Lori Propheter
English 401
Bibliographic Survey of Journals
Oct. 25, 2002
Bridging the Gaps:
Journals in Feminist Criticism and Theory
Prominent feminist critic Susan Gubar titles her analysis of the condition of modern
feminist theory and criticism, “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” In Gubar’s, and many other
contemporary feminist scholars’, view, modern feminism suffers from a variety of wounds.
Though she is careful to warn the reader against potential racist interpretations of her argument,
the fact cannot be avoided that Gubar exclusively criticizes non-white feminists. Her concern is
the how the integrity of feminism will hold in the face of inner rifts due to differences in class,
race, and sexual orientation. These divisions had germinated in silence, but exploded into
expression in the 80s, as the second wave was dissolving and the hegemony of white, straight,
middle-class feminism was revealed and began to be undermined. Contemporary feminism faces
the threats of disintegrating into potentially less effective feminisms, or of being subsumed by
the laissez-faire attitude of postfeminism, or of having its revolutionary potential cut short by
integration into the liberal mainstream.
A survey of journals devoted to feminist theory and criticism will reveal how modern
feminists are coping with these issues. Most will show a strong desire to face them head on, and
build new bridges between the splintered subgroups. Contemporary feminists are building on the
approach that feminist scholar Teresa de Lauretis hinted at in 1984 when she wrote, “not only
does feminism exist despite those differences, but, most important, as we are just now beginning
to realize, it cannot continue to exist without them” (14)
Feminist Studies is considered to be one of the premiere journals on feminism. It is published
three times a year, and receives some administrative support from the women’s studies
department at the University of Maryland. The current editor and manager is Claire G. Moses.
Feminist Studies was founded in 1969, at the ground level of the second wave, and is devoted to
encouraging feminist analysis of issues, and opening new areas of research, with a firm belief in
the power of feminism to change women’s condition. As is stated in their statement of purpose,
“For us, feminist thought represents a transformation of consciousness, social forms, and modes
of action.” Though those beliefs have not changed through the years, Feminist Studies is
determined to keep its focus up-to-date. The most current issue of Feminist Studies, from
summer 2002, is devoted to reassessing the second wave of feminism. Sara Evan’s article, “ReViewing the Second Wave,” addresses the fracturing of feminism since the 80s, and emphasizes
the need to weave these divergent strands into a coherent history. Feminist Studies plays an
important role in getting young, fresh voices into the discourse community. Three articles in the
summer issue are from younger feminist scholars who weren’t old enough to be active
participants in the early days of the second wave. These articles, titled “Expanding the
Boundaries of the Women’s Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Women’s Rights,”
by Premilla Nadasen; “Living a Feminist Lifestyle: The Intersection of Theory and Action in a
Lesbian Feminist Collective,” by Anne M. Valk; and “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the
Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” by Becky Thompson; stretch the boundaries of
traditional race, class, and gender lines, illustrating Feminist Studies commitment to if not
repairing, then at least to understanding the divisions that have occurred.
While Feminist Studies is extremely determined to reflect on and reevaluate its position
in the history of feminism as well as to look to its future, many of its concerns are less rigorously
theory-bound. An article in the summer issue, “Hanging the Yellow Wall-Paper: Feminism and
Textual Studies,” can be more easily seen as being immediately practical. It consists of a close
textual analysis of several editions of the widely-used feminist text, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,”
designed to help enable teachers, critics, and students determine which edition would be most
helpful to their needs. On the lighter side, every issue of Feminist Studies is interspersed with
poems that reflect on or illustrate the articles’ themes, and each issue ends with a “News and
Views” section that focuses on relevant current political issues.
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy is published three times a year by the Indiana
University Press. Its current editor is Margaret A. Simms. Hypatia has its roots in the Society for
Women in Philosophy, a group of scholars who felt discouraged by the lack of representation of
women philosophers in current academic discourse. According to its statement of purpose,
Hypatia aims to “encourage and communicate many different kinds of feminist philosophy.”
Though organized around philosophical conceptual models and concerns, many of the issues and
themes discussed in Hypatia can be seen as being pertinent to feminist criticism and theory in
general, and applied to feminist literary criticism, specifically.
