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Am I That Name?: Feminism And The Category Of Women In History
A new edition of a classic work on the history of feminism. Writing about changes in the notion of womanhood, Denise Riley examines, in the manner of Foucault, shifting historical constructions of the category of "women" in relation to other categories central to concepts of personhood: the soul, the mind, the body, nature, the social. Feminist movements, Riley argues, have had no choice but to play out this indeterminacy of women. This is made plain in their oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference. To fully recognize the ambiguity of the category of "women" is, she contends, a necessary condition for an effective feminist political philosophy.
134 pages, Paperback
First published October 28, 1988
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About the author
Denise Riley
52 books59 followersDenise Riley (born 1948) is an English poet and philosopher who began to be published in the 1970s.
Her poetry is remarkable for its paradoxical interrogation of selfhood within the lyric mode. Her critical writings on motherhood, women in history, "identity", and philosophy of language, are recognised as an important contribution to feminism and contemporary philosophy. She was Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and is currently A.D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. She was formerly Writer in Residence at Tate Gallery London, and has held fellowships at Brown University and at Birkbeck, University of London. Among her poetry publications is Penguin Modern Poets 10, with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair (1996). She lives in London.
Her poetry is remarkable for its paradoxical interrogation of selfhood within the lyric mode. Her critical writings on motherhood, women in history, "identity", and philosophy of language, are recognised as an important contribution to feminism and contemporary philosophy. She was Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and is currently A.D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. She was formerly Writer in Residence at Tate Gallery London, and has held fellowships at Brown University and at Birkbeck, University of London. Among her poetry publications is Penguin Modern Poets 10, with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair (1996). She lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 3, 2019
A pretty remarkable book, published two years before Gender Trouble, that lays out a small (and, it must be said, wretchedly cis- and Eurocentric) socialist-feminist history of the category of “women,” demonstrating its many changes and showing that it has no essence lying outside of history. (Indeed, what does? - but it’s the nature of real social abstractions like gender/sex that this constantly has to be demonstrated in order to even get to square one in analyzing them.) Puncturing through the appearance that “womanhood” or “femaleness” is pre-given, fixed and unassailable is an indispensable move for a communist approach to the liberation of proletarian women to make. Riley works through the vexing ways in which “women” slips around as a political category, analyzing it as a sort of character-mask which those under its designation wear, but which is never worn all the time - you can’t be “always a woman” or “completely a woman,” but you can’t swear off being a woman either (except by transitioning - but she’s a cis woman writing in 1988 and doesn’t address trans struggle). We can’t just strip away the harmful stuff that’s been imposed on women by male-supremacist class society to find the positive kernel of True Womanhood underneath, either: womanhood *is* the imposition. Feminists of different kinds have had to go back and forth between claiming to represent and fight for “women” and having to distance themselves from the inevitable destructive, neutralizing pull that the category of “women” exerts. Riley includes a useful section on the involvement of 19th-century bourgeois philanthropic white women in the formation of modern social science and social work, which both serves to demonstrate her points and provides valuable information in its own right about how bourgeois feminism has been involved in corralling, managing and repressing class revolt from proletarian women.
In fact, Denise Riley gets right to the edge of advocating for the end of the sexuation of human beings, and then says that such a transformation is unlikely to ever happen. Why? As I see it, Am I That Name has four main limitations:
- Riley constrains herself with Foucauldian thinking, fixating excessively on language and stopping short of properly investigating sexuation as a social process of the division of labor in class societies. She therefore implicitly keeps a degree of the split between “sex” and “gender” in place, which I almost fooled myself wasn’t happening until she popped up at the end of the book about people being “biologically female.” Retaining this split, which comes from the deeply reactionary sexologist and abuser of intersex children John Money, has awful consequences for trans proletarians, and seriously undercuts the entire thrust of the book. This limit therefore has to be overcome in considering the book’s analysis - for history serving this purpose, Julian Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child is badly written (and badly language-fixated and Foucauldian) but does the job.
- Because of how Riley constrains herself to language-fixated theoretical tools, her thinking fails to be fully materialist, and her historical analysis is held back. This, in fact, is *why* she stumbles and falls back on the notion of a “natural female sex” after going so far to undermine it. She’s able to analyze and demonstrate the historical movement of the “women” category well enough, but can’t grasp the historical-material bones and heart of that movement, especially because she doesn’t incorporate any analysis of the division of labor in class societies or the social and physical-metabolic relationship between human class societies and nature. For this, I highly recommend Alfred Soh-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: a Critique of Epistemology. Another consequence of this insufficiently materialist thinking is that she can see “women”’s discontinuities but not its continuities, and frames the social abstraction of womanhood as somehow unreal, fictional, rather than as a socially real abstraction - intrusions of bourgeois skeptical idealist philosophy which weaken the analysis.
