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Holding the center of feminist theory
Wome{l'sStudies Int . Forum. Vol. 12, No.3, pp . 313-318 . 1989 Printed in the USA .
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© 1989 Pergamon Press pic
HOLDING THE CENTER OF FEMINIST THEORY EVELYN
Fox KELLER
Department of Rhetoric, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley,CA 94720, U.S.A.
Synopsis-Despite the multiple fractures that have occurred over the last few years in feminist theory, I argue that the center of that venture continues to hold firm . If nowhere else, it holds in the force of the transcultural association between women's bodies and the birth of new living beings. But equally, it holds in the recognition of the cultural variability of the meanings attached to this basic association. Indeed, it is here that I would invoke (and perhaps reinstate) a form of that distinction that was so important to feminists of the seventies, namely the distinction between sex and gender. If "sex" is that which we are given by "nature," and "gender" that which derives from culture (i.e., the cultural representation of sex), then we need to underscore that what is left to both "sex" and "nature" is now little enough . But it is not yet nothing. Even disavowing all representational plasticity, there remains a core of observational experience that has thus far defied modulation. The premises of feminist theory require us to both acknowledge this observational core, and, at the same time, expose and examine the enormous variability in meanings that are inevitably superposed on it. Only when we have revealed the specificity of the forms and consequences of the interpretive structures built around this core in any given particular cultural context , ultimately in all cultural contexts, will we have done our work.
All of us must sometimes have wondered cles of common faith and formal knowledge. whether there ever are any really new ideas, Above all, we wanted to expose the contrawhether it is indeed possible for something to dictions that emerge from the juxtaposition be thought, or written, that wasn't already of the formal use of the term "man" as unithought, and perhaps even written, by not versal, and its colloquial understanding as one but many people, not once but many "male." These contradictions could then in times before us. There are moments, howev- turn be used to reveal the buried traces of er, when such doubts disappear, when it "gender" in the construction of our intellecseems absolutely clear that we are witnessing tual landscape, especially in the universal the appearance of something new. If it is not terms that are taken as its basic building originality in the ideas themselves that we blocks. In a word, we sought to bring these see, there is at least a newness in the ability to traces of "gender" to the fore of academic speak and hear these ideas, a climate that discourse, where "gender" was now to be unenables fresh visions and perspectives to rise derstood not as a natural but a social categoto the fore. Over a decade ago, we witnessed ry, and above all, as "an analytical tool" that the beginnings of just such a time. I dedicate could be used to lay bare the anatomy of our this paper to Ruth Bleier out of recognition social and intellectual order, including even of the critical role she played in these events. the anatomy of its own construction (e.g., Out of the women's movement of the six- Bleier, 1984; Harding, 1986; Keller, 1983b, ties and seventies emerged a bold, sometimes 1985). Behind our interest in exposure and brilliant, and unequivocally critical perspec- description lay our desire to transform. We tive on our entire intellectual history - a per- assumed that one would lead - naturally as it spective marked doubly, and simultaneously, were- to the other. In making visible the by its startling originality and gnawing famil- work that gender was already doing, we iarity. Indeed, we celebrated that doubleness could undo the cultural work of gender, espeof our vision. In "articulating the common- cially that work most effectively done in siplace," we saw both our mission and our op- lence and obscurity. First, we intended our portunity. We wanted to expose, examine and analyses to "transform the disciplines," asexploit the glaring contradictions that suming that that would at least facilitate emerge from the juxtaposition between arti - transformation of the social order. Wetook it 313
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as axiomatic that our efforts would ultimately prove emancipatory for women - understanding by the term "women," all women. What we lacked in modesty, we made up for in enthusiasm. There was of course, even from the beginning, a certain amount of tension between theoretical and activist interests, as there was even among different theoretical interests. Not all feminist theorists of the late seventies and early eighties were engaged in exactly the same enterprise, or held the same order of priorities. Nevertheless, on this side of the Atlantic at least, it was generally believed that the common ground beneath our feet was substantial enough to support the boldness of our enterprise, and that the loci of general agreement was strong enough to override our differences. For example, certain differences marked Ruth Bleier's work on gender and science from my own work on that subject, and, because of our subject, both necessarily proceeded out of and led into very different concerns from our colleagues working, say, on gender and literary canons. But nonetheless, most of us felt confident in the basic unity of our endeavor; at the very least, we could agree on the social and analytic importance of gender, as well as on the promise of the ultimate convergence of our intellectual and political goals. Today we are less sure. Just as feminist theory began to witness some successesin the academy (largely in the form of the sale of many books and the creation of a few jobs), the breach between theory and politics grew ever wider. With few exceptions, we have not "transformed the disciplines," and if our efforts have contributed to changing the social order, it has become abundantly clear how little such changes as those have meant to the vast majority of women. In the face of these various forms of resistance, even our theoretical agenda has begun to shift. Feminism has become feminisms, and the idea of "woman" has had to yield to the reality of radical differences, even divisions, among women. Even the core concept of "gender" - the concept which seemed to provide so much of the basic coherence of our endeavor - has itself come under criticism. In short, we have become more cautious, more self-conscious of our own universalizing tendencies, more muted in our claims. Indeed, we have grown
