Reading The Silences Within Critical Feminist Theory

Abstract

This paper reviews the literature produced on gender and critical literacy, particularly research which has drawn on Kristeva's (1986) three tier model of women's work to inform critical feminist literacy curriculum. It examines the strengths and limitations (silences) in this literature, and then proposes an alternative reading of Kristeva which draws on the work of postcolonial theorists. A postcolonial interpretation of Kristeva's (1986) theory of how the sign or representation of `woman' is constructed enables an analysis of the `difference' within the category `woman' not only the relational `difference' symbolically constructed between `man' and `woman'. Kristeva (1986) proposes that in the space of the postmodern nation, such as Australia, symbolic representation in the form of the sign of `woman' is constituted in and through three temporal relations. Kristeva's three temporal relations can be described as: (1) Monumental time (eternity), (2) Cyclic time, and (3) Linear or cursive time. From this perspective, the present of women's time (monumental, cyclical and linear) is a zone of representational instability. That is, the representation of women in and through the sign `woman' becomes the site of continual challenge and reconstruction. It is from this instability of cultural signification that the literary canon comes to be articulated as a dialectic of various temporalities - modern, colonial, postcolonial, feminist, post feminist, poststructural feminism(s), `native', traditional - that cannot be a knowledge that is stablized in enunciation. In this time, `woman' does not signify the female body as an a priori historical presence, a discursive object; but a discursive subject constructed in the performance of the narrative.