The Feminist Difference

Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender

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by Barbara Johnson

Harvard University Press

Due/Published April 2000, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 0674001915

New in paper (S00)

Johnson makes the case that although literary criticism and feminism are both being spoken of today as being at a standstill, in the doldrums, not terribly relevant, or even embattled and belittled, it is in literary criticism that the renewed promises, possibilities, and applications of feminist thought lie. In readings of a wide range of legal, literary, cinematic, philosophical, and psychoanalytical texts, Johnson demonstrates that the conflicts and uncertainties that beset feminism are signs not of a dead end, but of a creative turning point.
Employing surprising juxtapositions, Johnson looks at fiction by black writers from a feminist/psychoanalytic perspective: at poetry form Phillis Wheatley to Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore; and at feminism and law, particularly in the work of Patricia Williams and the late Mary Joe Frug. Toni Morrison and Freud, John Keats and Jane Campion, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nella Larson and Heinz Kohut are among the many occasions for Johnson's reading o moments at which feminism seems to founder in its own contradictions, but which are then seens as sources of a revitalized critical awareness. In the end, Johnson argues that literature is essential for feminism because it is the place where impasses can be kept and opened for examination, where questions can be guarded and not forced into a premature validatio of the available paradigms.

"This acute and brilliant interrogation of feminism, race, and psychoanalysis turns each term back upon the other, producing illuminations that are, in their own way, quietly spectacular. Insisting on the productive moments of ambivalence and perplexity within the field, she single-handedly expands our capacity for critical thinking in directions we did not know we could move."--Judith Butler

"The place where other theories of difference end is the point where Barbara Johnson's work typically begins. While most cultural commentaries tend either to censor or to celebrate the fact of difference, this brilliant new book takes difference itself as the enabling contradiction of feminism. One of the most original and influential thinkers in the academy today, Johnson suggests that it is time to stop simply discovering difference and time to start rigorously analyzing it."--Diana Fuss

"The Feminist Difference is an exhilarating, energizing experience which moves like a complex, and melodic musical composition. I was so caught up in the fun of it, the accessibility of it, that I barely realized its feat. Barbara Johnson's intellect is like water on a mountain--changing the shape of rock, subtly, patiently, persistently, inevitably, giving us alternate routes. She shifts around dynamics of power and representation, looking at them from underneath and from all sides, reorganizing the pieces into an unforgettable and new image. It would be impossible for me to understand contemporary race-gender identity issues in art and life without her help. She sits in the corners and the shadows of what sometimes seems overbearing, entrenched, monumental, with her vigilant sense of humor and light. She brings visibility to so much of what we don't see, even when we are in the business of enlarging the population of who is seeing and being seen."--Anna Deavere Smith

"From Baudelaire to Beloved, from Freud to de Beauvoir, there is no more deft reader than Barbara Johnson, with her resonant insight, observant ear, and her linguist's taste for the complexities of the chosen word. This brilliant book is a work of art and grammatical intrigue, of translation and diplomacy."--Patricia Williams

Contents

 Introduction 

Literary Differences: Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender
Is Female to Male as Ground is to Figure?
The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut
The Re(a)d and the Black: Richard Wright's Blueprint
 'Aesthetic' and 'Rapport' in Toni Morrison's Sula

Gender and Poetry
Euphemism, Understatement, and the Passive Voice: Phillis Wheatley and the Genealogy of African-American Poetry
Gender and Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Muteness Envy

The "Voice" of the Author
Lesbian Spectacles: Reading Sula, Passing, Thelma and Louise, and The Accused
The Alchemy of Style and Law
The Postmodern in Feminism: A Response to Mary Joe Frug

 Notes
Index