The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics

Abstract

This essay grows out of an experience of severe puzzlement. For several years now I have been watching with growing incomprehension as increasing numbers of feminist scholars have been trying to use or adapt the theory of Jacques Lacan for feminist purposes. I myself have felt a deep disaffinity with Lacan, a disaffinity as much intellectual as political. So while many of my fellow feminists have been using Lacanian ideas to theorize the discursive construction of subjectivity in film and literature, I have been relying on alternative models of language to develop a feminist social theory. Until now, I have avoided any explicit, metatheoretical discussion of these matters. I have explained neither to myself nor to my colleagues why it is that the footnotes in my recent papers contain some positive or quasipositive references to Foucault, Bourdieu, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Gramsci but not positive references to Lacan, Kristeva, Saussure, and Derrida.2 In this essay, I want to begin to provide such an explanation. I will try to explain why I think feminists should have no truck with Lacan and why we should have only the most minimal truck with Julia Kristeva. I will also try to identify some places where I think we can find more satisfactory alternatives.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 122 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.