Feminism, Language, and Philosophy

LLEN MESSER-DAVIDOW'S The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms is one of a number of overviews and syntheses of feminist scholarship that have appeared in recent years.' This development no doubt reflects the fact that feminist theory has now established a very broad base and a remarkable record of accomplishments in a number of academic disciplines, including literature and history; thus it is now possible to generalize not only about what needs to be done but also on the basis of what has actually been accomplished. Moreover, as a body of theory, feminism's relationship to its scholarly history is markedly different from that of other contemporary theories. There has been a tradition, say, in psychoanalysis and semiotics, in which the development of the most abstract and transdisciplinary versions of the theory could remain partly independent of their application to and continuing development within particular academic fields. Feminism, however, has a much stronger sense of being a collaborative enterprise and thus has more impetus to continue updating and rearticulating its collective identity and common ground. Like Marxism, feminism moreover remains much more strongly committed to its material and social incarnations and to its general political aims-making real changes both in society at large and in the academic fields in which its influence has grown substantially over the past decade or so. Unlike Marxism, however, feminism has not lost touch with its sense of commitment to a common mission, perhaps because women themselves are necessarily in part their own subject matter. Feminism, furthermore, is committed to theorizing on the basis of the personal and intellectual experience and histories not only of women generally but also of specific populations and subcultures, ranging from diverse racial and national groups to writers identified with different cultural domains. Thus feminism's more general theorizing tends to stay much more closely in touch with its local articulations and struggles, a tendency that in fact makes for a very different kind of general theory, one that cannot easily identify itself with a transcendent metaphysics and one that cannot fantasize that its progress takes place outside history. One of feminism's most pro

Feminism · Linguistics · Sociology · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications