Changing the Wor(l)d

Discourse, Politics and the Feminist Movement

Stacey Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136664144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Changing the Wor(l)d draws on feminist publishing, postmodern theory and feminist autobiography to powerfully critique both liberal feminism and scholarship on the women's movement, arguing that both ignore feminism's unique contributions to social analysis and politics. These contributions recognize the power of discourse, the diversity of women's experiences, and the importance of changing the world through changing consciousness. Young critiques social movement theory and five key studies of the women's movement, arguing that gender oppression can be understood only in relation to race, sexuality, class and ethnicity; and that feminist activism has always gone beyond the realm of public policy to emphasize improving women's circumstances through transforming discourse and consciousness. Young examines feminist discursive politics, critiques social science methodology, and proposes an alternative approach to understanding the women's movement.

1
Introduction

Women have come a long way. I turned on the preliminary hearings for the O. J. Simpson trial and saw a woman magistrate and a woman prosecutor. How can you complain?

—Harriet Woods, President of the National Women's Political Caucus, in an address to the City Club of Cleveland, aired July 21, 1995

The Grammar Of Liberalism

Ben Anderson¹ has argued that nationalism is the "grammar" through which people make sense of their places in the world in the current historical period. His point is that nationalism is much more fundamental even than perspective, as it is the medium through which we formulate, express, promote, or alter perspectives. Nationalism, he argues, is the very structure through which we see, think about, and make sense of the world.

Yet nationalism is not the only grammar that defines American society; liberalism is equally salient (and, of course, not unrelated to nationalism). It structures how we define well-being, what we think about individuality and the citizen's relationship to the state, the nature of power, democracy, freedom, and equality—and, more fundamentally, that we think in these terms at all. Liberalism structures how we identify abuses and imbalances of power, how we respond (or fail to respond) to those abuses and imbalances, and what kinds of responses we deem appropriate and "successful."

In the United States over the last fifty years, several challenges to liberal notions of power, abuse, and redress have emerged in connection with mass movements for social change. The two most fundamental have been grounded in critiques of race and gender²—their social construction and their functions in social organization. The civil rights/Black Power/anti-racist and feminist movements emerged as large numbers of people rallied around these critiques and the social change agendas they imply. These movements have not been homogeneous; nor have they been galvanized by consensus. Rather, they have entailed large-scale internal struggles over the analyses of the systems they target: how oppression works, how entrenched it is, where responsibility for it lies, what types of change are possible and desirable, and how that change can best be brought about.

The complexities of these struggles, though, almost invariably drop out of public imagination, which reduces these critiques to their liberal versions, easily graspable within the dominant "grammar" or paradigm. This reduction results from the conscious efforts of powerful institutions, individuals, and classes; it also results, however, from the unconscious assimilative processes that any system engenders—i.e., the inexorable tendency for a system to reshape what it encounters in its own terms. For a population steeped in one grammar finds it difficult, at best, to grasp a different one it views as neutral; when the new grammar represents not neutrality, but a fundamental shift in the distribution of power, it is downright threatening, and thus all the more likely to be rejected.

Yet inroads are achieved, new grammars take hold, even if only in localized and incomplete ways. Sometimes they take hold on a large scale— though large-scale acceptance is usually contingent upon the challenge having been altered, reordered into something that more closely conforms to the original grammar. Ellen Willis writes, for instance, of the metamorphosis of feminism's initial concern with women's sexual liberation into a blander, reformist focus on a few sexual rights.³ This metamorphosis simultaneously narrowed feminism's agenda and broadened its appeal—a dual impact that Willis's critique works to counteract. The Willises of the world keep pushing for radical change—and they continue to win adherents to their cause. For the most part, though, they go unacknowledged in accounts grounded in the status quo grammar and the interests it represents.

This book argues that this is the case with regard to the women's movement and its representation in popular culture and in academic studies. That is, the women's movement, like the anti-racist movement that preceded and accompanies it, has developed and promoted a far-reaching, radical critique of one of the cornerstones of our society—the inequality of women and men. This fundamental critique has been recast—almost as often by constituencies within the movement as by those outside of it—as a challenge to tinker with, to modify—but not to transform in any fundamental way—the liberal ideologies and institutions that govern our society. Yet, the radical critiques have not withered away— they persist, as do efforts to promote social change that would bring social relations in line with those critiques.

This book explores some versions of these radical critiques and their manifestations in activism directed at promoting new grammars, new social paradigms through which individuals, collectivities, and institutions interpret social circumstances and devise responses to them. That is, it investigates the interpretive, discursive forms of activism that represent the most direct attempts by the women's movement to change fundamentally the way people think: feminist publishing, feminist writing, and discursive aspects of direct-action activism. Specifically, it argues that those most marginalized within and beyond the women's movement—women of color, lesbians and bisexual women, working-class women—have launched the most interesting endeavors to analyze the present "grammar" and to construct alternatives. It then looks at why these fundamental critiques "drop out" of academic accounts whose very aim is to articulate and evaluate the efforts of the movements associated with them. According to this argument, it is the pervasiveness of the grammar of liberalism, and how it imports prejudices that work to sustain it, that informs liberal feminism's⁴ analyses and agendas, as well as social sciences theories of power and its methodologies, in ways that render both liberal feminism and social science studies of the feminist movement profoundly myopic. This book explores the consequences for the fundamental critiques—and for those whose interests they advance—of the obfuscation liberalism imposes upon movement politics and academic investigations.

Finally, the book presents and assesses some theoretical projects— within social movement theory and within postmodern theories of the subject and identity—that offer academics, in their own language, a bridge from the liberal paradigm to more interdisciplinary, eclectic, extra-institutional approaches that might enable them better to comprehend and evaluate discursive political action and the radical paradigms—the "grammars"—that action often promotes.

With regard to human nature, liberalism subscribes to a "twofold idea of individuality and sameness": that is, it assumes that, on the one hand, we are all free to do what we please; and, on the other, "we all speak the same language, hold the same values, and know the same truths—unless, that is, we're aberrant and abnormal."⁵ This paradox of individuality and sameness underlies liberalism's notion that there exists a universal standard of rationality that forms a core essence common to all "normal" people. Those who fail to act in accordance with accepted models of rational behavior do so, in this view, not because those models restrict their freedom or are, in fact, irrational in the context of their lives; they do so, rather, because they either lack reason or are consciously flouting it—in either case, to the detriment of their fellow human beings.⁶

Liberalism makes this notion of universal rationality as the essence of humanity the basis of its epistemology and politics, which valorize rational "objectivity" and its supposed embodiment in scientific inquiry and institutions of government. Essentialism enables the assumption that these "objective" standards apply equally well all around. The extension of the notion of universal rationality into a faith in argument, persuasion, and the inevitability of progress leads to the assumption that individuals in "democratic" societies who feel that they are somehow being treated unequally or unfairly need only present their case before the appropriate institutions of governance. The expectation is that these institutions will then apply their objective standards of rationality and equality under the law to determine whether mistreatment is actually taking place. If it is found that an individual has been treated unfairly or unequally, the solution is assumed to lie in a correction of the mistake which led to the unequal treatment. If it is found that the individual has been treated equally, in accordance with the rational, objective standards of liberal institutions, then any problems that individual encounters are assumed to be due to her failure to exercise her rationality—or her failure to take advantage of opportunities that are supposedly available to everyone—and are thus of her own making.

Liberalism posits what Michel Foucault calls a juridical model of power, in which power resides in a central authority and inhibits those who hold it from exploring the social and political mechanisms, including discursive production, through which "human nature" and human relations are constructed and controlled.⁷

Liberalism's focus on government at the expense of other levels of society leads feminists who subscribe to liberalism's theory of power to prioritize engagement with institutions of governance as the strategy of choice for feminist change. This is premised on the assumption that women's oppression is merely an accident or an oversight, or a rather superficial, hollow vestige of obsolete social organization, and that the machinery of liberal institutions can be harnessed to effect women's equality with men, since this goal is consistent with "equality"—a central tenet of liberalism. Though Celia Kitzinger reaches very different conclusions from those advanced by postmodern feminist theorists (see chapter 6), she aptly characterizes liberalism's approach to conflict: "Ignoring the issue of power, liberalism dissolves entire areas of sociopolitical conflict into interpersonal problems which can be resolved through the learning of good communication skills." Kitzinger goes on to discuss the limitations liberalism imposes on examinations of gender relations and sexuality—areas of life thoroughly invested with power relations but presented, within liberalism, as "private" and therefore non-political:

Liberalism . . . leaves the structure of patriarchy and the institution of heterosexuality unexamined in the belief that lesbianism is a personal choice or preference and that lesbians will achieve "equality" with heterosexual women, or women with men, through shared communication and understanding, through education and the application of reason.⁸

The limitations of liberal institutions extend as well to their responses to conflict. That is, because these institutions acknowledge a very limited scope of conflict, they also mark out a very limited range of available responses to it. One of liberal feminism's mam shortcomings, then, is its reluctance to question seriously whether liberalism's available responses to conflict are sufficient to secure women's emancipation from domination. Relatedly, liberal feminism fails to question whether a definition of equality that pays only passing notice to individuals' embeddedness in social structures of inequality can ever be used to bring about actual—not just nominal—equality. (The women's movement studies also typically neglect to question the premises of liberal institutions and liberal feminist engagement with those institutions; thus, these studies run the risk—to which, I will argue, they ultimately succumb—of supporting and perpetuating discourses and institutions that themselves perpetuate the domination of women, on the basis of sex, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality.)

