SOURCE: “Can a Feminist Read Deleuze and Guattari?”, in Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, University of California Press, 1999, pp. 32-58.

In the following essay, Olkowski elucidates the reasons why Deleuze and Guattari's work has not garnered much commentary from feminist critics.

Cosmic Empiricism

In a text that introduced many American feminists to the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alice Jardine forcefully lays out her view of the status of Deleuze and his sometime collaborator Félix Guattari in contemporary philosophy and linguistic and literary studies.¹ Largely ignored in the early 1980s by most academics, Deleuze and Guattari had found an American audience consisting, she claims, chiefly of a “vocal [male] student minority.”² The largely male character of this audience extended, not surprisingly, to France, to the point that, even in France, where Deleuze and Guattari publicly supported the feminist movement, by the mid 1980s only one feminist...