Missing m/f

CONSTANCE PENLEY

           m/f may have gone missing, but the ideas and debates that drove the journal are far from lost. The journal's project was founded on the belief that the stakes of feminist and socialist theory and practice could best be gauged, in the 1970s, through a fiercely focused examination of key terms such as subjectivity, sexual difference, identification, and desire. Within this belief, m/f for nine years scrutinized the language of feminism and socialism, including some of the prize slogans of the '60s and '70s—such as "every woman's right to choose" and "the personal is political"—with the aim of showing how discourse shapes action and response, makes certain strategies possible while limiting others.

           To m/f 's critics, however, one term crucial to the debate—the female subject—was typically slighted in the zeal of the journal's investigation of essentialist ideas. It is indeed true that m/f eschewed any founding subjectivity for feminism as a movement—be it "Woman," or perhaps even more radically, "women." But this was because its project was precisely to study all claims for a feminine or feminist subjectivity, a project of "deconstruction" in the broadest sense of the term that frequently had to meet accusations of theoreticism, indifference to political urgencies, or worse. Compounding it all, of course, was m/f's adoption of psychoanalysis (historically anathematized by many feminists), with its particular account of subjectivity, as its chief analytical approach. m/f chose, however, not to go on the defensive about its allegiance to psychoanalysis, but instead proceeded forcefully to extend and rework psychoanalytic ideas for feminist theory.

           What has been the fate of the kinds of ideas generated within m/f? It is heartening to see how they have proliferated. In pointing to some of the latest work on the debate around essentialism that has followed in the wake of m/f, I do not mean to suggest that m/f was the only source of all the newer work on questions of identity, subjectivity, and sexual difference. Rather, m/f served as an example (it was even exemplary) in the way it presented the most condensed and focused critique of the terms of the debate during a particularly crucial period in the development of feminist theory, from about the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Some of the strongest work that appeared later included arguments ranging from Joan Scott's avowal of the usefulness of the nonessentialist term "gender" to feminist historical studies, Denise Riley's claim that the category "women" is as constructed as the more metaphysical category "woman," Donna Haraway's polemical call for a new hybrid and nonorganic "cyborg feminist" identity, Diana Fuss's demonstration of the way in which essentialist ideas inform all constructionist arguments and vice versa, and Paul Smith's attempt to formulate for feminism a nonessential notion of "agency."1

           Looking back, one of the main strengths of m/f as a feminist project was the way it kept psychoanalysis at the forefront of feminist theory. To argue for the usefulness of psychoanalytic ideas to feminist theory was an often difficult and unwelcome task. But it was a necessary one, and the enormity of the loss of m/f as a kind of theoretical beacon can be seen quite clearly in the face of the recently renewed will to purge feminism of psychoanalysis (or at least of certain less desirable parts of it). Frequently this takes the form of a call to substitute "gender" for "sexual difference" as an analytical category for feminist theory—thus displacing the role of the unconscious in the formation of subjectivity and sexuality—or to substitute a theory of a socially divided and contradictory subject for one that is psychically split. Gender is seen as a more capacious and less loaded term than sexual difference, particularly insofar as gender is seen as a way of "referring to the exclusively social origins of the subjective identities of men and women . . . [and] emphasiz[ing] an entire system of relationships that may include sex, but is not directly determined by sex or directly determining of sexuality."2 The call is fueled by the presumption that theories of sexual difference, indebted as they are to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, are no longer adequate (if, for these writers, they ever were) to the needs of contemporary feminist theorizing, especially when that theorizing is extended to include the categories of class, race, ethnicity. While few feminist theorists would want to reject psychology altogether, the search is on to find a theoretical account of the construction of the female psyche that would be more readily "articulable" than psychoanalytic theory with social and historical accounts of women's position within class, race, and so on. Almost automatically, with scarcely a look backward, feminists are turning to those psychoanalytic theories which, because they are already sociologized, appear to allow an easier link with the other categories, presumed to be entirely social. The work of Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, for example, is quite frequently cited in the effort to find psychoanalytic theories that fit with a more apparently pluralistic account of modern femininity. While Chodorow and Gilligan do not offer pluralistic accounts of female subjectivity, their sociologizing of the psyche puts the mechanisms of the unconscious acquisition of sexual identity on the same level as supposedly more social forms of acquiring identity (the effects of class, race, etc.). A similar impulse shapes Teresa de Lauretis's call for a theory of the "multiple" subject rather than the split subject of psychoanalysis, which thus reconceives sexual difference as only one strand among many in a pluralistic array of (purely social) differences.3

