Wome{l'sStudies Int . Forum. Vol. 12, No.3, pp . 313-318 . 1989Printed in the USA .

0277-5395/89 S3.OO + .00© 1989 Pergamon Press pic

HOLDING THECENTER OFFEMINIST THEORY

EVELYN Fox KELLERDepartment of Rhetoric, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley,CA 94720, U.S.A.

Synopsis-Despite the multiple fractures that have occurred over the last few years in feministtheory, I argue that the center of that venture continues to hold firm. If nowhere else, it holds in theforce of the transcultural association between women's bodies and the birth of new living beings.But equally, it holds in the recognition of the cultural variability of the meanings attached to thisbasic association. Indeed, it is here that I would invoke (and perhaps reinstate) a form of thatdistinction that was so important to feminists of the seventies, namely the distinction between sexand gender. If "sex" is that which we are given by "nature," and "gender" that which derives fromculture (i.e., the cultural representation of sex), then we need to underscore that what is left to both"sex" and "nature" is now little enough . But it is not yet nothing. Even disavowing all representa­tional plasticity, there remains a core of observational experience that has thus far defied modula­tion. The premises of feminist theory require us to both acknowledge this observational core, and,at the same time, expose and examine the enormous variability in meanings that are inevitablysuperposed on it. Only when we have revealed the specificity of the forms and consequences of theinterpretive structures built around this core in any given particular cultural context , ultimately inall cultural contexts, will we have done our work.

All of us must sometimes have wonderedwhether there ever are any really new ideas,whether it is indeed possible for something tobe thought, or written, that wasn't alreadythought, and perhaps even written, by notone but many people, not once but manytimes before us. There are moments, howev­er, when such doubts disappear, when itseems absolutely clear that we are witnessingthe appearance of something new. If it is notoriginality in the ideas themselves that wesee, there is at least a newness in the ability tospeak and hear these ideas, a climate thatenables fresh visions and perspectives to riseto the fore. Over a decade ago, we witnessedthe beginnings of just such a time. I dedicatethis paper to Ruth Bleier out of recognitionof the critical role she played in these events.

Out of the women's movement of the six­ties and seventies emerged a bold, sometimesbrilliant, and unequivocally critical perspec­tive on our entire intellectual history - a per­spective marked doubly, and simultaneously,by its startling originality and gnawing famil­iarity. Indeed, we celebrated that doublenessof our vision. In "articulating the common­place," we saw both our mission and our op­portunity. We wanted to expose, examine andexploit the glaring contradictions thatemerge from the juxtaposition between arti -

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cles of common faith and formal knowledge.Above all, we wanted to expose the contra­dictions that emerge from the juxtapositionof the formal use of the term "man" as uni­versal, and its colloquial understanding as"male." These contradictions could then inturn be used to reveal the buried traces of"gender" in the construction of our intellec­tual landscape, especially in the universalterms that are taken as its basic buildingblocks. In a word, we sought to bring thesetraces of "gender" to the fore of academicdiscourse, where "gender" was now to be un­derstood not as a natural but a social catego­ry, and above all, as "an analytical tool" thatcould be used to lay bare the anatomy of oursocial and intellectual order, including eventhe anatomy of its own construction (e.g.,Bleier, 1984; Harding, 1986; Keller, 1983b,1985). Behind our interest in exposure anddescription lay our desire to transform. Weassumed that one would lead - naturally as itwere- to the other. In making visible thework that gender was already doing, wecould undo the cultural work of gender, espe­cially that work most effectively done in si­lence and obscurity. First, we intended ouranalyses to "transform the disciplines," as­suming that that would at least facilitatetransformation of the social order. Wetook it

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as axiomatic that our efforts would ultimate­ly prove emancipatory for women- under­standing by the term "women," all women.What we lacked in modesty, we made up forin enthusiasm.

There was of course, even from the begin­ning, a certain amount of tension betweentheoretical and activist interests, as there waseven among different theoretical interests.Not all feminist theorists of the late seventiesand early eighties wereengaged in exactly thesame enterprise, or held the same order ofpriorities. Nevertheless, on this side of theAtlantic at least, it was generally believedthat the common ground beneath our feetwas substantial enough to support the bold­ness of our enterprise, and that the loci ofgeneral agreement was strong enough tooverride our differences. For example, cer­tain differences marked Ruth Bleier's workon gender and science from my own work onthat subject, and, because of our subject,both necessarily proceeded out of and ledinto very different concerns from our col­leagues working, say, on gender and literarycanons. But nonetheless, most of us felt con­fident in the basic unity of our endeavor; atthe very least, we could agree on the socialand analytic importance of gender, as well ason the promise of the ultimate convergenceof our intellectual and political goals.

