Abstract
We began working on this project after visiting our respective “homes” in Lynchburg, Virginia and Bombay, India in the fall of 1984—visits fraught with conflict, loss, memories, and desires we both considered to be of central importance in thinking about our relationship to feminist politics. In spite of significant differences in our personal histories and academic backgrounds, and the displacements we both experience, the political and intellectual positions we share made it possible for us to work on, indeed to write, this essay together. Our separate readings of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s autobiographical narrative entitled “Identity: Skin Blood Heart” became the occasion for thinking through and developing more precisely some of the ideas about feminist theory and politics that have occupied us. We are interested in the configuration of home, identity, and community; more specifically, in the power and appeal of “home” as a concept and a desire, its occurrence as metaphor in feminist writings, and its challenging presence in the rhetoric of the New Right.
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Notes
Zillah Eisenstein, Feminism and Sexual Equality ( New York: Monthly Review, 1984 ).
See, for example, Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century” and Barbara Smith’s introduction in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1984)
Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years ( Boston: South End Press, 1984 ).
For incisive and insistent analyses of the uses and limitations of deconstructive and poststructuralist analytic strategies for feminist intellectual and political projects, see in particular the work of Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)
Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985 ).
This notion of a female “true self” underlying a male-imposed “false consciousness” is evident in the work of cultural feminists such as
Mary Daly, Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978);
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975 );
Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her ( New York: Harper and Row, 1978 )
Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence ( New York: Harper and Row, 1981 ).
See critiques of Brownmiller (1975) by Angela Davis (Women, Race, and Class [Boston: Doubleday, 1983])
Bell Hooks (Ain’t l a Woman: Black Women and Feminism [Boston; South End Press, 1981])
Jacqueline Dowd Hall (“The Mind That Burns in Each Body: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983], pp. 328–49).
For a discussion of the relevance of Foucault’s reconceptualization of power to feminist theorizing, see Biddy Martin, “Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault,” New German Critique, no. 27 (1982), pp. 3–30.
For a historical account of the situation of lesbians and attitudes toward lesbianism in NOW, see Sidney Abbot and Barbara Love, Sappho Was A Right On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism ( New York: Stein and Day, 1972 ).
For writings that address the construction of colonial discourse, see Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question—the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen 24 (November-December 1983): 18–36;
Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks ( London: Paladin, 1970 );
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1965 );
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” forthcoming in boundary 2 (1985);
Edward Said, Orientalism ( New York: Vintage, 1979 );
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” Yale French Studies, no. 62 (1981), pp. 154–84.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1 ( New York: Vintage, 1980 ).
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Martin, B., Mohanty, C.T. (1986). Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?. In: de Lauretis, T. (eds) Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18997-7_12
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