Theory Hope and Feminism

I'm working on my review of Reynolds's The Single Woman, and I found it necessary to revisit Stanley Fish's "Anti-Foundationalism: Theory Hope, and the Teaching of Composition" (1987) to ground my review in Fish's skepticism. Fish asserts that "questions of fact, truth, correctness, validity, and clarity can neither be posed nor answered in reference to some extracontextual, ahistorical, nonsituational reality, or rule, or law, or value; rather anti-foundationalism asserts, all of these matters are intelligible and debatable only within the precincts of the contexts or situations or paradigms or communities that give them their local and changeable shape" (344). Reynolds relies of Fish's "theory hope" to carry her discussion of the politics of being single, though she does work to situate it "on the ground" and in the discourse of the women she interviewed. This point, I feel, is the one that draws the line between expansive critical theory as it's housed in the Humanities and theory as it exists in Educational Psychology. The first is ethereal, sometimes ephemeral; the second is lived. This point may be followed with a "Well, of course," but hang with me.

In 2003, Fish's article, "Theory's Hope," posited that "truly effective theorizing occurs within disciplinary contexts and in response to the urgent questions those contexts have precipitated." (The article can be found at http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Fish.html.) Theory hope, then, lies within disciplinary paradigms.

What I'm finding in Reynold's book is that she's writing against the non-history of research on singleness as she tries to (maybe imperfectly) set up this dichotomous relationship between single and not-single, alone and not-alone. She pivots to research on and with single women by using research about other types of women or by utilizing even more imperfect models of previous research on single women which she then critiques as both incomplete and misogynist. Some of the studies she uses as models, such as Giddens (p. 10), pits "ordinary women against feminist thinkers," a reproduction of the dichotomies she's working to explore/explode (but supports with the alone/not-alone approach).

Of course Reynold's findings seem to produce a continuum of aloneness, a counter to the alone/not-alone binary, but she enters the project with a full investment of theory hope, with the belief that her disciplinary theories will carry her project forward, scaffold it with understanding, and give it some relevance outside the local.

Maybe it's that The Single Woman was a dissertation and wasn't fully revised to NOT sound like a dissertation, but this all-in adoption of feminist models felt decidedly unfeminist to me in its adherence to strict disciplinary bounds and its use of foundational theories. I'm not assuming that feminist research must always create new models of communication or new methods of inquiry; however, Reynolds begins to hint at the Politics of Singleness without working much to counter these politics, besides through those broad concepts of "understanding" and "recognition."