Liberalism's characterization of the locus of power and domination— and thus the logical site of resistance—promises the impossible. That is, it claims that power resides in legal and governmental institutions; consequently, it views these institutions as the appropriate arena for resistance. In this view, engagement with formal governing or other policy-making institutions is the path to eventual liberation. This perception diverts attention away from the restrictive forces that emanate from sources other than these centralized, juridical institutions. Domination does not always take the form of outright prohibition; and resistance takes place in many different arenas. Forms of domination that these institutions define as "private" are seen as non-structural, not remediable via government action, and ultimately not important. Ideologies that construct power as being centralized in state institutions divert attention from other arenas and processes of domination, keeping them out of sight and thus decreasing the likelihood that they will become sites of resistance. These ideologies also divert attention away from the resistance that does take place at these levels, by failing to recognize it as resistance. That the studies of the women's movement prioritize the type of resistance that involves engaging with government institutions on those institutions' terms, and dismiss discursive politics and other forms of cultural resistance as something other than "politics," is evidence not of the paramount importance of formal governance and policy-making, but of the studies' rootedness in liberal notions of power, and of the limitations those notions impose.

Justice Denied: The Limits of Liberalism

Liberal institutions are premised on the principle of treating people as though they are equal, as individuals, to other individuals. As demonstrated by the civil rights and women's movements in particular, there are important, substantive gains to be made through a strategy designed to bring government practice in line with this ideology. However, these gains can be quite fragile, since they depend on the good faith and judgment of those who have power (and thus a stake in the status quo) to determine what constitutes "discrimination," "inequality," "fairness," and so on. Moreover, to the extent that liberal governmental institutions treat people as atomized individuals, they are unable to acknowledge and alleviate the large-scale social inequalities between dominant and subordinate groups—inequalities that stem, in part, from the disparate treatment of these groups by the law. In treating individuals equally, regardless of the social conditions that place them in dominant and subordinate positions, liberal institutions perpetuate social inequalities: everyone is assumed to be entitled to the same benefits, and to be burdened by the same responsibilities, even though in reality different people receive differential social, political, and economic advantages.

Sometimes, liberal governing structures do try to acknowledge hegemonic social divisions and take these into consideration in dispensing political goods and responsibilities. Liberalism's own emphasis on individuality, however, is all too easily marshaled against this attention to structural inequalities. One need only look at the success of the "New Right" in demolishing any semblance of a social safety net for poor people to understand how this works: in their recourse to liberalism's valorization of individuality, they overwhelm liberalism's focus on democracy.

The liberal political system is not a structure that feminists can easily appropriate, even on its own terms. Feminists and others who seek equality through legal institutions have found those institutions to be replete with contradictions that often work to resist intervention on behalf of marginalized groups. The four examples that follow demonstrate the tenacity of social inequalities, even in legal situations designed explicitly to ameliorate these inequalities.

Bakke

One example can be found in the pivotal 1978 Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. This case involved a challenge by a white applicant, Bakke, to the UC Davis Medical School's affirmative action program. Bakke, who was denied admission to the school, claimed he was discriminated against because the admissions committee had set aside a number of seats in the entering class for students of color. In this case, the definition of discrimination the Court utilized was that of "facial intent to discriminate." The Court's decision stated that admissions programs in which "race or ethnic background is simply one element—to be weighed fairly against other elements—in the selection process"⁹ are acceptable. On the other hand, admissions processes that identify race or ethnicity as a definitive criterion¹⁰ contain, according to the Court, a "facial intent to discriminate"—that is, they openly intend from the start to make admissions decisions based on race or ethnicity. The Court rejects such policies for institutions that have not been shown to discriminate intentionally against ethnic and racial minorities, claiming that these policies would impose "disadvantages upon persons like respondent [Bakke], who bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the special admissions program are thought to have suffered."¹¹

The interesting thing about: this case is the Court's definition of discrimination. The Court's decision turns on an intent to discriminate, which must be demonstrated in a court of law to have been directed toward specific individuals. What this definition leaves out, of course, is the kind of pernicious discrimination that comes about not as the result of individual intent to discriminate, but as a result of socially accepted, unconsciously internalized prejudice that gets expressed in subtle but powerful and pervasive cult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Feminist Publishing As Discursive Politics
• 3. The Autotheoretical Texts
• 4. Social Science Studies of the Women's Movement: Problems in Theory and Method
• 5. Social Movement Theory
• 6. Postmodern Critiques: Power and Subjectivity, Domination and Resistance
• 7. Social Science Methodology
• 8. Last Words/Words First
• Notes
• References
• Index