French Feminisms

Focusing on Kathy Acker's interaction with French feminist thought and experimental writing, Finch examines the writers texts to bridge seemingly conflictual branches of feminist thought in order to position Acker in an ongoing genealogy of queer experimental literature.

It is simply no longer acceptable to speak of the goddess Athena from the fifth generation of Olympian/Orphic Greece without reference to her mother Metis. Hesiod (1959), among others, tells us Metis appears as a reincarnation of her first-generation self in the Olympian dynasty as wife of Zeus. She was originally the cosmic egg of all creation in the Orphic Theogony, as recounted by Apollodorus (1921), and Taylor (1896), from whose mucosity, the entire gene-alogy of the Olympian/Orphic heaven (and theology), is spawned. However, from the moment Zeus murdered Metis as she was about to give birth to Athena their daughter, she has lapsed into the fissures of forgetfulness in philosophy, theology, mythology and early psychoanalysis. Indeed, in each field of inquiry, Athena is overwhelmingly deemed 'unmothered' and produced as Harrison tells us as a desperate ploy 'from the brain of Zeus' through his cunning intellect, for Athena to serve as his 'mouthpiece' (Harrison 1922, 648). This paper seeks to do more than simply restore Metis as mother to Athena. It explores the tragedy inherited by her violent removal, for mother/daughter relations, grievability and sustained disavowal of maternal divinity in dominant discourse.

The article aims to sketch the reception and the representations of French feminist discourses in the Anglo-American critical theory starting from the early 1970s. It situates French Feminism within the field of French Theory, a notion created in the Anglophone critical discourses, and analyses the meanings ascribed to both terms. Through a historicised discussion of the appropriation the French theories – for a long time limited to the propositions of Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray – the text also attempts to present the popular critical moves (selectiveness and standardisation) in this process. What follows constitutes a brief analysis of the reasons and responses to the propagation of French feminism as a reductive construct. The article concludes registering a change in more contemporary approaches which attempt to move beyond the initial label.