Today we are less sure. Just as feministtheory began to witness some successesin theacademy (largely in the form of the sale ofmany books and the creation of a few jobs),the breach between theory and politics grewever wider. With few exceptions, we have not"transformed the disciplines," and if our ef­forts have contributed to changing the socialorder, it has become abundantly clear howlittle such changes as those have meant to thevast majority of women. In the face of thesevarious forms of resistance, even our theoret­ical agenda has begun to shift. Feminism hasbecome feminisms, and the idea of "woman"has had to yield to the reality of radical dif­ferences, even divisions, among women.Even the core concept of "gender" - the con­cept which seemed to provide so much of thebasic coherence of our endeavor - has itselfcome under criticism. In short, we have be­come more cautious, more self-conscious ofour own universalizing tendencies, moremuted in our claims. Indeed, we have grown

so conscious of the partiality of our own per­spectives that the question of the late eightiesthreatens to become: Can the subject of fem­inist theory hold? Is there still a female sub­ject in our text?

In part, our very exuberance, the sheerboldness of our endeavor guaranteed that atime would come when we would have to stepback. Wecould not do so much so fast; giventhat it is in the nature of "new ideas" to over­reach, it was perhaps inevitable that a periodof careful qualification must follow. But thepressures confronting us today are more mul­tiple, and more complex. Many differentcross-currents, stemming from often radical­ly different and often conflicting interests,have converged in the 1980s in propellingfeminist theory beyond its early enthusiasms.These cross-currents are only partly respon­sive to theoretical developments within femi­nist theory; in perhaps larger part, they areresponsive to political and technologicalchanges occurring in the larger world aroundus. I will cite only a few of these differentkinds of pressures.

From the writings of black feminists espe­cially, we were painfully reminded how muchour own perspective, our own ideas aboutgender, depended on our own particular situ­ations. Most of us were white, middle-classacademics, largely ignorant of the contoursof our cultural configurations. In speakingof women, we were severely-and rightly­chastized for our presumption in attemptingto speak for all women, for the tendencies inour very language to tacitly elide the experi­ence, if not the existence, of women differentfrom ourselves, most especially, of women ofcolor. We were even taken to task for ourways of speaking about gender, for our ten­dency to assume that, for all its cultural spe­cificity, gender always worked in similarways, that, within each cultural context, gen­der could always be assumed to have thesame kind of salience, that it could always beassumed to be bimodal. It was better, andsafer, to replace the concept of gender by thetriplet "race, class, and gender" - perhapsbetter still, by "race, class, and genders."

But perhaps the main pressure underlyingthe shift from gender to genders came from arather different quarter. From across the At­lantic, came an impetus for the deconstruc­tion of all grounded categories: We learned

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to understand the ways in which our mostfundamental concepts - man, nature, theself, sexuality- were themselves products ofan enlightenment, and imperialist (or "tota­lizing"), sensibility. It is true that, as femi­nists, we had already understood the extentto which the meaning of masculine and femi­nine were constructed, and had becomefreshly conscious of the enormous variabilityof these constructions. But now, we learnedfrom Foucault and his followers that eventhedivision between male and female-sex it­self - must be seen as a social constructionalready laden with oppressive force. Noground on which one might base the exist­ence of women qua women could be taken asgiven. Not even what we used to think of the"facts" of reproduction.

Many women welcomed the deconstruc­tion of the female subject - perhaps especial­ly, if it meant dissolving the bonds that hadtraditionally tied them to reproduction. Thesame intellectual move seemed to solve twoproblems at once: it helped decenter theidealized (read, white, middle-class) "wom­an" that continued to lurk at the heart ofearlier feminist theory at the same time as itundercut the historical use of womens's re­productive "natures" to define their produc­tive capacities. Ironically, however, the wom­en who felt such political and ideologicaluses of women's reproductive nature to bemost burdensome have tended to be preciselythose women for whom a choice betweenproduction and reproduction had seemedpossible, namely, educated, white, middle­class women. The emancipation of our con­ceptions of both women and gender from allfoundational constructs serves many differ­ent interests, but it is at least worth notingthat it does so differentially, once again,privileging educated, white, middle-classwomen.

