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Writing Culture, Writing Feminism: The Poetics and Politics of Experimental Ethnography

Deborah Gordon


On the cover of Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, is a photograph.[1] The photo is of Stephen Tyler, one of the contributors to the collection, taken while he was doing fieldwork in India. Tyler, the ethnographer, white and male, is seated on a thatched bench, hunched over, writing on a clipboard. To his left is note paper, filled apparently with his notes. Behind Tyler is a dark-skinned man, presumably Indian, watching him, whose expression is ambiguous, suggesting a kind of detached amusement. The reader's eye moves back and forth between Tyler and this man We are either watching Tyler or watching the Indian man watching Tyler. In this image, ethnographic writing is represented as the movement of the white male ethnographer's hand across the page. Ethnographic authority is established through the presence of ethnographic writing which involves the former "native" as witness to the ethnographer. This ethnographic authority is encoded as a relationship between the ethnographer's writing, the dominant act of the scene, and two men, one white and Western, the other Indian. The authority of the white male is present but not unambiguous--it is now watched, and we watch it being watched. At the same time, there is no mistaking the fact that Tyler is central to this photo. Tyler may be on the edge of the frame in a literal reading of the photo, but visually he is positioned as the center.

In the background of the photo are figures that are visible with some effort, figures which disappear in editor James Clifford's reading of this photo which opens his introduction to Writing Culture. In a darkened recess of the thatched building behind Tyler is a figure which appears to be an Indian woman, holding a child. Inadvertently the graphic design of the cover includes a thick black line, running through her eyes, which cuts off her gaze. To the left of the Indian woman and child is another Indian child with his hands up against a trunk in front of the dwelling. Dark-skinned women and children are outside of the visual dynamic which binds the ethnographer and Indian male observer. It is hard to call these people even marginal ethnographic subjects.

This image suggests a central tension in Writing Culture, a collection of essays interested in the links between colonial discourse, social or cultural anthropology and writing. This tension is related to gender, feminism and those theories of writing which are crucial to the collection's critique of colonial discourse. For feminists, particularly feminist anthropologists and ethnographers, an important problem with experimental ethnographic authority is its grounding in a masculine subjectivity which encourages feminists to identify with new modes of ethnography, claiming to be decolonial, while simultaneously relegating feminism to a strained position of servitude. This kind of subordination is not located in marginalization nor does it indicate a conspiracy to silence feminists. Rather it is a management of feminism produced out of a masculine feminism with specific troubles for feminist ethnographers. The consequences of this ambivalence for feminist anthropologists are, no doubt, interest and discomfort, perhaps anger, at this collection, a result of another kind of ambivalence--that of feminist scholarship which exists in a field of social referentiality which includes and excludes the critics who have been building a discussion about ethnographic writing for the past ten years or so.

My reading exists in between the disparate but not opposed fields of feminism and experimental ethnography. With social, intellectual and ideological connections to both, I find myself in the predicament of being neither the kind of feminist anthropologist referred to in Writing Culture nor the kind of critic that has contributed to the collection. Rather, I'm a participant/observer/interpreter of both, as a result of considering what feminist experimentation in ethnography might mean while remaining dissatisfied with the meanings associated with "experimental."

My dissatisfaction stems from a sense that discussions of experimental ethnography have relied too heavily on assumptions from Western critical theories which have been developed and utilized in cultural studies. Experimental ethnography has been limited by its borrowing of a modernist, avant-garde insistence that there is a stable distinction between art which reflects on processes of representation and art which does not, art which alienates and interrupts its viewer's expectations and art which identifies with its viewer. Film theory and criticism has been one of the places in cultural studies where this distinction has been utilized and subsequently criticized. Recent film criticism has critiqued the opposition between distanciation and identification in interpreting the construction of different subject positions in the interaction between cinema and its viewers. This criticism has come from critics such as Teresa de Lauretis who works with theories of meaning which break with Lacanian film theories. De Lauretis, drawing on the work of Stephen Heath, argues that meanings are not produced in specific films but 'circulate between social formation, spectator and film' (Heath 107). She argues against the tendency in film theory to divide representations into two somewhat stable camps. An example of this is Annette Kuhn's taxonomy which names these as "tendentious" and "feminine," representing two kinds of desire. The first are representations which "take processes of signification for granted,"(Kuhn 17) the second which foreground the "meaning production process itself as the site of struggle"(17).

