SOURCE: Adlam, Carol. “Ethics of Difference: Bakhtin's Early Writings and Feminist Theories.” In Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, edited by Carol Adlam, et al., pp. 142-59. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Adlam discusses the ways in which Bakhtin's concepts of carnival, double-voicing, heteroglossia, and polyphony have been employed in feminist literary criticism, arguing that Bakhtin was a precursor of feminist theories of language.

I

The impact of Bakhtin on twentieth-century thought shows no signs of abating in his centenary year. The abundance of both exegetic and applied research testifies to the appeal of Bakhtinian concepts, and in many instances, reference to that abundance is structured by means of a barely acknowledged appeal to a hierarchy between the two forms of research. The splash made by Bakhtin's texts has produced ripples across the disciplines the world over, but there is dispute...