SOURCE: Fuss, Diana. “Getting into History.” Arizona Quarterly 45, no. 4 (winter 1989): 95-108.

In the following essay, Fuss discusses Sexual/Textual Politics in terms of recent feminist approaches to historicism that emphasize histories of feminism instead of feminist theories of history.

The problem may be not how to get into history, but how to get out of it.

—Hayden White, “Getting Out of History”

While historians like Hayden White have busily been trying to get out of history, feminist literary critics have been just as energetically trying to get into it.¹ Since women as historical subjects are rarely included in “History” to begin with, the strong feminist interest in forging a new historicity that moves across and against “his story” is not surprising. What is more surprising perhaps is the particular form these new feminist approaches to historicism are taking: feminism enacts its engagement with history through a fetishistic fascination...