Read Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body Online
Authors: Susan Bordo
Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (31 page)
Such skepticism is by no means universal; contemporary feminism remains a diverse and pluralist enterprise. Nor does gender skepticism take a single characteristic form. Rather, it has emerged (as my opening montage suggests) across disciplines and theoretical affiliations, speaking in different voices and crystallized around different concerns. Naming and criticizing such a phenomenon is
a slippery, perilous business. Yet, it is my contention that we are seeing an important cultural formation here, the analysis of which must become a pressing concern for feminists.
Like all cultural formations, feminist genderskepticism is complexly constructed out of diverse elements—intellectual, psychological, institutional, and sociological. Arising not from monolithic design but from an interplay of factors and forces, it is best understood not as a discrete, definable position which can be adopted or rejected but as an emerging coherency which is being fed by a variety of currents, sometimes overlapping, sometimes quite distinct. In this essay, I critically examine four such currents and the (sometimes unintentional) routes by which they empty into the waters of gender skepticism.
The first current is the result of an academic marriage that has brought wellfounded feminist concerns over the ethnocentrism and unconscious racial biases of gender theory into a theoretical alliance with (a highly programmatic appropriation of) the more historicist, politically oriented wing of poststructuralist thought (e.g., Foucault, Lyotard). This union, I argue, has contributed to the development of a new feminist methodologism that lays claims to an authoritative critical framework, legislating "correct" and "incorrect" approaches to theorizing identity, history, and culture. This methodologism, which eschews generalizations about gender a priori on theoretical grounds, is in danger of discrediting and disabling certain kinds of feminist cultural critique; it also often implicitly (and mistakenly) supposes that the adoption of a "correct" theoretical approach makes it possible to
avoid
ethnocentrism.
The second current that I discuss in this chapter is the result of certain feminist appropriations of deconstructionism. Here, a postmodern recognition of interpretive multiplicity, of the indeterminacy and heterogeneity of cultural meaning and meaningproduction, is viewed as calling for new narrative approaches, aimed at the adequate representation of textual "difference." From this perspective, the template of gender is criticized for its fixed, binary structuring of reality and is replaced by a narrative ideal of ceaseless textual play. But this ideal, I argue, although it arises out of a critique of modernist epistemological pretensions to represent reality adequately by achieving what Thomas Nagel has called the "view from nowhere," remains animated by its own fantasies of attaining an
Through these critical concerns, I hope to encourage caution among those who are ready to celebrate wholeheartedly the emergence of postmodern feminism. The programmatic appropriation of poststructuralist insight, I argue, is, in shifting the focus of crucial feminist concerns about the representation of cultural diversity from practical contexts to questions of adequate theory, highly problematic for feminism. Not only are we thus diverted from attending to the professional and institutional mechanisms through which the politics of exclusion operate most powerfully in intellectual communities, but we also deprive ourselves of still vital analytical tools for critique of those communities and the hierarchical, dualistic power structures that sustain them.
3
If this is so, then what mechanisms have drawn feminists into participation with such a development? The last two currents I examine provide foci for examining such issues, through an exploration of the institutions of knowledge and power that still dominate our masculinist public arena and that now threaten, I argue, to harness and tame the visionary and critical energy of feminism as a movement of cultural resistance and transformation.
Let me begin with a story, told from my perspective as a feminist philosopher, about the emergence of gender analytics and the difficulties into which it later fell.
4
In 1979, Richard Rorty's
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
burst onto the philosophical scene in the United States. Its author, established and respected in the very traditions he now set out to deconstruct, was uniquely situated to legitimate a simple yet subversive argument. That argument, earlier elaborated in different ways by Marx, Nietzsche, and Dewey, and being developed on the Continent in the work of Derrida and Foucault, held that ideas are the creation of social beings rather than the (more or less adequate) representations or "mirrorings" of nature.
Rorty's presentation of this argument was philosophically elegant, powerful, and influential. But it was not Rorty, rebellious
member of the club (or, indeed,
any
professional intellectual voice), who was ultimately responsible for uncovering the pretensions and illusions of the ideals of epistemological objectivity, universal foundations of reason, and neutral judgment. That uncovering first occurred, not in the course of philosophical conversation, but in political practice. Its agents were the liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, emerging not only to assert the legitimacy of marginalized cultures and suppressed perspectives but also to expose the biases of the official accounts. Now those accounts could no longer claim to descend from the heavens of pure rationality or to reflect the inevitable and progressive logic of intellectual or scientific discovery. They had to be seen, rather, as the products of historically situated individuals with very particular class, race, and gender interests. The imperial categories that had provided justification for those accounts—Reason, Truth, Human Nature, History, Tradition—were now displaced by the (historical, social) questions:
Whose
truth?
Whose
nature?
Whose
version of reason?
Whose
history?
Whose
tradition?
Feminism, appropriately enough, initiated the cultural work of exposing and articulating the gendered nature of history, culture, and society. It was a cultural moment of revelation and relief. The category of the "human"—a standard against which all difference translates to lack, insufficiency—was brought down to earth, given a pair of pants, and reminded that it was not the only player in town. Our students still experience this moment of critical and empowering insight when, for example, they learn from Gilligan and others that the language of "rights" is, not the ethical discourse of God or Nature, but the ideological superstructure of a particular construction of masculinity.
