The point of this presentation is merely to offer an outline of the interrelations of feminism and cultural studies.

The first part is to elaborate on where the two overlap in their means and research areas, which is to be followed by the insight in some points of divergence, ending with some more general questions about the feminist analysis of culture. Both feminism and cultural studies have complicated and contradictory histories, inside and outside the academy. It would be impossible to map out a comprehensive outline of these developments here; however, it is important to highlight some of the key issues in these developments. Both women's studies and cultural studies have in common a strong link to radical politics outside the academy, having their academic agendas informed by, or linked to the feminist movement and left politics respectively. So, for instance, the interdisciplinary basis of each subject has produced consistent and important challenges to conventional academic boundaries and power structures, making shared the analysis of forms of power and oppression, and well as the politics of the production of knowledge within the academy, as well as elsewhere in society the shared focus. Similarly, both feminism and cultural studies have attempted to challenge some of the conventions of academic practice, such as introducing collective, rather than individual work, encouraging greater student participation in syllabus construction and opening up spaces for connections to be made between personal experience and theoretical questions. When it comes to feminism, it is of utmost importance to briefly mention the efforts taken to form a whole new academic subject of womens studies. Women studies have had a long and rather striving way up establishing an institutional base for feminism, and yet they managed to establish a space within educational institutions from which to document, analyze and theorize the position of women in society. Early interventions by feminists in the academy were mostly concerned with the absence of attention to gender within existing theories and debates. Challenging existing academic knowledges, feminists convinced that the 'personal was political' have introduced new issues such as male violence, sexuality and reproduction into the academic arena.These topics, amongst others, became subjects of study in their own right in sociology, anthropology, history and literature, as well as within women's studies. In addition, the shift, from interest in issues concerning ideology and hegemony to those concerning identity and subjectivity can be partly attributed to feminist interventions. Alongside the documenting of women's oppression which occurred across a broad range of disciplines, feminists began to develop generalized theories to explain how and why women are oppressed. So, for instance, some feminists took on already existing social theory to formulate generalized accounts of women's oppression; so, for example, feminists have extended existing Marxist

theories of the exploitation of labour within capitalism to look at women's position in paid employment. Others, on the other hand believes the basis of women's subordination to be located outside class relations, and have developed theories of patriarchy as a relatively separate system of exploitation. However, one of the key debates in the latter is the extent to women are universally subordinated, which emphasizes the effects of issues such as colonialization, imperialism and capital accumulation. Therefore, whereas early feminist theory tended to emphasize the commonalities of women's oppression, in order to establish that male domination was systematic and affected all areas of women's lives, the second wave of feminism emphasizes differences based on ethnic identity, nationality, class and sexuality as highly important within feminist work, questioning the collective 'we' of feminism. Thus, the feminists challenge is to be able to hold hold on to certain commonalities in women's position in relation to oppressive patriarchal social structures, without denying the very real differences between women and the resulting specificities in the forms of their oppression. As a result of this, feminism drew its impetus drew its impetus from areas of academic theorizing which had a significant impact on feminist thought, namely, poststructuralism and postmodemism and their theories of ideology, subjectivity, discourse and sexual difference, as well as psychoanalysis asserting the disruptive nature of the unconscious to any coherent, unified identity, undermined some of the foundational assumptions of feminist analysis. On the other hand, cultural studies has been a major site of developments within theories of cultural production, and more recently, cultural consumption. As such, it influenced many strands. So, for example, cultural studies has been a particularly important site of developments within Marxist theory which attempts to leave behind the limits of economic determinism, and an over-emphasis on the mode of production as the key contradiction within society in that it was central to the development of analyses which take the cultural dimensions of power and inequality seriously (for example, in the study of literature, Marxist cultural theorists challenged bourgeois notions of the literary, and the limited understandings of 'culture' prevalent in that academic subject). On the other hand, its recent developments have been strongly influenced by many theorists. For instance, it drew on the work of Foucault and his notion of discourse, which came as a great help in exploring the cultural aspects of the reproduction of inequality and proposed an understanding of the subject produced through the discourses of 'self'-knowledge, developed through the construction of social categories such as madness, discipline and sexuality. Moreover, it started examining the importance of the unconscious in the formation of identity, calling the previous unified subject into question, which means that subject was now seen as unstable, complex and heterogeneous and questioning the role of desire, pleasure and

fantasy in the process of cultural construction of subjects, the notions taken from the theory of psychoanalysis, Lacan primarily. In addition to this, cultural studies were also influenced by the emergence of postmodernism and its challenges to conventional understandings of the standpoint of the knowing subject and the traditional object of knowledge, which emphasizes the increasing instability and complexity of contemporary cultural processes. Furthermore, changes within left politics have also had an effect on the kinds of political questions taken seriously within cultural studies; what has been seen as a crisis in left politics had led to a rethinking of political strategies, allegiances and agendas by some on the left. When it comes to some points of convergence between cultural studies and feminism, it is important to mention some of the following things. First, theoretically both are concerned with analyzing the forms and operations of power and inequality, and take as an integral part of such operations the production of knowledge itself. Second, to some extent, each has drawn on critical insights from discourse theory, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, semiology and deconstructionism. Third, both have drawn on strands of critical theory which are seen to offer more sophisticated tools for analyzing the reproduction of social inequality, and relations of dominance and subordination at a cultural level. However, while these overlaps have produced possible points of convergence between feminism and cultural studies, there are also considerable divergences in interest which suggest a rather different ordering of priorities within feminism and cultural studies. Drawing attention to the ways in which they and the traditions of thought which produced them were gender-blind, there is now caution about the use of concepts such as discourse, deconstruction and difference. Besides this, although feminism has influenced cultural studies, there are limits to this influence which are important for what they reveal about the uneven interaction between the two fields. Perhaps one of the clearest indicators of the limits to this influence is provided by the lack of interest within cultural studies in the developments in feminist theories of gender inequality; so, for example, the models of culture employed within cultural studies have remained largely uninformed by feminist theories of patriarchy, which has produced a number of problems for feminists working in cultural studies. Many of the reasons why the influence of feminism on cultural studies has been limited can be traced back to some of the more general understandings of culture employed within cultural studies. For example, feminism has been successful in shifting away from Marxist economic determinism by disputing the Marxist conception of the economic, in so far as it is seen to be based on the industrial mode of production associated with capitalism, and to naturalize the sexual division of labour. However, the appropriation and development of these models within cultural studies did little to counter the marginalization of issues of importance to feminism.

Another powerful model of culture which has been developed in cultural studies has its origins in structuralism, a model with two principal strands, deriving from social anthropology (Levi.Strauss) and linguistics (Saussure). By constructing the sexual division of labour and sexual difference as a priori constants, the first model of structuralism reifies patriarchal dominance as a 'natural fact'. The problem for feminists, therefore, is that this model of culture takes for granted precisely what feminism is most concerned to explain. On the other hand, the second model proposed a structuralist analysis of sign, in which meaning is understood to be produced through the play of difference and is relational (produced in relation to other signs) rather than referential. However, while structuralism and poststructuralism have been important for feminists providing the analysis of contradictory meanings and identities, their use has often obscured the significance of power relations in the constitution of difference, such as patriarchal forms of domination and subordination. Nonetheless, deconstruction has been quite helpful both for cultural studies and feminism. Its analysis of culture as a text, as well as the ablity to locate the production, criticism and consumption of literary texts in the context of the non-literary 'texts' of patriarchal social relations, opened up an obvious space for more politicized readings of both the literary canon and what had been excluded from it. Likewise, the emphasis on how meanings are encoded into practices of cultural production and consumption opened up a whole range of radical rereadings of traditional subjects in both the humanities and the social sciences. For many feminists, however, who saw the control of women through their bodies as one of key issues, the body was not simply a text and this method may end up in objectification. Therefore, analyzing gender within the model of culture as a language' presents specific problems for feminists who have highlighted these objectifying practices within language itself. While feminists have turned to disciplines such as cultural studies for frameworks to analyze the cultural dimensions of gender inequality, and whilst the work of feminists has been influential in both challenging and reworking these frameworks, there remain substantial difficulties in defining what might be meant by specifically feminist understandings of culture. Ironically, this is true at a time when cultural issues are seen to be of growing importance to feminism. The power relations of pornography, abortion, male violence, technology and science as well as the economic aspects such as as paid work (where feminists have begun to uncover the ways in which the construction of gender-appropriate identities and subcultures helps to organize, for example, the hierarchies in internal labour markets and the nature of workplace activities) have increasingly come to be seen not only in terms of social institutions and practices, but also of symbolic meanings, the formation of identities and deeply-rooted belief systems. Indeed, cultural issues are so central to a wide variety of analyses of women's subordination that it might seem surprising that feminists have not developed general frameworks

