Confessing Feminist Theory:

What’s “I” Got to Do with It?

SUSAN DAVID BERNSTEIN

Confessional modes of self-representation have become crucial in feminist

epistemologies that broaden and contextualize the location and production of knowl-
edge. In some versions of confessionalfeminism, the insertion of “I” is reflective, the
poduct of an uncomplicated notion of experience that shuttles into academic dis-
course apersonal truth. Incontrast to reflective intrusions ofthe firstperson, reflexive
confessing is plimarily a questioning mode that Emposes self-vigilance on the process
of self positioning.

I. EMBATTLED
SUBJECTSOF PERSONAL DISCLOSURE

The eruption of first-person voices in critical discourse in recent years has

been neither limited to feminists nor to literary theory, although these are the
parameters that frame my interest here. For instance, the February 1991 issue
of Lingua Franca, the latest gossip sheet of academia, boasts on its front page
an article titled “True Confessions: Feminist Scholars in the First Person,”
which surveys a host of feminist academics who are doing confessional theory.
And Nancy Miller’s Getting P e r s d : Feminist Occasions and Other Autobio-
graphical Acts is an impressive reckoning of what she calls (and practices)
“personal criticism.”’ This new confessionalism marks a struggle between the
subject-r the subjective-ar the “personal”-and theory. In the wake of the
death and transfiguration of the author has dawned an increasing fascination
with the relationship between “I” and “it,” that is, theory in its various guises
as the intellectual, the ineluctably abstract, the antithesis of the “real” world
and the “personal.” Confessional feminism interests me not as a panacea for
the “alienating” distortions of theoretical discourse or for the disingenuous
stance of objective authority, but precisely for the way it dramatizes the struggle
between “I” and “it,” between rhetorical subjectivity and critical attention to
its very construction.
Hypatia vol. 7, no. 2 (Spring 1992) 0by Susan David Bernsrein
 Susan David Bernstein 121

One current example of personal scholarship is Patricia Williams’s Alchemy

of Race and Rights, a study of law that incorporates a variety of firsthand
disclosures. This “inside” perspective is registered on the jacket cover, which
sports, beneath a photo insert of the author, the caption “diary of a law
professor.” In the scene of academic writing, these first-person anecdotes
transgress disciplinary boundaries; although Williams is a law professor, the
back jacket copy promotes her book through the endorsements of two profes-
sors of literature.* Similarly, deploying the confessional mode raises questions
of genre and discourse. Williams’s book is both theoretical and autobiograph-
ical; it uses analytic, colloquial, and poetic discourses. Of her own project “to
write in my own voice,” Williams claims, rehearsing a chat with her sister over
her parents’ kitchen table, “I am trying to challenge the usual limits of
commercial discourse by using an intentionally double-voiced and relational,
rather than a traditionally legal black-letter, vocabulary” (Williams 1991, 6).
This discursive virtuosity--“double-voiced and relational”-has attracted a
range of designations including first-person theorizing, anecdotal individual-
ism, and the new personalism, written by the new subjectivists, all approxi-
mating what I label the confessional mode.
I prefer “confessional” to “autobiographical” or “personal” because of the
implication of transgression encoded in the first term. I am interested in the
intrusive “I” as a rhetorical event; this textual moment carries the capacity to
accentuate and overturn conventions of authority, particularly the pretense of
objectivity as an ideological cover for masculine privilege? Along with this
challenge to discursive authority and the motivated interests that inscribe it,
the confessional mode contests and redesigns what constitutes legitimate
“truth.” In this way, first-person theorizing has been crucial in feminist
epistemologies that seek to broaden and contextualize the location and con-
struction of knowledge. However, as confessional acts become more prevalent
across academic writing, so do they cease to confront the structuring of
authority and knowledge; this transgression of conventions instead becomes
the latest convention.
Although the confessional mode does offer politically transgressive possibil-
ities, its interrogative, even transformative, potential is often undermined by
critical neglect of the very categories it employs. Embattled subjects of confes-
sional feminist theory, “identity” and “experience” delineate female subjectiv-
ity, but often both terms are employed vaguely. Taken instead as transparent
truths, these uncontested categories that generously populate first-person
theorizing perpetuate a mystification of “women’s experiences” by rendering
their representations self-evident, continuous with and reflective of a “self‘
and a “real world.”
Because subjectivity is the cornerstone of feminist inquiry, it is no wonder
that first-persontheorizing, with its insistence on the “I,” has garnered so many
practitioners. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl suggests that recent theories of subjec-
122 Hypatia

tivity provide “a rhetorical space for identity assertion” (Young-Bmehl 1991,

16),with confessional feminism as both a product and process of this discursive
trend. While confessing can offer a stylistic instance from which to complicate
and address questions of subject positioning, “personalizing” feminist theory
also provides an expedient frame for “identity a~sertion.”~ Do confessional
modes enrich theory, or does theory legitimize confessing?Are confessional
modes, as Foucault would have it, part of repression’s work of political subjec-
tion? Rather than the emancipation of an imprisoned personal “I,” confes-
sional feminism enforces the production of a “privatized”discourse to uncover
the truth of gender. To what extent has personal disclosure become an
obligatory gesture to impress feminists with a remarkably unified “different
voice”?
I focus my discussion of confessing feminists on a frequently neglected
distinction between “subject” and “self,” between the process and product of
representation. Instead of attending to the varied implications of a particular
verbal display of subjectivity, confessional modes often reclaim a coherent,
unmediated (if gendered) self, a universalizing source of knowledge whose
identity rests squarely on her concrete experiences. Because “experience” is
an interpretation and, as such, demands interpretation, Joan Scott notes that
when experience simply bespeaks empirical evidence, it “reproduces rather
than contests given ideological systems” (Scott 1991,778).Scott emphasizes
that experience is discursive, that its formulation registers a process, as well as
an effect,of representation. Rather than suggestinglinguistic determinism, this
recognition attends to the “productive quality of discourse” as well as to the
conflicts and contradictions within discursive schemes (Scott 1991,793). For
Teresa de Lauretis, “experience” is “a constellation of meaning effects . . .
[that] shifts and is reformed continually” (de Lauretis 1987,lO).Inother words,
discursively constructed, “experience” is an interpretive process of identity
production shot through with politics, with varying assumptions about power,
privilege, and legitimacy. By the same token, “experience” often acts as an
integrative device, intetpellating a subject into a particular identity-in this
case, gender-which absorbs other subject-positions like class, race, ethnicity,
sexuality, each with multiple, sometimes contradictory, claims.
I am not suggesting that “experience” should be discounted in theorizing
confessional modes, but advocating “experience” as the reigning authority on
feminist knowledge overlooks contexts and contingencies, discursive and
otherwise. Besides its lived or “teal-life” component with historical and
cultural specificities,“experience”-necessarily a product and process of inter-
pretation-is an alloy of both attribution and imposition. Recounting
“experience” encompassesqualities culturally ascribed to a particular phenom-
enon as well as the excess or latitude of meaning entailed in its repre~entation.~
The persuasions of “real-life” testimonies compel promiscuous identification,
the promotion of correspondences between textual and historical subjects,
 Susan David Bemstein 123

between interpellated and interpolated readers and writers. The confessional

mode often capitalizes on promiscuous identification, championing an uncom-
plicated resemblance that disguises a vexed nonresemblance. To some extent,
confessional theory is motivated by an anxiety of pluralism and a desire to
domesticate identity difference through the exchange of personal experiences.
The appeal to some sort of personal experience that fortifies the confessional
mode is often staged through the writing of women of color, who have assumed
the dubious status of privileged other in academic discourse: As such, these
texts occupy a sacred space protected from charges of self-presence and
positivism that the hailing of “lived experience” provokes. The sensational
confession of Williams’s book reveals her great-great grandmother’s experi-
ences as a slave raped by her master. Williams inserts this personal narrative
of brutal racism and sexism from her family history for political advocacy, for
her Alchemy of Race and Rights that features the partiality of a legal system
protecting those already empowered by it.
For other feminists, sexual or textual violations often motivate incursions
into the first person; some confessions take up the subject of erotic domination,
and some confessional feminists characterize the abstractions of critical theory
as an assault. In this scene of discursive violence, the woman academic is forced
to submit herself to the master discourse of her profession. In each case,
confession vindicates academic feminist theory as some species of political
activi~m.~
Confessional modes in feminist theory need not simply reify “experience”
and the politically oppressed identity of “woman” attached to it. I do not
dismiss the significant contributions of feminist scholars to political move-
ments beyond the academy, but confessing “experience” does not automati-
cally qualify theory as political action. Rather, confessional modes furnish a
strategy to explore the discursive and social constructions of subject position-
ing.’ If the construction of gender is, as Teresa de Lauretis underscores, “the
product and process of both its representation and self-representation” (de
Lauretis 1987,9), then confessing feminist theory offers a crucial opportunity
to analyze this double register of representation and self-representation. It is
precisely this double register that locates my attention here.
Despite its current popularity, not all feminists embrace or tolerate the
confessional mode. For some feminist theorists, the exposure of a confessing
female subject represents a distressing object, an unpleasant otherness, a source
of embarrassment that provokes the gendered charge of emotionalism and
anti-intellectualism threatening to reverse recent strides of feminists from the
confessional venues of kitchen table-talk and diary entries, the very two
locations that frame Williams’s Alchemy.
Does this discomfort with personal disclosure signify a repressive feminist
backlash that continues to marginalize and discredit the female-gendered
subject as an oppressed other of academic discourse? Does the insistence on
124 Hypatia

confessing feminisms threaten to undermine evidence that women do theory,

that some women are intellectuals? What does it mean to constitute one’s
subjectivity through the confessional mode? What kinds of assumptions or
claims about identity, experience, agency, and signification underwrite this
discourse?

