Kristeva, Julia (1941–)

4. Kristeva and feminism

A visit to China which resulted in the book Des Chinoises (1974) (About Chinese Women, 1977) set the tone for Kristeva’s uneasy relationship with feminism. The book caused controversy, and Kristeva was accused of being ‘romantic’ and ‘utopian’ in her figuring of the Orient as other. Given to dramatic statements, such as ‘a woman cannot “be”’, Kristeva’s often dismissive remarks about other versions of feminism – what she calls in an interview ‘sociological protest’ (Marks and de Courtivron 1981) – did little to curry favour with her detractors. In her defence, it should be pointed out that Kristeva’s work has shared the same fate as that of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, with whom she is so often compared. The reception of their work has been plagued by a failure to take account of their intellectual heritage, political contexts and personal biographies. The misshapen versions of their work that critics have handed down to their English-speaking readers made it easy for readers of the 1980s to accuse these three so-called French feminists (Irigaray is Belgian, and Cixous is Algerian) of ‘essentialism’. Afraid that Kristeva’s caution about totalizing politics, her attempt to reintroduce the body into analyses of language, and the Lacanian influence on her work amounted to a male-identified conservative and reactionary elitism, feminist critics shunned her work. Instead of understanding her insistence upon sexual difference as a refusal to neutralize the specific material conditions of the production of language, conditions which include the sexed body, her attempt to reintroduce the body into feminism was hailed as detrimental to the progress of women’s quest for equality.

In the 1990s, Kristeva began to receive a fairer hearing in English-speaking feminist circles, and this was in large part due to the fact that critics began to equip themselves with the conceptual tools that Kristeva’s diverse intellectual endeavours required. Not least among these is the importance of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism – specifically Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics and its post-structuralist modifications by figures such as Roland Barthes.