so conscious of the partiality of our own perspectives that the question of the late eighties threatens to become: Can the subject of feminist theory hold? Is there still a female subject in our text? In part, our very exuberance, the sheer boldness of our endeavor guaranteed that a time would come when we would have to step back. Wecould not do so much so fast; given that it is in the nature of "new ideas" to overreach, it was perhaps inevitable that a period of careful qualification must follow. But the pressures confronting us today are more multiple, and more complex. Many different cross-currents, stemming from often radically different and often conflicting interests, have converged in the 1980s in propelling feminist theory beyond its early enthusiasms. These cross-currents are only partly responsive to theoretical developments within feminist theory; in perhaps larger part, they are responsive to political and technological changes occurring in the larger world around us. I will cite only a few of these different kinds of pressures. From the writings of black feminists especially, we were painfully reminded how much our own perspective, our own ideas about gender, depended on our own particular situations. Most of us were white, middle-class academics, largely ignorant of the contours of our cultural configurations. In speaking of women, we were severely-and rightlychastized for our presumption in attempting to speak for all women, for the tendencies in our very language to tacitly elide the experience, if not the existence, of women different from ourselves, most especially, of women of color. We were even taken to task for our ways of speaking about gender, for our tendency to assume that, for all its cultural specificity, gender always worked in similar ways, that, within each cultural context, gender could always be assumed to have the same kind of salience, that it could always be assumed to be bimodal. It was better, and safer, to replace the concept of gender by the triplet "race, class, and gender" - perhaps better still, by "race, class, and genders." But perhaps the main pressure underlying the shift from gender to genders came from a rather different quarter. From across the Atlantic, came an impetus for the deconstruction of all grounded categories: We learned
Holding the Center of Feminist Theory
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to understand the ways in which our most verbial death of the (now female) subject; fundamental concepts - man, nature, the and the emergence of technological alternaself, sexuality- were themselves products of tives to conventional modes of reproducan enlightenment, and imperialist (or "tota- tion.' If the first two threaten a crisis for lizing"), sensibility. It is true that, as femi- feminist theory, the last threatens a far more nists, we had already understood the extent global crisis, affecting all of us, feminists to which the meaning of masculine and femi- and nonfeminists alike.! But even though the nine were constructed, and had become controversies and confusions generated by freshly conscious of the enormous variability reproductive technology are not limited to of these constructions. But now, we learned feminism, it is the locus of their convergence from Foucault and his followers that even the with other strains in contemporary feminism division between male and female-sex it- that is of particular interest here. The locus is self - must be seen as a social construction this: on no issue has modern feminism tendalready laden with oppressive force. No ed to fracture more seriously than over the ground on which one might base the exist- issue of women's relation to reproduction. ence of women qua women could be taken as Between the critical work of deconstruction, given. Not even what we used to think of the the reminder of ever-present cultural variability, and the advent of ultra-modernist "facts" of reproduction. Many women welcomed the deconstruc- technology, a curious convergence of intertion of the female subject - perhaps especial- ests has worked to place any definition of ly, if it meant dissolving the bonds that had women as a durable category (as well as sigtraditionally tied them to reproduction. The nificantly distinctive one) in jeopardy. We same intellectual move seemed to solve two have come to see even the biology of reproproblems at once: it helped decenter the ductive difference - that difference that has idealized (read, white, middle-class) "wom- till now constituted an irreducible bottom an" that continued to lurk at the heart of line-reinterpreted as a historical biology, itearlier feminist theory at the same time as it self available to reconstruction. From this undercut the historical use of womens's re- perspective, sexual difference becomes mereproductive "natures" to define their produc- ly one of an endless list of differences, leavtive capacities. Ironically, however, the wom- ing the category of gender apparently shorn en who felt such political and ideological of both its analytical and social force. uses of women's reproductive nature to be But before we take this leap into the world most burdensome have tended to be precisely that might alternatively be depicted as postthose women for whom a choice between modern or ultra-modern, we need to remind production and reproduction had seemed ourselves that the worlds we envision for the possible, namely, educated, white, middle- future necessarily grow out of the world (or class women. The emancipation of our con- worlds) we have inherited from the past. And ceptions of both women and gender from all however much we may wish it to have been foundational constructs serves many differ- otherwise, none of those worlds - pre-modent interests, but it is at least worth noting ern or modern, past or present - has been that it does so differentially, once again, unmarked by gender. To say this is not to privileging educated, white, middle-class make a normative or political claim, but a factual one: what is and has been has little if women. Today, the links between women and re- anything to do with what should - and perproduction are threatened by forces stronger haps even what will- be. When feminist than those of deconstruction, and if some scholars argued that these marks of gender women welcomed post-structuralist theory as should be exposed and examined for what an ally in their emancipatory (and also pro- they teach us about cultural organization, fessional) struggles, others welcomed the ad- their purpose was to make visible the work vent of a technology that paradoxically that gender was already doing, not to conenough promises to produce the same effect. tribute to that work. Similarly, it needs to be Ours is a decade of curious convergences: emphasized here too that my goal in remindfeminists' recognition of the import of differ- ing us of the inescapability of gender markences of race, class, and ethnicity; the pro- ings is to subvert the dynamics of gender, not
