Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History, (1988)

Abstract

Riley’s extended essay, devised as an argumentative contribution to the feminist historiography of the 1970s and 80s, suggests that the category of ‘women’ is to be deployed cautiously and strategically since its meanings are rarely straightforward; if used as an ever-reliable foundation, it will continue to produce more problems for contemporary feminist analysis than it solves. ‘Women’ as a category has its own elaborate — and profoundly political — history of production and use, is marked with strange temporalities, and is hardly more transhistorical than the category of ‘the homosexual’, the historical emergence of which has been shown by Foucault. The history of feminism is itself endemically vexed by the ambiguity of ‘women’ on which it is founded. The book reflects on the extent to which the newish ‘human science’ of sociology and the development of social policy at the turn of the century, in creating those very questions of ‘women’, posed as perhaps intractable, did not in fact establish forms of thought which, ostensibly in order to investigate ‘sexual difference’, constructed their own convictions in sexualised terms from the very beginning. The nineteenth-century intimacy between women and ‘the social’ is discussed as an invention of this kind, while the history of the suffrage in Britain is seen as an instance of past feminism’s productive games with the instability of ‘women’. For the present, reliance on ‘the body’ as the key to confounding modern anti-essentialism is argued to be worse than useless. The problems of ‘sexual difference’ cannot be resolved within epistemological frameworks inherited from the nineteenth-century human sciences, but must remain eternally smouldering away — in part because the problem of ‘sexual difference’ was itself at least partly constitutive in forming these very epistemologies