The spring 1989 issue, (vol.4, no.1), is a special issue devoted to “The History of Women
in Philosophy.” Displaying an annoyance and concern with the lack of representations of female
philosophers in current academic discourse, the editors selected articles for the issue that perform
important recoveries of philosophical texts by women. The act of recovering neglected or
forgotten work by women is one of the primary activities of feminist scholars. One such article
of recovery is “Anne Viscountess Conway: A 17th Century Rationalist,” by Jane Duran. Another
in the same issue is “Damaris Cudworth Marsham: A 17th Century Feminist Philosopher,” by
Lois Frankel. The editors are careful to note that they have not deal exclusively with texts that
would be considered feminist. They found it important to resurrect these works simply because
of the fact that they were written by women.
Several of the articles in another special issue, from fall 1989, entitled “Ethics and
Reproduction,” make important contributions to the feminist discourse of the body, specifically
the maternal body, inaugurated by such scholars as Julia Kristeva. Though approaching these
issues from a philosophical/ethical standpoint, the theories these writers develop could be
effectively and interestingly applied to other areas, such as literary criticism. Three articles in
this issue that have this potential are “Marxism and Surrogacy,” by Kelly Oliver, “The Moral
Significance of Birth,” by Mary Ann Warren, and “Is Pregnancy Necessary? Feminist Concerns
about Ectogenesis,” by Julian S. Murphy. These articles transcend boundaries of race, class (an
exception would be the article on Marxism, which would certainly address class issues), and
gender as they question the female universals of pregnancy and birth.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society is published four times a year by the
University of Chicago Press. Its current editor is Catharine R. Stimpson. Its purpose, outlined in
its inaugural issue in autumn of 1975, is twofold. The first was “to publish the new scholarship
about women from both the US and other countries” in the form of both “original research and
contemplative essays,” or a synthesis of the two methods. Its second purpose was to be
interdisciplinary. They proposed to accomplish this by publishing examples of one person,
skilled in several disciplines, exploring one subject, or several persons, each skilled in one
discipline exploring one subject together, and by embodying this interdisciplinarity in the
structure of the magazine itself. They summarize their vision of this publication process as “one
group, delegates of several disciplines, publish in more or less random conjunction with each
other in a single journal. Like Feminist Studies, Signs is interested in the effects this research can
have: “we also want Signs to point to directions modern scholarship, thought, and policy can
take.
A recent issue of Signs focused on “Globalization and Gender.” Guest edited by Sandra
Harding and Kathryn Norberg, this issue contains articles that transcend the restraints of time,
gender, class, and race in their examinations of globalization and gender. In their introduction,
the editors establish how modern feminist scholars have worked to address issues of political
economy and gender in relation to globalization. Their work revealed that “capitalism depended
on sexism to become global, such work was seminal for gendering political economy.”
An article that addresses these issues is “Political Economy Discourses of Globalization
and Feminist Politics,” by Suzanne Bergeron. This article examines scripts of globalization, such
as different kinds of texts, essays, for example. Another article, “Traveling with Her Mother’s
Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race and Location in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacote
in Many Lands, by Sandra Gunning, works to illuminate issues of class, race, and gender in the
19th century. In Gunning’s words, “Mary Jane Seacote reveals a great deal about the complex
interplay in the 19th century between gendered mobility, black diaspora identity, colonial power,
and transnational circularity” (949). Like some of the other journals we’ve looked at, Signs is
concerned with analyzing the history through the eyes of feminism, and with locating their
proper place in the modern world by addressing troublesome issues like race, class, and gender.
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature is a publication associated with the University of Tulsa in
Oklahoma. Its current editor is Holly S. Laird, and the current managing editor is Linda S.
Frazier. According to its statement of purpose, Tulsa Studies is devoted to the study of the
relations between women and writing of every period, in every language. They look to publish
“literary, historicist, and theoretical work.” One can see this variety of work in recent issues of
the publication. Each issue has a theme. For the spring 2002 issue, the theme was “Feminism and
Time.” Articles in this issue include “Telling Time in Feminist Theory,” by Rita Felski, and
“Feminism, Ethics, and History, or What is the ‘Post’ in Postfeminism,” by Jennifer Fleissner.
The fall 2001 issue, “Women Writing Across the World,” contains a narrative of Spanish women
writers of the nineties, by Carmen de Urioste. From this selection of articles, one can see that
Tulsa Studies, like many of the other publications we’ve looked at, doesn’t shy away from issues
that have been controversial in feminist studies, such as postcolonialism and multiethnicity, and
the issue of what “postfeminism” means and implies as opposed to “feminism.” These articles
are often indebted to major literary critics and scholars.