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to reinforce them - to subvert them by exposing some of the unwitting cultural uses made of obvious facts. For good or for bad, one vital process has proven of sufficient importance to compel people of all kinds, throughout history, and across culture, to distinguish some bodies from others: I am referring, of course, to the vital process that issues in the production of new life. That it is only from some bodies, and not from others, that human offspring materialize has escaped neither the attention nor interest of people anywhere, at any time. On this basic observation, residents of Abyssinia, the Roman Empire, the South Bronx, the Texan Panhandle, Ancient Greece, Central India, even of Melanesia, have all concurred. To be sure, what people have made of this observation, the meanings they have given it, the social uses to which they have put it, these have varied enormously. But the force of the observation itself and the correlative need to give it meaning have not varied.' To many people (perhaps to most), these remarks merely state the obvious. Yet I cannot think of anything that makes contemporary feminists more nervous than the articulation of this particular commonplace. The main reason for this is also the most obvious: One of the most problematic (and at the same time distressingly familiar) uses that many different cultures have made of the observation of women's link to reproduction has been to extend its import until that fact, and that alone, both defines and justifies women's existence. In other words, the significance of women's distinctive reproductive potential has too often been allowed to expand until it synedochally subsumes the remainder of women's bodies and lives.' Indeed, it is against just this tendency in our own cultural context that modern feminism has struggled so long and hard - often, even, finding it necessary to occlude this fundamental asymmetry in their own attempts to restore a larger frame for thinking about and actually seeing women. But there is another, almost equally familiar, interpretive move that also surfaces in a distressing number of different cultural contexts. In this move, the significance of women's link to reproduction is not so much expanded (or inflated) as it is deflated-more
accurately, denigrated, demeaned, despoiled, or more simply denied. For actual women, of course, it is the conjunction of these two kinds of interpretive moves that is most acutely problematic, for then it is they themselves, and not just their reproductive potential, that come to be denigrated, demeaned, and denied. And even when these two moves are not conjoined, even when the latter is made in lieu of the former,' we are still in the realm of reacting to, of granting culturally codified meaning, to that basic observation of reproductive difference. If the promise of a new reproductive technology enables us to anticipate a world in which even that difference is dissolved, it is because modern western (scientific) culture has created such a world - first in imagination, and before very much longer, in actuality. But be it in imagination or in actualization, the point is that this vision has not been created denovo. Rather, it has been created out of the stuff of our present and past realities. High on the list of ingredients of the stuff of these realities are our culturally molded, even constructed, responses to a difference that has not itself been given to us by culture. I am saying, in short, that the center of feminist theory does hold. If nowhere else, it holds in the force of the transcultural association between women's bodies and the birth of new living beings. But equally, it holds in the recognition of the cultural variability of the meanings attached to this basic association. Indeed, it is here that I would invoke (and perhaps reinstate) a form of that distinction that was so important to feminists of the seventies, namely the distinction between sex and gender. If "sex" is that which we are given by "nature," and "gender" that which derives from culture (i.e., the cultural representation of sex), then we need to underscore that what is left to both "sex" and "nature" is now little enough. But it is not yet nothing. Even disavowing all representational plasticity, there remains a core of observational experience that has thus far defied modulation. The premises of feminist theory require us to both acknowledge this observational core, and, at the same time, expose and examine the enormous variability in meanings that are inevitably superposed on it. Only when we have revealed the specificity of the forms
Holding the Center of Feminist Theory
and consequences of the interpretive structures built around this core in any given particular cultural context, ultimately in all cultural contexts, will we have done our work. Ruth Bleier helped begin one crucial part of this larger project. Her work contributed critically to the examination of the interpretative structures built around reproductive difference in our own scientific cultural tradition. But even (or perhaps especially) here, a great deal remains to be done. We are still just learning how to productively use gender as an analytic tool in the study of the cultural underpinnings of modern science, and the ways in which these underpinnings have influenced scientific growth and development. Contrary to one popular misconception, the work that remains to be done is not, as most of the earlier work on gender. and science was not, an advocacy of a particular "feminine" way of doing science. Rather, it is a continuing exploration of the force that certain ideals of gender, and certain prevalent attitudes towards the roles that our culture has stereotypically relegated to women, have historically had on the doing of science. To take just one example, it is from such attitudes as these that the young Pierre Curie wrote: Women, much more than men, love life for life's sake. Women of genius are rare. And when, pushed by some mystic love, we wish to enter into a life opposed to nature, when we give all our thoughts to some work which removes us from those immediately about us, it is with women that we have to struggle, and the struggle is nearly always an unequal one. For in the name of life and nature they seek to lead us back." (quoted in Easlea, 1983, p. 45) Along with many other women before and after her, Marie Curie was in fact able to prove her husband wrong. But the basic ideological structure - that the life of science is "opposed to nature"; that women stand for "life and nature"; and that women must therefore be resisted by those who would be scientists - that set of ideas nonetheless endured. Its structure was too deeply embedded in our cultural frame to permit negation by the occasional exception. Indeed, such exceptions could only have sufficient force to, as it