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Gender theorists Dinnerstein, Chodorow, Gilligan,
6
and many others uncovered patterns that resonate experientially and illuminate culturally. They cleared a space, described a new territory, that radically altered the malenormative terms of discussion about reality and experience; they forced recognition of the difference gender makes. Academic disciplines were challenged, sometimes in their most basic selfconceptions and categories—as in philosophy, which has made an icon of the ideal of an abstract, universal reason unaffected by the race, class, gender, or history of the reasoner (Nagel's "view from nowhere").
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There
is
no view from nowhere,
feminists insisted; indeed, the "view from nowhere" may itself be a male construction on the possibilities for knowledge.
The unity of the "gendered human," however, often proved to be as much a fiction as the unity of abstract, universal "man." In responding to the cultural imperative to describe the difference gender makes, gender theorists (along with those who attempt to speak for a "black experience" uninflected by gender or class) often glossed over other dimensions of social identity and location, dimensions which, when considered, cast doubt on the proposed gender (or racial) generalizations. Chodorow, for example, has frequently been criticized for implicitly elevating one pattern of difference between men and women, characteristic at most of a particular historical period and form of family organization, to the status of an essential ''gender reality." Since the patterns described in gender analysis have often been based on the experiences of white, middleclass men and women, such accounts are guilty, feminists have frequently pointed out, of perpetuating the same sort of unconscious privilegings and exclusions characteristic of the malenormative theories they criticize.
As was the case when the first challenges were presented to the imperial unities of the phallocentric worldview, the agents of critical insight into the biases of gender theory were those excluded: women of color, lesbians, and others who found their history and culture ignored in the prevailing discussions of gender. What I wish to emphasize here is that these challenges, arising out of concrete experiences of exclusion, neither were grounded in a conception of adequate theory nor demanded a theoretical response. Rather, as new narratives began to be produced, telling the story of the diversity of woman's experiences, the chief intellectual imperative was to
listen,
to become aware of one's biases, prejudices, and ignorance, to begin to stretch the emotional and intellectual borders of what Minnie Bruce Pratt calls "the narrow circle of the self."
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A new personal attitude was called for, a greater humility and greater attentiveness to what one did not know and could only learn from others with a different experience and perspective. The corresponding institutional imperative, for academics, was to stretch the established, culturally narrow borders of required curriculum, course reading lists, lecture series, research designs, student and faculty recruitment, and so forth.
We also
should
have learned that although it is imperative to struggle continually against racism and ethnocentrism in all its forms, it is impossible to be "politically correct." For the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion (as history had just taught us) are played out on multiple and shifting fronts, and all ideas (no matter how liberating in some contexts or for some purposes) are condemned to be haunted by a voice from the margins, either already speaking or presently muted but awaiting the conditions for speech, that awakens us to what has been excluded, effaced, damaged.
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However, nothing in the early feminist critique of gender theory, it should be noted, declared the theoretical impossibility of discovering common ground among diverse groups of people or insisted that the abstraction of gender coherencies across cultural difference is
bound
to lapse into a pernicious universalization. It is only as feminism has become drawn into what Barbara Christian has called the "race for theory,"
10
that problems of racism, ethnocentrism, and historicism have become wedded to general methodological concerns about the legitimacy of gender generalization and abstraction.
Frequently (although not exclusively),
11
the categories of postmodern thinkers have been incorporated in statements of these concerns. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, for example, urge feminists to adopt a "postmodernfeminist theory" of identity, in which general claims about "male" and "female" reality are eschewed in favor of ''complexly constructed conceptions . . . treating gender as one relevant strand among others, attending also to class, race, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation."
12
Conceptions of gender (and, presumably, of race, class, sexual orientation, and so forth) that are not constructed in this way are totalizing; that is, they create a false unity out of heterogeneous elements, relegating the submerged elements to marginality. Much past feminist theory, Fraser and Nicholson argue, is guilty of this practice. Like the "grand narratives of legitimation" (of the white, male, Western intellectual tradition) criticized by Lyotard and others, the narratives of gender analysis harbor, either fully (as in Chodorow) or in "trace" form (as in Gilligan), "an overly grandiose and totalizing conception of theory."
13
Donna Haraway, too, describes gender theory in the same terms used by postmodernists to criticize phallocentric culture: as appropriation, totalization, incorporation, suppression.
14
These proposals for more adequate approaches to identity begin from the invaluable insight that gender forms only one axis of a complex, heterogeneous construction, constantly interpenetrating, in historically specific ways, with multiple other axes of identity. I want to question, however, the conversion of this insight into
the
authoritative insight, and thence into a privileged critical framework, a "neutral matrix" (to borrow Rorty's term) that legislates the appropriate terms of all intellectual efforts and is conceived as capable of determining who is going astray and who is on the right track. This is a result that Fraser and Nicholson would also deplore, given their obvious commitment to feminist pluralism; their ideal is that of a "tapestry composed of threads of many different hues."
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I share this ideal, but I question whether it is best served through a new postmodernfeminist theoretical agenda.
Certainly, feminist scholarship will benefit from more local, historically specific study and from theoretical projects that analyze the relations of diverse axes of identity. Too often, however (for instance, in grant, program, and conference guidelines and descriptions), this focus has translated to the coercive, mechanical requirement that
all
enlightened feminist projects attend to "the intersection of race, class, and gender." What happened to ethnicity? Age? Sexual orientation? In any case, just how many axes can one include and still preserve analytical focus or argument? Even more troubling is the (often implicit, sometimes explicit) dogma that the only "correct" perspective on race, class, and gender is the affirmation of difference; this dogma reveals itself in criticisms that attack gender generalizations as
in principle
essentialist or totalizing. Surely such charges should require concrete examples of
actual
differences that are being submerged by any particular totality in question.