11. ANATOMIZING CONFESSION

In order to begin to answer these questions, I present a taxonomy of

confessional modes, a variety of descriptive categories for viewing textual
moments where the first person intrudes as a rhetorical performance. I do not
offer them as mutually exclusive and monolithic categories, nor do I presume
an intentional “I” that masters the specific rhetorical effects of a given
confessional passage with its particular subject positioning. These modes
sketch a heuristic for apprehending the way first-person theorizing constructs
subjectivity. I am particularly interested in how all these confessional modes
repeatedly cohere around the subject (in both senses) of violence, whether
construed as textual violation or sexual domination.
Let me quickly cover the terrain of four confessional modes in feminist
theory.’ Contestatmy confession deploys excursions into the first person as a
rhetorical device to redress limitations of critical discourse. All confessional
maneuvers begin here; that is, every confession in the context of feminist
theory stages a challenge. In its most common form, confession as dissension
brandishes the familiar “I” to defamiliarize the subject/object dialectic under-
writing the tradition of Western epistemology. As part of its critique of power
and knowledge, this first-person subject takes a “close-up” stance to interrupt
conventions of discursive authority predicated on detached distance. To this
end, confessing feminist theory often invokes representations of personal
experience as a structure and source of knowledge.
As confession, this disputatious voice is transgressive insofar as it unsettles
the rhetorical sovereignty of supposed objectivity in academic language. But
inevitably the confessional “I” reinforces discursive power relations if it
becomes obligatory as feminist methodology-yet another compulsion to
confess-and if the confessional “I” masters the other others in its discourse.
Although all confessional modes in the context of feminist theory embark with
some implication of political protest, their varying contexts, tone, and sub-
stance suggest a few descriptive subcategories of contestatory confession.
Expressionist confession relies on the articulation of emotions to contest the
precedent of objective authority in critical language. Inspired by “the personal
is the political” rhetoric, this confessional mode celebrates self-identity by
imparting feelings. A kind of politics of sentiment, expressionist confession
values affective discourse as a way to build solidarity among women academics
alienated by both the distance of an objective stance as well as the abstractions
 Susan David Bernstein I25

of a theoretical lexicon. In this politics of sentiment, emotions and the

experiences from which they arise presumably redefine power relations in
critical discourse and replace knowledge as the source of truth. The mere
emergence of this confessional “I” qualifies as a liberating gesture in and of
itself. In this mode of confessional feminism, “Father Knows Best” is replaced
by “I, a woman, know best” without due attention to the contingent construc-
tions of this “I” and its ways of knowing.
Exhibitionist confession uses personal disclosure as rhetorical striptease to
entice readers with juicy tidbits that flaunt the mutuality of body and mind
underwriting the audacious “I.” Although this showwomanship contests pre-
scriptions of authority and detachment that structure an opposition between
critic and text, exhibitionist confession reinforces a hegemonic subject posi-
tion through the force of its sensational revelations.
If the intrusive voice of the confessional “I” assumes a local rhetorical force,
hypertheorized confession exploits theory to sanitize a troubling personal disclo-
sure. A pretext rather than a context, the surrounding theory attenuates
through intellectual somersaults the substance of the confession. While this
confessional mode seems to rectify the untheorized deployment of such cate-
gories as “identity” and “experience” that mark some expeditions into the first
person, in this case theory supplants any notion of political struggle motivating
the confession in the first place.

111. THEPERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL IS THE THEORETICAL:

OCCASIONS OF CONFESSING FEMINIST THEORY

With this taxonomy as a descriptive device, I now turn to particular

instances of confessing feminist literary theory in the United States over the
last five years. Ellen Messer-Davidow’s“Philosophical Bases of Feminist Liter-
ary Criticisms” in the Autumn 1987 issue of New Literary History is a landmark
event in the recent history of first-person theorizing; it has generated many
confessional replies, both within and beyond the volume of its initial appear-
ance.’’ As the title suggests, Messer-Davidow explores the nature of a feminist
epistemology, one distinguished by allusions to “lived experiences.” The essay
seeks “a rehumanized epistemology” of literature that conjoins “our female
selves” with “a critical self” through the corrective methodology of “self-
reflexivity” in scholarly work. Messer-Davidow implies that knowledge quali-
fies as “feminist” if it is informed by “perspectivity”-a fancy term for what
otherwise passes as “self-awareness”-in which Literary critics are “knowers”
defined “by their experiences, self-reflection, and contingent standpoints”
(Messer-Davidow 1989,88).This “perspectivity” bears some resemblance to
Foucault’s notion of “effective history,” which recognizes “knowledge as per-
spective.” Yet the two perspectives diverge. For Foucault, “effective history. . ,
shortens its vision to those things nearest to it,” thus rendering knowledge
126 Hypatia

partial and provisional (Foucault 1988, 155). For Messer-Davidow,the short-

sighted view constitutes a unified and self-evident awareness rather than a
fragmented, decontextualized particle.
Just as Messer-Davidow promotes a feminist epistemology that incorporates
“self-reflexivity” in order to remedy the pretense of objectivity, confessional
voices challenge oppositions between subject and object, intellect and emo-
tion, the abstract and the particular, theory and practice. In this sense, every
feminist confession is contestatory. Fortifying the embattled subjects of con-
fessional theory are the twin constructions of “self” and “experience,” as Jane
Tompkins claims in her reply to Messer-Davidow: “The female subject par
excellence, which is her self and her experiences, has once more been elided by
literary criticism” (Tompkins 1989, 135; emphasis added).
Conflating subject and self, Tompkins’s first-person theorizing allows her to
heal the rift between two voices, “the critic’’ and “this person.” Mariana
Torgovnick ttansposes this distinction from self to style. The gap she wishes to
bridge through her “experimental critical writing” separates “critical” and
“creative” writing, although by implication she makes a distinction between
“critic” and “creative writer” (Torgovnick 1990, 25). Similarly, Olivia Frey
opposes two methods of critical discourse used in writing as well as in the
classroom: the “adversarial” and the “personal,” the first aligned with male
critics, the second with the beleaguered woman academic who longs to speak
in “her personal feminist voice” (Frey 1990,511).
The oppositional logic that structures female subjectivity for these three
feminists replays Messer-Davidow’s division between ‘‘a critical self” and “our
female selves,” although it is far from clear that such a dichotomy holds
steadfast in critical discourse. Rather than collapsing enforced subject divi-
sions, these contestatory confessional modes, if anything, perpetuate a false
opposition, since Tompkins, Torgovnick, and Frey imply that “person” or
“creative writer” can be cleanly disengaged from “critic” in any scene of writing
or in any rhetorical act. By underscoring a conventional formulation of the
voice or style that modulates academic prose, Tompkins, Torgovnick, and Frey
(to cite three of many contestatory “1’s’’) create a privileged other voice whose
textual representation they can then champion.
This notion of a closeted voice and style, one that must be held in check in
order to pass muster as an accomplished critic, is also a prerogative, a profes-
sional luxury that some academics can afford better than others. Tompkins, for
instance, is established in her careers, so little wonder she gets to confess herself
into her scholarly work. What about the untenured aspiring feminist theorist
who questions their self-sanctioning rhetoric? She risks making enemies in
high places. When do readers tolerate this journey into confessional feminism
and what motivates this acceptance? In part, this tolerance accommodates a
desire to make academic work incorporate its own criticism, that is, to register
the limitations of any interpretive enterprise and the institutional forces that
 Susan David Bernstein 127

