Practising Feminism: Identity, Difference, Power
Edited by Nickie Charles and Felicia Hughes-Freeland
Routledge, 1996. 228 pp., $36.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Carla Gorton
I was drawn to Practising Feminism by its claim to be "an important contribution to the neglected middle ground between post-modernism's deconstruction of subjectivity, and continued feminist concern with agency and the validity of experience".
In fact, Nickie Charles' introductory chapter on "Feminist Practices" raised many of the debates and issues which I thought the book would tackle. She starts out by declaring that a central concern of the book is the relationship between theory and practice and a conviction that feminist political practice and academic feminism should be (but often seem not to be) related.
Charles analyses theoretical developments within British feminism and what she defines as the shift from class to culture, from structure to agency, from a concern with systematic gender divisions to a concern with gender identities based on difference. Feminist identity politics, she claims, placed the emphasis on personal responsibility for oppression rather than the social relations that situate individuals in different positions relative to one another.
It is also Charles who raises the epistemological debates which have become central to academic feminism. She is critical of feminists who privilege the role of experience in knowledge production and deny any place to theory.
However, while Charles returns again and again to the theme of practising feminism and often points out the tension between feminist practice and what is regarded as "good academic practice", the remaining chapters in this collection are less engaging. They don't address the big questions outlined in the introduction and, despite their emphasis on qualitative research and "women's voices", they fail even at the level of an "interesting read".
The book is the result of a seminar series organised during 1992-93 by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wales Swansea. The nine chapters travel similar ground in very different settings, addressing the issue of feminist consciousness and identity in Greece, at Greenham and in Wales. Other chapters explore the same issues via the experience of witchcraft, university life and sexuality.