           Whether it is intended or not, what gets lost here are certain emphases that feminists drawing on psychoanalysis have considered crucial to the theorizing of subjectivity, feminine or otherwise, that is, the insistence on the role of the unconscious in the assumption of sexual identity, and the instability of that identity, imposed as it is on a subject that is fundamentally bisexual. Psychoanalysis gives us not only the most complex account of sexuality and subjectivity that we have, it also suggests how that imposed sexuality and subjectivity is resisted by the subject. This is not to say that a positive or immediate politics can be constructed on the resistant tendencies of the unconscious (an unconscious that is in no way radical, and is even quite conservative), but that many lessons can be learned here about both the need to have a fixed sexual identity and the ways that identity is never in fact fixed. While it is indeed important to extend feminist theorizing to take account of class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation (itself a crucial counter to essentialist thinking of another kind), it does not have to be done at the price of a theoretical leveling in the name of pluralism. Not all differences are the same; not all (if any) can be accounted for purely sociologically.

           New developments in feminist cultural studies make it particularly important to keep the psychoanalytic account of subjectivity in mind. To take one instance, the last few years have seen a marked increase in feminist interest in popular culture. Rather than theorizing about "subject positions" or "textual operations," or even "the subject in the text," feminist critics of popular culture are now asking fans, readers, and viewers how they use popular culture, what they do with it in relation to other daily life activities. In the rare instances when these theorists invoke psychoanalysis (in the anxiety that the statements of users of popular culture may consist of more than their face value), it is usually more sociologized versions of it that are called up. Thus consumers of popular culture are seen to be using it to work through, in a very immediate way, the problems of everyday domestic life (for example, soap opera viewing as a living out of revenge fantasies against the constrictions of women's lives under patriarchy),4 or they are seen to rely on popular culture to gain moments of controlled pre-Oedipal regression (for example, female romance reading as escape into a space of nurturance socially denied women in their role as caretakers).5 Seldom in this new feminist work on popular culture do we see an account of the vast range and complexity of fantasies, desires, and identifications suggested by psychoanalysis, an account that could help to describe both the unconscious construction of subjectivity as well as crucial mechanisms for resisting subject positions imposed from the outside. It is undeniable that introducing psychoanalysis into the study of popular culture and its uses can make for a messy and even contradictory account of subjectivity and subject positioning, because psychoanalysis does not patly categorize subjectivity as "progressive" or "reactionary," for example, (a kind of categorization that Meaghan Morris has decried as the "banality of cultural studies"),6 but focuses instead on the subject's complex and intricate negotiation of psychical and cultural forces.

           Through the sharpness of its critique of essentialism and its commitment to the importance of psychoanalysis for feminist theory, m/f offers a retort to the continued urging, both within feminism and outside it, that feminism must "take the risk of essentialism" or that it must "reject psychoanalysis." In contrast, m/f put forward the demand that we take the risk of psychoanalysis. It took that risk and showed, again in an exemplary way, what a modern feminist rethinking of psychoanalysis could offer feminism.

Notes

  1. Joan Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," The American Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 5 (December 1986), p. 1056; Denise Riley "Am I That Name?": Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History, University of Minnesota Press, 1988; Donna Haraway "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review, no. 80 (March—April 1989); Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking, Routledge, 1989; Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject, University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
  2. Scott, p. 1056.
  3. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, Indiana University Press, 1987.
  4. See, for example, Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, Methuen, 1984.
  5. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
  6. Meaghan Morris "Banality in Cultural Studies," Discourse, vol. 10, no. 2 (Spring—Summer 1988), pp. 3-29.