shape it. Some readers appreciate confessional modes as a rhetorical strategy

when the intrusive “I” explicitly highlights the provisional nature of its
representation and the profession that governs it. Other readers find
“personalizing” academic work a self-indulgent obstacle to this project of
reflexive scrutiny when it becomes more absorbed in autobiographical details
and less attentive to the wider implications of its own rhetoric.
Since contestatory confession assumes that a particular convention of
objectivity and distance must be countered, does this turn the “impersonal”-
the aversion to a n explicitly personal voice, an autobiographical disclosure-
into a n unacceptable and occluded space? I t has become a truism in
interpretive theories today that “objectivity,” the exclusion of the subject and
the subjective, describes a style of presentation rather than even a remote
possibility. Any rhetorical posture, whether in an article or in the classroom,
is already mediated, compromised by desires, by forces of language and culture,
that cannot be grasped together by any one “1”-speaker, writer, knower, or
person. Confessing feminists occasionally presume an “I” that has the most
privileged access to the meaning of its own representation. This rhetorical
ascendancy of the writer’s self-knowledge substitutes for critical objectivity.
Although questioning the authority of knowledge motivates expressionist
confessing in the first place, somehow personal knowledge, along with its
emotions and experiences, is excluded from this interrogation. T h e shortcom-
ings, the inevitable blind spots that no “I” or “one” can illuminate remain
unexplored.
Tompkins and Frey wage contestatory confessions to battle the tradition of
impersonal academic discourse, yet these personal disclosures are also exhibi-
tions, whose value resides precisely in the rhetoric of exposure. Tompkins’s
“Me and My Shadow” advertises the virtues of “a new personalism,” one that
distills the precious ore of “Me” from “My Shadow,” the dregs of feminist
criticism. In Tompkins’s article, “Shadow” ostensibly refers to the discourse of
“the critic.” If this critic happens to be a feminist or a woman or just a “person”
(this distinction isn’t always clear), then she suffersfrom discursive oppression,
from the disciplinary mandate that she adhere to “a male standard of rationality
that militates against women’s being recognized as culturally legitimate sources
of knowledge” (Tompkins 1989, 124). To describe this gendered division
between her two writing voices, “the critic” and “just myself as a person,”
Tompkins likens academic prose to “wearing men’s jeans.” This metaphor of
“men’s jeans” for a style of academic prose unlike Tompkins’s “new
personalism” encourages a comparison between confessional feminism and
icriture fhinine. Tompkins wishes to find discursive garments to fit her gen-
dered body. She yearns to produce a kind of writing that, not “like men’s jeans,”
fits her very own bodily contours.
Progenitor of iccriture fiminine, Cixous celebrates the female body as revolu-
tionary confession, as transgressive language that threatens to unhinge patri-
128 Hypatia

archal hegemony: “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent
the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics,
regulations and codes” (Cixous 1981,256). Cixous imagines an alterior space
for this “impregnable language” that somehow escapes the imprint of culture
and ideology, and she urges confessing woman to a mythical space where
language, writing, and the body are interwoven: “Her flesh speaks true. She
lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she
signifies it with her body” (Cixous 1981,251).
Confessing feminist theory, as practiced by Tompkins and Frey, for example,
construes a version of writing an embodied feminine desire into the text.
Unlike the dispersed and multivoiced “I” in icriture fiminine, the mode of
confessing feminism described here, with both expressive and exhibitionist
tendencies, recuperates a teleological “I” whose personal disclosures somehow
delineate the truth of “myself as a person.” The discursive clothing of first-per-
son theorizing is the wrapper of authenticity rather than the critical abstrac-
tions of “men’s jeans.” This mantle of authenticity resituates authorial
presence, recently marked as an endangered species.
In a passage in which she contemplates her struggle with her voice as
“critic,” Tompkins reveals both a desire to embody her writing as well as the
problem of excess that this desire entails:

Most of all, I don’t know how to enter the debate without

leaving everything else behind-the birds outside my window,
my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in
stockinged feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open,
and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet.
(Tompkins 1989, 126)

In this expressive confession the grammatical subject chronicles an array of

sensations and feelings. The allusions to a chilly body at the window with birds
outside, to grieving a death, to unshod feet promote promiscuous identifica-
tion, urging the reader to “relate” to “myself as a person,” thus circumventing
attention to the process of rethinking critical theory that motivates this
confessional intrusion in the first place.” Tompkins’s musings here do contex-
tualize the immediate scene of writing; the confessional mode opens onto the
conditions of production and as such maintains that academic “debate” is
never detached from a very local historical moment. The solipsism of these
details, however, ultimately obscures this project to illuminate the circum-
stances surrounding an event of literary criticism. If the “impersonal” voice
effaces the means of its production, the “personal” voice does not necessarily
make these conditions more accessible. These confessional items construct a
particularized “personal” voice that contests the old-rather than the new-
rubber stamp of critical discourse.
 Susan David Bernstein 129

As expressionist confession, Tompkins’s first-person theory functions as

therapy, each text a co-counseling session to bring reader and writer together
in a mutually beneficial relationship.

I think people are scared to talk about themselves. . . . I think

readers want to know each other. . . . I love writers who write
about their own experience. I feel I’m being nourished by them,
that I’m being allowed to enter into a personal relationship with
them. That I can match my own experience up with theirs. . . .
(Tompkins 1989, 123)
Tompkins constructs an interactive model of reader, writer, and text, a scheme
correcting the hegemonic distance that establishes the author as irreducible
authority. Rather than the elevation of the author in traditional criticism or
the demotion or elision of the author in some versions of poststructuralist
theory, the confessional mode of this feminist theory compels the political
revaluation of the author-function. In Tompkins’s rendition, the author’s
personal “experience” becomes the new uncontested authority that displaces
any accounting for its discursive, cultural, and ideological positioning. Knowl-
edge of the reader, which replaces knowledge of the text, issues precisely from
the transmission of “their own experience” and “my own experience” as if
representation were a matter of forthright transcription with the confessional
“I” as transcendent purveyor of a truth of self. In her pitch to recover both
authorial and reader presences in the text, Tompkins presumes an unmediated
exchange of “experiences” between writer and reader.
In this vein, Tompkins also envisions a discourse that signifies the wedding
of her two voices, “the critic” and “this person”: “The criticism I would like
to write would always take off from personal experience. Would always be in
some way a chronicle of my hours and days. Would speak in a voice which can
talk about everything, would reach out to a reader like me and touch me where
I want to be touched” (Tompkins 1989, 126). Tompkins’s sloganeering of the
personal “I” captures in tone and syntax the discourse of consumerism resound-
ing in the advertising formula of AT&T “Reach out and touch someone.”
Similar to the ploy of commercials, Tompkins rehearses a retreat into same-
ness--“a reader like me”-and an aversion to difference; others are absorbed
in this mirroring scheme as counterparts of “I,” and identity functions through
figures of unity and similarity. This campaign for “a reader like me” typifies
what Lauren Berlant calls “the scene of monstrous doubling, or narcissistic
horror that reproduces the dominating fantasy of female self-identity” (Berlant
1988, 253). Instead of perpetuating an uncontested notion of identity “like
me,” Berlant encourages feminists to pursue “a policy of female disidentifica-
tion at the level of female essence.” In other words, by mapping out contin-
gencies of difference in the very process of constructing identification, it is
possible to disturb the bourgeois tradition of an imperiously centered or central
130 Hypatia