The desire manifested in "tendentious" texts is that of identification and movement toward clarity and completion; the desire in "feminine" texts is that of distanciation and movement toward ambiguity. I have used this quotation from Kuhn to suggest a parallel between her division and definitions of experimental ethnography which depend on a similar map; conventional vs. experimental being analogous to tendentious vs. feminine. In both cases, there are implicit values which work on a binary opposition, distanciation/identification, with distanciation serving as a kind of politically correct position. De Lauretis and Tania Modleski have shown how this opposition forces a too rigid valorization of a masculine avant-garde on the part of feminist film theorists[2]. According to de Lauretis and Modleski, the problem with this division for feminism is that it assumes a universal referent--a masculine avant-garde--and then measures feminism in relationship to that standard. Feminists must be willing to displace this hierarchy, because the position of feminism in relationship to any avant-garde, cinematic or ethnographic, is much more complex and shifting than these criteria allow. The most interesting question for me about feminist ethnographic writing is not its place in a preconceived poetics of experimentation but rather its social referentiality--the ways it creates and responds to certain audiences and the way it shifts discourse. Marilyn Strathern, in an earlier version of her article on feminism and anthropology published in Signs, claims that feminist anthropology:

...alters the nature of the audience, the range of readership, and the kinds of interactions between author and reader, and alters the subject matter of conversation in the way it allows others to speak--what is talked about and whom one is talking to." [3]
Unless one imagines that the world of global capitalism and male dominance divides neatly into the mainstream or establishment and the avant-garde--that this is the crucial distinction of the myriad of women's experiences in postmodern society--then this map, no matter how much it is elaborated, won't do for understanding the political and social meanings of ethnography for women or feminists. This is because feminist ethnography is part of an ongoing practice to construct women's and feminist connections, indeed, communities, which are permeable and diversely-defined. It is not antagonistic to question the engendering of an avant-garde and to ask what's in it for women, particularly feminist women, since in the case of Writing Culture, feminism is an explicit source of concern for the editors.

With the foregoing reservations in mind, I think that there is much for feminist anthropologists to learn from and use in this new discourse about ethnography and images of fieldwork constructed by its writers. For if there is one thing that discussions about experimental ethnography have brought home to cultural anthropology it is the centrality of power relations, both historically and theoretically. Indeed, there is great potential for feminist anthropologists in the kinds of political thinking going on in books such as Writing Culture. Feminism is nothing if not a set of political practices, and its recent history suggests that the category "women" is "multiply organized across positionalities along several axes and across mutually-contradictory discourses and practices." [4] To the extent that feminist anthropologists see themselves as part of the recent women's movements then the discussion of experimental ethnography, with its focus on the relations of power, knowledge and fieldwork, will intersect with their interests in questions such as: How and in what senses is feminist ethnography political? How is it linked with histories and discourses of colonization and decolonization? Feminist ethnographers who have connections with women's movements can learn from the discussion of experimental ethnography and add to it because they are aware of the difficulty and complexity of politics when boundaries are both necessary and constantly challenged, being recreated in daily practices of resistance.