Fleissner’s articles cites theorist Jacques Derrida as the source of feminist scholar Toril
Moi’s coinage of the term postfeminism. The same issue also pays homage to seminal feminist
Helene Cixous in an article titled “The Colonial Outsider: Helence Cixous’s Les Reveries de la
femme sauvage.” Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Susan Gubar are among
the prominent feminists cited on numerous occasions. Another article in the spring 2002 issue,
Betty Joseph’s “Gendering Time in Globalization: The Belatedness of the Other Woman and
Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy,” unravels the “time lag” between the modern, white, middle-class
female, and the third-world, non-white female. This article leans frequently on
feminist/postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak’s work.
Tulsa Studies includes a groundbreaking archival feature in almost every issue. They
recover important manuscripts by women writers that are previously unpublished for publication
in their journal. Some authors that have been published in this feature include Virginia Woolf,
Edith Wharton, and Ann Yeardley.
Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory is a publication concerned with the
issues of performance art, feminist literary criticism, and feminist theory. The first issue of
Women and Performance came out in 1983, and has been published semi-annually by the
Women and Performance Project, Inc. at the New York University/Tisch School of the Arts
Department of Performance Studies. Its founding editors were Jill Dolan, Trudy Scott, Anne B.
Wyma, Judy Rosenthal, and Celia Weisman. In a statement in their second issue, the editors laid
out their aims: “Only by creating a vital dialogue with and balance between readers will Women
and Performance authentically serve as a catalyst for intense polemics, vigorous debate, personal
empowerment, and societal transformation.” Here, we see the same concern shared by many
other feminist journals, that their publication will have practical results, will serves as a “catalyst
for change.”
Two recent issues of Women and Performance, numbers 19 and 20, came out in 1999.
These were published together as “Performing Autobiography.” While most of the articles in
these issues deal with specific performance art or artists, or with the theory of feminist
performance art and drama, several articles deal with issues of literary autobiography as well.
One such article, Claire MacDonald’s “Requiem for the Self: Kathy Acker’s Final Work,”
explores the postmodern, experimental writer’s construction of a voice. MacDonald focuses on
how illuminating how Acker exploded the boundaries between poetry and prose, between high
and low art, between literature and the art world. Another article along the same lines is Susan
Edwards’s “The Wild West Wind,” which focuses on poet and beat icon Allen Ginsberg.
Edwards explores the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction in Ginsberg’s work, ultimately
determining that it should be considered “poetic non-fiction.” We can see how many articles in
Women and Performance are important additions to current discourses in current literary
criticism, concerned with issues such as the boundaries between genres, and what determines
what is a text, and what is not a text.
Women and Performance takes seriously this talk of exploration of blurred genres with
its publications of performance pieces for print. One such piece, “Be To Want I,” by Marianne
Goldberg is included in issues 19 and 20. Its prequel, “Ballerinas and Ball Passing” appeared in
issue six of Women and Performance in 1989.
From the sampling above, we can see how devoted current feminist journals are to bridging the
gaps that internal splintering caused in the feminist movement in the 80s and 90s. While still
carrying on the more traditional feminist-scholarly tasks of recovery of lost or neglected texts by
women and giving standard texts feminist re-hauls, these publications are extremely committed
to understanding the history of feminism, and to rewriting that history with new emphasis placed
on differences of race, gender, or class. Feminists are determined to overcome obstacles of
misunderstanding in order to enter into fruitful discourse with each other, and the world. In the
theory-heavy domain of literary criticism, it is refreshing to see that a belief that feminist theory
and criticism can have practical applications, that they can have the potential to change the
world, is still alive and kicking.
Works Cited
de Laurentis, Teresa. “Feminist Studies/ Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts.” Feminist
Studies/ Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Laurentis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
Gubar, Susan. “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” Critical Inquiry 24 Summer 1998.
Feminist Studies Summer, 2002.
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 4.1 Spring 1989.
—. 4.3 Fall 1989.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1.1 Autumn 1975.
—. 26.4 Summer 2001
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature Fall 2001
—. Spring 2002
Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 6 1989
—. 10.19-20 1999.
Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory