Pergamon Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 211-224, 1997 Copyright © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0277-5395/97 $17.00 + .00 PII S0277-5395(97)00010-1 (MIS)REPRESENTATIONS: WHAT FRENCH FEMINISM ISN'T l BRONWYN WINTER Department of French Studies, Universityof Sydney,NSW 2006, Australia Synopsis - - The recognition of a discipline within the academy necessitates some conformity to pre-establishedparametersand priorities, such as accepted research methods and the dictates of academic fashion. Hence the paradoxicalpositionof women's studies: it is increasingly at risk of losing touch with the movementto which it owes its existence, and often ends up reinforcingassumptionsit purportedly set out to challenge.A striking example of this double problem, in western English-speaking countries, is the academic representationof "French feminism"as synonymous with postmodernism and as almost entirely limited to the work of a few academics whose connection with feminism is at best highly questionable.This is both reductionistand dangerous, as it masks both the diversity of feminist debate and practice in France and the problemsof manipulation, disinformation and lack of access to a public forum which plague both French feministsand some areas of English-speaking feminist scholarship. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd Providing a clear and comprehensive picture of a body of theory or practice that lies in some way beyond one's own boundaries (whether these be national, cultural, disciplinary, linguis- tic, ideological or whatever) is always a tricky business. 2 It requires what can often amount to years of rigorous intellectual and political in- quiry, an essential component of which is a fair degree of skepticism. In other words, it is nec- essary to lay aside -- or at the very least to seriously question -- received wisdom in order to better check for oneself. This in turn implies that one needs to know what and where to check, which largely involves the personal ex- perience of trial and error. In short, the gather- ing of "knowledge," especially "feminist knowledge," or to recontextualise a famous Australian literary title, "the getting of (femi- nist) wisdom ''3, is necessarily a combination of theoretical and empirical inquiry, which both need to be refined through the filter of challenge and debate. Why especially feminist knowledge? Well, it is arguable that as an ostensibly "subversive" discipline, especially within the academy, "feminist knowledge" is particularly vulnerable to co-opting, to misrepresentation, to dilution to the point of meaninglessness, or quite simply, to silencing through direct censorship or sidelin- ing. Vulnerable, in short, to anything that will render it undefinable and/or unthreatening, in- cluding, in many cases, to academic women. Now, what does all this have to do with "French feminism"? My answer is: everything. For the misrepresentation of French feminism within the academy through the 1980s and, it would seem, well into the 1990s, brings into sharp relief the problems of knowledge, of methodology, of accountability and even of the definition of feminism itself within academia. This essay is an attempt to address some of these issues through a brief examination of what French feminism is and isn't, and of why one particular, narrow -- and erroneous -- defini- tion has prevailed to the quasi-total exclusion of others. For the problem is not that French fem- inism is given, or has been given, unwarranted prominence within the western English- speaking academy, but rather that what is com- monly thought of as French feminism has, in fact, very little to do with what French feminism actually is. Concurrently, I will be referring briefly to the work of some important French feminists who, despite the long-standing exist- 211