Feminism's Radical Fluidity

Although I've already voiced my dissenting opinion when it comes to  "What Ails Feminist Criticism?", I would like to engage in this post Robyn Wiegman's much more eloquent response to Gubar's essay in her article "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion."

While Gubar laments the alleged attacks on feminism by postcolonial and poststructuralist theory, Wiegman points out that this glorification of the earlier phases of feminism is really a glorification of the literary historical. Gubar's distrust of theoretical feminism comes from a distrust of the displacement of the text as the final authority in literary studies with the explosion of interdisciplinary cultural theory; it is in fact a fear of losing her authority as a "real" feminist--a label which she bases entirely on her position in the earlier phases of feminism. Her claim that poststructuralist theory is "obscurantist" is really an attack against the validity of literary theory that imposes a preexisting framework on literary texts, which is characteristic of the general move in academia toward theorization. She fears becoming obsolete, and her fears are well-grounded: if she continues to denigrate the liberal progression of feminism, she will become obsolete.

Wiegman, rather than suggest that metacriticism within the academy is destroying the feminist movement, celebrates such dissent as a sign of vitality. Gubar's conceptualization of feminism as a field of academic study is objectifying; she would have it confined to a single discipline, making it into an object of study rather than a way of thinking about the world. In a sense, she has forgotten the radical roots of feminism, and she would like to see the movement solidified and institutionalized, paradoxically integrating it into a preexisting patriarchal system it was originally meant to resist. Wiegman, however, conceptualizes feminism as an overarching worldview; it is not an object of study, but rather a way of studying other things (literature, culture, race, politics.) She sees Gubar's fourth stage of metacritical dissension as a positive sign that the object of "women's studies" has been subjectivated into the active process of "feminine studying." Such metacriticism allows for the constant fluidity of the movement, a sort of radical refusal to be objectified, which is in fact the sort of rejection upon which feminism was originally based. The continually evolving nature of interdisciplinary feminism maintains the movement's integrity, and the only constant in feminism becomes a radical rejection of oppression--even in the form of academic institutionalization.

Gubar's lamentation of the former glory of a unified feminism constitutes a mourning of the unity of meaning. This is framed for Gubar in the terms of feminism, but it really signifies a broader mourning of the literary-historical approach to literary criticism. I do not wish to minimize or denigrate her historical contributions to the field of feminism, but her desire for the institutionalization of an inherently radical and system-resistant movement is counterproductive to contemporary feminism, and Wiegman's re-subjectivation of the term "feminist" as a epistemological paradigm rather than an object of study through postcolonial and poststructuralist theory provides a much more pragmatic and productive definition than Gubar's consevative nostalgia.