Today, the links between women and re­production are threatened by forces strongerthan those of deconstruction, and if somewomen welcomed post-structuralist theory asan ally in their emancipatory (and also pro­fessional) struggles, others welcomed the ad­vent of a technology that paradoxicallyenough promises to produce the same effect.Ours is a decade of curious convergences:feminists' recognition of the import of differ­ences of race, class, and ethnicity; the pro-

verbial death of the (now female) subject;and the emergence of technological alterna­tives to conventional modes of reproduc­tion.' If the first two threaten a crisis forfeminist theory, the last threatens a far moreglobal crisis, affecting all of us, feministsand nonfeminists alike.! But even though thecontroversies and confusions generated byreproductive technology are not limited tofeminism, it is the locus of their convergencewith other strains in contemporary feminismthat is of particular interest here. The locus isthis: on no issue has modern feminism tend­ed to fracture more seriously than over theissue of women's relation to reproduction.Between the critical work of deconstruction,the reminder of ever-present cultural varia­bility, and the advent of ultra-modernisttechnology, a curious convergence of inter­ests has worked to place any definition ofwomen as a durable category (as well as sig­nificantly distinctive one) in jeopardy. Wehave come to see even the biology of repro­ductive difference- that difference that hastill now constituted an irreducible bottomline-reinterpreted as a historical biology, it­self available to reconstruction. From thisperspective, sexual difference becomes mere­ly one of an endless list of differences, leav­ing the category of gender apparently shornof both its analytical and social force.

But before we take this leap into the worldthat might alternatively be depicted as post­modern or ultra-modern, we need to remindourselves that the worlds we envision for thefuture necessarily grow out of the world (orworlds) we have inherited from the past. Andhowever much we may wish it to have beenotherwise, none of those worlds- pre-mod­ern or modern, past or present - has beenunmarked by gender. To say this is not tomake a normative or political claim, but afactual one: what is and has been has little ifanything to do with what should - and per­haps even what will- be. When feministscholars argued that these marks of gendershould be exposed and examined for whatthey teach us about cultural organization,their purpose was to make visible the workthat gender was already doing, not to con­tribute to that work. Similarly, it needs to beemphasized here too that my goal in remind­ing us of the inescapability of gender mark­ings is to subvert the dynamics of gender, not

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to reinforce them - to subvert them by expos­ing some of the unwitting cultural uses madeof obvious facts.

For good or for bad, one vital process hasproven of sufficient importance to compelpeople of all kinds, throughout history, andacross culture, to distinguish some bodiesfrom others: I am referring, of course, to thevital process that issues in the production ofnew life. That it is only from some bodies,and not from others, that human offspringmaterialize has escaped neither the attentionnor interest of people anywhere, at any time.On this basic observation, residents of Aby­ssinia, the Roman Empire, the South Bronx,the Texan Panhandle, Ancient Greece, Cen­tral India, even of Melanesia, have all con­curred. To be sure, what people have made ofthis observation, the meanings they have giv­en it, the social uses to which they have putit, these have varied enormously. But theforce of the observation itself and the correl­ative need to give it meaning have notvaried.'

To many people (perhaps to most), theseremarks merely state the obvious. Yet I can­not think of anything that makes contempo­rary feminists more nervous than the articu­lation of this particular commonplace. Themain reason for this is also the most obvious:One of the most problematic (and at thesame time distressingly familiar) uses thatmany different cultures have made of the ob­servation of women's link to reproductionhas been to extend its import until that fact,and that alone, both defines and justifieswomen's existence. In other words, the sig­nificance of women's distinctive reproductivepotential has too often been allowed to ex­pand until it synedochally subsumes the re­mainder of women's bodies and lives.' In­deed, it is against just this tendency in ourown cultural context that modern feminismhas struggled so long and hard - often, even,finding it necessary to occlude this funda­mental asymmetry in their own attempts torestore a larger frame for thinking about andactually seeing women.

But there is another, almost equally famil­iar, interpretive move that also surfaces in adistressing number of different cultural con­texts. In this move, the significance of wom­en's link to reproduction is not so much ex­panded (or inflated) as it is deflated-more

accurately, denigrated, demeaned, despoiled,or more simply denied. For actual women, ofcourse, it is the conjunction of these twokinds of interpretive moves that is most acu­tely problematic, for then it is they them­selves, and not just their reproductive poten­tial, that come to be denigrated, demeaned,and denied. And even when these two movesare not conjoined, even when the latter ismade in lieu of the former,' we are still in therealm of reacting to, of granting culturallycodified meaning, to that basic observationof reproductive difference.

