Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates 9780804720304

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DESTABILIZING THEORY CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST DEBATES

EDITED BY MICHELE BARRETT & ANNE PHILLIPS

Destabilizing Theory

Destabilizing Theory Contemporary Feminist Debates

Edited by

Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips

/■

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

1992

Stanford University Press Stanford, California This collection and Introduction © 1992 Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips, each chapter copyright the author Originating publisher: Polity Press, Cambridge in association with Blackwell Publishers, Oxford First published in the U.S.A. by Stanford University Press, 1992 Printed in Great Britain Cloth ISBN 0-8047-2030-4 Paper ISBN 0-8047-2031-2 LC 91-67234 This book is printed on acid-free paper

Contents

List of Plates List of Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements

vi vii ix t

1

Introduction

1

Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips 2

Universal Pretensions in Political Thought

10

Anne Phillips 3

Post-Post-Modernism? Theorizing Social Complexity

31

Sylvia Walby 4

‘Women’s Interests’ and the Post-Structuralist State

53

Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson 5

Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience

74

Chandra Talpade Mohanty 6

Sexual Practice and Changing Lesbian Identities

93

Biddy Martin 7

Power, Bodies and Difference

120

Moira Gatens 8

Painting, Feminism, History

138

Griselda Pollock 9

The Politics of Translation

177

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 10 Words and Things: Materialism and Method in Contemporary Feminist Analysis

201

Michele Barrett Index

220

List of Plates

Plate 1. Henri Matisse (1869-1954), The Painter and his Model, 1917. Paris, Musee National d’Art Moderne. Plate 2. Brassai, Henri Matisse in his Studio. Photograph London, Victoria and Albert Museum. Plate 3. Hans Namuth,/fvnr&'ri -JT" i

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