Does post-structuralism damage the purposes of feminist history?

In her famous article 'Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis,' Joan Hoff exposed some of the aspects of poststructuralism that may negatively affect the progress made by scholars of women's history. But her caricature of poststructuralism, athough raising some valid concerns, mostly rested on an essentialist view of women's history that ignored the variety of postmodern theory and the important and thoughtful criticism that it has brought to feminist history as illustrated by Mary Poovey. Although there is a risk of feminist marginalisation in the move from women's to gender history, rethinking the previous feminist assertions about poststructuralism's politically paralysing effects can highlight the problems of dichotomising the linguistic/discursive and material/prediscursive dimensions of analysis. Ultimately, the poststructuralist strain of gender analysis need not damage the purposes of feminist history if undertaken under a self-aware and self-critical lens.

Joan Hoff

In her assessment of poststructuralism and women's history, Joan Hoff argued that poststructuralism, by casting into doubt stable meanings and being hostile to the concepts of linear time and cause-effect, was undoing the success of early practitioners of women's history with their straight-forward language and chronological narratives. According to Hoff, under poststructuralism's 'hermeneutics' (although thinkers like Derrida challenged established notions around hermeneutics itself), interpretation was based solely on textual analysis and left no room for experience outside the ways language constructs it. Thus, Hoff argued that poststructuralism misleadingly used gender as a category of analysis to reduce the experiences of women struggling to define themselves in particular historical contexts to mere subjective stories. Having been conceptualised mainly by male, misogynist theorists, Hoff saw postmodern histories as politically paralyzing. Poststructural linguistic theories were not designed to recognise the existence of socioeconomic hierarchies that give meaning to gender differences. For Hoff, gender analysis was about the power of men over women, and poststructuralism only made historical agency impossible (by disregarding the socio-historical context) and questioned the validity of memory (by diminishing the significance of bodily and physical suffering), being ultimately rooted in a 'tootsie' syndrome in which male theorists become more authentic representatives of women than real women.

As could be expected, Hoff's portrayal of the poststructuralist strain of gender analysis was done for the purpose of critique, and although some of her claims may remain worth revisiting, others turned to be completely unfounded. First of all, Hoff seems to assume that women's history is equivalent to feminist history, which is not necessarily the case. Second, the undeniable fact that most leading posstructuralist thinkers were men without interest in feminism does not mean that feminist historians cannot appropriate those theories for feminist causes. In her response to Hoff, Susan Kent highlighted the variety of poststructuralist theory and the important and thoughtful criticism that it has brought to feminist history. Attacking Hoff quite personally, she stressed how postmodernism (and poststructuralism within it) is not merely a narrative about the identity crises of a few, privileged contemporary Western white men, but privileged white women as well. She raised the crucial point of how many white feminist discourses such as Hoff's are dependent upon and participate in maintaining Enlightenment hopes of reason and the unitary subject which poststructuralism sets up to debunk. An unitary voice requires the suppressing of many differences, and thus a critique of poststructuralism in nostalgic terms, i.e. in terms of a return to an 'unitary sisterhood,' has to be taken carefully as it risks the exclusion of many feminist voices.

Joan Scott in inverted commas

But Hoff did show how thinkers such as Joan Scott had displaced questions about what needs to be known about women's lives and why relations between women and men are as they are for questions about how we know gender, i.e. how the subjective collective meanings of women and men as categories of identity have been constructed and how gender, as a system of knowledge about sexual difference, has produced various meanings of the body. Building up on some of Hoff's arguments, Caroline Ramazanoglu argued that although feminists shouldn't naively hang on to the validity of 'women's experiences,' as these are always political and contested, if on the other hand the material realities of women's lives become deconstructed into the readings of texts, women's complex and contradictory experiences can be reduced to debates about the limits and possibilities of knowing. The world is a text, but it is not only a text: gender relations may be discursively constituted but this does not mean that they do not really exist. What this effectively means is that the disintegration of history into a multiplicity of voices does not make all narratives equal. Feminists may be entangled in (as well as critical of) Enlightenment thought, and the validity of their knowledge is always problematic due to the social and intersecting divisions between women, but postmodernist thought needs to recognise the challenges that feminism offers to poststructuralism (as well as viceversa). Lastly, with poststructuralism came the shift from women's history to gender history and, although Corfield has been right to argue that dichotomous models in history are giving way to more complex and pluralistic accounts as gender is conceptualised as relational, contextualised and multiscalar, there is a risk that the establishment of gender history ends up becoming a malestream incorporation strategy adopted within the Western academy, decentering the study of women as women and becoming another variation of men's history (all in the name of postmodernism). Despite the theoretical discussion developed here, it is always important to remember the material realities of production of knowledge and the influence that particular sites of production such as universities can have on the formation of this knowledge.

Many feminist writers have argued that if feminist history is to maintain a leading role in producing wide-ranging strategies for change, it cannot afford losing its theoretical edge, be it poststructuralist or not. Ultimately, the challenge is one of inclusion, and historians such as Mary Poovey have clarified deconstructionist claims that 'there is nothing outside the text' by arguing that texts and subjects are produced by material conditions in the ever elusive last instance, ever elusive because the material and economic relations of production can only make themselves known through faulty representation. It is here that the problems of dichotomising the linguistic/discursive and the material/pre-discursive dimension of gender analysis becomes evident: poststructuralists are anti-representationalists, not anti-realists. That there is not a direct correspondence between the world and human representations of it that could be described as 'true' does not mean that women have no existence outside language but rather that their existence has no determinable meaning outside language. The material and the discursive thus become mutually constituted realities.

Rather than bringing about the end of feminist history, poststructuralism helped to revitalise it by giving more choice to feminist historians and allowing for a variety of oppressed voices to be heard. Although it is necessary to be aware of poststructuralism's shift from questions about what needs to be known about women lives and why relations of women and men are as they are to questions of how we know gender, the poststructuralist challenge has also brought positive elements to feminist history such as a resistance of totalising forms of expression, a decentering of the subject, the abandonment of grand narratives and the inescapable centrality of language in the creation of historical meaning. Ultimately, language and experience are not opposed categories but mutually constituted ones, and discourses are material as well as ideological. Rethinking previous feminist assertions of poststructuralism's politically paralysing effects, it is more effective to acknowledge the multiplicity of feminist positions within theory, which is not a cause for the dismissal of the integrity of the feminist discourse itself but a series of wide-ranging strategies for change with the common purpose of (re)inscribing what is meant by the term 'women.'