Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I. EMBATTLED
SUBJECTSOF PERSONAL DISCLOSURE
archal hegemony: “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent
the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics,
regulations and codes” (Cixous 1981,256). Cixous imagines an alterior space
for this “impregnable language” that somehow escapes the imprint of culture
and ideology, and she urges confessing woman to a mythical space where
language, writing, and the body are interwoven: “Her flesh speaks true. She
lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she
signifies it with her body” (Cixous 1981,251).
Confessing feminist theory, as practiced by Tompkins and Frey, for example,
construes a version of writing an embodied feminine desire into the text.
Unlike the dispersed and multivoiced “I” in icriture fiminine, the mode of
confessing feminism described here, with both expressive and exhibitionist
tendencies, recuperates a teleological “I” whose personal disclosures somehow
delineate the truth of “myself as a person.” The discursive clothing of first-per-
son theorizing is the wrapper of authenticity rather than the critical abstrac-
tions of “men’s jeans.” This mantle of authenticity resituates authorial
presence, recently marked as an endangered species.
In a passage in which she contemplates her struggle with her voice as
“critic,” Tompkins reveals both a desire to embody her writing as well as the
problem of excess that this desire entails:
property and the family in which “woman” excels in exchange value. Neither
confessing “I” interrogates the way her first person is constructed within the
rhetoric of her argument nor through the details that claim a relation between
grammatical subject and historical entity. Rather than politicizing this subjec-
tivity, Frey and Tompkins “authenticate” themselves in their critical work
through home improvements and cafe beverage^.'^ These details of fashion
construe a particular kind of subjectivity that domesticates the potential
difference of a confessing “I” into a homogeneity manifesting the self-imperi-
alism of traditional humanism. The confessional mode becomes a matter of
style, a renovation rather than a reformation.
As rhetorical events, these confessions question conventions of academic
prose that elide a “personal” voice. The truth of discourse, of critical theory,
is somehow lodged in this confessional wrapper of authenticity, .much like
Foucault’s idea of confession as a discursive strategy to produce the truth of an
individual subject. So many of these confessional “1’s” signify the unexamined
use of example that stands for truth itself. Although the status of subjectivity,
as well as the relationship between authority and identity in critical discourse,
informs all contestatory confession, too often this intrusive “I” resorts to a
pre-cartesian notion of selfhood that dispenses with important complications
of a contestatory subject.
late twenties, her son only six. She was no Leda, the rapist no
swan. To remember the story, to keep it as a fire within con-
sciousness and political will, is the feminism in feminist criti-
cism. (Stimpson 1990,28-29)
In this appropriated confession, Stimpson exhibits a voiceless unquoted
“woman colleague” who has sustained violent sexual domination. After warn-
ing that “a difficult anecdote” is on the horizon of this passage, Stimpson veers
off into the commonplace scenery of a highway embellished with the signposts
of industrial life. Following this associative chain of thought, she then moves
back in time from the “personal” realm of a drive home to the “professional”
realm “after a meeting” when her colleague “told me about an experience.”
The word “experience” is benign, strikingly mundane in contrast to the
sensation of the words that qualify it: “She had been raped, at knife-point, in
her car, with her son watching.”
Stimpson’s point here is to conjoin seemingly segregated languages and
spheres ofknowledge together, to heal the fracture between Tompkins’s “critic”
and “person.” Helena Michie qualifies Stimpson’s “integrative ‘I’ ” as rhetor-
ical evidence of a commitment to “a systematic dialectical pluralism.” Encom-
passing personal, academic, and political voices, this “integrative ‘I,’ ” Michie
contends, “refus[es] to see any rupture between them” (Michie 1989,20).But
the “integrative” impulse of this “difficult anecdote” remains troublesomely
divided and incoherent. Stimpson insinuates the violence of aestheticizing
sexual violence in her epigrammatic contrast between this real-life rape and
Yeats’s poetic imagery: “She was no Leda, the rapist no swan.” Even so, this
recounted incident is subject to the way Stimpson’s sensationalizing language
manages its representation; this contestatory confession also functions as
exhibitionism to accentuate the argument’s rhetorical force.