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were, "prove the rule." Even today, when women scientists have ceased to be exceptional- are indeed becoming almost commonplace - that same ideological structure still survives to haunt us. But even though deeply embedded and powerfully durable, we must not mistake this set of familiar linkages for the biologically rooted core observation to which it points. It is not only (or even so much) the association of women with the production of life that is hereby codified, but far more importantly, the association of women with the caring for life, and by metonymic affiliation, with the caring for nature. And by the now all too familiar logic of oppositionality, science, accordingly, need not/does not "care" for nature. It is here, in these latter associations, that the gendered cultural specificity of modern science is most conspicuously betrayed. It might seem a simple proposition that those who produce life have the obligation to care for it, but it is hardly SO.6 Now that this sequitor is breaking down in our own cultural milieu, even we can see that it has been convention more than logic that has been sustaining it. While there have always been women who have repudiated this entire tradition (in their hearts if not in their lives), it is only now, thanks (at least in part) to the modern feminist movement, that the opportunities have been created for some women to live out these "deviant" paths, and to do so with an almost conventional stamp of legitimation. From the example of these women, we can now see (perhaps all too clearly) that there is nothing in the nature of being a woman that guarantees her caring either for life or for nature. We have won for a few women at least the right to choose whether or not to be mothers, the right to disclaim, if they wish, responsibility for nurturing children already born, the right to fight; for a very few, even the right to be Star-Warriors. By every indication, the ideological grip that traditional sex-role stereotypes have held on white middle-class women has weakened. That world at least has definitely changed. But while those changes may unarguably bespeak a good for some particular women (i.e., the women they have benefited most directly), the scope and reach of the changes in question extend far beyond the interests of the particular group they represent - indeed,
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such changes would never have come to pass if they did not happen to converge with other interests, and probably, interests far removed from those of contemporary feminists. That is, a particular world has changed, in response to interests more complex than we may have realized, and with consequences more far-reaching than we have begun to anticipate. The implications of these rather more global changes for the future of the human race as a whole are anything but transparent. For example, when educated, middle-class women are relieved of the burdens of caring for life and nature, and perhaps even of giving birth, we might ask what happens to the place of the values associated with life-giving and life-caring in the larger culture? The answer to this question clearly depends on how another question is to be answered, namely: Where in the social order are their replacements to be found? Who will now be shouldering the responsibilities of life-giving and life-caring? Given the virtually total interdependence of the normative cultural value of a particular social task and the place in the social order where that task is assigned, the question then becomes: how will this shift in the distribution of responsibilities affect the value our cultural norms accord to "life itself'? And conversely, how have such prior cultural shifts in value themselves influenced the social redistribution of roles and responsibilities that we are witnessing today?
*** The center of feminist theory does hold, but the questions that face us today are considerably harder than at first it seemed they would be. To do justice to these questions will require the help of many students and colleagues, working collectively, at what, for all its fracturing, remains a common effort. Perhaps it is through this effort that we can best repay our debt to Ruth Bleier for helping us get started.
ENDNOfES 1. These convergences have been "imaginatively and provocatively explored by Donna Haraway (see, in particular, Haraway, 1986). 2. Some modern feminists (as early as Shulamith Firestone in 1970) have looked to technological knowhow to solve the problem that they have identified - be it for ideological or biological reasons - as the ultimate obstacle to the emancipation of women, while others have come to see this same solution as a means to ever greater oppression. 3. My point would continue to hold even without so strong a claim of universality. That is, the essential point is the virtual unanimity of cultures in attributing great significance (and even priority) to this observation . 4. Because the force of this proclivity makes itself felt everywhere, even among contemporary feminists, any attempt to discuss the asymmetry of reproduction must constantly be accompanied by the reminder of what does not follow from this fact. To give an example, there is no implication that all women must reproduce , nor that women are defined by their reproduction function, nor that their "anatomy is [their] destiny." 5. As, for example, women were taken to be not only equal to but indistinguishable from men, at least in every significant aspect. 6. For a part icularly interesting and illuminating discussion of the relation, and differences, between the tasks of life-giving and life-caring, see Sara Rudd ick (1989).
REFERENCES Bleier, Ruth. (1984). Science and gender. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press. Easlea, Brian . (1983). Fathering the unthinkable: Masculinity, scientists, and the nuclear arms race. London: Pluto Press. Firestone, Shulamith . (1970). The dialectic of sex. New York: Morrow. Haraway, Donna . (1986). A manifesto for cyborgs . Socialist Review, 80, 65-108 . Harding, Sandra. (1986). The science question in feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Keller, Evelyn fox. (l983a) . A feeling for the organism: The life and work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W. H. Freeman and Co. Keller, Evelyn Fox. (1983b). Feminism as an analytic tool for the study of science. Academe, 69, 5, 1521. Keller, Evelyn Fox. (1985). Reflections on gender and science. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press. Ruddick, Sara . (1989). Maternal thinking: Towards a politics ofpeace. Boston : Beacon Press.
0277-5395/89 S3.OO
+ .00
© 1989 Pergamon Press pic
HOLDING THE CENTER OF FEMINIST THEORY EVELYN
Fox KELLER
Department of Rhetoric, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley,CA 94720, U.S.A.
Synopsis-Despite the multiple fractures that have occurred over the last few years in feminist theory, I argue that the center of that venture continues to hold firm . If nowhere else, it holds in the force of the transcultural association between women's bodies and the birth of new living beings. But equally, it holds in the recognition of the cultural variability of the meanings attached to this basic association. Indeed, it is here that I would invoke (and perhaps reinstate) a form of that distinction that was so important to feminists of the seventies, namely the distinction between sex and gender. If "sex" is that which we are given by "nature," and "gender" that which derives from culture (i.e., the cultural representation of sex), then we need to underscore that what is left to both "sex" and "nature" is now little enough . But it is not yet nothing. Even disavowing all representational plasticity, there remains a core of observational experience that has thus far defied modulation. The premises of feminist theory require us to both acknowledge this observational core, and, at the same time, expose and examine the enormous variability in meanings that are inevitably superposed on it. Only when we have revealed the specificity of the forms and consequences of the interpretive structures built around this core in any given particular cultural context , ultimately in all cultural contexts, will we have done our work.
All of us must sometimes have wondered cles of common faith and formal knowledge. whether there ever are any really new ideas, Above all, we wanted to expose the contrawhether it is indeed possible for something to dictions that emerge from the juxtaposition be thought, or written, that wasn't already of the formal use of the term "man" as unithought, and perhaps even written, by not versal, and its colloquial understanding as one but many people, not once but many "male." These contradictions could then in times before us. There are moments, howev- turn be used to reveal the buried traces of er, when such doubts disappear, when it "gender" in the construction of our intellecseems absolutely clear that we are witnessing tual landscape, especially in the universal the appearance of something new. If it is not terms that are taken as its basic building originality in the ideas themselves that we blocks. In a word, we sought to bring these see, there is at least a newness in the ability to traces of "gender" to the fore of academic speak and hear these ideas, a climate that discourse, where "gender" was now to be unenables fresh visions and perspectives to rise derstood not as a natural but a social categoto the fore. Over a decade ago, we witnessed ry, and above all, as "an analytical tool" that the beginnings of just such a time. I dedicate could be used to lay bare the anatomy of our this paper to Ruth Bleier out of recognition social and intellectual order, including even of the critical role she played in these events. the anatomy of its own construction (e.g., Out of the women's movement of the six- Bleier, 1984; Harding, 1986; Keller, 1983b, ties and seventies emerged a bold, sometimes 1985). Behind our interest in exposure and brilliant, and unequivocally critical perspec- description lay our desire to transform. We tive on our entire intellectual history - a per- assumed that one would lead - naturally as it spective marked doubly, and simultaneously, were- to the other. In making visible the by its startling originality and gnawing famil- work that gender was already doing, we iarity. Indeed, we celebrated that doubleness could undo the cultural work of gender, espeof our vision. In "articulating the common- cially that work most effectively done in siplace," we saw both our mission and our op- lence and obscurity. First, we intended our portunity. We wanted to expose, examine and analyses to "transform the disciplines," asexploit the glaring contradictions that suming that that would at least facilitate emerge from the juxtaposition between arti - transformation of the social order. Wetook it 313
314
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as axiomatic that our efforts would ultimately prove emancipatory for women - understanding by the term "women," all women. What we lacked in modesty, we made up for in enthusiasm. There was of course, even from the beginning, a certain amount of tension between theoretical and activist interests, as there was even among different theoretical interests. Not all feminist theorists of the late seventies and early eighties were engaged in exactly the same enterprise, or held the same order of priorities. Nevertheless, on this side of the Atlantic at least, it was generally believed that the common ground beneath our feet was substantial enough to support the boldness of our enterprise, and that the loci of general agreement was strong enough to override our differences. For example, certain differences marked Ruth Bleier's work on gender and science from my own work on that subject, and, because of our subject, both necessarily proceeded out of and led into very different concerns from our colleagues working, say, on gender and literary canons. But nonetheless, most of us felt confident in the basic unity of our endeavor; at the very least, we could agree on the social and analytic importance of gender, as well as on the promise of the ultimate convergence of our intellectual and political goals. Today we are less sure. Just as feminist theory began to witness some successesin the academy (largely in the form of the sale of many books and the creation of a few jobs), the breach between theory and politics grew ever wider. With few exceptions, we have not "transformed the disciplines," and if our efforts have contributed to changing the social order, it has become abundantly clear how little such changes as those have meant to the vast majority of women. In the face of these various forms of resistance, even our theoretical agenda has begun to shift. Feminism has become feminisms, and the idea of "woman" has had to yield to the reality of radical differences, even divisions, among women. Even the core concept of "gender" - the concept which seemed to provide so much of the basic coherence of our endeavor - has itself come under criticism. In short, we have become more cautious, more self-conscious of our own universalizing tendencies, more muted in our claims. Indeed, we have grown
