Abstract
The gynocritical paradigm in feminist theory and criticism, as defined by Elaine Showalter in her influential essay, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" (1978), and fleshed out in what can be described as its founding texts, Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977) and Sandra M. Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic (1979), has become over the last two decades an empowering framework for a considerable number of critical studies aiming to trace a specifically female literary tradition in various national and transnational contexts. To give but one among many possible examples, monographs published in the series Women in Context (Athlone Press) are historical investigations (dating back to mid-nineteenth century) of women's writing in, respectively, Norway, Italy, France, Sweden, and so on. Showalter herself had projected that feminist studies proceeding from gynocritical postulates would aim to investigate and theorize such subjects as "the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of the female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works" (1992, 382). Some of these pathways of inquiry-especially those dependent on the potentially essentializing and homogenizing notions of "female creativity" and "female language"-were soon to be accused, on the one hand, of relying on a naively tautological assumption "that a 'feminine' identity is one which signs itself with a feminine name" (Kamuf 285) and, on the other, of ignoring or diminishing the constitutive importance of racial, ethnic and geopolitical differences among women writers.