ABSTRACT
In light of the pervasive reluctance amongst poststructuralists to acknowledge any possible productive role for essentialism, the issue of constructionism's complicity with essentialism demands more careful and precise demonstration. Let me pose the central problematic in a slightly different way: can social constructionism entirely dispense with the idea of essence? In this chapter I propose not to confront the stronghold of constructionism head-on, as I attempted to do in the previous chapter, but to take a more oblique approach by engaging with the subsidiary debates on gender and reading. What does it mean to read as a woman or as a man? When social constructionist theories of reading posit groups of gendered readers, what is it exactly that underwrites and subtends the notion of a class of women or a class of men reading? Precisely where, in other words, does the essentialism inhere in anti-essentialism? Although the present analysis focuses predominantly upon three recent pieces, Robert Scholes's "Reading Like a Man" (1987), Tania Modleski's "Feminism and the Power of Interpretation" (1986), and Gayatri Spivak's "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" (1987), the dispute over "reading as woman" has a much longer history which includes Peggy Kamuf's "Writing Like a Woman" (1980), Jonathan Culler's "Reading as a Woman" (1982), and, most recently, the many contributions to the controversial volume Men in Feminism (Jardine and Smith 1987). In the background of all these investigations lies the question of essentialism and the problem of the vexed relation between feminism and deconstruction. How and why have the current tensions between feminism and deconstruction mobilized around the issue of essentialism? Why indeed is essentialism such a powerful and seemingly intransigent category for both deconstructionists and feminists? Is it possible to be an essentialist deconstructionist, when deconstruction is commonly understood as the very displacement of essence? By the same token, is
it legitimate to call oneself an anti-essentialist feminist, when feminism seems to take for granted among its members a shared identity, some essential point of commonality?