If the promise of a new reproductive tech­nology enables us to anticipate a world inwhich even that difference is dissolved, it isbecause modern western (scientific) culturehas created such a world - first in imagina­tion, and before very much longer, in actuali­ty. But be it in imagination or in actualiza­tion, the point is that this vision has not beencreated denovo. Rather, it has been createdout of the stuff of our present and past reali­ties. High on the list of ingredients of thestuff of these realities are our culturallymolded, evenconstructed, responses to a dif­ference that has not itself been given to us byculture.

I am saying, in short, that the center offeminist theory does hold. If nowhere else, itholds in the force of the transcultural associ­ation between women's bodies and the birthof new living beings. But equally, it holds inthe recognition of the cultural variability ofthe meanings attached to this basic associa­tion. Indeed, it is here that I would invoke(and perhaps reinstate) a form of that dis­tinction that was so important to feminists ofthe seventies, namely the distinction betweensex and gender. If "sex" is that which we aregiven by "nature," and "gender" that whichderives from culture (i.e., the cultural repre­sentation of sex), then we need to underscorethat what is left to both "sex" and "nature" isnow little enough. But it is not yet nothing.Even disavowing all representational plastici­ty, there remains a core of observational ex­perience that has thus far defied modulation.The premises of feminist theory require us toboth acknowledge this observational core,and, at the same time, expose and examinethe enormous variability in meanings thatare inevitably superposed on it. Only whenwe have revealed the specificity of the forms

Holding the Center of Feminist Theory 317

and consequences of the interpretive struc­tures built around this core in any given par­ticular cultural context, ultimately in all cul­tural contexts, will we have done our work.

Ruth Bleier helped begin one crucial partof this larger project. Her work contributedcritically to the examination of the interpre­tative structures built around reproductivedifference in our own scientific cultural tra­dition. But even (or perhaps especially) here,a great deal remains to be done. We are stilljust learning how to productively use genderas an analytic tool in the study of the culturalunderpinnings of modern science, and theways in which these underpinnings have in­fluenced scientific growth and development.

Contrary to one popular misconception,the work that remains to be done is not, asmost of the earlier work on gender. and sci­ence was not, an advocacy of a particular"feminine" way of doing science. Rather, it isa continuing exploration of the force thatcertain ideals of gender, and certain prevalentattitudes towards the roles that our culturehas stereotypically relegated to women, havehistorically had on the doing of science. Totake just one example, it is from such atti­tudes as these that the young Pierre Curiewrote:

Women, much more than men, love lifefor life's sake. Women of genius are rare.And when, pushed by some mystic love,we wish to enter into a life opposed tonature, when we give all our thoughts tosome work which removes us from thoseimmediately about us, it is with womenthat we have to struggle, and the struggleis nearly always an unequal one. For in thename of life and nature they seek to leadus back." (quoted in Easlea, 1983, p. 45)

Along with many other women before andafter her, Marie Curie was in fact able toprove her husband wrong. But the basicideological structure - that the life of scienceis "opposed to nature"; that women stand for"life and nature"; and that women musttherefore be resisted by those who would bescientists - that set of ideas nonetheless en­dured. Its structure was too deeply embeddedin our cultural frame to permit negation bythe occasional exception. Indeed, such excep­tions could only have sufficient force to, as it

were, "prove the rule." Even today, whenwomen scientists have ceased to be excep­tional- are indeed becoming almost com­monplace - that same ideological structurestill survives to haunt us.

But even though deeply embedded andpowerfully durable, we must not mistake thisset of familiar linkages for the biologicallyrooted core observation to which it points. Itis not only (or even so much) the associationof women with the production of life that ishereby codified, but far more importantly,the association of women with the caring forlife, and by metonymic affiliation, with thecaring for nature. And by the now all toofamiliar logic of oppositionality, science, ac­cordingly, need not/does not "care" for na­ture. It is here, in these latter associations,that the gendered cultural specificity of mod­ern science is most conspicuously betrayed.

