The Politics of Recognition and Social Justice

Transforming Subjectivities and New Forms of Resistance

Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, Bob Pease

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135040956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Féminisme et théorie féministe

Via a wide range of case studies, this book examines new forms of resistance to social injustices in contemporary Western societies. Resistance requires agency, and agency is grounded in notions of the subject and subjectivity. How do people make sense of their subjectivity as they are constructed and reconstructed within relations of power? What kinds of subjectivities are needed to struggle against forms of dominance and claim recognition? The participants in the case studies are challenging forms of dominance and subordination grounded in class, race, culture, nationality, sexuality, religion, age, disability and other forms of social division. It is a premise of this book that new and/or reconstructed forms of subjectivity are required to challenge social relations of subordination and domination. Thus, the transformation of subjectivity as well as the restructuring of oppressive power relations is necessary to achieve social justice. By examining the construction of subjectivity of particular groups through an intersectional lens, the book aims to contribute to theoretical accounts of how subjects are constituted and how they can develop a critical distance from their positioning.

1	Recognition, Resistance and Reconstruction
	An Introduction to Subjectivities and Social Justice
	Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli and Bob Pease

Introduction

The aim of this book is to examine new forms of resistance to social injustices in contemporary Western societies. Resistance requires agency, and agency is grounded in notions of the subject and subjectivity (Parker 1999). It is a premise of this book that new and/or reconstructed forms of subjectivity are required to challenge social relations of subordination and domination.

Subjectivity is primarily based on lived experience (Malone 2000). While subjectivity is sometimes used to explore individualistic strategies for personal meaning, we argue that subjectivity is central to political struggles against regimes of power (Elliott 2007). Thus, understanding how subjects are constituted is important in fostering the capacity of critical reflection and social transformation (Allen 2008).

Our aim here is to understand the relationship between subjectivity and the wider social order. The relationship between the psyche and society is one of the most challenging issues facing social theory (Emirbayer and Mische 1998; McNay 2000; Davies et al., 2013). While there is a variety of theoretical approaches to subjectivity, those that explore the links between the subject and society are the most promising in developing strategies for resistance. In this introductory chapter, we review and interrogate what we believe are the most important theoretical approaches to subjectivity, drawing upon Marxism, critical theory, feminism, postcolonialism and post-structuralism. Our aim in this book is not to develop a new theory of subjectivities. Rather, we are more concerned with investigating how diverse subjectivities are constructed and reconstructed.

Numerous writers on subjectivity challenge the notion of a unified subject. Frost and Hoggett (2008), for example, point out that post-liberal notions of subjectivity move beyond the idea of a rational consistent identity to locate the subject within power relations and inequality. Subjectivity is not transhistorical, but rather is connected to particular social and cultural contexts (McNay 2008). Once we move away from the notion of subjectivity as bounded, rational and autonomous, we embrace the idea of a socially situated and historically mediated subjectivity intersected by gender, race, class, sexuality and other social categories (Layton 2008). Indeed, positionality, intersectionality and the intersection of multiple positionalities are significant structures and processes that require multiple and diverse agentic negotiations and navigations (Anthias 2008; Lutz, Vivar and Supik 2011; Yuval-Davis 2006). Positionality refers to both structural social position and social positioning “as process, that is, a set of practices, actions and meanings” (Shinozaki 2012, 1811). Crenshaw (1989) coined the term “intersectionality” to foster the recognition of how multiple social divisions may simultaneously create discrimination and marginalisation (see also hooks 1981; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983; Brah and Phoenix 2004). Pallotta-Chiarolli (2004, 2010) adopts and applies the term “interweaving” to describe how these multiple axes of difference require multiple and interwoven strategies of resistance, resilience and agency. Thus, intragroup identities and the subsequent confluences and conflicts are able to be recognised and resourced for. It must be stated here that not all identifications cause disadvantage, and, indeed, within one person or community, an intersectional approach allows for the recognition of the continuum between privileged and ostracised identities and subjectivities. Likewise, in any research, resourcing or action, not all identities can be mapped, analysed or addressed at once and equally, and, as will be evident in this book’s collection, some identities are more likely to come to the fore in certain contexts than others. Nevertheless, intersectionality is a framing device that keeps us mindful of the interactions and interweavings between identities, and their “criss-crossing and power-infused social relations and spaces-how we make sense of ourselves and mediate the contours of social life” (Yip and Page 2013). In this book, “the intimate interconnections, mutual constitutions and messiness of everyday identifications and lived experiences … linked to structural phenomena” will be exemplified (Taylor, Hines and Casey 2011, 2, 4).

