LAUSR

In her second book of critical prose, Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (1988), Denise Riley tracks the historical oscillations, in feminist and proto-feminist movements, between claims for and disavowals of the name ‘women’. The book asks how ‘women’ – as a name and as language – has interacted and will continue to interact with feminist political formations as both an irritant and a necessity. The book’s argument is that such shifts and mutations are not aberrant but rather endemic to feminism’s multifaceted relationship to the category ‘women’ in the first place. Riley’s goal is not simply to insist on the real heterogeneity of women, as if the category ‘women’ contained an empirical mass, however variable, but rather to show that the category itself amasses and gathers forces that sometimes do violence to those who call themselves or find themselves called ‘women’; so, as she writes,