Although Stimpson exhorts feminists to use memories, like this one of
sexual violence, as political kindle for their feminist criticism, her imperative
remains abstract and impressionistic. This passage begs the question of a
fraught relationship between “experience” and text, between the personal and
the academic, the all-too-familiar scene of violence and an aestheticized
counterpart, but it does not begin to consider the deeply vexed and crucial
nature of these connections. One might indeed ponder how “conscious”
knowledge that rape is perpetrated on a “woman colleague” invigorates a
feminist reading of a poem like “Leda and the Swan.” There is something
disturbing about Stimpson’s startling arrogation of this “difficult anecdote”
used to enliven feminist criticism with a jolt of political advocacy. Does
Stimpson’s appropriated confession champion the unvoiced and violated
female body written into her text, or does this example provide a dramatically
“personal” field for her rhetorical thrusting? Tompkins’s vague allusions to
“erotic domination” shield her personal “I” from revelatory specificity;
134 Hypatia
not simply “the Body,” as the title announces, but her body as the privileged
site of knowledge that shapes her own critical “thinking.” The confessional
portions map out a transferential exploitation of Gallop’s body, one often
defined by sexual experience rather than political struggle. Gallop’s confes-
sional mode assumes an authorized, privileged access to the writer’s “true”
transference that underlies or shapes these essays. In one confessional instance
Gallop explains: “I wtote ‘The Student Body,’ my reading of [Sade’s] Philosophy
ofthe Bedroom and my attempt to understand ‘the sexuality that underlies’ my
chosen profession” (Gallop 1988, 3). A related blip appears in the “Prelims”
preface to “The Student Body”: “The series [of affairs with thirty-six-year-old
men] began while I was in graduate school. The first member was a professor
on whom I developed a crush. . . . This paper tries to think through the place
of the female student in the pederastic institution” (Gallop 1988,41).
Like fast-paced news clips from the confessional tabloids, Gallop’s “autobio-
graphical bits” titillate uneasy speculation. Do these exhibitionist disclosures
impart knowledge that transforms the reader’s apprehension of Gallop’s close
reading of Sade, for instance? Do we benefit from Gallop’s intellectual, insti-
tutional, and embodied struggles with sadomasochistic desires? Or does her
transference methodology furnish a rhetorical stage on which Gallop can
uncurtain the real-life “experiences” of this writer “thinking through the
body”?Gallop’s confessional scholarship demonstrates that no interpretation,
no intellectual endeavor, can be purely disinterested, that a mind is never
truncated from a body. This insistence justifies the very act of confessing as a
component of her feminist campaign; yet the confessions belie this political
project by substituting a narcissistic body for a collective one.
The confessional scenes of transference that fetishize Gallop’s body reveal
a fascination with erotic domination, with a transgressively violating or
violated body. Citing a passage about motherhood and the mind-body problem
from Adrienne Rich‘s Of Woman Born,Gallop takes up this opposition as a
figure of violence: “If we think physically rather than metaphysically, if we
think the mind-body split through the body, it becomes an image of shocking
violence” (Gallop 1988, 1). This “image of shocking violence” forecasts the
nature of the confessions Gallop inserts around her essays.
The first “image of shocking violence” Gallop offers is drawn not from the
considerable arsenal of her own autobiography but from a sensational news
story of infanticide quoted in Rich‘s study of maternal ambivalence. This
criminal case violently literalizes the mind-body split upon which Gallop’s
volume meditates. Situating the maternal body as the perpetrator of domestic
violence, the case describes “Joanne Michulski, thirty-eight, the mother of
eight children,” who on June 11,1974, “took a butcher knife, decapitated and
chopped up the bodies of her two youngest on the neatly kept lawn of the
suburban house where the family livedoutside Chicago” (Gallop 1988,l).Not
unlike Stimpson’s appropriated confession of a “woman colleague’s” rape,
Susan David Bernstein 139
Gallop frames the collection of essays with a shocking example to remind her
readers that violence is uncomfortably familiar, as nearby as the jacket photo
that witnesses the inauguration of motherhood itself.
