New Literary History

Why has modernist culture been so unable imaginatively to integrate women’s creativity into its narratives of radicalism, innovation, dissidence, and transgression when gender has to be recognized as one of the neuralgic points of modernity itself? If the canonical story of art wrote gender into modernism only in the negative, by effacement of its most agitating bearers–women avant-gardists—how can a retrospective archaeology of the avant-garde, not as a single vanguard but as a constellation of historically contingent moments and radical self-positionings vis-à-vis the triangulation of family, state, and religion typical of Western bourgeois modernity, open up new lines of analysis that reveal the oscillating place of “the feminine/le feminine” in all avant-garde formations? Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology of contemporary liquid modernity and Julia Kristeva’s ever fertile thoughts on the temporalities of sexual difference, this article argues, firstly, that in liquid times the relatively solid ground against which avant-garde transgression operated is no longer operative, displacing the classic model of the avant-garde, while, secondly, the feminist perspective on the long durée of the phallocentric symbolic order places an intervention “in, of and from the feminine” continuously in a historically strategic position of transformative dissidence. My argument weaves historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theories of aesthetics and sexual difference, contesting the rapid shifts in intellectual fashion typical of liquid modernity that are seeping into the academy and leading to premature abandonment of certain intellectual-political projects. For all the dangers and complexities of thinking about “the feminine” in any form at all, and certainly now, when high feminist theories of sexual difference are apparently so démodé, I show how this troubled and troubling concept is still historically significant and theoretically relevant to rethinking the avant-garde.