so conscious of the partiality of our own perspectives that the question of the late eighties threatens to become: Can the subject of feminist theory hold? Is there still a female subject in our text? In part, our very exuberance, the sheer boldness of our endeavor guaranteed that a time would come when we would have to step back. Wecould not do so much so fast; given that it is in the nature of "new ideas" to overreach, it was perhaps inevitable that a period of careful qualification must follow. But the pressures confronting us today are more multiple, and more complex. Many different cross-currents, stemming from often radically different and often conflicting interests, have converged in the 1980s in propelling feminist theory beyond its early enthusiasms. These cross-currents are only partly responsive to theoretical developments within feminist theory; in perhaps larger part, they are responsive to political and technological changes occurring in the larger world around us. I will cite only a few of these different kinds of pressures. From the writings of black feminists especially, we were painfully reminded how much our own perspective, our own ideas about gender, depended on our own particular situations. Most of us were white, middle-class academics, largely ignorant of the contours of our cultural configurations. In speaking of women, we were severely-and rightlychastized for our presumption in attempting to speak for all women, for the tendencies in our very language to tacitly elide the experience, if not the existence, of women different from ourselves, most especially, of women of color. We were even taken to task for our ways of speaking about gender, for our tendency to assume that, for all its cultural specificity, gender always worked in similar ways, that, within each cultural context, gender could always be assumed to have the same kind of salience, that it could always be assumed to be bimodal. It was better, and safer, to replace the concept of gender by the triplet "race, class, and gender" - perhaps better still, by "race, class, and genders." But perhaps the main pressure underlying the shift from gender to genders came from a rather different quarter. From across the Atlantic, came an impetus for the deconstruction of all grounded categories: We learned
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to understand the ways in which our most verbial death of the (now female) subject; fundamental concepts - man, nature, the and the emergence of technological alternaself, sexuality- were themselves products of tives to conventional modes of reproducan enlightenment, and imperialist (or "tota- tion.' If the first two threaten a crisis for lizing"), sensibility. It is true that, as femi- feminist theory, the last threatens a far more nists, we had already understood the extent global crisis, affecting all of us, feminists to which the meaning of masculine and femi- and nonfeminists alike.! But even though the nine were constructed, and had become controversies and confusions generated by freshly conscious of the enormous variability reproductive technology are not limited to of these constructions. But now, we learned feminism, it is the locus of their convergence from Foucault and his followers that even the with other strains in contemporary feminism division between male and female-sex it- that is of particular interest here. The locus is self - must be seen as a social construction this: on no issue has modern feminism tendalready laden with oppressive force. No ed to fracture more seriously than over the ground on which one might base the exist- issue of women's relation to reproduction. ence of women qua women could be taken as Between the critical work of deconstruction, given. Not even what we used to think of the the reminder of ever-present cultural variability, and the advent of ultra-modernist "facts" of reproduction. Many women welcomed the deconstruc- technology, a curious convergence of intertion of the female subject - perhaps especial- ests has worked to place any definition of ly, if it meant dissolving the bonds that had women as a durable category (as well as sigtraditionally tied them to reproduction. The nificantly distinctive one) in jeopardy. We same intellectual move seemed to solve two have come to see even the biology of reproproblems at once: it helped decenter the ductive difference - that difference that has idealized (read, white, middle-class) "wom- till now constituted an irreducible bottom an" that continued to lurk at the heart of line-reinterpreted as a historical biology, itearlier feminist theory at the same time as it self available to reconstruction. From this undercut the historical use of womens's re- perspective, sexual difference becomes mereproductive "natures" to define their produc- ly one of an endless list of differences, leavtive capacities. Ironically, however, the wom- ing the category of gender apparently shorn en who felt such political and ideological of both its analytical and social force. uses of women's reproductive nature to be But before we take this leap into the world most burdensome have tended to be precisely that might alternatively be depicted as postthose women for whom a choice between modern or ultra-modern, we need to remind production and reproduction had seemed ourselves that the worlds we envision for the possible, namely, educated, white, middle- future necessarily grow out of the world (or class women. The emancipation of our con- worlds) we have inherited from the past. And ceptions of both women and gender from all however much we may wish it to have been foundational constructs serves many differ- otherwise, none of those worlds - pre-modent interests, but it is at least worth noting ern or modern, past or present - has been that it does so differentially, once again, unmarked by gender. To say this is not to privileging educated, white, middle-class make a normative or political claim, but a factual one: what is and has been has little if women. Today, the links between women and re- anything to do with what should - and perproduction are threatened by forces stronger haps even what will- be. When feminist than those of deconstruction, and if some scholars argued that these marks of gender women welcomed post-structuralist theory as should be exposed and examined for what an ally in their emancipatory (and also pro- they teach us about cultural organization, fessional) struggles, others welcomed the ad- their purpose was to make visible the work vent of a technology that paradoxically that gender was already doing, not to conenough promises to produce the same effect. tribute to that work. Similarly, it needs to be Ours is a decade of curious convergences: emphasized here too that my goal in remindfeminists' recognition of the import of differ- ing us of the inescapability of gender markences of race, class, and ethnicity; the pro- ings is to subvert the dynamics of gender, not
