ABSTRACT
What distinguishes this particular forum is, precisely, the theoretical dimension. The negotiation of men’s relation to feminism thus marks, perhaps, a new stage of theoretical sophistication within feminism. The relative merits of that theoretical sophistication might then be tested, as it were, by examining the relationship to feminism of a certain kind of man, equally theoretically sophisticated. The task of any theoretical project is to examine the working field of oppositions that constitute the scope of inquiry, in this case, feminist inquiry. Feminist theory is thus assessed in the essays by Stephen Heath, Paul Smith, and Andrew Ross. Stephen Heath describes man’s “impossible relationship” to feminism as a sign, a symptom of feminist theory as a simultaneous investment in and distance from the persistent dualisms upon which our most fundamental, and problematic, notions of identity are based. Paul Smith situates the theoretical sophistication of feminism as a problem, the danger of a theory with a limited academic field of application: hence the familiar yet problematic fit between theory and practice defines his engagement with feminism. In Andrew Ross’s discussion of the Yorkshire Ripper, the theoretical issue is most succinctly understood as a battle of opposing views. Ross’s demonstration of the “danger of failing to distinguish between the natural and the sexual” collapses the distinction between the law
and a certain kind of feminism which wants to speak in the name of “all women.” Thus there are two theoretical protagonists in Ross’s discussion, which correspond to the poles of “essentialism” and “antiessentialism” (and their attendant implications of French and American allegiances) in current debates within feminism.