Following the above discussion regarding multiple positionalities, it becomes apparent that subjective processes are both intra-psychic and socio-historical (Mama 1995). They are internalised from discourses (Venn 2002) and shaped by material conditions (Malone 2000). They change over time and can be multiple and contradictory (Walsh and Bahnisch 2002). Furthermore, subjectivity is best understood as being performed or actively constructed rather than being reflective of an essential core. It is embodied and reflected in one’s engagement and practice in the world (McNay 2008). If subjectivity is constructed through practice, it is neither fully determined nor fully capable of being willed.

Layton (2010) points out how in the context of neoliberalism, many in the professional middle class in Western societies have adapted their subjectivities to individualistic norms that separate the individual from the social. Modern subjectivities in neoliberal market economies are constituted primarily through roles as workers and consumers (Burkitt 2008). Layton (2009) observes how the investment in individualised forms of identity encourage disidentification with the suffering of others and thus disables individuals from the capacity for empathy and responsibility, and for how one is implicated in their suffering. This is what happens when the psychic is separated out from the social. For Butler (2004), recognition is required for the vulnerability of others to be seen, understood and altered/reconstructed.

While subjects often accommodate to regimes of power, they have the capacity to re-imagine themselves as new political subjects. We need to understand more fully how external relations of power are psychically internalised to construct a particular sense of self. It seems clear that refusing to accommodate to dominant power relations will necessitate the creation of new forms of subjectivity (Allen 2008). Burkitt (2008) has previously raised the question of whether or not new forms of subjectivity that are not linked to domination and control are emerging. For example, many social movement activists are constructing collective identities that combine ant-sexism, anti-racism and anti-capitalism, among others (Layton 2009). Burkitt (2008) believes that these new forms of resistance have the potential to create a new democratic form of politics and that the subjectivities of individuals who resist domination and control should be researched. This book is in part a response to that imperative.

Moving Beyond Structural Determinism

In the compilation of the chapters in this book, we are returning to an age-old debate in critical theory and Marxism where the primacy of economic structures is cast against voluntarist models of change which emphasise changes in consciousness leading to changes in cultural norms as a catalyst for significant structural change. In early Marxist debates, this issue was framed in terms of ideology. Why did so many working-class people come to accept inequalities and injustices as legitimate (Gil 2008)? While the Marxist notion of false consciousness was appropriately understood as patronising and elitist, Marxists were trying to understand oppressed people’s accommodation to dominant ideologies.

We need to explore ways in which individuals become both complicit in sustaining oppressive social relations as well as resisting them (Layton 2008; Freire 1972). Gil (2008) argues that the key task is working out how to understand subjectivity in ways that move beyond the intra-psychic to encompass the cultural, political and social. The challenge we face is how to locate the individual within the context of the social without reverting to a socially determinist conception of the self. At the same time, how do we understand human subjectivity without disconnecting the individual from their historical and social context (Layton 2008; Davies et al., forthcoming)?

Structural determinists would argue that individuals have no capacity at all for human agency (Robinson 2003–2004). Materialists argue that focusing on language and culture privileges agency and identity over structural inequalities. They question the extent to which systemic and structural forms of oppression can be addressed by forms of identity politics (McNay 2008). For many years now, the conflict between materialist and cultural analyses has translated into a tension between a politics focused on structural changes versus a politics emphasising the affirmation of marginalised identities. This is mirrored in the debate between cultural and materialist feminisms (McNay 2004). While some feminists have attempted to explore the interconnections between cultural and materialist approaches, many have continued to emphasise the superiority of one form of analysis over another. For example, Walby (2001) argues that the main sources of change will not come from individual action, but rather from the interaction between social structures. Hence, she places more emphasis on changes to the gender division of labour than changes within gender norms and ideologies.

Materialists believe that substantial structural change must flow from the macro level downward to the micro level. In discussing changes in women’s lives, for example, McNay (2000) reminds readers that the gender division of labour, and the resulting material resources that flow from it, has been an important source of both subordination and emancipation. Similarly, in their study of cosmetic surgery as an increasingly “legitimized form of female empowerment” that simultaneously highlights women’s increased access to material resources as well as women’s ongoing disempowerment via the increased scrutinisation of their bodies, Doyle and Karl (2008, 84) argue that “the concept of choice needs to be critically examined within the context of popular post-feminist and neoliberal ideologies of the self which focus upon individual responsibility and consumer agency, thereby rendering invisible structural and social inequities.”