It might seem a simple proposition thatthose who produce life have the obligation tocare for it, but it is hardly SO.6 Now that thissequitoris breaking down in our own cultur­al milieu, even we can see that it has beenconvention more than logic that has beensustaining it. While there have always beenwomen who have repudiated this entire tradi­tion (in their hearts if not in their lives), it isonly now, thanks (at least in part) to themodern feminist movement, that the oppor­tunities have been created for some women tolive out these "deviant" paths, and to do sowith an almost conventional stamp of legiti­mation. From the example of these women,we can now see (perhaps all too clearly) thatthere is nothing in the nature of being awoman that guarantees her caring either forlife or for nature. We have won for a fewwomen at least the right to choose whetheror not to be mothers, the right to disclaim, ifthey wish, responsibility for nurturing chil­dren already born, the right to fight; for avery few, even the right to be Star-Warriors.By every indication, the ideological grip thattraditional sex-role stereotypes have held onwhite middle-class women has weakened.That world at least has definitely changed.

But while those changes may unarguablybespeak a good for some particular women(i.e., the women they have benefited mostdirectly), the scope and reach of the changesin question extend far beyond the interests ofthe particular group they represent - indeed,

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such changes would never have come to passif they did not happen to converge with otherinterests, and probably, interests far removedfrom those of contemporary feminists. Thatis, a particular world has changed, in re­sponse to interests more complex than wemay have realized, and with consequencesmore far-reaching than we have begun to an­ticipate. The implications of these rathermore global changes for the future of thehuman race as a whole are anything buttransparent.

For example, when educated, middle-classwomen are relieved of the burdens of caringfor life and nature, and perhaps even of giv­ing birth, we might ask what happens to theplace of the values associated with life-givingand life-caring in the larger culture? The an­swer to this question clearly depends on howanother question is to be answered, namely:Where in the social order are their replace­ments to be found? Who will now be shoul­dering the responsibilities of life-giving andlife-caring? Given the virtually total interde­pendence of the normative cultural value of aparticular social task and the place in thesocial order where that task is assigned, thequestion then becomes: how will this shift inthe distribution of responsibilities affect thevalue our cultural norms accord to "life it­self'? And conversely, how have such priorcultural shifts in value themselves influencedthe social redistribution of roles and respon­sibilities that we are witnessing today?

* * *

The center of feminist theory does hold,but the questions that face us today are con­siderably harder than at first it seemed theywould be. To do justice to these questionswill require the help of many students andcolleagues, working collectively, at what , forall its fracturing, remains a common effort.Perhaps it is through this effort that we canbest repay our debt to Ruth Bleier for helpingus get started.

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1. These convergences have been "imaginatively andprovocatively explored by Donna Haraway (see, in par­ticular, Haraway, 1986).

2. Some modern feminists (as early as ShulamithFirestone in 1970) have looked to technological know­how to solve the problem that they have identified - be itfor ideological or biological reasons - as the ultimateobstacle to the emancipation of women, while othershave come to see this same solution as a means to evergreater oppression.

3. My point would continue to hold even without sostrong a claim of universality. That is, the essential pointis the virtual unanimity of cultures in attributing greatsignificance (and even priority) to this observation .

4. Because the force of this proclivity makes itselffelt everywhere, even among contemporary feminists,any attempt to discuss the asymmetry of reproductionmust constantly be accompanied by the reminder ofwhat does not follow from this fact. To give an example,there is no implication that all women must reproduce ,nor that women are defined by their reproduction func­tion, nor that their "anatomy is [their] destiny."

5. As, for example, women were taken to be not onlyequal to but indistinguishable from men, at least in ev­ery significant aspect.

6. For a part icularly interesting and illuminating dis­cussion of the relation, and differences, between thetasks of life-giving and life-caring, see Sara Ruddick(1989).

REFERENCES

Bleier, Ruth. (1984). Science and gender. Elmsford, NY:Pergamon Press.

Easlea, Brian. (1983). Fathering the unthinkable: Mas­culinity, scientists, and the nuclear arms race. Lon­don: Pluto Press.

Firestone, Shulamith . (1970). The dialectic of sex. NewYork: Morrow.

Haraway, Donna . (1986). A manifesto for cyborgs . So­cialist Review, 80, 65-108 .

Harding, Sandra. (1986). The science question in femi­nism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Keller, Evelyn fox. (l983a) . A feeling for the organism:The life and work of Barbara McClintock. NewYork: W. H. Freeman and Co.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. (1983b). Feminism as an analytictool for the study of science. Academe, 69, 5, 15­21.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. (1985). Reflections on gender andscience. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press.

Ruddick, Sara . (1989). Maternal thinking: Towards apolitics ofpeace. Boston : Beacon Press.