SOURCE: Knight, Deborah. “The Rhetoric of Theory: Responses to Toril Moi.” New Literary History 26, no. 1 (winter 1995): 63-70.

In the following essay, Knight analyzes the antithetical relationship between “theory” and “feminist theory,” comparing the critical practices of both kinds of thought.

In “Women, Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Humanism in Feminist Film Theory,” I investigate some of the ways in which feminist (film) theory relates itself to, and distinguishes itself from, theory in general. If one imagines that feminist theory is something that is distinct from theory due to a specifically political causal history, then feminist theory will be inclined to relate itself to theory confrontationally. If on the other hand feminist theory is understood as something which follows from, or responds to, work done in a prior or dominant theoretical domain, then it might be condemned in perpetuity to being asymmetrically dependent upon that prior domain. Both these...