“self”--whether engendered as male or updated as female-empowered as

“universal” through its supposed relatability.
Much in the spirit of the expressive confessionalism Tompkins deploys, Frey
advocates first-person theorizing as therapeutic intervention in “Beyond Lit-
erary Darwinism: Women’s Voices and Critical Discourse.” In the scene of
academic criticism, a “trusting” reader is preferable to a thrusting critic, while
writing that is “personal, revelatory, non-adversarial” is more “natural” and
“nurturing” than the conventional “adversary method” where the argument
advances through “put-downs” and “bad” or “nasty” sallies at other writers.’*
The “adversarial” approach of traditional academic criticism is bellicose,
hurling “things that hurt other writers’ feelings”; Frey deplores that women
literary critics have been “forced” to adopt this vicious rhetoric in order to
succeed professionally.
Frey’s reproach here suggests a discourse Berlant calls “the female com-
plaint.” As a genre of self-expression, self-circumscription, and self-contain-
ment, this version of female public discourse is ultimately conservative rather
than transformative: “self-expression in that the conceit of the complaint is
to release to the public news of suppressed injuries; self-circumscriptionin that
the complaint implicitly marks the conditions and the probability of its failure
to persuade the addressed subject” (Berlant 1988,243).Berlant cites a paradox
in the social construction of the female complaint: a female-centered public
discourse that promotes political consciousness at the same time that it is
dependent on the oppressor for its existence. The contestatory confessionalism
of Tompkins and Frey seems oblivious to its contextual and contingent
positioning within a discipline, within a publication, both inscribed within a
particular historical moment; it tries to construct a fantastic rhetorical space
that is simultaneously outside and within the academy, a discourse to accom-
modate intellectual and emotional needs that are ascribed to the totalized
identity of “women.”
Imagining a separatist academic community, Frey launches a “personal”
approach to literary criticism that includes “what matters to women . . . our
everyday endeavors-thinking, learning, studying, making mundane decisions
like what color to paint the house or what to cook for dinner; or making more
significant decisions, like whether to have this baby or not, or whether to go
to this conference or not (I will miss my son’s play if I go)” (Frey 1990,
509-510). Frey’s personal disclosures situate the academic heroine in banal
middle-class family scenery; Tompkins’s confessions similarly construct a priv-
ileged subjectivity: “This person talks on the telephone a lot to her friends,
has seen psychiatrists, likes cappuccino, worries about the state of her soul”
(Tompkins 1989, 122).
Both series of first-person escapades reproduce the social construction of
these subjects of the new personalism. Both confessions are embedded within
an ideology of capitalism that acclaims and perpetuates the sanctity of private
 Susan David Bernstein 131

property and the family in which “woman” excels in exchange value. Neither
confessing “I” interrogates the way her first person is constructed within the
rhetoric of her argument nor through the details that claim a relation between
grammatical subject and historical entity. Rather than politicizing this subjec-
tivity, Frey and Tompkins “authenticate” themselves in their critical work
through home improvements and cafe beverage^.'^ These details of fashion
construe a particular kind of subjectivity that domesticates the potential
difference of a confessing “I” into a homogeneity manifesting the self-imperi-
alism of traditional humanism. The confessional mode becomes a matter of
style, a renovation rather than a reformation.
As rhetorical events, these confessions question conventions of academic
prose that elide a “personal” voice. The truth of discourse, of critical theory,
is somehow lodged in this confessional wrapper of authenticity, .much like
Foucault’s idea of confession as a discursive strategy to produce the truth of an
individual subject. So many of these confessional “1’s” signify the unexamined
use of example that stands for truth itself. Although the status of subjectivity,
as well as the relationship between authority and identity in critical discourse,
informs all contestatory confession, too often this intrusive “I” resorts to a
pre-cartesian notion of selfhood that dispenses with important complications
of a contestatory subject.

Iv. VIOLENCE OF CONFESSIONS AND CONFESSIONS OF VIOLENCE

Redressing the domination of “impersonal” and disinterested authority in
academic discourse, many of these confessional anecdotes intimate scenes of
violence. On the level of rhetoric, first-person feminists contest the discursive
violation of a personal voice that academic language trivializes, marginalizes,
or occludes. Frey, for instance, likens conventional criticism-the
“adversarial” method-to a full-scale war that inflicts relentless “attacks” on
people rather than ideas; at her highest rhetorical pitch, Frey figures adversarial
criticism as “ ‘limited nuclear exchange’ ” (Frey 1990, 511).
O n the level of autobiographical anecdote, however, confession transfers
political struggle into the realm of the material, where sexual difference is not
only a matter of the semiotics of gender but also the threat of superior bodily
force. Without doubt, personal testimony has occupied a significant political
role in the domestic violence movement. Rita Felski notes that feminist
confession “is marked by a tension between a focus upon subjectivity and a
construction of identity which is communal rather than individualistic”
(Felski 1989, 115). This vacillation between a narcissistic self and an “I” of
political advocacy surfaces in many confessional instances. Attempting to link
intellectual work to political activism, confessing feminism often rivets atten-
tion on a sexual struggle for power.
132 Hypatia

In “Me and My Shadow,” Tompkins makes oblique personal allusions to

sexual conflict as she registers her intense preoccupation with Jessica
Benjamin’s essay, “Master and Slave: The Fantasy of Erotic Domination.”
Tompkins qualifies her engagement with this topic “because the subject is so
close to home, and therefore so threatening, that I need relief from it, little
breathers, before I can go on. I underline vigorously and often. Think of people
I should give it to read (my husband, this colleague, that colleague)” (Tomp-
kins 1989, 134). While her explanation is coded, the underscored “so close to
home” and the specified “my husband” in contrast to the more abstract “this
colleague, that colleague” suggests that “erotic domination” has some bearing
on her marriage.
Tompkins’s confessions encourage another reading of the “Shadow” in her
title that assails “Me,” or “the voice of a person who wants to write about her
feelings.” Repeatedly she attaches the demerits of academic criticism to “my
husband.” Disparaging the “straitjacket of a subject-object epistemology,”
Tompkins elaborates on this confining garment as “the epistemology I know
from my husband”; later she bemoans “my intellectual dependence on my
husband.” Tornpkins then extols the virtues of anger as a catalyst for feminist
critiques: “What enrages me is the way women are used as extensions of men,
mirrors of men, devices for showing men off, devices for helping men get what
they want. They are never there in their own right, or rarely” (Tompkins 1989,
136).While this confessional mode registers the latest rage, it is also ensnared
by the contradictions Berlant locates in the female complaint in which a
woman protests and at the same time continues her alignment with men and
her place in a heterosexual economy “because the mode of her discourse
concedes the intractability of the (phallocentric) conditions of the complaint’s
production” (Berlant 1988, 243). One might ask if these confessional inter-
stices signify a kind of Fishbowl poetics, a first-person theorizing that turns
criticism into a plate-glass exhibition anatomizing an academic marriage.
Where Tompkins’s obsession with “erotic domination” intimates a specific-
ally personal crisis, Catharine Stimpson incorporates a scene of sexual violence
to close her essay “Feminism and Feminist Criticism,” whose objective is to
forge a political bond between academic and political feminisms. She does so
by converting “a woman colleague” into an object for feminist advocacy:
I wish to end with a difficult anecdote. I was thinking about
feminist criticism one night as I was driving home from my
university work. On either side of the highway’s twelve lanes
were oil refineries, with great curved pipes and round towers. I
smelled industrial fumes. 1 saw no green, except for paint and
neon signs. Earlier that day, after a meeting, a woman colleague
had told me about an experience. She had been raped, at
knife-point, in her car, with her son watching. She was in her
 Susan David Bernstein 133

late twenties, her son only six. She was no Leda, the rapist no
swan. To remember the story, to keep it as a fire within con-
sciousness and political will, is the feminism in feminist criti-
cism. (Stimpson 1990,28-29)
In this appropriated confession, Stimpson exhibits a voiceless unquoted
“woman colleague” who has sustained violent sexual domination. After warn-
ing that “a difficult anecdote” is on the horizon of this passage, Stimpson veers
off into the commonplace scenery of a highway embellished with the signposts
of industrial life. Following this associative chain of thought, she then moves
back in time from the “personal” realm of a drive home to the “professional”
realm “after a meeting” when her colleague “told me about an experience.”
The word “experience” is benign, strikingly mundane in contrast to the
sensation of the words that qualify it: “She had been raped, at knife-point, in
her car, with her son watching.”
Stimpson’s point here is to conjoin seemingly segregated languages and
spheres ofknowledge together, to heal the fracture between Tompkins’s “critic”
and “person.” Helena Michie qualifies Stimpson’s “integrative ‘I’ ” as rhetor-
ical evidence of a commitment to “a systematic dialectical pluralism.” Encom-
passing personal, academic, and political voices, this “integrative ‘I,’ ” Michie
contends, “refus[es] to see any rupture between them” (Michie 1989,20).But
the “integrative” impulse of this “difficult anecdote” remains troublesomely
divided and incoherent. Stimpson insinuates the violence of aestheticizing
sexual violence in her epigrammatic contrast between this real-life rape and
Yeats’s poetic imagery: “She was no Leda, the rapist no swan.” Even so, this
recounted incident is subject to the way Stimpson’s sensationalizing language
manages its representation; this contestatory confession also functions as
exhibitionism to accentuate the argument’s rhetorical force.
Although Stimpson exhorts feminists to use memories, like this one of
sexual violence, as political kindle for their feminist criticism, her imperative
remains abstract and impressionistic. This passage begs the question of a
fraught relationship between “experience” and text, between the personal and
the academic, the all-too-familiar scene of violence and an aestheticized
counterpart, but it does not begin to consider the deeply vexed and crucial
nature of these connections. One might indeed ponder how “conscious”
knowledge that rape is perpetrated on a “woman colleague” invigorates a
feminist reading of a poem like “Leda and the Swan.” There is something
disturbing about Stimpson’s startling arrogation of this “difficult anecdote”
used to enliven feminist criticism with a jolt of political advocacy. Does
Stimpson’s appropriated confession champion the unvoiced and violated
female body written into her text, or does this example provide a dramatically
“personal” field for her rhetorical thrusting? Tompkins’s vague allusions to
“erotic domination” shield her personal “I” from revelatory specificity;
134 Hypatia

