context in which we find ourselves, is made up of a different "com-
plex of persons, events, objects and relations"; therefore the "actual
or potential exigence" we discern is not, and cannot be, construed to
correspond to that of the dominant culture. Their "rhetorical situa-
tion" has often explicitly, as well as inferentially, demanded our ca-
pitulation to their more pressing needs, the "exigencies" of their situ-
ational context. The status quo is precisely what does not answer or
respond to the exigencies of our situation.

In a literary context, audience-oriented theories and analyses that
concern themselves with reader response offer a route toward possi-
ble answers to my original question. ⁴ Indeed, the framework of in-
quiry that readership or reader-response theories emphasize is one
into which I have settled myself, but without direct recourse to most
of the specific formalizations of the concept. My reasons for eschew-
ing their specific aid are twofold.

A radical split separates how women theorists and men in the same
profession see the possibilities of the relationship between reader
and writer. ⁵ This difference itself seems clearly to mark our realiza-
tions of what for each group constitutes its "rhetorical situation" and
the "exigencies" it identifies there. What for most masculine critics
(and readers perhaps?) is an "implied or 'intended' reader" ( Wolf-
gang Iser), which or who is correspondent with the "implied author"
( Wayne Booth), who "sets himself out with a different air depending
on the needs of particular works" ⁶ would indeed seem to be a "fic-
tion" when compared to the way a woman reader identifies herself in
relation to what and who she reads. In an essay entitled " The Writer's
Audience Is Always a Fiction," Walter Ong observes that, from the
critic's point of view, such a reader "has to play the role in which the
author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest
of actual life." ⁷ The masculine theorists who are working with these
ideas are looking for "critical tools," as one of them has put it. ⁸ For
the analyst who is a feminist (possibly and simply a woman), the audi-
ence for a woman writer's work, and their (her) response to it, is no
more a "fiction" than is the woman herself—writer or reader. In par-
ticular, the effect of the woman's work is not merely an aesthetic one,
wanting only critical tools to release its full implications. A woman's
view of the reading-writing relationship is more practical and more
political than that.

Jane Gallop brings many aspects of this view into focus in a re-
sponse to a special issue of Critical Inquiry—"Writing and Sexual Dif-ference."

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