Given these interests then I would like to turn to two essays in Writing Culture which are simultaneously self-reflexive about this collection, engaged in a discussion with each other and with feminism. The first is the introductory essay by James Clifford, "Partial Truths"; the second is Paul Rabinow's, "Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology." A linking concern in the work of these writers is the status of an "ethnographizing subject" [5] within Western, industrialized post-World War II societies. The study of "non-Western" or "Third World" peoples by Westerners has, in recent years, become the focus of intense reflection and debate as Western anthropologists reconstruct a sense of themselves by interrogating and rebuilding the borders of their discipline. Both essays are a part of these debates and are interested in the problem of how to construct a subjectivity that can address the social, cultural and political conditions of global or multinational capitalism. The writers' specific predicament includes the context of white men, educated in the U.S. in the 1960s when strong anti-colonial activism found in the anti-war movement was a daily feature of university life, who are now functioning in a context where that activism has, in many ways, become "academized." In tandem and conflict with that academic inheritance of the 1960s of anti-war and anti-colonial activism in the U.S. has been the white women's movement. This movement has had a felt impact on the academy and the anti-colonial political culture that men such as Clifford and Rabinow were witness to. This impact is difficult to measure but it has included an ongoing dialogue and contest among feminist and non-feminist scholars over gender, understood now not only as a social and political construction but also as irreducible, not to be subsumed under class, race, ethnicity, cultural or national identity There is hardly overwhelming consensus on this in academic practices, but the fact that it is contentious is a feminist achievement.

From Clifford's and Rabinow's location (which I've only outlined schematically) feminism has clearly been a potent set of demands, as have the various interests, movements, and discourses of decolonizing people. In their essays in Writing Culture, both see feminism simultaneously as a political ally and problem. It is not enough, however, from a feminist political perspective to celebrate this ambiguity or chalk it up to the inevitable tensions of a kind of coalition consciousness. This ambiguity must be tracked to see the possibilities and costs in this work for feminists, particularly feminist anthropologists.
In his essay, Clifford brings up an obvious source of discomfort, both for himself and the participants in the original seminar which produced Writing Culture. This is the absence of feminist perspectives in the text. This raising of the absence is, in and of itself, an interesting event signifying, as Clifford notes, that feminism is "an especially strong intellectual and moral influence in the university milieux from which these essays have sprung" (Clifford 19). Clifford is voicing a masculine subjectivity which is feminist--that is feminism is already a part of this kind of masculine consciousness. Clifford's introduction demonstrates an ambivalent response to this feminism, an attempt to situate it within critical categories which are masculine by splitting feminism into positive and negative types. This splitting, however, never quite contains the trauma of feminism's perceived power, the pressure it exerts, the kind of obligations it now makes ethnographers feel. [6] In Clifford's essay this occurs in the way he situates feminism in relationship to his own description of the history of ethnographic representation. This history claims that at an earlier moment, somewhere prior to the 1960s, ethnographers believed in the transparency of their ethnographies but that recently that distortion, that "ideology" (Clifford 2), has broken down. That ideology was intimately bound up with a mode of authority--various associations are called up by Clifford: Western, visualist, Archimedian, immediacy of experience, full versions of stories, setting the record straight, revising canons, conventional forms of writing. A range of contemporary social and political movements and philosophical bodies of writing are brought together under an umbrella of a new epistemology, a theory of knowledge which is set in opposition to the older form of authority. The new associative terms are partiality, polysemous, inventive, experimental, collage, self-reflexive, historicist, and theorizing about the limits of representation. Like all oppositions these categories are hierarchically-organized; in this case the latter set of associations are valued over the former. This hierarchy is narrativized with the former set signifying the past which is the condition of possibility for the latter, which are ontologized --this is "our" reality.

Or is it? Feminism is located ambiguously in and between these associations, sometimes included in the latter. Clifford sees it, for example, as one of a spate of alternative epistemologies within the West which have questioned Western practices of representation (10) but also part of the "past," which still possibly believes in "fuller" ethnographies (18). Clifford recognizes this ambiguity and gives it a particular meaning when he comments on feminism as an explicit absence in the collection:

Feminist theorizing is obviously of great potential significance for rethinking ethnographic writing. It debates the historical, political construction of identities and self/other relations, and it probes the gendered positions that make all accounts of, or by, other people inescapably partial. Why, then, are there no essays in this book written from primarily feminist standpoints? (19)
His first turn in response to this is to mark out the institutional space from which Writing Culture emerged--an advanced seminar of the School of American Research organized by Clifford and George Marcus. According to Clifford the formal seminar policy of the School restricted the seminar participants to ten people, all scholars doing "advanced" work analyzing "ethnographic textual form" (20). But if feminism really does have the theoretical potential mentioned in the previously quoted passage, that potential could have been brought to bear on the seminar's subject. The central problem which Clifford sees with feminist anthropology and ethnography, and which explains their absence from the book, is their lack of "textual innovation" and consciousness of textual theory.