- In line with this lack of an adequate historical materialism is that Riley provides powerful analysis and evidence against cross-class, and therefore bourgeois, models of feminism that claim to work for all women while in fact working to advance the careers/positions of bourgeois, primarily white, cis and abled, women within capitalist society - yet Riley herself doesn’t break with this generic, cross-class feminism, instead merely advocating critical awareness of its dynamics and limits. This shows up in her critically engaging with the Fabian-cum-Stalinist “socialism” of Beatrice Webb, but not with, say, Alexandra Kollontai; it shows up in her criticism of bourgeois sociological philanthropic ladies’ feminism not extending to a class critique of the category of “feminism” in general, or a consideration of how that category got extended into the communist project when it was considered as entirely a label for bourgeois women’s agitation by communist women like Goldman, Luxemburg and Kollontai in the early 20th Century; it shows up, most finally, in the implicit analytic separation of sex/gender dynamics from the core operations of class society in general.
- Part and parcel with the incomplete consideration of class is the total Eurocentrism of Riley’s historical account, which shows her to be repeating the same bourgeois-pseudouniversalist white feminism she agrees with the criticism of. The twin of this Eurocentrism, which may be less obvious to some readers, is that Riley focuses only on the pressures of being designated part of the category “women,” and nowhere even mentions the pressures of being seen as un-woman, partially woman, or not woman at all but entirely below that category, in the category of animal or monster. This means that despite her embrace of criticisms of white-supremacist faux-universalism, she does not consider the concrete situation of proletarian black, disabled, trans or intersex women at all, and her thinking is rendered abstract, out of place, and in need of transformation in order to be useable to us.
Regardless of all that, reading Am I That Name was important, even a bit revelatory. Limited as it is, if this were repeating the analysis given by dozens of other books I would give it three stars; for its historical rarity and the clarity of what Riley achieves within her too-tight limits, I’m giving it four.
In fact, Denise Riley gets right to the edge of advocating for the end of the sexuation of human beings, and then says that such a transformation is unlikely to ever happen. Why? As I see it, Am I That Name has four main limitations:
- Riley constrains herself with Foucauldian thinking, fixating excessively on language and stopping short of properly investigating sexuation as a social process of the division of labor in class societies. She therefore implicitly keeps a degree of the split between “sex” and “gender” in place, which I almost fooled myself wasn’t happening until she popped up at the end of the book about people being “biologically female.” Retaining this split, which comes from the deeply reactionary sexologist and abuser of intersex children John Money, has awful consequences for trans proletarians, and seriously undercuts the entire thrust of the book. This limit therefore has to be overcome in considering the book’s analysis - for history serving this purpose, Julian Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child is badly written (and badly language-fixated and Foucauldian) but does the job.
- Because of how Riley constrains herself to language-fixated theoretical tools, her thinking fails to be fully materialist, and her historical analysis is held back. This, in fact, is *why* she stumbles and falls back on the notion of a “natural female sex” after going so far to undermine it. She’s able to analyze and demonstrate the historical movement of the “women” category well enough, but can’t grasp the historical-material bones and heart of that movement, especially because she doesn’t incorporate any analysis of the division of labor in class societies or the social and physical-metabolic relationship between human class societies and nature. For this, I highly recommend Alfred Soh-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: a Critique of Epistemology. Another consequence of this insufficiently materialist thinking is that she can see “women”’s discontinuities but not its continuities, and frames the social abstraction of womanhood as somehow unreal, fictional, rather than as a socially real abstraction - intrusions of bourgeois skeptical idealist philosophy which weaken the analysis.
- In line with this lack of an adequate historical materialism is that Riley provides powerful analysis and evidence against cross-class, and therefore bourgeois, models of feminism that claim to work for all women while in fact working to advance the careers/positions of bourgeois, primarily white, cis and abled, women within capitalist society - yet Riley herself doesn’t break with this generic, cross-class feminism, instead merely advocating critical awareness of its dynamics and limits. This shows up in her critically engaging with the Fabian-cum-Stalinist “socialism” of Beatrice Webb, but not with, say, Alexandra Kollontai; it shows up in her criticism of bourgeois sociological philanthropic ladies’ feminism not extending to a class critique of the category of “feminism” in general, or a consideration of how that category got extended into the communist project when it was considered as entirely a label for bourgeois women’s agitation by communist women like Goldman, Luxemburg and Kollontai in the early 20th Century; it shows up, most finally, in the implicit analytic separation of sex/gender dynamics from the core operations of class society in general.
