SOURCE: McCallum, Pamela. Review of Sexual/Textual Politics, by Toril Moi. Signs 12, no. 4 (summer 1987): 822-23.

In the following review, McCallum outlines Sexual/Textual Politics, praising the work as illuminating and provocative.

Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics takes as its theme “the methods, principles and politics” (xiii) that inform contemporary feminist literary theory. This provocative and wide-ranging book is not concerned with a conventional survey of contributions to feminist critical practice. Rather, it is concerned with a critical reexamination or decoding of the numerous theoretical models and political strategies that underpin received feminist discourse. Moi argues that both the theoretical and practical limitations of feminist criticism derive from a weakening of critical discussion within the women's movement. Once subversive emancipatory slogans such as “sisterhood” and “being a woman” have been unexpectedly co-opted and neutralized by a homogenizing humanist/essentialist discourse.

The first section of Moi's book—a lucid and...