It's important to note that, in fact, not all of the essays in Writing Culture exhibit a strong or advanced interest in textual theory. Talal Asad's essay is not enmeshed in academic debates over the kind of textual theory Clifford is talking about, and Paul Rabinow's essay is a critique of the preoccupation with ethnographic textual form. Furthermore, there are feminist theorists who could have been invited to bring theoretical analysis to bear on ethnographic texts. Textual theory and analysis have never been an exclusively male province in the U.S. academy.

Leaving aside these discrepancies, there are other problems with Clifford's reading of this "lack." Clifford claims that either women have made textual innovations but not on feminist grounds or else they have exhibited in their form feminist claims about subjectivity but that these forms were not exclusively feminist--other experimental ethnographies shared these claims. The second point raises tensions about the first. If feminist claims about subjectivity were reflected in the ethnographic form of writers such as Manda Cesara and Fatima Mernissi (Clifford cites these) doesn't this constitute some kind of "feminist ground"? The second claim about the non-exclusivity of feminist subjectivity and form sets up an impasse to including certain ethnographies either within the boundaries of experimentation or, ironically, feminism. By expecting feminist claims to be exclusively feminist (an impossibility by definition as long as the world isn't feminist--at which point the word "feminism" would cease to exist) Clifford creates a double bind. Feminism must produce innovation that is completely distinct from any other; if it doesn't live up to this impossibility then it ceases to be either feminist or innovative.

The difficulties around the categories of textual innovation and theory become even more pronounced when Clifford tries to make feminism innovative, but in ways outside the book's focus. He notes that ethnographers such as Annette Weiner are "rewriting the masculinist canon," but rewriting canons seems to have no relationship to textual practices. According to Clifford, feminist ethnography has been working on "either setting the record straight about women or on revising anthropological categories ...Ó( 21). But again these practices are separated from writing unconventionally or "reflecting on ethnographic textuality as such" (21). The difference that is carved out between feminist ethnography and textuality--textual innovation, form and theorizing--is undermined when Clifford then questions his defining premises, the foregrounding of textual form and theory (21). While criticizing the distinction between "form" and "content," Clifford still utilizes it in order to talk about institutionalization and the reworkings of ethnographic knowledge. He criticizes the "fetishizing of form" on which the seminar was based but also divides innovative ethnographic writing into two kinds, those affecting form and those whose "greatest impact" have revolved around issues of content. Innovation in content is associated with feminism and Third World perspectives, which, in turn, are linked with institutional forces such as global power inequities. Innovation in form, however, is left unmarked in this description. There is an equivocation over a kind of avant-garde formalism on which Clifford's explanation about the absence of feminism closes. This faltering turn of phrase, form/content, found in the attempt to associate institutionalization with "content" suggests that debates over the form/content distinction in textual theory may not be the best basis on which to analyze practices of representation from feminist or Third World perspectives, a point I'll return to in the final part of this essay. Clifford's map of consciousness with its sense of history and maturation from a state of belief in total knowledge to experimentation threatens to collapse under the weight of feminism and non-Western writings which make this division unstable.

