Review

Reviewed Work(s): Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory by Nancy J. Chodorow:

Postmodernism in the Contemporary West by Jane Flax: Refiguring the Father: New
Feminist Readings of Patriarchy by Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace
Review by: Ruth Perry
Source: Signs , Spring, 1991, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring, 1991), pp. 597-603
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174592

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 BOOK REVIEWS

Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. By NANCY J. CHODOROW.

Yale University Press, 1989.

Postmodernism in the Coittee,por-a-y West. By JANE FLAX. Berkele

University of California Press, 1989.

Refiguring the rather: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy. Edite

YAEGER and BETH KOWALESKI-WALLACE. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U
1989.

Ruth Perry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

How is human identity constructed in different cultural contexts?

How do bodies come to have the meanings they have? How are
women and men socialized to think and feel and act, and how do
these cultural expectations fit into larger political and economic
structures? Questions like these, posed by feminist intellectuals for
the past twenty years, lately have been catching on in more
fashionable academic discourses such as "cultural studies" and
"new historicism." Ever since Simone de Beauvoir observed that
women are made and not born, and Betty Friedan noted the "click"
that went off in women's minds when they registered their deval-
uation as women, feminist intellectuals have been asking how
gender is constructed and perpetuated.
Nancy Chodorow made her original contribution to a theory of
gender difference remarkably early in the process, working with
Freudian theory and cultural anthropology. Building on Freud's
perception (elaborated by object-relations theorists such as D. W.
Winnicott and Melanie Klein) that female psychosexual identity
was formed in an earlier developmental sequence than that postu-
lated for male Oedipal conflict and resolution, Chodorow reimag-
ined the steps that led to female identity formation. She then
generalized her theory of how gendered subjects-boys and girls-
are produced, not on the basis of anatomical distinctions between

Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.

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Book Reviews

the sexes, as Freud would have it, but on the basis of cross-cultural
data that women everywhere are the primary caretakers of children
of both sexes.
I remember vividly my own introduction to Chodorow in 1973,
when someone in my Cambridge women's group brought to our
attention "Family Structure and Feminine Personality," one of
Chodorow's graduate student papers written the year before at
Brandeis. I read it with growing excitement: here, at last, was a
rewriting of Freud's script for women's psychosexual development.
No longer did one have to struggle skeptically with the tortured
theory of the female Oedipus, whether "penis envy" or the difficult
and crippling transition from the clitoral to vaginal genital orienta-
tion. Chodorow, a year or two younger than we were, had explained
how women's universal role as the caretaker of children set in train
a process by which those children grew into their gendered
identities as boys and girls, men and women. Her theory located
difference in social process, not biology. Starting with women's
universal social role as mothers, Chodorow derived an explanation
for the "reproduction of mothering"-that is, how girl children are
conditioned to take responsibility for child rearing and other forms
of human intimacy and to define themselves as "relational" beings.
She suggested that the universal female backdrop to childhood
development had different consequences for girls than it did for
boys.
This early paper is reprinted in Feminism and Psychoanalytic
Theory, along with other Chodorow essays published between
1972 and 1990 on subjects such as personality formation, psycho-
analytic theories of difference, and psychoanalytic practice. The
collection documents Chodorow's twenty-year dialogue with psy-
choanalysis. For her, psychoanalysis is first and foremost a theory of
the construction of heterosexuality-of femininity and masculinity
as they are conventionally understood. For others, psychoanalysis
has been a theory of childhood sexuality, or a theory about the
operations of the unconscious, or a theory about psychic structure-
the economy of id, ego, and superego. But what Chodorow credits
to Freud is providing "an account of the genesis of psychological
aspects of gender and sexuality in their social context" (170). Her
readings of Freud redirect attention from the body-its anatomy
and drives-to perceptions about the self in relation to other selves.
The chapters take up various aspects of the difference gender
makes in psychoanalytic theory and practice: the professional
debate, for example, about boys' and girls' perceptions of their
genitals; the problem of asymmetrical cross-gender countertrans-
ference (the way male analysts may be "less likely to recognize