Stimpson’s “integrative” or collective “I” graphs an other’s narrative of rape

onto her agenda to politicize feminist theory, to boldface the feminism in
feminist criticism.
If Stimpson’s appropriated confession of sexual violence serves as an anec-
dotal copula to yoke feminist theory to political struggle, Gerald MacLean uses
theory to justify and displace his own distressing personal disclosure of domes-
tic violence. In a response to Tompkins’s “Me and My Shadow,” MacLean
construes ‘Citing the Subject” as a heterogeneous genre with personal letters
addressed “Dear Jane” interspersed with dated reflections that he claims “will
not be journal entries” (Maclean 1989, 141). MacLean maintains that
Tompkins’s confessional “I” uncritically endorses an ideology of presence,
unique individuality, and free choice that bolsters her “commitment to self-
improvement [that] substitutes for a commitment to more radical transforma-
tions in a social order that exploits people because of their race, class, or
gender” (Maclean 1989, 141). Rather than a personal voice that, like
Tompkins’s, lapses into solipsism, MacLean calls for “the figure of the politi-
cized personality” in order to promote “a collective practice toward social
justice” (Maclean 1989, 142, 147).
How does MacLean “politicize” his “personality” in the interests of his own
“collective practice toward social justice”? While criticizing Tompkins, he
turns this critical scrutiny toward himself and confesses that he is a “white,
heterosexual, first-world male” who does “what I was trained to do, telling
‘women’ what to do, how to think and behave” (Maclean 1989, 148). This
disclaimer seems doctrinaire self-criticism, an instance of male grandstanding
on the feminist band~ag0n.I~ The rhetorical meaning of“white, heterosexual,
first-world male” in MacLean’s reply behaves like a contrite confession about
his socially privileged position. He can’t help himself because he is a subject
subjected to the rules of dominant culture. Tompkins and Frey neglect to
theorize their “personal” voices; MacLean resorts to theory to sanitize and
displace the “person”-and any sense of agency or responsibility that a
commitment to “social justice” entails-in the violently troublesome disclo-
sure he makes toward the end of his essay. In this way, MacLean’s personal
anecdotes function as hypertheorized confessions.
First, MacLean describes himself as someone who teaches “from a ‘feminist’
stance” as he flirts with both women and men students and talks about sex “a
good deal.” When MacLean observes that no one has “begun to examine fully
the range of erotic interactions that go on between students and teachers,” he
then retreats from this examination by resorting to “personal” explanation: “I
need to be liked” (Maclean 1989, 150). Nevertheless, this confessional foray
into classroom erotics disturbs the status of his professed “collective” commit-
ment to “social justice.”
With this pedagogical scene of erotic domination, MacLean frames his
confessional crescendo of domestic violence. Launching into a narrative that
 Susan David Bernstein 135

collects various autobiographical details, including the economic and familial

deprivations of his British underclass childhood, his mother’s recent death, and
the complications of his two-career academic marriage with “Donna,” MacL-
ean delivers this confessional punch: “That winter, during a period of gloom
which reading [Alice]Miller led me to associate with guilt over Mother’s death,
I had hit Donna during an argument over nothing that important. This must
not happen again” (Maclean 1989, 151).
Through its allusion to a historical event and as a rhetorical disruption, the
violence of this disclosure operates on two levels. The syntax of the last
sentence transposes a confession of domestic violence into an agentless
abstraction. MacLean deflects his personal agency in relation to this incident
by displacing “the problem of my violence” onto a generalized social phenom-
enon of “male violence” constituted by unspecified “institutional privileges
and pressures.” Concluding the lengthy paragraph in which he embeds the
confession, MacLean addresses Tompkins: “I wonder, Jane, what more you
might have to say on the problems of your husband’s ‘influence.’ I was sad you
left this topic of marriage/professional pressures in symptomatic silence”
(Maclean 1989, 152).
One might well wonder why “Gerald” chooses to place on exhibition, in
the context of an academic article, painful details of his marriage and encour-
age “Jane” to do 1ike~ise.l~ Does this confession heal or deepen the alleged rift
between personal and political, subjective and theoretical? As macho exhibi-
tionism, MacLean’s confessional mode demonstrates the gap between his
theorizing and his “individual” practices at school and at home. What MacL-
ean construes as an overdetermined cultural problem of violence toward
women vindicates this specific scene of domestic violence. In other words, the
theorizing defers the category of the “personality of the writer” as well as the
“personal” incidents attached to this nominative case.
Tompkins, Frey, Stimpson, and MacLean deploy confessions of violence in
the lives of academics to transform their discourse into political struggle. For
Page duBois, however, the confessional mode elicits “embarrassment” because
it threatens to violate the intellectual welfare of feminist theory. In her essay
“Antigone and the Feminist Critic,” duBois displaces her discomfort with this
trend of first-person academic feminism onto her reading of Sophocles’ Anti-
gone (duBois 1986, 371). While theory sanitizes and overdetermines the
disturbing specificities of MacLean’s confessional mode, theory becomes an
antidote to temper the discomfort confessing feminists cause duBois. MacLean
hypertheorizes his confession; duBois hypertheorizes her confessed uneasiness
with confessional feminism.
DuBois opens her essay with reticence as she concedes “a certain embarrass-
ment I have felt” about “the confessional mode in feminist criticism.” She both
reveals and conceals her own confession: “I feel uncomfortable with this sort
of unveiling, I confess, and would like to understand why” and “I don’t want
136 Hypatia

to expose myself here, to unveil” (duBois 1986,372).Offsetting an acknowl-

edgment of these “exhibitionist spaces” in feminist discourse, duBois fends off
the lure of the confessional mode by stressing that her essay is something else.
In the opening passages, duBois embraces what Frey designates as “the
adversarial method” by framing her essay through rhetorical stances like “I
argue.” Rather than falling in line with women academics who “simply
personalize their intellectual work into the culturally endorsed position of
‘emotionalism,’” duBois is careful to emphasize that gender and sexual differ-
ence are ideological as well as historically specific constructions. Whereas
Tompkins,Frey, Stimpson, and MacLean wish to reevaluate and transform the
discourse of emotions in academic writing, duBois wishes to banish it from
professional view.
Retreating from this precarious place of discursive exposure, duBois insti-
gates a reading of Antigone to theorize her anticonfession position. Antigone’s
problem is her refusal of metaphor and a tendency toward metonymic relations
between herself and family members, between herself and other incarcerated
women in classical history. As an interned woman, Antigone represents the
in-turned confessing feminist critic. She refuses to establish an exchange with
a different community; she rejects exogamy and difference for inbred sameness
and claustrophobic affiliations. Deploying Antigone as a metaphor for the
“feminist critic,” duBois implies that confessional feminism likewise suffers
from an entrenched sisterhood, one that dwells on the contiguities of oppressed
women rather than the symbolicsubstitution of their political struggles beyond
the academy.
DuBois claims that theorizing Antigone’s figuration in the “cultural and
linguistic codes of the ancient city” marks the historicity of gender and sexual
difference. Nonetheless, her own elaborate example of Antigone belies this
pitch for historical and cultural specificity, since Antigone of ancient Thebes
functions as metaphor precisely for “confessional feminist writers” who “simply
personalize the intellectual.” To be sure, duBois intellectualizes the personal-
both confessing feminisms as well as her own discomfort with this rhetorical
feature.
One might question whether first-person theorizing perpetuates an opposie
tion between the personal and the intellectual despite a common interest in
complicating and dismantling this dichotomy; inevitably, autobiography and
theory motivate each other. To the extent that these positions can be cleanly
articulated, it is useful to consider the relationship between the personal and
the theoretical. But these speculations, ones that surround any act of criticism,
every act of writing, do not necessarily warrant inclusion within the text itself.
It is also important to ask whether the theoretical-in this case the revision
of critical authority-becomes a justification for confessional displays that
upstage the theory billed as the main attraction.
 Susan David Bernstein 137