Paul Rabinow's essay extends an ongoing debate with Clifford over ethnographic authority and politics, [7] particularly over the degrees of freedom individual interpreters have and how and what kind of world historical difference writing experimental ethnographies makes. Rabinow uses Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernism and multinational capitalism to situate historically what he perceives as a central conflict in Clifford's work between Clifford's political and ethical commitments and his aesthetic commitments to postmodernism. Feminism, on the other hand, is used to question Clifford's image of "dialogical" relations among Western ethnographers and non-Westerners. In his essay, Rabinow uses feminism to argue that Clifford doesn't sufficiently take into account the social meaning of interpretations and the pragmatic character of language. To do this Rabinow turns to Marilyn Strathern's essay, "Dislodging a World View: Challenge and Counter-Challenge in Anthropology," initially published in Australian Feminist Studies and later in the U.S. in Signs. Strathern's piece is the first Western feminist anthropological writing to engage experimental ethnography by comparing its radicalism with that of feminism. In Strathern's reading of Clifford, the term "dialogical" signifies "the search for a medium of expression which will offer mutual interpretation, perhaps visualized as a common text, or as something more like a discourse"( 23). Rabinow reads with Strathern, juxtaposing feminism to experimental ethnography. Through this reading he throws doubt on valuing the dialogic, because feminism's ethics are practiced with a continual political recognition that the world is divided and unequal. Feminism meets the inequality of gender through the creation of an interpretive community in which dialogue is open and conflictual, meeting specific responsibilities among its participants. This community presents a face of similarity outward toward men who are its "other." Unlike experimental ethnography where the point is to establish a mutuality between self and other, feminism's relationship to its other is antagonistic. According to Rabinow, this has consequences for a theory of language and representation which is politically grounded, because feminism reveals the social character of rhetoric, that figures of language are deployed in specific interactions. This assertion about representation stresses its pragmatics: "While tropes are available for all to use, how they are used makes all the difference" (Rabinow 256).

Rabinow's map of consciousness places himself and feminism on one side and Clifford and textualism on another. Because feminism, as represented here, is based on an oppositional ground which is opposed to men, Rabinow takes up a position which excludes him. This taking up of a position that excludes him simultaneously challenges that exclusion and suggests that feminism's oppositional stance in this interpretation is not so unyielding as to actually exclude men. Indeed, Strathern's piece in which her own position as a feminist includes arbitrating between feminism and experimental ethnography hardly enacts the antagonism toward men that Rabinow attributes to feminism. For Rabinow to read with Strathern is to situate himself as a male within feminism. This situation creates problems, however, when he leaves this position in order to construct another one--critical cosmopolitanism, one not marked clearly by any contemporary "local" concerns such as gender, race, nationality, etc., although Rabinow calls up past identification of the term with Christians, Jews and homosexuals. The Greek sophists who are his fictive figure for this were European men. His "interpretive federation" includes four categories: interpretive anthropologists represented by Clifford Geertz, critics represented by James Clifford, political subjects represented not by any particular name but by feminism as a totality, and critical, cosmopolitan intellectuals. Critical cosmopolitan intellectuals are the telos of Rabinow's story about criticism which begins with interpretive anthropology and moves through feminism exemplified in the opening sentence of the description of this category: "I have emphasized the dangers of high interpretive science and the overly sovereign representer, and am excluded from direct participation in the feminist dialogue" (258). Critical cosmopolitans promote "an understanding suspicious of its own imperial tendencies,"(Rabinow) but Rabinow's remapping in the final section brings its own difficulties, specifically the move from identification with feminism, constructed as a place from which to critique "textualism," (significantly not male domination) to then claiming to be excluded from feminist dialogue. This seems to be the kind of practice which Rabinow is advocating when he claims, "We live in-between." There is a conflict between an ethics suspicious of its own will to power, however, and the claim of being excluded from a dialogue that one has already been engaged. The designation "interpretive federation" tends to obscure this problem by glossing over the hierarchy built into this unity.

What are the consequences of these conflicted masculine subjectivities for feminists, particularly feminist anthropologists? What Clifford's construction suggests is that if feminists are to identify with this particular anti-colonialist discourse manifested in the reworking of ethnography, then they will have to accept their responsibility for their part in reproducing the "Western" habits such as claiming to tell "fuller" stories. While Clifford designates "morality" as feminist, his categories of criticism and politics are also accusatory as is a feminism which seeks to hold ethnographic writers such as Lienhardt accountable for their sexism, however unintentional it may have been at the time. Accepting Clifford's basic account makes at least two moves possible for feminist ethnographers. First, feminists might build reflections into their ethnographic accounts which acknowledge their relationship to the Western epistemology Clifford critiques. Second, feminists might try to persuade experimental ethnographers that women also write experimental ethnographies. Kamala Visweswaran's essay in this volume makes a persuasive case for a women's experimental ethnography.

