To provide a context for what follows, I will first narrativize the broad intellectual paradigms that my stretch of feminism has involved—paradigms that do not rely on that of motherhood, which Roof claims dominates feminist herstories. Feminism was originally a modernist movement. Indeed, 60s-80s feminisms arguably represented the last gasp of socialist modernity's challenges to the capitalist dominant. Feminist challenges probably succeeded because modernity was already becoming postmodernity, with its attendent transnational capitalism, insistence of the market, globalization, computerization, the end of coloniality and the increase in diasporic communities. The start of the cyber-age through imaging technologies, the internet, the worldwide web, and yet newer processes, will bring changes to feminisms, the extent of which are not yet known. Impacts of postmodernism on gender, race, and class—on what we knew as liberal political traditions—are also not yet known. In a sense, feminists have moved from the social politics of modernism to a crisis in political activism itself. What can activism mean in a world where larger oppositional formations are no there to longer support the local levels of resistance? Feminists must continue such local resistances—indeed, they become more vital than ever. But we must also seek ways to forge links /pp. 5-6/ across local actions. Finally, the impact of global finance and the cyber-age on the university is as yet unclear, although feminists certainly know that the university is under severe attack and will change drastically in the very near future.

None of the women at the "Feminism Beside Itself" Conference who were of the same cultural or numerical generation necessarily thought alike or shared paradigms. But still my use of postmodern or Queer theory differs from the way it would be used by a 28 year old. For I have been arguing that the having-done-this-ness of women who have been involved in various phases and aspects of feminisms for 30 years is a different place to speak from than that of a 28 year-old. The residue of the experiences remains and is never totally written over.

But why do some 28 year-olds (like Rene Denfield, discussed below) actually see the problem in terms of generation? What is at stake for them in using this word? Does the personal framing of the term "generation" in this case point to differences between a politics of the free individual subject, and a politics of how institutions and historical periods construct certain subject-positions? How much is the debate really between academic feminisms and other career women who feel excluded from academic discourse and academic debates?

As a partial answer, let me note that first and second wave feminists (at least in my mapping) have both the personal/longitudinal (age) axis and the generational one. Young women largely just have the latter. It is less confusing for them, since they have not had the experience of passing-through-ness that I've alluded to. Things appear as simply generational: we had the 60s, they didn't; they have raced, queered, scienced and cyborged theory, we didn't. The anxieties, therefore, have to be different.

/pp. 6-7/

There's no doubt that the US is experiencing a continuing backlash against "feminism" in the public cultural terrain. My quotation marks around "feminism" indicate that what is being attacked from outside the academy is clearly a fantasy of a feminist monolith, a set of myths and images that backlashers take for "true." Witness the review of yet another anti- "feminism" book in The New York Times Sunday March 19, 1995, this time by Rene Denfeld, who moves in on Katie Roiphe's coattails and calls feminists the "new victorians." What's interesting is that the reviewer, Michelle Green of People Magazine, situates the book confidently within a generational discourse: her first line notes that Denfeld is 28 years old and a "bold writer" who "fueled by good sense and righteous anger... has taken on the feminist establishment in a book sure to provoke her radical foremothers." Like others of her generation, the reviewer continues, "she is impatient with the women's movement and appalled by extremists who neglect real-life issues in favor of bashing men, worshiping the Goddess, battling porn-mongers and denouncing heterosexuality...." The /pp. 7-8/ reviewer concludes that like Naomi Wolf, Denfeld is weary of women being cast as "maidens in distress." They want reforms and social change that will put women on an equal footing with men," and the reviewer says "that will not happen until her generation reclaims feminism."

Something is seriously wrong when such stale views, such worn statements, are taken as valid by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. The list of accusations describes no feminist communities I know today, if they ever existed (and if they did, it would have been between 1965 and 1970—something that gives this new discourse such a curious archaic feel). I am appalled by an implicit ageist ideology that the term "foremothers" connotes: the term relegates first and second generation feminists to some fixed past place, where they are frozen in their texts. In reality, most first and second wave feminists are still growing, developing their ideas, and using their knowledge to understand changes taking place today.2 2

See Betty Friedan's The Fountain of Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993) for evidence both of ageist assumptions in American culture generally, and for an example of a first wave feminist still growing and changing as she advocates our developing a new concept of aging.

What does it mean, then, that such stale fictions of generational splits continue to proliferate in the high-culture sphere that The New York Times represents? What are the anxieties underlying the construction of such generational polarities? What ends does this old discourse serve?

/pp. 8-9/

One end (and an anxiety) is an attack on lesbian feminism. The fact that lesbian women are finally getting some of their needs and rights articulated is making many women anxious. The backlash seems to be primarily against lesbians, and lesbians, for some reason, are associated with "feminist foremothers," as if all "foremothers" were lesbians. This is strange, since while there certainly were activist feminist lesbian foremothers (e.g. Andrea Dworkin), many of the most public of early feminists (Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan) were clearly heterosexual. And it is many of the younger women, like Catherine McKinnon (perhaps the most public of lesbian legal activists) and Kimberly Crenshaw who are dominant in the public sphere today. Why the creation of straw women against whom to rail? Why the assumption that foremother lesbian feminists have remained unchanged by all that has happened since 1960? Lesbianism is evidently still something that scares some straight women, although I do not fully understand the deep underlying causes for this reaction. Many glib psychoanalytic answers come to mind, but these are not sufficient.