within which the significance of cultural processes might be more fully realized. This results in a number of confusions. One example of the confusion which results from the implicit use of different understandings of culture is provided by the current debate about pornography. Some feminists see pornography as a process of signification or representation, ultimately irreducible to, and, to some extent, separate from social and economic relations. Pornographic images of women, then, are understood as the extreme articulation of the objectification of women at the representational level. The model of culture being drawn upon here is one which assumes that representations have a relative autonomy and are a mediated articulation of social practices. On the other hand, other feminists propose an understanding of pornography not as a representational form of patriarchal culture, but as its exemplary moment of expression: pornography reveals to us the truth about what men really think about women. In other words, it is seen as an expression of male sexual violence and as an integral part of violent practices against women. Here, culture is seen to parallel directly the social, and is derivative of the misogyny deeply embedded in patriarchal society. Thus, an analysis of pornography forces us to face and to challenge the full extent of misogyny in this society. Another important example of feminist work where the models of culture have not been foregrounded is the analysis of gender and objectification. Feminists who have emphasized the objectification of women in terms of commodity fetishism and the circulation of objects within capitalist relations of exchange often draw heavily on Marxist models of culture. Another perspective criticizes the voyeuristic and fetishistic construction of woman in visual images, and uses a psychoanalytic account of the cultural construction of gendered identities to explain and challenge the patriarchal pleasures offered by such processes of objectification. A third approach develops an analysis of the forms of female objectification through the construction of female sexuality in patriarchal culture, and points towards a feminist methodology which would challenge such objectification. However, there is another set of questions which arises out of the explicit use of radically heterogeneous understandings of the cultural, in which cultural criticism has come to mean a very wide variety of things within feminism. Some feminists working within women's studies have used more explicit models of culture drawn from the disciplines in which they are based. For example, feminist sociological theory tends to analyze the cultural as something distinct from the social, a differentiated sphere structured through specific institutions, such as the media, education and religion. Feminists working within anthropology, in which culture is the traditional object of study, have drawn upon a diverse set of frameworks and methods for cultural analysis, including detailed ethnographic accounts, crosscultural comparisons,

evolutionary and archaeological approaches, and linguistic studies. Culture is also studied within other disciplines, such as psychology, linguistics, literary criticism and history, through frameworks which are formulated in various ways in relation to the primary objective of study. Many of these approaches to the study of culture from the traditional disciplines have been borrowed by feminists in order to investigate the cultural dimensions of gender relations. The importance of theories of culture to feminism, then, arises from many different sources and for many different reasons. This concern arises both from the recognition of these problems and the desire to provide a set of terms for an analysis of culture which addresses the specificity of patriarchal power and suggests ways in which to challenge it. One of the primary aims in bringing together feminism and cultural studies, is to consider the significance within feminist theory and politics of questions concerning the cultural dimensions of gender inequality and patriarchal power. However, it seems that whilst feminists have gradually built up a complex picture of the operations of patriarchal culture, there has been less of an attempt to systematize generalized theories of these power relations. feminist cultural analysis would look like. However, the diversity and heterogeneity of contemporary feminist analyses of culture would suggest that such a project, while focused on a common set of themes, is not, and is unlikely ever to be, unified. The point of bringing together feminism and cultural studies is to approach the question of how to develop feminist cultural analysis. This important project can draw much that is of value from work within cultural studies. Yet, it must also take account of the shortcomings and limitations of the models of cultural analysis on offer within cultural studies. In turn, as it has already done, feminist analysis will likely serve, in their continuing shared project to challenge the existing conventions of producing and sharing knowledge, and to combine theoretical debate with strategies for change, as both a resource and a stimulus to cultural studies.