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 Spring 1991 / SIGNS

maternal transference [from older women patients] whereas they

easily recognize an erotic transference from a younger woman"
[183]); the intellectual differences among feminist psychoanalytic
theorists-Jean Baker Miller, Jane Flax, Jessica Benjamin-or be-
tween object-relations theorists and Lacanians. Her writing in
these essays is exemplary social science writing (unlike her con-
gested Reproduction of Mothering). It has the strange colorlessness
of all social science writing, but there is a satisfying accuracy in the
verbs positioning the ideas, indicating the relations among them.
There is no backing off from what she has to say, no wasted motion,
no feints or hedging. Her quiet clarity is comforting.
Feminists with more activist political orientations tend to get
irritated by what they consider to be "trivial" about psychoanalytic
approaches. Why study middle-class constructs such as individual-
ism, selfhood, relationships, or family dynamics rather than the
material facts of life, the brute forces that dominate the lives of the
disenfranchised: poverty, racism, and the unequal distribution of
power? Why read about Freud and object-relations theory when
real problems stalk the earth?
The reason is that the family is where one first experiences
social relations based on negotiated power; one's earliest political
realities are family power struggles. By exploring the primal
experience of growing up in a family, psychoanalytic theory can
account for the construction and "tenacity of people's commitment
to our social organization of sex and gender" (171), how a culturally
constructed sex/gender system takes hold in the unconscious,
showing itself in intractable emotional responses or retrograde
erotic fantasies that no amount of rational analysis can eradicate.
Chodorow has also come in for criticism, along with other white
middle-class academics of her generation, for "essentializing" the
experience of women-for not taking into account the ways in
which class, race, and ethnicity complicate models of difference
and for not facing up to the problem of theorizing about "Woman"
in a world with an astounding variety of women. In her introduction
to this collection, Chodorow indirectly responds to this charge by
noting that her early work reflects her "early training as a culture
and personality anthropologist" (15) (evident in references to
family structure in India, Kenya, Java, Atjeh [Indonesia], and
Morocco). On the other hand, she herself acknowledges that this
early work reflects "the early feminist search for universals and
single-cause theories of male dominance" (14-15).
In Chodorow's last chapter, "Seventies Questions for Thirties
Women," these political issues take an unexpected turn. Reading
the results of a study Chodorow began in 1984 in which she

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Book Reviews

interviewed leading women in the first generation of analysts, on

begins to see how the commitment of the "seventies" generation o
feminists to social change made the crucial difference in reinte
preting Freud. Asking "thirties" women how they felt about su
Freudian concepts as "penis envy," or why they thought so ma
women went into the psychoanalytic profession, Chodorow learned
that this earlier generation of women analysts believed that
gender differences they perceived were natural, innate, and immu
table. They did not challenge the gendered division of labor in
family or investigate the perpetuation of male-dominant soc
organization. Interested in reconstructing gender relations, n
simply fine-tuning them to the existing society, Chodorow saw th
implications for social change in Freud's theory of how the psycho
logical is constructed by the social. If the social arrangements t
relegated all child rearing to women could be altered, the psych
logical processes creating gender identity as we know it, she
suggested, might also be altered.
Formatted as questions and answers so as to present the re
sponses of pioneering women psychoanalysts in their own wor
this chapter also makes the point that gender was not so salient
that earlier generation of women as to Chodorow's own. For
thing, quite a number of women participated in the early psyc
analytic movement relative to other professional circles, and th
gave it a more egalitarian feel. Then, too, Europeans accept
intellectual women as intellectuals; it was not until they came
the United States that they were dismissed as women. Severa
her respondents remarked that "they did not notice the phallocen
tricism of the theory until they were in the context of a sex
culture" (210). Chodorow also conjectures that other social
categorizations-such as that of European Jew in the context of
World War II-made gender less significant in these women's lives.
The recognition that gender is not always the dominant identity
factor in relation to other social factors is a significant move in
feminist theory at present because it creates the conceptual space to
examine the intersections of gender with other social factors such as
race or class.
While Chodorow's essays document her feminist interrogation
of psychoanalytic theory and practice over the past twenty years,
Jane Flax's book examines the work of about a dozen theorists-
including Chodorow-who together constitute the postmodern
critique of Enlightenment subjectivity and epistemology. Accord-
ing to Flax, the collapse of Enlightenment certainties about the
nature of personhood, rational and irrational sources of knowledge,
objectivity, and the uses of instrumental reason have left a gulf, into

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 Spring 1991 / SIGNS

which have rushed the waters of feminist theory, psychoanalytic

theory, and postmodern philosophy. Each of these streams has its
tributaries, Flax explains. Economic determinism, structural an-
thropology, and psychological theory supply feminist theory; psy-
choanalysis, since its source in Freud, has been fed by Winnicott
and Lacan; the wellsprings of postmodernism are to be found in
Derrida, Foucault, and, according to Flax, Lyotard and Rorty.
With diagrammatic clarity Flax details the contributions and
blind spots of these schools of thought. She wants practitioners
within each movement to pay attention to the others. She thinks
each orientation to reality insufficient by itself; each "unwittingly
provides reasons for and proof of the inadequacy of some of the
ideas it posits but cannot abandon" (225). Keenly aware of ambigu-
ity and contradiction, Flax is best known for having written about
one of the central ambiguities to evolve from Chodorow's paradigm
of the reproduction of mothering: the conflict between nurturance
and autonomy in mother-daughter relationships. Thinking Frag-
ments (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1989) explains why psychoanalysis needs to take seriously the
realpolitik of gender-"the social origins of gender and gender-
based asymmetries of power" (105)-and why postmodern philos-
ophers (all white men, in her account) need to add the feminist
story line to their cultural narratives and women subjects to their
concepts of subjectivity before they "destabilize" the concept of
personhood. She asks feminists to recognize the profound change
in the philosophical bases of life in this postmodern era, the radical
uncertainty of what we know, the failure of rationality to increase
power, and the insufficiency of knowledge to bring greater freedom
or greater happiness.
Despite Flax's brilliant analysis of male bias in psychoanalytic
thought, this is in many ways a depressing book-another feminist
theorist paying respect to an intellectual establishment that re-
mains oblivious to feminist insight. Another feminist drawn off
course by the siren song of postmodern ambiguity, abandoning the
project of understanding how gender itself is constructed and how
it might be re-constructed.
Refiguring the Father, edited by Patricia Yaeger and Beth
Kowaleski-Wallace, is a collection of essays committed to the
combined feminist, psychoanalytic, and postmodernist methodol-
ogy that Flax recommends. A set of literary readings about the
representation of the father in texts from Euripides' Hippolytos to
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, this anthology draws heavily on
psychoanalytic and postmodern formulations to complicate femi-
nism's relation to the father. The introduction announces that it is