A second end is that railing against "foremothers" hides a difference I noted earlier: namely that between an ideology of free individuals who can bring about change for their personal fulfillment; and an ideology that links women's oppressions to larger thought-systems and capitalist economic determinism. We are dealing with an attack on socialist or oppositional feminists. Barbara Johnson was probably right when she noted that what women like Roiphe and Hoff Sommers see as "feminist" is the liberation of the individual woman, subject of agency. Neither see feminism as a systematic critique of institutions; indeed, they consider the critique of systems itself as limiting women's possibilities. That is, if you start out with a concept of the "free female subject," a theory of institutional (or, I would add, psychoanalytic) constraints seems like something that is limiting. The critique of patriarchy by some feminists appears to construct victims, passivity, instead of being seen as explaining and accounting for certain observable feminine constructs. Roiphe and Hoff Sommers do not see that /pp. 9-10/ claiming victimhood can be empowering, as Johnson suggests it can be.3 3

Mentioned in a paper on feminism at the Modern Language Association in San Diego, December 29 1995.

This theoretical gulf seems unbridgeable. It's improbable that an understanding between the groups can be reached. What the debates highlight is how most generalizations about any monolithic "feminism" are bound to be made from a very specific location, cultural/intellectual context, and historical moment—none of which are articulated in books by people like Roiphe, Hoff Sommers, and Denfeld or by reviewers like Michelle Green, who lack any awareness of what shapes their perspectives. Meanwhile, many of us within the academy have painfully had to become aware of the blinders on our perspectives and to recognize that our perspectives have performative aspects that we need to develop.

A second painful example of this backlash outside the academy is William Buckley's November 1994 Firing Line program. The thesis to be debated was "That the Women's Movement Has been Disastrous" and women from different generations and political positions were deliberately invited. The women defending the thesis (Arlene Huffington was one) came across as glamourous (given prevailing norms and social codes) while those opposing it were less obviously so. And the ensuing debates provided one with the spectator sport of angry women throwing insults back and forth. Since little clarity emerged from the highly charged language, spectators may have been left to take sides on the flimsy ground of superficial televisual appearance.

In all of these four examples, what emerges is that backlashers have confused three different areas of feminism: namely, Feminism as Personal Growth (gaining independence, autonomy, sexual and intellectual self-fulfillment); Feminism as Political Activism (to change laws and policies affecting women); Feminism as Scholarship (developing new /pp. 10-11/ interdisciplinary insights through taking up female perspectives and topics). This confusion underlies much of the impetus of the backlash. The backlashers do not clearly distinguish the three separate but equal feminist terrains outlined.

It is true that first generation feminists did have slogans like "the personal is political," and did strive to link activism and the classroom. Such linking made sense at the time (1960s-70s), when many of the people engaged in activist movements were also dramatically altering their personal lives and were pioneering feminist scholarship and teaching. Since the same women were involved in all three feminist projects, it made sense to make up a slogan that described their intricate links.

Today's public feminists are not part of the political movements that shaped 60s-70s feminisms. They did not experience the ways in which institutions limited women's possibilities, because first and second wave feminists have opened society up and created awareness of ways in which women were marginalized and debased. 70s feminist movements have produced a situation such that younger women no longer experience so strongly the constraints that gave rise to theories that emerged from activism. Here is where Age matters: Today's public feminists focus on personal growth and individual achievement, and this masks the larger forces that still oppress the lives of many less fortunate women. Young white middle- class women were not around when such oppressions were painfully in place for their group. They attack academic feminists, because they do not understand how theory or scholarship works. They want a certain kind of activism—one that serves their personal, individual needs (abortion reform; child care), because they do not have any larger institutional or political theory. They do not see a need to think about other communities of women or to work for needs other than those of their own group.

/pp. 11-12/

As I noted earlier, the anxieties briefly outlined are closely linked with broad changes within the academy. For instance, at my institution, efforts to initiate a Cultural Studies Ph.D. program were viewed—not entirely wrongly—as endangering Women's Studies. While I would hope that any Cultural Studies program would be heavily committed to gender studies, the kind of concentrated research on women's issues clearly would not be viable within Cultural Studies. In the best of all worlds, with no limits on resources, Cultural Studies would work closely with other interdisciplinary programs, like Women's Studies. Then there is the question of whether Lesbian/Gay Studies should be constituted as a separate entity from Women's Studies. To what extent do Lesbian/Gay Studies compete with Women's Studies?

As the university itself comes under attack, and as political forces having little to do directly with feminisms are changing the university, demanding that it become economically self-sufficient in many cases, so faculty are being forced to rethink disciplinary organization not primarily from the point of view of what the best organization of knowledge would be. But from the point of view of downsizing and efficiency. We face demands for cutting out administrators, eliminating course release, and doing away with graduate and other assistants. This could be turned to the benefit of Women's Studies, but it could also result in pressures to link Women's Studies with other new studies, like Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, to which, of course, Women's Studies is often relevant.

There is the further issue of the degree to which specifically marked focus on women/gender is necessary. For /pp. 14-15/ example, in Film Studies, feminist perspectives were so powerful in the 80s that they now permeate almost all the work, as increasingly does the category of race. Does this mean that flagging specifically feminist perspectives is no longer necessary? Or are such moves attempts at coopting Women's Studies and "taming" feminisms into something else? Is there any validity to notions that feminism accomplished a paradigm shift such that from now on the category "woman" has entered all scholarly domains as an available topic for research? Is the paradigm shift over, as Kuhn would argue, precisely because administrations are beginning to question what the paradigm has yet to contribute?