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The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics

This essay grows out of an experience of severe puzzlement. For several years now I have been watching with growing incomprehension as increasing numbers of feminist scholars have been trying to use or adapt the theory of Jacques Lacan for feminist purposes. I myself have felt a deep disaffinity with Lacan, a disaffinity as much intellectual as political. So while many of my fellow feminists have been using Lacanian ideas to theorize the discursive construction of subjectivity in film and literature, I have been relying on alternative models of language to develop a feminist social theory. Until now, I have avoided any explicit, metatheoretical discussion of these matters. I have explained neither to myself nor to my colleagues why it is that the footnotes in my recent papers contain some positive or quasi-positive references to Foucault, Bourdieu, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Gramsci, but no positive references to Lacan, Kristeva, Saussure, and Derrida.1 In this essay, I want to begin to provide such an explanation. I will