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to reinforce them - to subvert them by exposing some of the unwitting cultural uses made of obvious facts. For good or for bad, one vital process has proven of sufficient importance to compel people of all kinds, throughout history, and across culture, to distinguish some bodies from others: I am referring, of course, to the vital process that issues in the production of new life. That it is only from some bodies, and not from others, that human offspring materialize has escaped neither the attention nor interest of people anywhere, at any time. On this basic observation, residents of Abyssinia, the Roman Empire, the South Bronx, the Texan Panhandle, Ancient Greece, Central India, even of Melanesia, have all concurred. To be sure, what people have made of this observation, the meanings they have given it, the social uses to which they have put it, these have varied enormously. But the force of the observation itself and the correlative need to give it meaning have not varied.' To many people (perhaps to most), these remarks merely state the obvious. Yet I cannot think of anything that makes contemporary feminists more nervous than the articulation of this particular commonplace. The main reason for this is also the most obvious: One of the most problematic (and at the same time distressingly familiar) uses that many different cultures have made of the observation of women's link to reproduction has been to extend its import until that fact, and that alone, both defines and justifies women's existence. In other words, the significance of women's distinctive reproductive potential has too often been allowed to expand until it synedochally subsumes the remainder of women's bodies and lives.' Indeed, it is against just this tendency in our own cultural context that modern feminism has struggled so long and hard - often, even, finding it necessary to occlude this fundamental asymmetry in their own attempts to restore a larger frame for thinking about and actually seeing women. But there is another, almost equally familiar, interpretive move that also surfaces in a distressing number of different cultural contexts. In this move, the significance of women's link to reproduction is not so much expanded (or inflated) as it is deflated-more
accurately, denigrated, demeaned, despoiled, or more simply denied. For actual women, of course, it is the conjunction of these two kinds of interpretive moves that is most acutely problematic, for then it is they themselves, and not just their reproductive potential, that come to be denigrated, demeaned, and denied. And even when these two moves are not conjoined, even when the latter is made in lieu of the former,' we are still in the realm of reacting to, of granting culturally codified meaning, to that basic observation of reproductive difference. If the promise of a new reproductive technology enables us to anticipate a world in which even that difference is dissolved, it is because modern western (scientific) culture has created such a world - first in imagination, and before very much longer, in actuality. But be it in imagination or in actualization, the point is that this vision has not been created denovo. Rather, it has been created out of the stuff of our present and past realities. High on the list of ingredients of the stuff of these realities are our culturally molded, even constructed, responses to a difference that has not itself been given to us by culture. I am saying, in short, that the center of feminist theory does hold. If nowhere else, it holds in the force of the transcultural association between women's bodies and the birth of new living beings. But equally, it holds in the recognition of the cultural variability of the meanings attached to this basic association. Indeed, it is here that I would invoke (and perhaps reinstate) a form of that distinction that was so important to feminists of the seventies, namely the distinction between sex and gender. If "sex" is that which we are given by "nature," and "gender" that which derives from culture (i.e., the cultural representation of sex), then we need to underscore that what is left to both "sex" and "nature" is now little enough. But it is not yet nothing. Even disavowing all representational plasticity, there remains a core of observational experience that has thus far defied modulation. The premises of feminist theory require us to both acknowledge this observational core, and, at the same time, expose and examine the enormous variability in meanings that are inevitably superposed on it. Only when we have revealed the specificity of the forms
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and consequences of the interpretive structures built around this core in any given particular cultural context, ultimately in all cultural contexts, will we have done our work. Ruth Bleier helped begin one crucial part of this larger project. Her work contributed critically to the examination of the interpretative structures built around reproductive difference in our own scientific cultural tradition. But even (or perhaps especially) here, a great deal remains to be done. We are still just learning how to productively use gender as an analytic tool in the study of the cultural underpinnings of modern science, and the ways in which these underpinnings have influenced scientific growth and development. Contrary to one popular misconception, the work that remains to be done is not, as most of the earlier work on gender. and science was not, an advocacy of a particular "feminine" way of doing science. Rather, it is a continuing exploration of the force that certain ideals of gender, and certain prevalent attitudes towards the roles that our culture has stereotypically relegated to women, have historically had on the doing of science. To take just one example, it is from such attitudes as these that the young Pierre Curie wrote: Women, much more than men, love life for life's sake. Women of genius are rare. And when, pushed by some mystic love, we wish to enter into a life opposed to nature, when we give all our thoughts to some work which removes us from those immediately about us, it is with women that we have to struggle, and the struggle is nearly always an unequal one. For in the name of life and nature they seek to lead us back." (quoted in Easlea, 1983, p. 45) Along with many other women before and after her, Marie Curie was in fact able to prove her husband wrong. But the basic ideological structure - that the life of science is "opposed to nature"; that women stand for "life and nature"; and that women must therefore be resisted by those who would be scientists - that set of ideas nonetheless endured. Its structure was too deeply embedded in our cultural frame to permit negation by the occasional exception. Indeed, such exceptions could only have sufficient force to, as it
