Imperialism and Sexual Difference

Feminist criticism can be a force in changing the discipline. To do so, however, it must recognize that it is complicitous with the institution within which it seeks its space. That slow labour might transform it from opposition to critique. Let me describe a certain area of this complicity in a theoretical and a historical way: My theoretical model is taken from Paul de Man. De Man suggests that a critical philosopher initially discovers that the basis of a truthclaim is no more than a trope. In the case of academic feminism the discovery is that to take the privileged male of the white race as a norm for universal humanity is no more than a politically interested figuration. It is a trope that passes itself off as truth, and claims that woman or the racial other is merely a kind of troping of that truth of man — in the sense that they must be understood as unlike (nonidentical with) it and yet with reference to it. In so far as it participates in this discovery, even the most 'essentialist' feminism or raceanalysis is engaged in a tropological deconstruction. De Man goes on to suggest, however, that even as it establishes the truth of this discovery/ the critical philosopher's text begins to perform the problems inherent in the very institution of epistemological production, of the production, in other words, of any 'truth' at all. By this logic, varieties of feminist theory and practice must reckon with the possibility that, like any other discursive practice, they are marked and constituted by, even as they constitute, the field of their production. If much of what I write here seems to apply as much to the general operations of imperialist disciplinary practice as to feminism, it is because I wish to point at the dangers of not acknowledging the