One does not have to be a structural determinist, however, to acknowledge that there are material constraints on discursive change and that material conditions influence and shape subjectivities (Malone 2000). In the British context of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, the politics of neoliberalism, with its endorsement of individual liberalism as promoted within New Labour’s commitment to the ideology of The Third Way, sought “to reconcile the irreconcilable” by “combining elements of left social democracy with right neoliberalism” (McRobbie 2000, 100). A commitment to tackling social inequalities was accompanied by an endorsement of the free market economy and capitalism. Doyle and Karl argue that the focus on individual responsibility helped to “create the conditions for social acceptance of a reduction in state welfare and an increase in the rights and responsibilities of the individual consumer”, which further entrenches white and middle-class constructs of consumerism and individualism (2008, 87). The discourse of individuality renders invisible the class-based structural mechanisms involved in its formation and operation (Skeggs 2004).

However, if we give priority to the transformation of economic structures as the basis of all significant change, then it leaves no room for changes in consciousness and subjectivity through the agency of individuals as a basis for social change. While ordinary people have no control over external objective sources of oppression in their lives (Robinson 2003–2004), they are able to work out how to relate to those structures (Malone 2000). Otherwise, they are posited as having no agency in the face of those structural forces. And, if we allow no space for agency and change within social relations without structural change, we end up with a reductionist position. With the rise of feminist materialism, and especially the work of Barad (2007), we see attempts to move beyond the binary of realism and constructivism. Barad has formulated the notion of agential realism which posits that agency is not an attribute of a subject or something that someone has, but is rather a relationship that is enacted in the world.

Whatever theoretical lens we use, we need to understand how to make relations of subordination and domination accessible to people’s awareness as a precursor to questioning and resisting them. As Hoy (2005) observes, if we are able to acknowledge the way in which our thoughts and actions are shaped by external constraints, these constraints are less likely to be effective in limiting our agency. We need to understand systemic constraints in order to “cross boundaries, crack codes, and bring back a store of secret information that society would like to use to keep us all in thrall” (Queen 1991, 20–21).

The Politics of Recognition

Recognition has increasingly become a key concept in the social sciences. Honneth (2003) identifies misrecognition as a form of disrespect. Recognition of one’s humanity by others is a basic requirement to avoid the distorting of one’s subjectivity. One is unable to flourish as a person in the absence of affirmation of subjectivity. Honneth (2003) regards recognition as a key component of social justice. It thus constitutes an injustice if people are stunted and deformed through misrecognition. Allen (2008) argues that our desire for recognition is so powerful that we prefer recognition that reinforces our subordination over and above not getting recognition at all. This is why we can so easily become psychically invested in various forms of subordination.

Honneth (2003) says that recognition politics provides greater opportunities for agency and resistance. Certainly, what is of value in Honneth’s conception of recognition is his consideration of the role of emotions as a catalyst for political action. The emotional consequences of the experience of misrecognition can provide an impetus for recognition struggles (McNay 2008), whereby various social movements in relation to gender, Indigenous people, disability and sexuality and so on seek to reaffirm marginalised identities (Yuval-Davis 2011). Such movements were sometimes pitted as alternatives to the more traditional politics of the left which focused on redistribution of resources.

Several theorists have coined terms to articulate these notions of recognition, resistance and reconstruction in relation to identity politics. In her work with same-sex families, Finch builds upon Butler’s notion of performativity and describes what she has termed “displaying” as the process by which individuals, and groups of individuals, “convey to each other and to relevant audiences” that their actions and identities constitute legitimacy and, indeed, deserve recognition (2007, 67). In the context of our book, we argue for the “need for display” to ensure recognition, acknowledgment and subsequent reconstructive action. However, we must also keep in mind that if we look at display and agency in terms of Butler’s ideas on enacted identity and recognition, “the social norms that constitute our existence [and actions] carry desires that do not originate with our individual person-hood” (2004, 1), meaning our perceived agency, what we display and how, is predicated ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Recognition, Resistance and Reconstruction: An Introduction to Subjectivities and Social Justice
• Part I: Reconstructing Gendered Subjectivities
• Part II: Recognising Resistant Sexualities
• Part III: Validating Racialised Subjectivities
• Part IV: Interrogating Privileged Subjectivities
• Part V: Creating New Spaces of Resistance in Everyday Life
• Contributors
• Index