Productive agencies of feminist theory; The work it does  

Oleh:

King, Katie

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Feminist Theory vol. 2 no. 1 (Apr. 2001), page 94-98.
Topik: agencies
Fulltext: 94.pdf (27.77KB)

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My interests in thinking about feminist theory within ecologies of production, distribution and consumption (as they separate apart but also as they can collapse into each other) arose in three US academic circumstances. The first was over the redefinition of the term ‘radical feminism’ in the context of the so-called Sex Wars, in which my own political memories were palpably deformed and reshaped as radical feminism was split into two parts – a laudable one with socialist trajectories and a lamented one, a reshaped ‘cultural feminism’. These redefinitions made clear to me how classification systems operate to create teleological histories and new political identities and alliances, and that all these actions were some of the kinds of work that feminist theory performs. The second circumstance involved my own travels from one community of feminist practice to another during the course of my postdoctoral work as a new assistant professor. In the first community, I was (at that time) derisively labeled a ‘theorist’, and in that community of practice that meant I was too academic, too careerist, too abstract, too difficult to understand. What was valued was to be an ‘activist’, which was precluded by the term ‘theorist’. Then I traveled to another feminist community, where I was derisively labeled an ‘activist’ in a community in which what was valued was ‘theory’; the work I did was not centrally structured by a psychoanalytic poststructuralism, so I couldn’t be understood to do ‘theory’. Thus I felt slapped in the face with ‘What counts as theory’ in material, concrete ways that were not simply unpleasant, but affected me politically, professionally, intellectually and as an activist. I responded to both these circumstances in my writing as much as possible, trying to puzzle out why all this mattered.1 The third circumstance arose over time, and has shifted and changed, ebbing and flowing as my women’s studies department has developed a PhD in women’s studies. As we have attempted to put together curricula, divergent views of ‘What counts as feminist theory?’ have continually affected our discussions and descriptions of the place of certain courses in the design of the PhD program. One understanding of feminist theory has emphasized a history of influential persons and texts and the transmission of exemplary classifications of different kinds of feminist theories,

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