1 - Kristeva and Feminism: A Critical Encounter
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
I think feminists should have … only the most minimal truck with Julia Kristeva.
(Fraser 1992b: 177)Kristeva offers us a strategy of subversion that can never become a sustained political practice.
(Butler 1990: 81)Julia Kristeva [is] one of the most brilliant feminist voices speaking today.
(Zerilli 1992: 111)This chapter provides an exposition of Kristeva's key concepts and ideas, and sketches the diverse feminist responses to her work. Its aim is to map the fault-lines, both within feminism, and between Kristeva and feminism, that allow for an assessment of the turbulent relationship between Kristeva and feminism. As I already stated in the Introduction, such a task is complicated by feminism's heterogeneity and plurality; after all, which feminist principles and ideas should be used as a benchmark to gauge Kristeva's feminist credentials? It is further obfuscated by an ambiguity at the core of her conceptual apparatus and compounded by Kristeva's ambivalence about feminism. Is it not unfair, then, to seek answers to feminist questions in Kristeva's œuvre? My overall aim in Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought is to demonstrate that feminists would benefit from an engagement with Kristeva's ideas. However, this assertion requires a further qualification; as I suggest in this chapter, Kristevan ideas do not translate easily into feminist thought, and where they do, they are bound to disappoint those feminist readers whose philosophical and political attachments are diametrically opposed to Kristeva's.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought , pp. 21 - 54Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011