In her talk, Toril Moi reflects over why there was a sudden ebb and disinterest in the history of feminist theory towards theorising women’s writing; in other words, she investigates the sudden lack of interest by feminist theoreticians in their enterprise to evolving a feminist aesthetics of literature by women.

Even as theorists like Helene Cixous were breaking new ground with the idea of ecriture feminine or writing by women arguing that women ought to subvert literary paternity by evolving a style of their own, by writing their bodies, which would make their work distinct from those of men and would also mean putting into practice an assertion of an aesthetic self, occupying a subject position as autonomous creator of the text and breaking away from the accepted and expected nature of writing, the literary and philosophical scene saw the emergence of thinkers like Roland Barthes and his famous proclamation of the ‘Death of the Author’, Jacques Derrida and his theory of Deconstruction and Michel Foucault and his notion of discursively constituted subjectivities. All these theories sent out a sense of a fragmented reality, privileging the reader in the meaning-making process, presenting all texts as open-ended discursive fields of enquiry and undermining the position and the agency of the author which also, in a way dealt a blow to the feminist politics of emphasis on authorial autonomy and subjectivity which was pivotal to feminist aesthetics.

This was followed by Judith Butler’s revolutionary work Gender Trouble which took the world of humanities by storm. It challenged the very categories of gender: man and woman as mutually exclusive and opposite. It looked at gender as fluid and presented the visual metaphor of the gender spectrum rather than the gender binary. In other words, Butler was trying to say that gender is not biological, gender is cultural and in this she resonated Simone de Beauvoir’s famous position : One is not born but becomes a woman’. However Butler took it to the next level arguing that even sex is not biological and is a cultural phenomenon since we access our sexed beings and sexual identities through language. We are assigned a sex at birth and endeavour to conform to and perform a gender corresponding to the assigned sex label throughout our life. She was thus challenging and deconstructing the very fundamentals of biology and culture. Thus though Butler and Beauvoir may have had underlying commonalities in their theories, their point of departure was in how each saw the body. While Beauvoir saw the body as a mediator through which we access our self and assert our subjectivity and specificity which she called ‘situation’, Butler regards the body as an assimilation and conglomeration of discursivities, a dynamic, shifting, unstable field on and through which various ideologies intersect, anchor themselves and play out.

Regardless of whatever their differences may be, the way this impacted women’s writing was that whenever one would talk about men and women or refer to the term ‘women’ they would do so with the consciousness and the awareness that they might be regarded as not having understood the dynamic and ever shifting nature of gender in the light of which the stable categories of man and woman stand completely refuted. Butler also never dwelt on the area of women’s writing and understandably so, since she was not a literary critic. Her theory however hugely influenced the literary world and feminist theory in particular which started shying away from its engagement with women’s texts and the project of feminist aesthetics and poetics of literature by women.

Also, trying to theorise writing by women as a whole, for some feminist thinkers implied an attempt to homogenise works by women authors and come up with some essential features of women’s writing which they argued was precisely how patriarchal literary presumptions of women’s writing worked. On the other hand, feminists like Nancy Miller argued that feminist theorists should not give up on the project of analysing women’s writings and evolving a feminist aesthetics as this would be a great disservice to all the writings of women authors done so far as they would be engulfed by the overwhelming male literary canon and fade into obscurity. Thinkers like Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak also came up with the idea of strategic essentialism arguing that practice needs to be privileged over theory. But on the whole can we deny the significance of theory and its relevance to any field. After all what is theory if not a process of thinking through and making more comprehensible a concept that poses as a difficult terrain. Theory articulates, elaborates and simplifies and in fact paves the way to practice. It also reflects on practices and material realities thus creating a springboard for further practices to be launched.

On the whole, there has been a dip in the interest in the area of aestheticizing women’s writing though some committed theoreticians continue to dedicate themselves in this area. There is a journal brought out by Oxford University Press called Contemporary Writing by Women which is expressly dedicated to this purpose.