Nina Auerbach teaches at the University of Pennsylvania; she writes frequently about ghosts, ghostly creatures and vampires.
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Vol. 22 No. 13 · 6 July 2000
pages 7-8 | 3218 words
Acrimony
Nina Auerbach
- Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century by Susan Gubar
Columbia, 237 pp, £16.00, February 2000, ISBN 0 231 11580 6
Susan Gubar has kept the faith. Most of the ‘feminist critics’ of the late 1970s, myself included, have drifted away, though not away from feminism: feminist criticism, an exclusive academic sorority, was always distinct from commitment to a political movement. But despite her dismay and even despair at what’s become of academic feminism, Gubar does her best to tend the flame.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 15 · 10 August 2000
From Sally Minogue
Susan Gubar's sub-heading, 'What Do You Mean "We", White Woman', described as 'provocative' by Nina Auerbach in her review of Gubar's Critical Condition (LRB, 6 July), must be a misquotation of, or reference to, Lorraine Bethel's poem 'What chou mean we, white girl?' Gubar's leaching the original of its blackness ('chou') and its contempt ('girl') is symptomatic of a weakness which was present at the inception of academic feminism. If the inclusive pronoun 'we' cannot be used, the case for feminism collapses. Bethel's poem is dedicated to 'the proposition that all women are not equal, i.e. identically oppressed'. Those who framed feminism didn't want to listen to competing claims about what it meant to be a woman. Still less did they want to think that there might be more damaging forms of oppression than patriarchy.
Sally Minogue
Canterbury Christ Church<br />University College
Vol. 22 No. 17 · 7 September 2000
From Peter Dear
The heading 'What Do You Mean "We", White Woman', of which Sally Minogue provides an earnest interpretation (Letters, 10 August), is unlikely to refer, as she claims, to Lorraine Bethel's poem. Bethel, like Susan Gubar, was surely alluding to the joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto that circulated widely in the US two or three decades ago. It culminates with the two of them surrounded by hostile (American) Indians. The Lone Ranger says: 'What shall we do?' Tonto replies: 'What do you mean "we", white man?'
Peter Dear
Cornell University<br />Ithaca, New York
From Rick Livingstone
The joke was old when I heard it more than thirty years ago. I commend it to Minogue, not just for its wry appreciation of contextually sensitive identities and solidarities, but also for what it has to say about the pleasures of piling on.
Rick Livingstone
Columbus, Ohio