- Part and parcel with the incomplete consideration of class is the total Eurocentrism of Riley’s historical account, which shows her to be repeating the same bourgeois-pseudouniversalist white feminism she agrees with the criticism of. The twin of this Eurocentrism, which may be less obvious to some readers, is that Riley focuses only on the pressures of being designated part of the category “women,” and nowhere even mentions the pressures of being seen as un-woman, partially woman, or not woman at all but entirely below that category, in the category of animal or monster. This means that despite her embrace of criticisms of white-supremacist faux-universalism, she does not consider the concrete situation of proletarian black, disabled, trans or intersex women at all, and her thinking is rendered abstract, out of place, and in need of transformation in order to be useable to us.
Regardless of all that, reading Am I That Name was important, even a bit revelatory. Limited as it is, if this were repeating the analysis given by dozens of other books I would give it three stars; for its historical rarity and the clarity of what Riley achieves within her too-tight limits, I’m giving it four.
March 25, 2025
“can anyone fully inhabit a gender without a degree of horror? how could someone ‘be a woman’ through and through, make a final home in that classification without suffering claustrophobia?”
“while it’s impossible to thoroughly be a woman, it’s also impossible to never be one.”
“while it’s impossible to thoroughly be a woman, it’s also impossible to never be one.”
June 10, 2023
“while it’s impossible to thoroughly be a woman, it’s also impossible to never be one” 🔥🔥🔥
September 3, 2018
Denise Riley begins her book by quoting Sojourner Truth “Ain’t I a Woman” and offering her alternative “Ain’t I a fluctuating Identity”(pg. 1). It is this dichotomy of ideas Riley discussed in the book Am I That Name. A better explanation may come later when Riley states “Is ‘women’ then an eternally compromised noun”(pg. 98), this is the central theme to the book. Riley believes the very designation of ‘women’ is problematic in the overarching goal of feminism in reaching the equality of women. To further explain, the very term ‘women’ assumes a difference between men and women as a part of the human species and in order for true equality to exist this designation must disappear.
Riley’s book promises a discussion of the history of feminism and she does take us chronologically through the history of feminism through the lense of ‘woman’. Historians hoping for a copious study of the history of feminism will be disappointed as she spends the first chapter introducing the reader to the concept of ‘woman’ as a word that inherently creates a situation where people view women as something different to, and therefore, unequal to men. The key concept here is to see that by creating an identity around ‘women’ we instantly assume differences within the human species instead of focusing on clear similarities between both men and women. The second chapter begins Riley’s foray into the realm of history as she begins to construct a discussion about the history of feminism. Here Riley creates the identity of women as “enlightened” figures would have seen women. Riley takes us back to the time of Augustine where we see women as inferior in the world but through the grace of god are given equal status in the afterlife. It is in this chapter we are introduced to a variety of different early feminist writers including Christine de Pizan, Marguerite Porete, and Mary Astell who all argue in defence of women within the constriction of the societies they were forced to live within. The demon of this chapter is Jean Jacques Rousseau who’s ideas late in the period of the Enlightenment argued against the ability for women to be rational in thought. The third chapter identifies new ideas and thought which pits women against men as a way to earn equality, the view here being one within society as being a constant struggle and in order for one to achieve equality the other has to lose something. Riley tends to focus here on the growing construct of the role of women within the family as being one who is loses out to the needs of man. An interesting anecdote from this chapter is the idea posited that women had a hard time fighting for equality after World War I because they did not suffer the casualties that men did while fighting for their respective countries. The fourth chapter takes the reader into the differing opinions on women’s suffrage offering us varying viewpoints on the ability of women to use the right to vote. Women and men both fought for or against the right of women to vote for varying reasons, women would only mimic the vote of their husbands or they did not have the mental ability to be a part of the political process. Riley emphasises here the differences between women who have education or are from an elevated social class and those of the working class showing the reader it is impossible for all women to possess the same political ideals or goals and therefore creating a view of women as a political entity should be considered impossible and even problematic toward feminist ideals as was demonstrated during the most basic of women’s goal in the right to vote. The final chapter in the book summarizes the ideas put forth throughout the book and can possibly be best summarized by Riley herself when she says “A true independence here would only be possible when all existing ideas of sexual difference had been laid to rest; but then ‘woman’, too would be buried”(pg. 107).
