Defining

A Feminist Literacy

As feminists, we tend to look outside ourselves in search of blame for the world's being the way it is. We claim we have no voice because the patriarchy has drowned us out or gagged us with a dust cloth. We dismiss our inner voices as either internalizations of male language or as "gossip."

Yet to label as "gossip" the unfamiliar voices that somehow seep through our gestapo-like, traditional linguistic filter is already to have internalized patriarchal language. Not to listen to the voices because they are unfamiliar is to have internalized the patriarchal value system as well.

"Our customary literacy language is systematically gendered in ways that influence what we approve and disapprove of, making it extremely difficult for us to acknowledge certain kinds of originality" (Ostriker 3). Yet, even as feminists attempt to "make female speech prevail, to penetrate male discourse, to cause the ear of man to listen" (Ostriker211), we continue to find our voices silenced both by the big, bad world out there - that we, of course, have nothing to do with perpetuating - and by our internalized selves that are really just slightly altered facsimiles of the outer world.

After all, if our inner voices are somehow different from our learned outer voices, why do we continue to hear only the "voices inside [us] that tell [us] to be quiet, the voices outside [us] that drown [us] out or politely dismiss what [we] say or do not understand [us], the silence inside [us] that avoids saying any- thing important even to [ourselves] (Annas 4)?

Yet, if woman's voice is still silent, whether from internal or external censors, what is feminist criticism? What is feminist literary theory? What is different about the "different truths" (Gilligan 156) men and women have if we continue to privilege difference between genders, rather than traits, in order to truths these truths?

Academic feminists, warns Betsy Draine, especially need to be more aware that being able to write from "'a woman's position' about 'subjects of interest to women' in language that women recognize as their own is no guarantee that [women authors] understand the first thing about women outside their class or outside their publishers' readership of white, upper-middle-class, females in Britain, Canada, and the United States" (Draine A40).

Indeed, it is interesting that silence is still a central theme of feminist theory even as feminists have begun creating their own canon, a rather ironic predicament for a movement that originally sought to "dispel the idea of a fixed literacy canon, which served to insure for so long the virtual exclusion of women from literary history" (Draine A40). In our efforts to de-canonize knowledge and overcome our past of silence, have we not merely become silencers ourselves? By making feminism another category, instead of changing the presupposed idea of categories, have we not become another exclusionary entity, inadvertently building more linguistic , barriers even as we claim to be tearing them down? Is the woman in the car next to you on the freeway more concerned with phallocentrism or the price of eggs? Does she have the faintest idea what deconstructed neo-post-modern, revisionist feminism is? If she doesn't know, does that make her a literate woman or an illiterate feminist? If, by chance, she does understand, is she then co-literate, or is she now an illiterate woman and a literate feminist?