| Chapter 1: | The Cultural Production of Controversial Women Writers |
Consequently, it is extremely critical for feminist critics not only to read women authors of color but to read in such a framework as to un-produce the controversies of women authors of color and of the female body.
The Politics of Literary / Cultural Criticism
It is literary and cultural criticisms, not the creative works being critiqued, that have produced the current debates on women authors of color. Reading does not just interpret but produces textual meanings and the author’s intentions. It is a politically powerful act and “a discourse of legitimation” beyond literary canon formation.8 It directly participates in the cultural productions of nation, race, gender, and sexuality.
The significance of literary interpretation is greatly emphasized in reader-response theories, and Stanley Fish’s notion of “interpretation” makes the reader the producer of a text. According to Fish, reading is “interpretive” in the sense that it is “regarded, not as leading to meaning, but as having meaning.” In other words, it does not “[wait] meaning, but [constitutes] meaning.”9 As a result of different readers employing different interpretive strategies, textual ambiguities appear and controversies emerge. Moreover, “interpretive strategies are not natural or universal, but learned” within “interpretive communities,” which are “made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around.”10
Fish’s theory opens up a vast space for political reading. His notion of “interpretive communities” establishes a direct relation between textual meaning, the reader, and the cultural context. That is, the text is fluid, its different meanings determined by readers with particular social, cultural, and political backgrounds. Its emphasis on the “learned” process of reading leads to the possibility to unlearn and thus to challenge dominant prejudiced criticisms, which is exactly what Patrocinio Schweickart has done when she argues for “a feminist theory of reading”11 to revise the male-centered literary canon.