Gallop situates the present volume more explicitly, more autobiographically,
in the context of maternal violence both produced by and reproducing the
mind-body split. Theorizing the confessional, Gallop declares that she incor-
porates “autobiographical bits, not only, I hope, because I tend toward exhibi-
tionism,” but because she reads associatively, “through things that happened
to me” (Gallop 1988,4).With this speculative introduction, Gallop confesses
one of these “things”:
At the age of eleven months I was strangled and left for dead
by a woman who cared for me. I have no memory of the event,
of course, but learned about it years later from a newspaper
clipping my mother gave me to read. (Gallop 1988,4-5)
of her authorized and textual body, Gallop wields her confessional blurbs as
exhibitionist clippings, as “a source of power” that both provokes and repro-
duces promiscuous-that is, uncontested-identifications between a histori-
cal Jane Gallop and herself as reader, as textual subject, as well as between
internal and external readers.”
v. TOWARD
A CONFESSIONAL MODE OF REFLEXIVITY
The shift from third-person to first-person voice in the course of the passage
exemplifies Spivak‘s reflexivity. The grammar dramatizes the discursive con-
struction of this female subject as excentric, the product and process of multiple
mediations, with ruptures within and between her assorted and fluctuating
interpellations. Spivak deploys the example of her professional training explic-
itly to consider the way dominant cultural ideologies structure the identity of
a “female academic” from an “International Frame.’’
This condensed academic bildungsroman renders Spivak’s career
“ ‘choices’ ” not a matter of some mythological free will, but constructed by
the dominance of Western ideology over a woman of color with high aspira-
tions shaped by her own “upper-class” identity. Spivak‘s interest in writing
herself into the essay has to do with the precarious positions of the academic
feminist, of theory, of identity politics, of “French Feminism,” each speaking
for the “other”-in this case, “so-called Third World women.” As a “western-
142 Hypatia
NOTES
2. These previewers from literature departments are Barbara E. Johnson and Hous-
ton A. Baker, J .
3 . Spivak (1990,52) also notes that gender, or any category of identity, is necessarily
imp1icated in ideological networks of signification that can be gleaned by “actually
attending to texts.”
4. Miller (1991,16-17) discusses the tension between personal and positional modes
of authority in confessional feminism. She rightly notes that “positional” and “personal”
are not synonymous. I would qualify “positional” as a use of the personal that attends
critically to the politics of representational authority.
5. See Scott (1991,787).
6. By citing “the dubious status of privileged other” that women of color have
assumed in recent materialist feminist theories, I refer to the fetishizing of this subject
position as the one that absorbs all other oppressed identities of gender, class, and race,
to name only the most commonly cited categories. Like confessional feminism, invoking
women of color can be an expedient way to justify literary analysis as political activism.
In “Criticizing Feminist Criticism,” a dialogue with Marianne Hirsch and Nancy
Miller, Jane Gallop acknowledges a shift in her intellectual attachment from French men
to African-American women theorists as sources of knowledge and approval:
I realize that the set of feelings that I used to have about French men 1
now have about African-American women. Those are the people I feel
inadequate in relation to and try to please in my writing. . . . The way
[Deborah]McDowell has come to occupy the place of Lacan in my psyche
does seem to correspond to the way that emphasis on race has replaced
for me something like French vs. American feminism. (Hirsch and Keller
1990,363.64)
Elizabeth Abel also described this phenomenon in the context of motivated cross-racial
readings in her talk “On White on Black: Race and the Politics of Feminist Reading,”
presented at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 19, 1991. In particular, Abel
locates from 1985 this trend in which white women turn to black women’s texts to
legitimate their use of a specific theoretical persuasion.
