Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

2006-09-24 14:44:51

I’ve mentioned several times that one of the most persistent divisions among feminists was the question, “who is woman?” How do we define what a woman is? Whatever a woman is, then this woman must be our subject, the one for whom we advance our politics. If woman is fundamentally oppressed by rape, then this helps us define our political practice — particularly in a world where there are many, many ways to advance women’s interests. So, the trick would be to figure out who the subject of feminism is — how she is universally oppressed across time and space — and actively campaign on behalf of this woman — this subject of history — for changes that will liberate the subject of history, women. Are all women nurturing? Are all women united simply by virtue of always being oppressed as a class? Is there no subject at all — as in the early MacKinnon — who isn’t an effect — yes an effect — of male domination. For in the early MacKinnon you have a theory where there is no such thing as the possibility of women’s agency. There is no woman with needs and desires that have not been shaped by patriarchy. So, this woman question — who women are, what we share, what unites us — has been important. And at the same time, trying to answer it has been at the center of endless debates. In the mid-80s, highly contentious debates arose at conferences and I had the, uh, pleasure of being at a small conference as an undergrad. I had no idea why everyone was so fucking pissed. But they were. The debates we had that day — was the lesbian continuum racist? was Maria Lugones being racist when she spoke of “world travelling,” who could unproblematically speak for women if women were not always literate enough to speak for themselves? If there is no unitary woman and thus no unitary collectivity of women who are the same or share interests, how can we have any feminist politics at all? — these were questions that were and remain at the center of our debates. The debates over prostitution were debates over who has a right to represent prostitutes’ interests, yes? The blow job war was a debate over who had a right to represent women as oppressed by the blow job and even who had a right to define women’s pleasure. The ‘choice feminist war’ is a debate over who has a right to define what feminism, after all, is. In the chapter entitled, ‘Feminism and its Othere,’ Janet Halley writes (pp 187-188):

Feminist theorists and activists repeatedly generate a profound misreading of Gender Trouble and Butler’s postmodernizing, specifically deconstructive, feminism. One encounters again and again feminists who say: “But how can we seriously entertain Butler’s deconstruction of woman? For does it not deny the social existence of women, disable us from organizing on behalf of women, and lead to paralysis?” Similarly, feminist theory of runs onto the rocks of despair over hybrid feminist divergentism. The multiplicity of women, their relation to each other through racial, colonial, and class differences; their divided loyalties to one another and to men within and across these differences; the incommensurabilities that drive class and race in discourses unlike and in tension with those attributed to sex1,sex2, gender, and sexuality: all of these are often thought to incapacitate feminism, to deauthorize it, to render it so incoherent that it cannot serve as a mode of intellectual or political articulation. Faced with this threat, feminists wreak upon fellow feminists high moralistic denunciations for failing to produce convergence. The bibliography of this despair … is very considerable, and some of the most interesting and most reticulated discussions within feminist theory are about how to explain it, narrate it, conceptualize it, and imagine a way out of it. Major splits in feminism — the pragmatists against the postmodernists, the materialists against the theory-heads, women of color against white feminists, and ‘real’ women against the ‘gender troubled’ — are organized around the very common view that, at least for the pragmatists, the materialists, some women of color, and ‘real women,’ postmodernizing divergentism and/or hybrid feminists divergentism are the problem. But I wonder. I wonder whether the experience of paralysis arises instead from two related commitments that are highly salient among those who fear and decry postmodernist feminism for its paralyzing force and divergentist hybrid feminism for its paralyzing force and its racism, classism, imperialism: paranoid structuralism and the moralized mandate to converge. In this section I first explain what I mean by paranoid structuralism and the moralized mandate to converge, and show why I think they have produced in feminists the experience of paralysis, and then I offer a thought experiment asking you to ponder whether and when you find paranoid structuralist writing to be empowering or paralyzing.

It would probably be helpful to create a little sidebar with definitions for some of these words — as a cheat sheet or reminder what sex1, sex2, divergentist, convergentist, etc. means.