The double feature of Jane Gallop’s confessional mode in Thinking Through

the Body is this intrication of the theoretical and the personal, or mind and
matter, as her title indicates. If the violated female body disrupts academic
discourse through confessional modes, Gallop deploys around her collected
essays “autobiographical bits” that fetishize the life of the authorial body, from
infancy through childbirth, including some professional landmarks along the
way. The Madonna of exhibitionist confession, Gallop exploits first-person
theorizing as a “Truth or Dare” proposition; her sensational excursions into
the life of her sexualized corpus promise a personal truth uncovering the origins
of her theoretical reading of a text.
In collecting the series of articles initially written and published between
1977 and 1986, Gallop contextualizes Thinking Through the Body within
confessional frames that situate her essays as by-products of her perverse,
transgressive desires. Like the confessional modes themselves, the very title of
the volume seeks to suture the gap between mindbody, a variation on the
public/private, impersonal/personal splits that each confessing feminist
addresses. The table of contents also publicizes Gallop’s concerted effort to
embody her text: “The Bodily Enigmame Anal B o d y m e Student Body/The
Female Body/The Body Politic.” This somatic discourse, intensified by the
confessional blurbs, suggests Gallop’s particular appropriation of French fem-
inism, of writing her body into her text.
Given Gallop’s extensive knowledge of poststructuralist theory, it is remark-
able that she does not problematize the epistemological status of this author-
itative body whose choice bits of exposed sexual history betoken crucial clues
for readers. The confessional frames advertise Gallop’s daring style of self-rep-
resentation from the cover that spreads out her body at the moment of
childbirth to the disclosures of love affairs. Gallop means to complicate the
author position by prefacing each essay with a confessional context that
centers on the specific personal and professional status from which she writes.
These “autobiographical bits” install the reader into the position of voyeuristic
confessor, an unwitting analyst of these striptease confessions that unfold
Gallop’s scenes of delivery.I6
The theory that motivates Gallop’s confessional mode is the psychoanalytic
concept of transference, something Lacan qualifies as “the subject-presumed-
to know,” which structures any cathexis to an object of desire, whether a sexual
body or a source of knowledge. Beyond the boundaries of psychoanalytic
thought, “transference” also signifies any carryover or affiliation. In this
generalized sense, Gallop’s confessional feminism takes up the challenge of
transference, whether between subject and object, between personal and
impersonal, or between feminism and academic criticism.
In her previous book, Reading Lacan, Gallop acknowledges her transference
onto Lacan and onto the institution of psychoanalysis that underwrites her
own interpretive speculation^.'^ In Thinking Through the Body, Gallop explores
138 Hypatia

not simply “the Body,” as the title announces, but her body as the privileged
site of knowledge that shapes her own critical “thinking.” The confessional
portions map out a transferential exploitation of Gallop’s body, one often
defined by sexual experience rather than political struggle. Gallop’s confes-
sional mode assumes an authorized, privileged access to the writer’s “true”
transference that underlies or shapes these essays. In one confessional instance
Gallop explains: “I wtote ‘The Student Body,’ my reading of [Sade’s] Philosophy
ofthe Bedroom and my attempt to understand ‘the sexuality that underlies’ my
chosen profession” (Gallop 1988, 3). A related blip appears in the “Prelims”
preface to “The Student Body”: “The series [of affairs with thirty-six-year-old
men] began while I was in graduate school. The first member was a professor
on whom I developed a crush. . . . This paper tries to think through the place
of the female student in the pederastic institution” (Gallop 1988,41).
Like fast-paced news clips from the confessional tabloids, Gallop’s “autobio-
graphical bits” titillate uneasy speculation. Do these exhibitionist disclosures
impart knowledge that transforms the reader’s apprehension of Gallop’s close
reading of Sade, for instance? Do we benefit from Gallop’s intellectual, insti-
tutional, and embodied struggles with sadomasochistic desires? Or does her
transference methodology furnish a rhetorical stage on which Gallop can
uncurtain the real-life “experiences” of this writer “thinking through the
body”?Gallop’s confessional scholarship demonstrates that no interpretation,
no intellectual endeavor, can be purely disinterested, that a mind is never
truncated from a body. This insistence justifies the very act of confessing as a
component of her feminist campaign; yet the confessions belie this political
project by substituting a narcissistic body for a collective one.
The confessional scenes of transference that fetishize Gallop’s body reveal
a fascination with erotic domination, with a transgressively violating or
violated body. Citing a passage about motherhood and the mind-body problem
from Adrienne Rich‘s Of Woman Born,Gallop takes up this opposition as a
figure of violence: “If we think physically rather than metaphysically, if we
think the mind-body split through the body, it becomes an image of shocking
violence” (Gallop 1988, 1). This “image of shocking violence” forecasts the
nature of the confessions Gallop inserts around her essays.
The first “image of shocking violence” Gallop offers is drawn not from the
considerable arsenal of her own autobiography but from a sensational news
story of infanticide quoted in Rich‘s study of maternal ambivalence. This
criminal case violently literalizes the mind-body split upon which Gallop’s
volume meditates. Situating the maternal body as the perpetrator of domestic
violence, the case describes “Joanne Michulski, thirty-eight, the mother of
eight children,” who on June 11,1974, “took a butcher knife, decapitated and
chopped up the bodies of her two youngest on the neatly kept lawn of the
suburban house where the family livedoutside Chicago” (Gallop 1988,l).Not
unlike Stimpson’s appropriated confession of a “woman colleague’s” rape,
 Susan David Bernstein 139

Gallop frames the collection of essays with a shocking example to remind her
readers that violence is uncomfortably familiar, as nearby as the jacket photo
that witnesses the inauguration of motherhood itself.
Gallop situates the present volume more explicitly, more autobiographically,
in the context of maternal violence both produced by and reproducing the
mind-body split. Theorizing the confessional, Gallop declares that she incor-
porates “autobiographical bits, not only, I hope, because I tend toward exhibi-
tionism,” but because she reads associatively, “through things that happened
to me” (Gallop 1988,4).With this speculative introduction, Gallop confesses
one of these “things”:
At the age of eleven months I was strangled and left for dead
by a woman who cared for me. I have no memory of the event,
of course, but learned about it years later from a newspaper
clipping my mother gave me to read. (Gallop 1988,4-5)

Gallop “hope[s]” the “exhibitionism” underwriting her confessional mode is

secondary to the more esteemed intellectual project of thinking, reading,
interpreting “through autobiography,”a variation on the interest proposed in
the title. Nevertheless, she presents the first “autobiographical bit” with
deadpan aplomb, heightening its sensational effect. Gallop’s confessional
allusion places her in the position of the nameless victim of infanticide in
Rich’s book.
This brief reference to an autobiographical “clipping” typifies Gallop’s
confessional mode, a species of narcissistic activism. She knocks off her “bits”
like commercial sound-bites to captivate the viewer, to turn her audience’s
attention-for a spectacular moment-toward the history of an authorial body
somehow implicated in the violent physical or erotic encounters that qualify
the essays themselves. Collecting these confessional tidbits together, we briefly
encounter the author alluding suggestively to the embodied acts of crying,
masturbating, and fornicating. Although Gallop is a consummate reader of the
linguistic and psychoanalytic details of other texts, her own she leaves remark-
ably bare, as if these shards of memory are unmediated transcriptions.
Interestingly, Gallop expresses her discomfort with the “celebration of self”
that underwrites American feminism; she also reports her triumphant trans-
valuation of this celebration as she defines “self” specifically through her body:
“I had not only overcome my own sense of illegitimacy but had moved the
body (my body?) from an embarrassment to a source of power” (Gallop 1988,
92). The parenthetical and interrogative accidentals encasing “(my body?)”
constitute what Gallop would ocherwise label a symptomatic moment in which
the text reveals a vested interest, one the author does not explicitly recognize.
Gallop’s confessions fetishize the body as the source of knowledge, but “(my
body?)”doubly encodes a hermeneutic uncertainty exposing Gallop’s transfer-
ence. Instead of incorporating signs of interpretive struggle around the status
140 Hypatia

of her authorized and textual body, Gallop wields her confessional blurbs as
exhibitionist clippings, as “a source of power” that both provokes and repro-
duces promiscuous-that is, uncontested-identifications between a histori-
cal Jane Gallop and herself as reader, as textual subject, as well as between
internal and external readers.”

