At this point what I'm actually doing is referring
you to the theoretical contents of my previous paper, which explains
all of this and develops it, rather than having to do
it all over again for this paper. That's what published authors are
allowed to do as a matter of normative practice: refer to the body of established
text they've already published and build upon it. In the academic environment,
the person with ideas who has not been able to get them published does not
easily have this luxury, and this is even more the case for those unpublished
thinkers whose thoughts are not closely approximated by the writings of
many other people whose works are in print, because then you cannot cite
anyone else that makes more or less the same point for you, either.
And this is, of course, the position that feminists have found themselves
in, in the academy. And it is this FACT, this SITUATION, that is the subject
of my paper about Feminism & Sociology (the one to which I just referred
you a handful of lines above this) as well as the objective purpose of poststructuralist
feminism as an endeavor: to pry open the doors, to invalidate the institution's
excuses for keeping our thoughts out. The poststructuralists, and I, are
doing "metatheory", in other words theory about theory itself.
The process of validating ideas that is part of the content of radical feminist
theory; just as the patriarchal canon of established social theory contains
the tools for its own legitimation, radical feminist theory contains within
itself the counterargument against the academy's excuses for keeping it
out, and it all fits together as an intrinsic whole.
Poststructuralist feminist theory contains tools for attacking the academy's
excuses for keeping feminist theory out. I bring with me a set of theoretical
tools that are derived from radical feminist theory, and they are better.
They are more coherently integrated with the rest of the body of radical
feminist theory. As you continue on from here, you will soon see how destructive
poststructuralist theory is for feminism, or at least my reasons for thinking
so, and for being so passionate about it.