SOURCE: Landry, Donna. “The Word According to Moi: Politics and Feminist Literary Theory.” Criticism 29, no. 1 (winter 1987): 119-32.

In the following essay, Landry addresses the political implications of Sexual/Textual Politics in the context of contemporary feminist theory.

“In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them. …”

… And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that those authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?

Bessie Head, A Question of Power¹

It is hardly a startling revelation that feminist theorists have tended to write essays rather than books. Indeed, something of a feminist orthodoxy has developed from...