Male Pro-Feminism and the Masculinist Gigantism of Gravity's Rainbow

[Dave Monroe]

This article appeared in the May 1996 issue of Postmodern Culture and
is still archived at PMC. If you would like to know why I reposted it
at this site, go here.

Copyright (c) 1996 Wes Chapman

Male Pro-Feminism and the Masculinist Gigantism of Gravity's Rainbow
Wes Chapman
Illinois Wesleyan University
P.O. Box 2900
Bloomington, IL 61702-2900
wchapman at titan.iwu.edu


The title of Tania Modleski's Feminism Without Women refers, Modleski
explains, to a confluence of two political/intellectual trends: the
subsumption of feminism within a "more comprehensive" field of gender
studies, accompanied by the rise of a "male feminist perspective that
excludes women," and the dominance within feminist thought of an
"anti-essentialism so radical that every use of the term 'woman,'
however 'provisionally' it is adopted, is disallowed" (14-15). The two
trends are linked, Modleski argues, because "the rise of gender
studies is linked to, and often depends for its justification on, the
tendendency within poststructuralist thought to dispute notions of
identity and the subject" (15). These trends are troubling for
Modleski because she fears that, insofar as gender studies tend to
decenter women as the subjects of feminism, they may be not a "new
phase" in feminism but rather feminism's "phase-out" (5).

My concern in this essay is with male-authored work on gender of the
type identified by Modleski, and in particular with its intersections
with anti-essentialism...

http://titan.iwu.edu/~wchapman/pynchon.html