There is another set of possibilities for a feminist anthropology linked with critiques of colonial discourse which can emerge from and transform the weak points of Clifford's essay. The very force which is brought up and contained in Clifford's discussion of textual theory and feminist and Third World perspectives--institutional forces, global inequalities, in short the political practices which engender not simply ethnography, but also power knowledge relations more generally--can be used by feminists to widen and shift the meanings associated with "experimentation" and "ethnography." Talal Asad's essay in Writing Culture moves beyond ethnography as the object of study and reinvention, to linking basic research "problems" in the history of social anthropology to colonialism. Asad's essay investigates when, how and why "cultural translation" became a central research problem in British social anthropology. He is interested in the limits of representation in a very specific way that differs from watching the construction and deconstruction of the figuration of ethnographic language. Rather, he looks at translation as a social practice.

Feminist anthropologists might take a lead from this and look at how their questions and research agendas tie in with macro and global relations. An example from the recent past of feminist anthropology is the question of sexually egalitarian societies. Feminist anthropologists might investigate the mapping of this problem onto the globe--which countries are viewed systematically as possibly egalitarian? Which are not? What are the variations? How is his practice of categorization of cultures linked with histories of colonization? What I'm proposing is a history of feminist problematics as they are played out in feminist anthropology and ethnography. By treating feminist questions as problematics, historically produced in specific struggles, new possibilities of international relations among women are opened up.

The second area of weakness which can be strengthened and used for feminist anthropologists is the contradictions around "community" and political unities not based on identity in Clifford's and Rabinow's essays. Recent writings by women of color in the U.S. have had a profound impact in expressing a consciousness which stresses the importance of community, in short, "identity" politics, without being based on a stable "enemy" or other and without dwelling on discovering what Foucault has called the "deep self," which speaks endlessly of its own silence and non-existence. Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years embraces a multiplicity of subjectivities--Chicana, lesbian, poet, daughter. In addition, Moraga's rhetoric does not deny the need for accusation, acknowledgment and accountability of different kinds of social privilege and judgment. But her judgments do not exclude connections with those who have mistreated her when those connections helped combat diverse forms of injustice. Moraga's judgments demand care and attention to complicity without denying its necessity at times for survival but she also has a constant interest in its costs--how it effects those closest to her whom she feels obligations toward. This discourse needs to be read by more scholars in the academy interested in the very questions Rabinow raises about ethics and politics. Anthropologists interested in colonialism have much to learn from these readings about the kind of community building going on in feminism which insists all at once on the burden of history which every production is immersed in, the need for imaginative reconstruction, and the will to power found in repositioning the self. This is a form of subjectivity and relationality which is neither "always, already" positioned nor transcendental but actualized with an ongoing movement of political prioritizing. Agency and intentionality are not opposed to structure here. [8]

Finally, feminism can push at the limits of the form/content split which Clifford rightly criticizes. "Form" can include questions of audiences that are made by specific representations. Feminist anthropologists can ask of their own work: What boundaries are being made in this? What possibilities for connection among different women does my account open up? Remembering Strathern's comments quoted earlier in this essay, feminist anthropologists can look at how ethnographic forms of writing situate Third World women. Studies of Third World women by Third World women suggest rich possibilities for linking Western and Third World feminist writers who are embedded in and wish to speak to diverse audiences. Women who claim some relationship to feminism and women's movements as well as decolonization are creating new kinds of ethnographic subjectivity linking indigenous and feminist ethnography. This is what attention to ethnographic form should be about--insights and knowledge into global relations among people diversely located and vying for power.

