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Modern Language Association

The Counterdiscourse of the FeminineAuthor(s): Joanna Russ and Rita FelskiSource: PMLA, Vol. 107, No. 2 (Mar., 1992), pp. 356-357Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462648

Accessed: 22/03/2010 06:57

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My aim was thus not to present a condemnation ofthe fin de siecle cult of artificiality. Clearly, its ques-tioning of the natural status of both gender and sex-uality played a significant part in the construction ofa variety of self-consciously oppositional identitiesduringthe period.(The writersI am thinkingof includenot only men but also women such as Rachilde.) Isought merely to demonstrate that the celebration ofart over nature was not unproblematically subversiveor free of ambiguity, given the intimate association

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between the categoriesof nature and woman that pre-vailed in the discourses of the period. In this regard,Iremain unconvinced by Russ's apparentbelief that themisogynistic dimensions of such discourses are alle-viated in being deployed as part of a self-consciousrhetoricalstrategy.

RITAFELSKIMurdochUniversity