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were, "prove the rule." Even today, when women scientists have ceased to be exceptional- are indeed becoming almost commonplace - that same ideological structure still survives to haunt us. But even though deeply embedded and powerfully durable, we must not mistake this set of familiar linkages for the biologically rooted core observation to which it points. It is not only (or even so much) the association of women with the production of life that is hereby codified, but far more importantly, the association of women with the caring for life, and by metonymic affiliation, with the caring for nature. And by the now all too familiar logic of oppositionality, science, accordingly, need not/does not "care" for nature. It is here, in these latter associations, that the gendered cultural specificity of modern science is most conspicuously betrayed. It might seem a simple proposition that those who produce life have the obligation to care for it, but it is hardly SO.6 Now that this sequitor is breaking down in our own cultural milieu, even we can see that it has been convention more than logic that has been sustaining it. While there have always been women who have repudiated this entire tradition (in their hearts if not in their lives), it is only now, thanks (at least in part) to the modern feminist movement, that the opportunities have been created for some women to live out these "deviant" paths, and to do so with an almost conventional stamp of legitimation. From the example of these women, we can now see (perhaps all too clearly) that there is nothing in the nature of being a woman that guarantees her caring either for life or for nature. We have won for a few women at least the right to choose whether or not to be mothers, the right to disclaim, if they wish, responsibility for nurturing children already born, the right to fight; for a very few, even the right to be Star-Warriors. By every indication, the ideological grip that traditional sex-role stereotypes have held on white middle-class women has weakened. That world at least has definitely changed. But while those changes may unarguably bespeak a good for some particular women (i.e., the women they have benefited most directly), the scope and reach of the changes in question extend far beyond the interests of the particular group they represent - indeed,
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such changes would never have come to pass if they did not happen to converge with other interests, and probably, interests far removed from those of contemporary feminists. That is, a particular world has changed, in response to interests more complex than we may have realized, and with consequences more far-reaching than we have begun to anticipate. The implications of these rather more global changes for the future of the human race as a whole are anything but transparent. For example, when educated, middle-class women are relieved of the burdens of caring for life and nature, and perhaps even of giving birth, we might ask what happens to the place of the values associated with life-giving and life-caring in the larger culture? The answer to this question clearly depends on how another question is to be answered, namely: Where in the social order are their replacements to be found? Who will now be shouldering the responsibilities of life-giving and life-caring? Given the virtually total interdependence of the normative cultural value of a particular social task and the place in the social order where that task is assigned, the question then becomes: how will this shift in the distribution of responsibilities affect the value our cultural norms accord to "life itself'? And conversely, how have such prior cultural shifts in value themselves influenced the social redistribution of roles and responsibilities that we are witnessing today?
*** The center of feminist theory does hold, but the questions that face us today are considerably harder than at first it seemed they would be. To do justice to these questions will require the help of many students and colleagues, working collectively, at what, for all its fracturing, remains a common effort. Perhaps it is through this effort that we can best repay our debt to Ruth Bleier for helping us get started.
ENDNOfES 1. These convergences have been "imaginatively and provocatively explored by Donna Haraway (see, in particular, Haraway, 1986). 2. Some modern feminists (as early as Shulamith Firestone in 1970) have looked to technological knowhow to solve the problem that they have identified - be it for ideological or biological reasons - as the ultimate obstacle to the emancipation of women, while others have come to see this same solution as a means to ever greater oppression. 3. My point would continue to hold even without so strong a claim of universality. That is, the essential point is the virtual unanimity of cultures in attributing great significance (and even priority) to this observation . 4. Because the force of this proclivity makes itself felt everywhere, even among contemporary feminists, any attempt to discuss the asymmetry of reproduction must constantly be accompanied by the reminder of what does not follow from this fact. To give an example, there is no implication that all women must reproduce , nor that women are defined by their reproduction function, nor that their "anatomy is [their] destiny." 5. As, for example, women were taken to be not only equal to but indistinguishable from men, at least in every significant aspect. 6. For a part icularly interesting and illuminating discussion of the relation, and differences, between the tasks of life-giving and life-caring, see Sara Rudd ick (1989).
REFERENCES Bleier, Ruth. (1984). Science and gender. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press. Easlea, Brian . (1983). Fathering the unthinkable: Masculinity, scientists, and the nuclear arms race. London: Pluto Press. Firestone, Shulamith . (1970). The dialectic of sex. New York: Morrow. Haraway, Donna . (1986). A manifesto for cyborgs . Socialist Review, 80, 65-108 . Harding, Sandra. (1986). The science question in feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Keller, Evelyn fox. (l983a) . A feeling for the organism: The life and work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W. H. Freeman and Co. Keller, Evelyn Fox. (1983b). Feminism as an analytic tool for the study of science. Academe, 69, 5, 1521. Keller, Evelyn Fox. (1985). Reflections on gender and science. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press. Ruddick, Sara . (1989). Maternal thinking: Towards a politics ofpeace. Boston : Beacon Press.