the world is compatible with scientific rationality (190). For Lyotard, postmodernism is feminist in allowing the system of rationality to be "complexified," allowing feminism to grow inside the system "as a way for the system to understand that another way of thinking and operating is possible, and more flexible" (189).

The interviews with Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway exemplify some ways in which postmodern feminism can grow inside the system. Harding is a feminist philosopher of science concerned with changing our conception of science and the way it is practiced from within. She does not repudiate the concept of objectivity but rethinks it, reconceptualizes it. The perspective she has worked out, and is continuing to work out, is feminist standpoint theory, which she considers to be a postmodernism (24). She says,

She explains that feminist standpoint theory is a science-based theory emerging out of Europe and out of the Enlightenment: "It's an Enlightenment theory in that it's about progress and reason; and while it may reject certain other Enlightenment theories, it falls within that range" (25). It arises out of "the sociology of knowledge, philosophy, epistemology, and political philosophy" (26). Feminist standpoint theory has developed concepts such as "strong reflexivity" and "strong objectivity," concepts that encourage the investigator to see "one's social location as a positive resource for advancing knowledge" (27). Harding emphasizes that within the realm of the natural sciences, the law, or public policy, it is objectivity rather than relativism and subjectivity that is going to help people improve upon what they have been doing (32). A standpoint, according to Harding, is an objective place (41). Greater objectivity will be achieved, according to Harding, if women's perspectives are articulated, if they report on their individual participation in a collective experience (42).

Donna Haraway, a biologist as well as a philosopher of science, acknowledges her commitment to the concept of "strong objectivity" and to feminist standpoint theory as described by Nancy Harstock and Sandra Harding but thinks her perspective is more postmodern than theirs (58). Like Harding, she is interested in bringing together the technical and the scientific without resorting to relativism (57). She agrees with them that women's historical position can form the basis for a radical material-social production of knowledge. But, perhaps because she has a background in literature, she has a greater awareness of the "thickness of language" and places greater emphasis, in accounts of situatedness, on foregrounding "how that situatedness is produced and what those consequences are and the finitude of it" (58). She clarifies that she is against the kind of idolatry that "mistakes the sign for the thing" (59). She also explains that a standpoint is not static but an "achievement," a verb, not something that is possessed but something that is used (65). It is therefore always dialogic.

As Olson observes, Haraway thinks that substituting female-centered and feminist accounts of history or science for male-centered and masculinist ones serves only to perpetuate systems of domination (58). She is concerned, then, with finding ways of holding on to conceptions of the materiality of difference while constructing strong shared standpoints for doing effective things in the world politically (59). As Olson also observes, Haraway is critical of the perspective of the white middle class that privileges sexual difference as the definitive axis of gender inequality (61). Haraway explains that an expanded notion of gender specifies ways that sexed categories are produced in historical situations (62).

Haraway claims that she has modified her criticism of psychoanalysis, though she mentions being uncomfortable with "analogizing everything to the family" (63) and observes that psychoanalysis, because it remains "resolutely European," is "incredibly parochial" (72). She also fears that an alternative to psychoanalysis, cultural studies, can become domesticated and lose its "acidity" (73). For her, cultural studies is about remaking worlds, about paying attention "to certain kinds of agencies that didn't get any description before, about getting at the complexity that Marxist theory as it was being done couldn't get at" (73). She even mentions specific practices that we should engage in: "writing the textbooks, learning how to do these things in classrooms, getting NSF funding, engaging in the textbook controversies in the schools, producing the visual culture, remembering that from the beginning biology was civics" (71).

As I have argued elsewhere ("Feminist Theories/Feminist Composition," College English, February 1995), the dominant tradition within feminist composition has been cultural feminism, what I am here calling constructivist feminism. Women Writing Culture makes a valuable and timely contribution to feminist composition because it emphasizes postmodernism feminism, a tradition that remains underdeveloped or underappreciated. I can't resist a concluding remark, though, that arises out of a postmodern sensitivity to hierarchy and contradiction. Women Writing Culture is a collection of interviews with experts from other fields on the subject of women and writing. Given that the interviews were originally published in JAC and that the interviewers are, for the most part, compositionists, the interviews provide a fruitful dialogue between compositionists and experts in other fields. What are we to make, though, of the absence of compositionists as interviewees? And will a time ever come when compositionists are invited by journal editors in psychology, the philosophy of science, philosophy, biology, and cultural studies to discuss the topic of women and writing? I am not arguing that numerous compositionists have achieved the stature of Haraway, Harding, Belenky, hooks, Irigaray, and Lyotard and were overlooked by Olson and Hirsh. I am suggesting, though, that the book serves as a reminder that for the most part we are a field talking mostly to ourselves.