1 have not failed to notice that I end this essay by endorsing the confessional modes of
Gayatri Spivak. However, it is not her identity as a woman of color that interests me, but
rather the way Spivak scrutinizes the very different, contradictory categories that shape
her subject positioning.
7. Young-Bruehl (1991, 15) originates a “deeply personal voice” of academic femi-
nism in the consciousness-raising and political activism of the late sixties’ women’s
movement. Miller (1991,21) draws interesting connections between sixties’ sloganeer-
ing, the seventies’ feminist watchword, “the personal is the political,” and the recent
phenomenon of confessing feminism that seeks to make the personal the theoretical.
8. Linda Alcoff (1988), for instance, devises “positionality” as a way to draw together
the most politically productive features of poststructuralist and cultural feminist theories.
Alcoff‘s positionality signifies the foregrounding of a particular subject position from
which a feminist theorist might speak. I am interested in the way this positioning of the
subject of the confessional mode is limited by the operations of language, by the
surrounding discursive and ideological contexts that complicate the way this subject
position gets read. In other words, positionality politics has its limitations. For Spivak
(1990,55-56), unveiling one’s positionality becomes a closed proposition, framed as it is
144 Hypatia
within specific discourses and their particular “communities of power.” Also see note 4
on Miller’s distinction between “personal” and “positional.”
9.1 defer to another time and place the exploration of a fifth category of first-person
theorizing, the uesheticized confession. This strain signifies a genre of American feminist
work informed by French feminisms in which personal voices, in the form of anecdotes,
diary entries, meandering meditations, along with theoretical speculation attempt to
dissolve divisionsbetween poetic and critical discourses.Three examples of aestheticized
confession include Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1978), Alice Jardine (1989, 73-87), and Eve
Sedgwick (1987).
Miller (1991, 2-3) offers “a typology, a poetics of the ‘egodocuments’that constitute
personal criticism: confessional, locational, academic, political, narrative, anecdotal,
biographematic, etc..” She distinguishes “self-narrative woven into critical argument”
from “self-representation as political representativity” (Miller 1991,2). While both our
inventories address the contextual hearings of personal disclosure, I attend to the
rhetorical intonations of specific confessional acts.
10. This issue of New Literary Hiswry contains nine replies to Messer-Davidow’s essay.
As many as six of the respondents (Joan E. Hartman, Ruth Hubbard, Patricia Clark Smith,
Amy Ling, Nellie McKay, Jane Tompkins) employ personal (invoking “experiences”) or
positional (underscoring the act of “speaking as”) modes. Gader and Theory:Dialogues
on Feminist Criticism, edited by Linda Kaufman, includes both Messer-Davidow’s and
Tompkins’s contributions and adds the followingessays that incorporate confessionalacts,
some brief, others protracted: David Shumway, “Solidarity or Perspectivity!,” Gerald
MacLean, “Citing the Subject,” and Joseph Allen b o n e , “Of Me(n) and Feminism:
Who(se) is the Sex that Writes?” Miller also responds specifically to the articles by
Toinpkins and MacLean in the first chapter of Getting Personal, while she inserts
autobiographical material throughout her book, including the last chapter in which she
describes herself coming to grips with her father’s penis.
11. Miller (1991,s-8,25,30)devotes careful attention to both the motivations and
the varied effects of this passage on readers. Risking getting “too” personal, she also
elaborates on the historical importance of “Janice” on the last page and in the last
explanatory note of her essay. While these biographical details do provide some useful
contextualizing of Tompkins’s otherwise oblique allusion, Miller’s revelations also occa-
sion questions about the sensation-effect of such confidential exposures, something 1
explore later in MacLean’s confessional exhibition of a scene from his marriage.