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Book Reviews

time to stop homogenizing all fathers as "the patriarchy" and to sto

automatically identifying the father with disembodied authority
the law, the "gaze," the power that exchanges and represents women
and appropriates their sexual services to reproduce itself. We nee
to dismantle these formulations, say the editors, and to "invoke the
father's self-division and plurality" (xv). It should be added that we
need to compare these theoretical formulations to lived experience.
Indeed, Nancy Miller's afterword does just that, with its hilariou
(and familiar) evocation of her father in his string pajamas.
It is high time to particularize the way in which fathers have
been represented in our literary tradition, to analyze them with
more complicated grid, to work out the complexities of "authority,"
"the law," "the symbolic," and to ask how the category of the
paternal has been constituted by women. Adrienne Munich's "Law
of the Mother," for example, points out that Virgil portrays Aeneas's
father, Anchises, as a burden, while his mother, the immortal Venus,
with an anti-Oedipal gesture, seduces Vulcan so that he will forg
arms for her son. Gwin Montrose foregrounds the feminine within
the father by showing how Faulkner takes the daughter's subjec
position and thus is both father and daughter of his text.
Once feminists would have argued that it was counterproductive
to study the father. Wasn't the whole Western tradition already
about fathers? Wasn't it the feminist intellectual's task to fill in the
experiences, perceptions, and contributions of women? Yet so long
as fathers figure in women's lives, they need to be part of that
analysis. Fathers are definitely on the feminist intellectual agenda
just now. Last year another anthology on the subject was published,
containing a number of excellent essays.1
Not all the essays in Refiguring the Father are about fathers and
daughters, however; a number are about fathers and sons. In fact,
this collection represents a somewhat new mood in academic
feminism with regard to male participation, printing essays by male
scholars and treating male themes. Heather Hathaway's "Maybe
Freedom Lies in Hating," for example, treats white father/mulatto
son relations in the fiction of Charles Chesnutt and Langston
Hughes. Nancy Sorkin Robinowitz reads Hippolytos as a text in
which the mother is destroyed and the son is reunited with a loved
father. Joseph Boone scrutinizes certain feminist contentions about
Absalom, Absalom! and concludes that the Oedipal male is "a
vulnerable man caught in the middle of a story that he has indeed
helped create but cannot control" (232).

1 Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

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 Spring 1991 / SIGNS

If
If Nancy
NancyChodorow
Chodorowdemonstrated
demonstrated thethe
centrality
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directing
directing
us tousexamine
to examine
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Toward
Toward aaFeminist
FeministTheory
Theoryof of
thethe
State.
State.
By CATHARINE
By CATHARINE
A. MACKINNON.
A. MACKINNON.
Cambridge,
Cambridge,
Mass.:
Mass.: Harvard
HarvardUniversity
UniversityPress,
Press,
1989.
1989.

Justice
Justice and
andGender.
Gender.ByBy
DEBORAH
DEBORAH
L. RHODE.
L. RHODE.
Cambridge,
Cambridge,
Mass.:Mass.:
Harvard
Harvard
University
University
Press, Press,
1989.

Carrie Menkel-Meadow, University of California, Los Angeles

How has law constructed "woman"? How has feminism changed

law? What contributions have legal feminism made to political
feminism and to feminist theory? Is a feminist theory of the state or
its rules of law possible? The authors of these books on legal
feminism take on these important questions, if somewhat obliquely.
MacKinnon's answers are crisp, radical, elegant, and eloquent, if
also dated, essentialist, and somewhat unsatisfying. Rhode's an-
swers are more textured, socially situated, contingent, measured,
and also somewhat unsatisfying. Read as historical documents,
these books capture both the exciting new theories (sexual harass-
ment, civil rights approaches to pornography) and the old ap-
proaches ("formal" versus "special" equality, the Equal Rights
Amendment) that have fueled the second wave of feminism in its
legal forms. But read as efforts to provide an organizing theoretical
structure for the role of law in modern feminism, both books fail to
transcend the current impasses in feminist legal theory.

603

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