v. TOWARD
A CONFESSIONAL MODE OF REFLEXIVITY

Each of these instances of confessing feminism repeatedly reverts to a logic

of dichotomy, despite an attempt to redress the limitations of oppositional
thinking. Foucault’s repression-and-confessionhypothesis is suggestive in this
regard. The insistence on the repression of the personal “I” in critical discourse
seems to intensify its expression. Is some “truth”--necessarily partial and
permeable-of feminist theory located in this recurrence of the confessional
mode that the more it is contested, the more it resurfaces?Even more at issue,
I think, are the competing notions over what feminist theory does, where it
should and shouldn’t go, what is doctrinaire or revisionary, what is conservative
or conversional. Confessing feminism, in its various conversational tones,
betokens both a stylistic contagion that must be checked and a rhetorical ploy
useful for the ways it opens up spaces for renegotiating the status of the subject
in feminist theory, still subject to the limiting empowerments of language.
Recognizing the resourcefulness of first-person theorizing for feminists, I
would like to add reflexive confessions to the taxonomy of confessional modes.
In the rhetorical modes explored above, confession is reflective, the product
of an uncomplicated “I” whose unveiling of “experience” provides a shunt to
a personal, which is also a political, truth. In contrast to the mirroring gesture
of reflective intrusions of the first person, reflexive confessing is primarily a
questioning mode, one that imposes self-vigilance on the process of subject
positioning both in language and discourse and at a specific historical moment
or a particular cultural space.lg Not a unilateral critique of power, reflexive
confession instead registers its complicity with the institutions that structure
its representation.
Critically punctuating theories with autobiographical material, several fem-
inists bring considerable scrutiny to citations of their “experiences,” to the
identity politics that underwrites the ways they position themselves as subjects
in their own arguments. Reflexive uses of confessional feminism complicate
and defamiliarize the “self‘)that these first-person infiltrations represent.*’ For
instance, reflexive confessing in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak‘s “French Fem-
inism in an International Frame” implements confession to probe the con-
struction of subjectivity based on identity categories and to explore the global
politics of theoretical discourse. Deploying a personal anecdote to introduce
the term “ideological victimage,” Spivak profiles the cultural hegemony that
first world (in this case French) theories cast over intellectual work from
 Susan David Bernstein 141

“other” worlds. To this end, Spivak relays a conversation with a Sudanese

woman sociologist who has written “ ‘a structural functionalist dissertation on
female circumcision in the Sudan’ ” (Spivak 1988, 134). Picking up on the
abstractions of “Structural Functionalism,” as well as the sexism encoded in
the sociologist’s term “female circumcision,” Spivak questions the sovereignty
of Western theoretical persuasions that displace and occlude political struggles
particular to the work of “so-called Third World women” (Spivak 1988,135).
Like other confessing feminists, Spivak addresses textual and sexual violence
in the two registers of theory and practice, the imperialism of (first world)
theories and the ritualized brutality of clitoridectomy.The “erotic domination”
that “fascinates” Tompkins assumes a collective political urgency in Spivak‘s
context that literalizes male sexual privilege. As a result, “ideological
victimage” is not only ideological but has “real” world applications as well.
To bring “ideological victimage” into close range, Spivak recites her own
interpellation in this system of intellectual domination:
The “choice” of English Honors by an upper-class young
woman in the Calcutta of the fifties was itselfhighly over-deter-
mined. Becoming a professor of English in the U.S. fitted in
with the “brain drain.” In due course, a commitment to femi-
nism was the best of a collection of accessible scenarios. . . .
Predictably, I began by identifying the “female academic” and
feminism as such. . . . When one attempted to think of so-called
Third World women in a broader scope [than the restricted
sense behind “International Feminism”], one found oneself
caught, as my Sudanese colleague was caught and held by
Structural Functionalism, in a web of information retrieval
inspired at best by: “what can I do for them?” (Spivak 1988,
134-35)

The shift from third-person to first-person voice in the course of the passage
exemplifies Spivak‘s reflexivity. The grammar dramatizes the discursive con-
struction of this female subject as excentric, the product and process of multiple
mediations, with ruptures within and between her assorted and fluctuating
interpellations. Spivak deploys the example of her professional training explic-
itly to consider the way dominant cultural ideologies structure the identity of
a “female academic” from an “International Frame.’’
This condensed academic bildungsroman renders Spivak’s career
“ ‘choices’ ” not a matter of some mythological free will, but constructed by

the dominance of Western ideology over a woman of color with high aspira-
tions shaped by her own “upper-class” identity. Spivak‘s interest in writing
herself into the essay has to do with the precarious positions of the academic
feminist, of theory, of identity politics, of “French Feminism,” each speaking
for the “other”-in this case, “so-called Third World women.” As a “western-
142 Hypatia

ized Easterner,” by virtue of her professional training, Spivak interrogates her

own ability to “know her own world,” to know whether or how to transfer
French theory to a “Third World” culture. Precariously positioning herself
adjacent to subaltern Indian women, Spivak explores the possibilities of
speaking for/as/of them; at the same time she notes her associative identity
withfas “First World women” who presume a knowledge of otherness based
merely on “feeling privileged as a woman,” a subject position that overlooks
cultural and historical specificities.
Spivak‘s reflexive confession offers a crucial tool for feminist inquiry.2’
Rather than a plaintive quest for an authentic female voice mirroring some
interior or exterior “truth,” confessing feminist theory-used with reflexive
analytic caution+an explore the politics of subject construction. While
subjectivity is not reducible to an intricate linguistic performance, the dimen-
sions of language structure the representation of any epistemological claims
about a n “I,” simultaneously discursive, historical, ideological. I also think that
critical attention to the positioning of subjectivity in first-person theorizing
revitalizes the author function that feminists have struggled to overhaul.22
Because of confession’s attention to a transgressive “I,” this rhetorical strategy
exposes the process and product of subjectivity as both contradictory and
irregular, textual and contextual. In other words, “I” does have a lot to do with
“it”; subjectivity and critical discourse as well as the personal, the positional,
and the theoretical all intertwine. Confessing feminist theory promises to
contemplate the folds of these imbrications.

NOTES

1. By rights, Getting Personal-particularly the first chapter, “Getting Personal:

Autobiography as Cultural Criticism”4eserves top billing in my survey of the field of
confessional feminist theory. Unfortunately, my essay was quickly approaching a deadline
when 1 discovered Miller’s book. For the most part, I have had to restrict my attention to
Getting Personal to explanatory notes, althoughI should have liked to engage more directly
and extensively several of the interestingobservations Miller offers on this recent trend
of “an explicitly autobiographical performance within the act of criticism”(Miller 1991,
1).
Briefly, Miller sees the proliferation of “personal criticism” in relation to “a crisis in
representativity” engendered by the attention to “identity politics” and positionality
(Miller 1991,20).Replacing a “Master Narrative” and an objective, distanced viewpoint
are assorted “micro-narratives,”with their compulsive screening and self-assessment of
the foundations of critical authority. Miller contends that personal criticism’s micro-nar-
ratives underscore this crisis of representativity, the presumption of speaking “as a” and
“for a.” While I fully endorse Miller’s observation here, she tends to be more sanguine
than I about the ability of these “micro-narrative”1’s to self-consciously take stock of
their own entrenchment (or interpellation) in systems of representation.
 Susan David Bemstein 143

2. These previewers from literature departments are Barbara E. Johnson and Hous-
ton A. Baker, J .
3 . Spivak (1990,52) also notes that gender, or any category of identity, is necessarily
imp1icated in ideological networks of signification that can be gleaned by “actually
attending to texts.”
4. Miller (1991,16-17) discusses the tension between personal and positional modes
of authority in confessional feminism. She rightly notes that “positional” and “personal”
are not synonymous. I would qualify “positional” as a use of the personal that attends
critically to the politics of representational authority.
5. See Scott (1991,787).
6. By citing “the dubious status of privileged other” that women of color have
assumed in recent materialist feminist theories, I refer to the fetishizing of this subject
position as the one that absorbs all other oppressed identities of gender, class, and race,
to name only the most commonly cited categories. Like confessional feminism, invoking
women of color can be an expedient way to justify literary analysis as political activism.
In “Criticizing Feminist Criticism,” a dialogue with Marianne Hirsch and Nancy
Miller, Jane Gallop acknowledges a shift in her intellectual attachment from French men
to African-American women theorists as sources of knowledge and approval:
I realize that the set of feelings that I used to have about French men 1
now have about African-American women. Those are the people I feel
inadequate in relation to and try to please in my writing. . . . The way
[Deborah]McDowell has come to occupy the place of Lacan in my psyche
does seem to correspond to the way that emphasis on race has replaced
for me something like French vs. American feminism. (Hirsch and Keller
1990,363.64)
Elizabeth Abel also described this phenomenon in the context of motivated cross-racial
readings in her talk “On White on Black: Race and the Politics of Feminist Reading,”
presented at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 19, 1991. In particular, Abel
locates from 1985 this trend in which white women turn to black women’s texts to
legitimate their use of a specific theoretical persuasion.
1 have not failed to notice that I end this essay by endorsing the confessional modes of
Gayatri Spivak. However, it is not her identity as a woman of color that interests me, but
rather the way Spivak scrutinizes the very different, contradictory categories that shape
her subject positioning.
7. Young-Bruehl (1991, 15) originates a “deeply personal voice” of academic femi-
nism in the consciousness-raising and political activism of the late sixties’ women’s
movement. Miller (1991,21) draws interesting connections between sixties’ sloganeer-
ing, the seventies’ feminist watchword, “the personal is the political,” and the recent
phenomenon of confessing feminism that seeks to make the personal the theoretical.
8. Linda Alcoff (1988), for instance, devises “positionality” as a way to draw together
the most politically productive features of poststructuralist and cultural feminist theories.
Alcoff‘s positionality signifies the foregrounding of a particular subject position from
which a feminist theorist might speak. I am interested in the way this positioning of the
subject of the confessional mode is limited by the operations of language, by the
surrounding discursive and ideological contexts that complicate the way this subject
position gets read. In other words, positionality politics has its limitations. For Spivak
(1990,55-56), unveiling one’s positionality becomes a closed proposition, framed as it is
144 Hypatia