12. In “Criticizing Feminist Criticism” (Hirsch and Keller, 1990) Jane Gallop draws
a distinction between criticism and “trashing.” Rather than peremptory dismissal, criti-
cism means attending to the argument by trying to pursue it in different directions. The
focus is the intellectual endeavor and not the specific theorist who participates in it,
although Gallop does allow for ways in which the two intertwine. Frey draws no
distinction between intellectual and personal subjects; self-identity is textuality and
criticism constitutes an ad feminam attack.
Miller (1991, 5-6) invokes “unfriendly readers” as a figure for those who are
“embarrassed” or “uncomfortable” with confessional outbursts. I find Miller’s term of a
piece with Frey’s “adversarial method” in that both render any critical objections finally
a matter of personal feelings. I appreciate the attempt here to complicate the construction
and relationship between intellect and emotion; nevertheless, it is crucial not to overturn
the dichotomy and simply privilege the once devalued position. If my observations brand
me as an “unfriendly reader,” 1 certainly do not intend to “attack” the people attached
Susan David Bernstein 145
to the signatures on these articles, but rather to scrutinize the deployment of a specific
rhetorical device. It seems to me that friendship is not really at issue in any case.
13. Miller (1991, 139.42) approaches the end of her book with a confessional
vignette, “Coda: Loehmann’s, Or, Shopping with My Mother,” that corresponds to what
I am describing in Tompkins’s and Frey’s articles.
14. De Lauretis (1987, 21) describes the vested nature of male feminism as an
“hommage”that legitimates and reifies positions within academic feminism that promote
“either or both the critic’s personal interests and male-centered theoretical concerns.”
Miller (1991, 17-18) says of MacLean’s obvious condescension toward women, “The
challenge, therefore, for me writing about this in my t u r n is not simply to condescend as
afeminist to him as a man . . .without sounding like the feminist police.” Condescension
and positionalities notwithstanding, I am pointing out contradictions between MacLean’s
professed politics and his rhetorical use of confession and related personal modes like
“Dear Jane” addresses.
15. Although Miller (1991, 17-19) devotes attention to the “personal criticism” of
MacLean’s essay, she submerges a bracketed allusion to this confession of domestic
violence in an explanatory note: “I am also not taking into account the self-narrative
MacLean produces within the reply: the account of his relations with his mother and his
wife which leads to the confession of having struck his wife during an argument” (Miller
1991,28). Curiously, Miller doesn’t explain why she chooses to foreclose this confession
and MacLean’s “self-narrative” that surrounds it from her discussion, though to my mind
it offers an extreme case of “getting personal” in academic discourse.
16. I owe this insight, among many, to a very illuminating discussion of Gallop’s book
by Ellen Michel, (Michel ad., 1). Michel also notes Gallop’s vexed attention to her own
institutional subject position: “Gallop is, after all, a ‘womanscholar’who frequently plays
the part of the seductive daughter, the call girl who can turn an intellectual trick” (p.
20).
17. For a more detailed examination of Gallop’s confessional mode in Reading Lacan,
see Bernstein (1989, 195-213).
18. Tori1 Moi (1988,16) makes some remarks about Gallop’s textual antics in Reading
Lacan that are relevant to my reading here. She argues that “the relentlessly self-subver-
sive strategies of [Gallop’s] writing unwittingly come to reproduce the very monological
monotony they set out to deconstruct.” Moi construes Gallopian criticism as a
“postfeminist” enterprise attempting “to replace feminist politics with feminine stylis,
tics,” which produces “a marvellously shrewd, brilliant, and witty text which somehow
has nothing to say” about “the material and ideological bases for women’s oppression.”
19. This reflexive mode of confession approaches signification as a genealogical
process. See Foucault (1988) and Ferguson (1990). Butler (1990, x+xi) describes the
genealogical critique that “refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of
female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view;
rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause
those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses
with multiple and diffuse points of origin.”
20. A provocative example of a text that establishes a dialogue between materialist
feminist theory and autobiography is Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman.
