ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1980s, the debate among American, British and Canadian feminist theorists has largely taken the form of a strenuous working out, followed by a stringent critique, of the French feminists-principally Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. With several notable exceptions, a consensus has been growing among many anglophone feminists in the United States, Britain and Canada that the French feminists are entangled in webs of essentialism. Domna C.Stanton, for instance, discards the ‘maternal metaphor’ in French feminism as a recuperation of the phallic mother. Claiming that the French feminists’ wish is to keep ‘both the symbolic baby and the bathwater’ (p. 169), Stanton throws out the mother. In a torrent of naming and labelling, Pamela McCallum dismisses the evocation of a ‘mother tongue’ in French feminism as a utopian return to origins, a ‘textually fervent biologistic mysticism’ with a tendency toward ‘an uncritical and non-problematic gynomorphic naturalism’ (pp. 131-2). Complaining that ‘the French feminists make of the female body too unproblematically pleasurable and totalized an entity’ (p. 254), Ann Rosalind Jones then reverses herself and grants a priori status to the very belief of which she is most critical. In purging the jouissance (and, along with it, difference and différance) from her own implicit version of the body, she herself reduces the body to unmediated nature and a small assortment of purely sexual organs.