within specific discourses and their particular “communities of power.” Also see note 4
on Miller’s distinction between “personal” and “positional.”
9.1 defer to another time and place the exploration of a fifth category of first-person
theorizing, the uesheticized confession. This strain signifies a genre of American feminist
work informed by French feminisms in which personal voices, in the form of anecdotes,
diary entries, meandering meditations, along with theoretical speculation attempt to
dissolve divisionsbetween poetic and critical discourses.Three examples of aestheticized
confession include Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1978), Alice Jardine (1989, 73-87), and Eve
Sedgwick (1987).
Miller (1991, 2-3) offers “a typology, a poetics of the ‘egodocuments’that constitute
personal criticism: confessional, locational, academic, political, narrative, anecdotal,
biographematic, etc..” She distinguishes “self-narrative woven into critical argument”
from “self-representation as political representativity” (Miller 1991,2). While both our
inventories address the contextual hearings of personal disclosure, I attend to the
rhetorical intonations of specific confessional acts.
10. This issue of New Literary Hiswry contains nine replies to Messer-Davidow’s essay.
As many as six of the respondents (Joan E. Hartman, Ruth Hubbard, Patricia Clark Smith,
Amy Ling, Nellie McKay, Jane Tompkins) employ personal (invoking “experiences”) or
positional (underscoring the act of “speaking as”) modes. Gader and Theory:Dialogues
on Feminist Criticism, edited by Linda Kaufman, includes both Messer-Davidow’s and
Tompkins’s contributions and adds the followingessays that incorporate confessionalacts,
some brief, others protracted: David Shumway, “Solidarity or Perspectivity!,” Gerald
MacLean, “Citing the Subject,” and Joseph Allen b o n e , “Of Me(n) and Feminism:
Who(se) is the Sex that Writes?” Miller also responds specifically to the articles by
Toinpkins and MacLean in the first chapter of Getting Personal, while she inserts
autobiographical material throughout her book, including the last chapter in which she
describes herself coming to grips with her father’s penis.
11. Miller (1991,s-8,25,30)devotes careful attention to both the motivations and
the varied effects of this passage on readers. Risking getting “too” personal, she also
elaborates on the historical importance of “Janice” on the last page and in the last
explanatory note of her essay. While these biographical details do provide some useful
contextualizing of Tompkins’s otherwise oblique allusion, Miller’s revelations also occa-
sion questions about the sensation-effect of such confidential exposures, something 1
explore later in MacLean’s confessional exhibition of a scene from his marriage.
12. In “Criticizing Feminist Criticism” (Hirsch and Keller, 1990) Jane Gallop draws
a distinction between criticism and “trashing.” Rather than peremptory dismissal, criti-
cism means attending to the argument by trying to pursue it in different directions. The
focus is the intellectual endeavor and not the specific theorist who participates in it,
although Gallop does allow for ways in which the two intertwine. Frey draws no
distinction between intellectual and personal subjects; self-identity is textuality and
criticism constitutes an ad feminam attack.
Miller (1991, 5-6) invokes “unfriendly readers” as a figure for those who are
“embarrassed” or “uncomfortable” with confessional outbursts. I find Miller’s term of a
piece with Frey’s “adversarial method” in that both render any critical objections finally
a matter of personal feelings. I appreciate the attempt here to complicate the construction
and relationship between intellect and emotion; nevertheless, it is crucial not to overturn
the dichotomy and simply privilege the once devalued position. If my observations brand
me as an “unfriendly reader,” 1 certainly do not intend to “attack” the people attached
 Susan David Bernstein 145

to the signatures on these articles, but rather to scrutinize the deployment of a specific
rhetorical device. It seems to me that friendship is not really at issue in any case.
13. Miller (1991, 139.42) approaches the end of her book with a confessional
vignette, “Coda: Loehmann’s, Or, Shopping with My Mother,” that corresponds to what
I am describing in Tompkins’s and Frey’s articles.
14. De Lauretis (1987, 21) describes the vested nature of male feminism as an
“hommage”that legitimates and reifies positions within academic feminism that promote
“either or both the critic’s personal interests and male-centered theoretical concerns.”
Miller (1991, 17-18) says of MacLean’s obvious condescension toward women, “The
challenge, therefore, for me writing about this in my t u r n is not simply to condescend as
afeminist to him as a man . . .without sounding like the feminist police.” Condescension
and positionalities notwithstanding, I am pointing out contradictions between MacLean’s
professed politics and his rhetorical use of confession and related personal modes like
“Dear Jane” addresses.
15. Although Miller (1991, 17-19) devotes attention to the “personal criticism” of
MacLean’s essay, she submerges a bracketed allusion to this confession of domestic
violence in an explanatory note: “I am also not taking into account the self-narrative
MacLean produces within the reply: the account of his relations with his mother and his
wife which leads to the confession of having struck his wife during an argument” (Miller
1991,28). Curiously, Miller doesn’t explain why she chooses to foreclose this confession
and MacLean’s “self-narrative” that surrounds it from her discussion, though to my mind
it offers an extreme case of “getting personal” in academic discourse.
16. I owe this insight, among many, to a very illuminating discussion of Gallop’s book
by Ellen Michel, (Michel ad., 1). Michel also notes Gallop’s vexed attention to her own
institutional subject position: “Gallop is, after all, a ‘womanscholar’who frequently plays
the part of the seductive daughter, the call girl who can turn an intellectual trick” (p.
20).
17. For a more detailed examination of Gallop’s confessional mode in Reading Lacan,
see Bernstein (1989, 195-213).
18. Tori1 Moi (1988,16) makes some remarks about Gallop’s textual antics in Reading
Lacan that are relevant to my reading here. She argues that “the relentlessly self-subver-
sive strategies of [Gallop’s] writing unwittingly come to reproduce the very monological
monotony they set out to deconstruct.” Moi construes Gallopian criticism as a
“postfeminist” enterprise attempting “to replace feminist politics with feminine stylis,
tics,” which produces “a marvellously shrewd, brilliant, and witty text which somehow
has nothing to say” about “the material and ideological bases for women’s oppression.”
19. This reflexive mode of confession approaches signification as a genealogical
process. See Foucault (1988) and Ferguson (1990). Butler (1990, x+xi) describes the
genealogical critique that “refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of
female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view;
rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause
those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses
with multiple and diffuse points of origin.”
20. A provocative example of a text that establishes a dialogue between materialist
feminist theory and autobiography is Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman.
While one might contend that Steedman’sattention to the imbricated narratives of both
her and her mother’s lives is far too extensive to be considered a confessional mode, the
way she explicitly structures autobiography through cultural materialism positions the
“personal” as interventions on the “theoretical,” much like the intrusions of confessions
146 Hypatia

I describe above. Steedman is one of many feminists who deploy autobiographical

material to pursue reflexively the construction of subjectivity.
21. While there are many examples to choose from, I want to mention only one more
that incorporates the reflexive confessional mode. The subtitle of my essay alludes to
“Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” by Biddy Martin and Chandra
Talpade Mohanty. Continually theorizing and personalizing identity, Martin and
Mohanty emphasize the use of “individual self-reflection” in order to ratify a “political
collectivity” (Martin and Mohanty 1986,210).
22. See Walker (1990,558-60) for a discussion of the embattled author position in
critical theory. The article investigates ways feminist theory both preserves and revises
the author position as asource ofpower and an instance ofcontradictions. Walker suggests
many useful connections with my treatment of confessional feminism that pursues the
author position in a particular discursive formation.

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