While one might contend that Steedman’sattention to the imbricated narratives of both
her and her mother’s lives is far too extensive to be considered a confessional mode, the
way she explicitly structures autobiography through cultural materialism positions the
“personal” as interventions on the “theoretical,” much like the intrusions of confessions
146 Hypatia
REFERENCES
Alcoff, Linda. 1988. Cultural feminism versus post-structuralism: The identity crisis in
feminisr theory. Signs 13(3): 405-36.
Berlant, Lauren. 1988. The female complaint. Social Text 19/20 (Fall): 237.59.
Bemstein, Susan David. 1989. Confessing Lacan. In Seduction and theory, ed. Dianne
Hunter. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble. London and New York: Routledge.
Cixous, Helene. 1981. The laugh of the Medusa. In New French feminisms, ed. Elaine
Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books.
De Laureris, Teresa. 1987. Technologies ofgender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
DuBois, Page. 1986. Antigone and the feminist critic. Genre 19 (Winter): 371-83.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. 1978. Washing blood. Feminist Studies 4(2): 1-12.
Felski, Rita. 1989. Beyondfeminist aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ferguson, Kathy. 1990. Interpretation and genealogy in feminism. Signs 16(2): 322-39.
Foucault, Michel. 1988. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In Language, counter-memory,
practice, ed. Donald E Bouchard. Trans. buchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Frey, Olivia. 1990. Beyond literary Darwinism: Women’s voices and critical discourse.
CoUege English 52(5): 507-26.
Gallop, Jane. 1988. Thinking through the body. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hirsch, Marianne, and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds. 1990. Conflicts in feminism. New York:
Routledge.
Jardine, Alice. 1989. Notes for an analysis. In Between feminism and psychoanalysis, ed.
Teresa Brennan. New York: Routledge.
MacLean, Gerald. 1989. Citing the subject. In Gender and theory: Dialogues on feminist
m‘ticism, ed. Linda Kauffman. New York: Basil Blackwell.
Martin, Biddy, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. 1986. Feminist politics: What’s home got
to do with it?In Feminist stwlies/mkicalstudies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Messer-Davidow, Ellen. 1989. The philosophical bases of feminist literary criticisms.
Gender and theory: Dialogues on feminist criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman. New York:
Basil Blackwell. First published in New Literary History 19,l (1987): 65-103.
Susan David Bernstein 147
Michel, Ellen. n.d. Jane Gallop's cryptogrammatic discourse: Rebuses of elation and
violation in Thinking through the body. Unpublished ms.
Michie, Helena. 1989. Not one of the family: The repression of the other woman in
feminist theory. In Discontented discourses, eds. Marleen S. Barr and Richard Feldst-
ein. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Miller, Nancy K. 1991. Getting personal: Feminist occasions and other autobiographical acts.
London and New York: Routledge.
Moi, Toril. 1988. Feminism, postmodemism, and style. Cultural Critique 9: 3-22.
Scott, Joan W. 1991. The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry 17(2): 773-97.
Sedgwick, Eve K. 1987. A poem is being written. Representations 17(Winter): 110-43.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. French feminism in an international frame. In In
other worlds. New York: Routledge.
. 1990. The post-colonial m'tic Interwiews, srrategks, dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym.
London and New York: Routledge.
Steedman, Carolyn. 1987. Landscape for a good w m n : A story of two lives. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Stimpson, Catharine R. 1990. Feminism and feminist criticism. In Where the meanings
are. New York: Routledge.
Tompkins, Jane. 1989. Me and my shadow. Gender and theory: Dialogues on feminist
criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman. New York: Basil Blackwell.
Torgovnick, Mariana. 1990. Experimental critical writing. Profession 90 (MLA, New
York): 25-27.
Walker, Cheryl. 1990. Feminist literary criticism and the author. Critical Inquiry 16(1):
55 1-71.
Williams, Patricia]. 1991. The alchemy ofrace and rights. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 1991. Pride and prejudice: Feminist scholars reclaim the first
person. Lingua Franca (February): 15-18.