By looking at the weak points in this shared terrain of a masculinity engaged in feminism, I have suggested some of the possible costs for feminist ethnographers. According to Tania Modleski, by examining the gaps in masculinity, feminists can assess our own strengths relative to them and further our understanding of women's victimization. This kind of interpretation suggests that beliefs are less the product of negations and taboos than processual and active negotiations of historically-specific encounters. The difficulties around feminism in these essays can, thus, be read as ineffective management of men's negotiation of feminism. This suggests not feminism's weaknesses but its real strength and accomplishments. And while there is obviously a response to feminism that is tenuous, feminist anthropologists need not believe that male-centered critical theories of ethnography are inflexible and entrenched. Knowledge of victimization and oppression is, of course, central to ending it. But without actually engaging those gaps and transforming them into useful practice we run the risk of being overwhelmed by men's not surprising ambivalence toward feminism, overwhelmed in the sense of remaining caught in victimization or ignorance. Reading them provides hope for a reinvented crossing of feminism and crossing of colonial discourse.

NOTES


1. I would like to thank the following people at U.C. Santa Cruz for critical readings and editorial suggestions on this essay: Lisa Bloom, James Clifford, Vince Diaz, Vicki Kirby, Maria LaPlace, Lata Mani, Chela Sandoval, Roz Spafford, Marita Sturken and Deborah Wright. Finally, thanks to Lata Mani, Ruth Frankenberg, and Kamala Visweswaran for initial encouragement to write this essay. Back to main text

2.See Teresa de Lauretis,. particularly her "Introduction" and "Through the Looking Glass: Woman, Cinema, and Language," 1-36, and Tania Modleski, "Hitchcock, Feminism, and the Patriarchal Unconscious," in her The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Film Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988) 1-15. Back to main text

3. Marilyn Strathern, "Dislodging a World View: Challenge and Counter-Challenge in the Relationship Between Feminism and Anthropology," draft of a lecture given in the series, Changing Paradigms: The Impact of Feminist Theory upon the World of Scholarship, at the Research Center for Women's Studies, Adelaide, Australia, July 1984. The fullest version of this essay is published in Australian Feminist Studies 1 (Summer 1985). Back to main text

4. See Teresa de Lauretis' essay in this volume. Back to main text

5. I am borrowing here a move from Foucault in his analysis of the construction of a "desiring subject" in the West where he investigates sexuality as a "problematic," a focus of interest found in an incitement to discourse. See his "Introduction" in The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986) for a discussion of this method. Back to main text

6. See Clifford's comments on page 18 where, discussing the sexism of Godfrey Lienhardt's Divinity and Experience, he notes, "The partiality of gender question here was not at issue when the book was published in 1961. If it were, Lienhardt would have addressed the problem, as more recent ethnographers now feel obliged to..." for a sense of the perceived weight of feminism. One of the questions that emerges from this quote and also points at the central tension of this collection is, if ethnographers now are under the sway of feminist pressure why didn't more contributors in this collection feel obliged to address the engendering of ethnography, ethnographic authority, colonialism, representation, etc.? Back to main text

7. See Paul Rabinow, "'Facts Are a Word of God:' A Review Essay of James Clifford's Parson and Myth," in George Stocking, ed., Observers Observed, History of Anthropology Vol. 1, (Madison: University of Wisconsin) in which he questions the utopian dimensions of Clifford's interpretation of Lienhardt's missionary practice. Back to main text

8. This point is also made by Donna Haraway in her reading of Buchi Emecheta's The Double Yoke and Teresa de Lauretis' reading of Monique Wittig's "One Is Not Born a Woman," in their essays in this volume. Back to main text

Works Cited

Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California, 1989.

de Lauretis, Teresa. "Introduction" and "Through the Looking Glass: Women, Cinema, and Language." Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1981. 1-36.

Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1981. Quoted by de Lauretis.

Kuhn, Annette. Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.

Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Film Theory. New York: Methuen, 1988.

Rabinow, Paul. "Representations are Social Facts." Clifford and Marcus. Strathern, Marilyn. "Changing Paradigms: The Impact of Feminist Theory Upon The World of Scholarship." Research Center for Women's Studies: Adelaide, Australia, July 1984.


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