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Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture (A Hypatia Book)

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Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky take French feminism--as it was introduced to the Anglo-American world by the work of Elaine Marks' and Isabelle de Courtivron's New French Feminism (1980)--and reconsider it today, in the context of developing postmodern thought/feminisms. Inaugurating third wave feminisms, the writings of Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, Christine Delphy, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig bear both a deconstructive-psychoanalytical strand of thought--holding an upper hand today in the English-speaking academia, as expressed in the Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva triad--and a materialist subversive, countercultural instance. Focusing on issues of "identity, difference and femininity" (5), Fraser and Bartky rejoin French feminisms with Anglo-American feminists of a difference understood as a battle field between essentialist and non-substantialist significations. The presence of the American positive "gynocentric feminism" (Iris Young, Nancy Chodorow, and Carol Gilligan) vs. the universally emancipated subject is renegotiated today. Identity and difference are again problematized into "identities" and "differences" (6) within Derridean meaning indeterminacy and dislocated subjectivities. The question then returns to a full circle: do feminist postmodern identities of difference reaffirm an essentialist project? This is a useful collection of articles on challenging Franco-American representations of the feminine in Western philosophy, psychoanalysis, and French theories of discourse.