Peter Hitchcock, for one, in Dialogics of the Oppressed , uses Bakhtin's theories to analyze the work of four noted feminist writers. But Bakhtin's theories have been applied by feminist critics in a number of ways. Still other feminists have concentrated on applying theories of Bakhtin's other than dialogism. The power of laughter can be just as subversive, as when carnival turns the old hierarchies upside-down, erasing old differences, producing new and unstable ones. However, it could be argued that Moi and others have made erroneous use of Bakhtin's carnival by trying to apply it as a counterforce to modern political or social authority.
Carnival is past millennia's way of sensing the world as one great communal performance . . . .
There have also been suggestions that Bakhtin's dialogics is somehow compatible with or complementary to the ideas of Derrida. But there can be no compromise between Bakhtin and deconstruction, a fact understood all too well by one of its foremost proponents, the late Paul de Man. While there may be similarities between Derrida and Bakhtin, there are a number of marked differences also. Both thinkers sought to overturn earlier rationalist theories of communication which posited that meaning resided in either an abstract ideal or an individual consciousness. But when faced with the new view of language posited by structuralist thought, Bakhtin steered clear of the nihilistic trap that ensnared Derrida and his followers and led them to believe that any attempts to wring meaning from a text are an illusionary scam of the Western critical tradition.