Riley’s book promises a discussion of the history of feminism and she does take us chronologically through the history of feminism through the lense of ‘woman’. Historians hoping for a copious study of the history of feminism will be disappointed as she spends the first chapter introducing the reader to the concept of ‘woman’ as a word that inherently creates a situation where people view women as something different to, and therefore, unequal to men. The key concept here is to see that by creating an identity around ‘women’ we instantly assume differences within the human species instead of focusing on clear similarities between both men and women. The second chapter begins Riley’s foray into the realm of history as she begins to construct a discussion about the history of feminism. Here Riley creates the identity of women as “enlightened” figures would have seen women. Riley takes us back to the time of Augustine where we see women as inferior in the world but through the grace of god are given equal status in the afterlife. It is in this chapter we are introduced to a variety of different early feminist writers including Christine de Pizan, Marguerite Porete, and Mary Astell who all argue in defence of women within the constriction of the societies they were forced to live within. The demon of this chapter is Jean Jacques Rousseau who’s ideas late in the period of the Enlightenment argued against the ability for women to be rational in thought. The third chapter identifies new ideas and thought which pits women against men as a way to earn equality, the view here being one within society as being a constant struggle and in order for one to achieve equality the other has to lose something. Riley tends to focus here on the growing construct of the role of women within the family as being one who is loses out to the needs of man. An interesting anecdote from this chapter is the idea posited that women had a hard time fighting for equality after World War I because they did not suffer the casualties that men did while fighting for their respective countries. The fourth chapter takes the reader into the differing opinions on women’s suffrage offering us varying viewpoints on the ability of women to use the right to vote. Women and men both fought for or against the right of women to vote for varying reasons, women would only mimic the vote of their husbands or they did not have the mental ability to be a part of the political process. Riley emphasises here the differences between women who have education or are from an elevated social class and those of the working class showing the reader it is impossible for all women to possess the same political ideals or goals and therefore creating a view of women as a political entity should be considered impossible and even problematic toward feminist ideals as was demonstrated during the most basic of women’s goal in the right to vote. The final chapter in the book summarizes the ideas put forth throughout the book and can possibly be best summarized by Riley herself when she says “A true independence here would only be possible when all existing ideas of sexual difference had been laid to rest; but then ‘woman’, too would be buried”(pg. 107).
December 3, 2021
IT's a history of the concept of 'women' as the "lesser sex" and how socialist feminism can bring women together and drive feminist activism forward.
Nice and easy to understand, not too many references, a good part of the work is led by the author's theory. Recommended.
Nice and easy to understand, not too many references, a good part of the work is led by the author's theory. Recommended.
October 2, 2015
I found the first chapter rather dense and a little overwhelming, which made me concerned about how I would manage with the rest of the text. However, from the second chapter onwards I found the text far more interesting and engaging. It was very philosophically based which was overwhelming at times but still accessible.
There was a constant state of questioning on the part of Riley about the issue of feminism and her aim to truly define the term 'women'. Often, I found that Riley would backtrack and try to remain ambivalent within her investigation which was sometimes confusing. But overall the text provided a sense of what feminism has meant over time within society, although the ending was open and ambiguous as to where the term falls within contemporary society and ultimately Riley's own views.
There was a constant state of questioning on the part of Riley about the issue of feminism and her aim to truly define the term 'women'. Often, I found that Riley would backtrack and try to remain ambivalent within her investigation which was sometimes confusing. But overall the text provided a sense of what feminism has meant over time within society, although the ending was open and ambiguous as to where the term falls within contemporary society and ultimately Riley's own views.
August 19, 2015
This was fascinating; but it was also one of those books which was so "philosophical" in its writing style that I felt sometimes Riley's points were overshadowed in the midst of her rolling prose and unusual wording. As I read this a while ago, I admittedly can't remember much distinctly. However, there was definitely the feeling that Riley was having some sort of tangible crisis by the end about how to 'resolve' feminism, and I remember leaving the last chapter feeling very inspired, as she seemed to emerge from this stress with a fresh-feeling perspective.
January 3, 2009
Hated it, hated it, hated it.
May 20, 2010
Collection of essays in which Riley explores the category of "women" and its relationship to the writing of history and to feminism. Recommended, but primarily for the first essay, "Am I That Name?"
August 16, 2011
Judith Butler is in trouble...
October 11, 2012
Ugh. She needs a better editor.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews