Feminist Alliances (Value Inquiry Book Series 175)

FEMINIST ALLIANCES

VIBS Volume 175 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Peter A. Redpath Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno Mary-Rose Barral Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum H. G. Callaway Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon William Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling Matti Häyry

Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy Alan Milchman George David Miller Alan Rosenberg Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Anne Waters John R. Welch Thomas F. Woods

a volume in Philosophy and Woman PW Laura Duhan Kaplan, Editor

FEMINIST ALLIANCES

Edited by

Lynda Burns

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1728-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS Preface

vii

Introduction LYNDA BURNS

1

Part One: Responding to Challenges

9

ONE

The Complexities of Coalition IRIS MARION YOUNG

11

TWO

Whose Politics? Who’s Correct? ALISON M. JAGGAR

19

THREE

Speaking of Feminism . . . What Are We Arguing About? CHRIS BEASLEY

35

Part Two: Rethinking Feminist Alliances

59

FOUR

The Purposes of Politics: A Feminist Inquiry JANNA THOMPSON

61

FIVE

Foucault, Feminism, and History LISA FEATHERSTONE

77

SIX

Emasculating Metaphor: Whither the Maleness of Reason? JACQUI BROAD, KAREN GREEN, HELEN PROSSER

91

SEVEN

Care Ethics, Power and Feminist Socioanalysis SUSAN DUGGIN, JASON PUDSEY

109

EIGHT

Pornography and Power NARELLE LYDEAMORE

133

NINE

Splitting the Difference: Between Young and Fraser on Identity Politics MARGUERITE LA CAZE

151

vi

Contents

Bibliography

165

About the Authors

175

Index

179

PREFACE This book is a contribution to debates about the prospects for alliance between feminism and sundry other political positions. The chapters represent a range of feminist views on alliances. They develop detailed critiques of some alliances. No unified thesis emerges, but the authors’ distinct perspectives on alliances contribute to the development of different aspects of feminist theory. The collection is of central interest to readers in the area of feminism and gender studies. The wide scope of these chapters situates feminism with respect to other left movements, Liberal theory, Foucauldian power theory, Jacques Derrida’s conception of philosophy, the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu, and to different theoretical and pragmatic approaches to difference. The broad range of topics will extend the readership to researchers in other areas in addition to feminism and gender studies. Readers interested in political theory, sociology and philosophy of language will find this relevant to their work. Its range includes topics of relevance to current issues, making it also of interest beyond a purely academic audience. The Center for Applied Philosophy at Flinders University provided financial support for this project. Ian Hunt, the director of the Center and Yvonne Corcoran-Nantes of Women’s Studies at Flinders, offered valuable advice. The book has taken some time to appear. I would like to thank the contributors for their patience and my family and friends for their encouragement and help. Siobhan Davenport and Gunnar Sivertsen read parts of the text and made many useful suggestions. A study leave spent in the friendly and intellectually generous La Trobe Philosophy Department made it possible to finish the work of editing the volume. I would also like to thank the Editors of Dissent for permission to reprint the article by Iris Marion Young entitled “Complexities of Coalitions” which appeared in Dissent in Winter 1997, Volume 44, issue 1.

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INTRODUCTION Lynda Burns Politics is often a matter of alliances. This is a commonplace about the reality of political practice also reflected in feminist political theory. Often, feminist activists in the last few decades have forged alliances with those working for gay rights, with environmentalists, socialists, and other left wing activists. Also, from its beginning in the 1960s, modern feminist theory has engaged with a range of Marxist, Liberal, Postmodernist, Foucauldian and Communitarian perspectives. Sometimes these engagements have produced a measure of compromise or coalition, a combination of elements of feminism with other nonfeminist platforms or theoretical positions, and sometimes they have aimed at more solid alliances. Since most feminist theories have developed either in conjunction with, or in critical response to mainstream theories, theorists often categorize these as “kinds” of feminist theory. These include Liberal Feminism, Marxist Feminism, Psychoanalytic Feminism, Socialist Feminism, Communitarian Feminism, Existentialist Feminism, Ecofeminism, and Postmodern Feminism and so on. Rosemarie Tong’s Feminist Thought presents these as alternatives between which feminists can choose.1 The theoretical and strategic advantages and problems associated with such alliances remain a contested area in feminist theory. A central purpose of this volume is to contribute to a few of the debates generated by alliances. Presently we need to rethink theoretical alliances because this division into “kinds” of feminism, which has been so fruitful in the past, no longer serves the same purposes. As Moira Gatens says, feminist theories are no longer compelled to assert their allegiances to provide an authority to speak.2 Many feminists, including Gatens, have become skeptical about the usefulness of “applications” of nonfeminist theories to women’s situation. There have been substantial feminist critiques of the prospects for alliances with Marxism, with Rawlsian contractarianism and with Existentialist theory.3 They claim that reflections of masculine experience masquerade as universal claims about the human condition, and that accounts of social justice or of oppression turn out, on examination, to ignore injustices to women. These are quite serious criticisms but they have not spelled the end of feminist alliances. On the contrary, feminist separatism appears, at some levels of theory and practice, to be in decline. One practical reason for this has to do with the strategic advantages of unity with other groups. Where a range of past gains is under threat (including abortion rights, equal pay and even human rights), obvious advantages exist in a regrouping and combining of resources. In the current political climate isolationism is not a healthy option. Another more subtle reason has to do with the impact on both feminist prac-

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tice and theory of the recognition of difference, and the inadequacy of assumptions of some common ground such as the experience of a common oppression of “all women.” This has resulted in a more realistic focus on unity and diversity. If feminist theory must recognize diverse purposes and problems, then some theorists are likely to share common issues with groups of men. Diverse theoretical perspectives on justice, power, or social oppression might also be useful if no clearly specifiable social situation shared by all women exists. Recognition of difference has led, inevitably, to new alliances and new goals, some of which we would not have characterized as “feminist” in the past. The economies of effort and other strategic gains possible from the first type of alliance—short term working coalitions—are obvious. Just what the advantages are of the second, more genuine, variety of alliance is less clear. Unlike short-term coalitions, such alliances involve commitment either to common goals or to theoretical frameworks within which such goals might emerge. Since critical examination by feminists of applications of nonfeminist theories to gender relations often reveals bias, what the advantages of theoretical alliances might be remains unclear. Some feminists, including several of the contributors to this volume, have investigated the possibility of a third sort of alliance making use of some specific notions drawn from nonfeminist theories. Feminists might make use of the idea of a social field (Bourdieu) or power/knowledge (Michel Foucault) or Nietzschean conceptions of social power, while maintaining a critical distance from possible sources of bias in the home theory. This kind of utilization by feminist theorists of conceptual resources drawn from nonfeminist theories is one familiar variety of alliance. As the following chapters show, such types of alliance also have their problems. Another kind of alliance is possible, apart from these three—the short term coalition, application of nonfeminist theory to women, or the more limited appropriation of theoretical conceptions from nonfeminist theories. This fourth variety of alliance involves a critical reworking of existing theory from within. It results in a substantial revision of the original, which then emerges as a feminist theory. One could cite several instances. Simone de Beauvoir’s rethinking of Jean Paul Sartre’s Existentialism as a feminist theory is one.4 Susan Moller Okin’s reworking of John Rawls5 and Karen Green’s revision of humanist theory6 attempt to forge this type of alliance with varieties of Liberalism. We find another contemporary instance in Iris Marion Young’s article “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory” (in her book Throwing Like a Girl7) in which she reworks traditional Marxist theory, substituting the conception of division of labor for the traditional conception of class. Her claim is that division of labor is a more fundamental system of social relations, regarded as basic in a materialist social theory. Division of labor is a broader and more general category, making it more fundamental than class. This explains divisions within class. Division of labor is also a more concrete concept in that it refers to activities of labor and their institutionali-

Introduction

3

zation in particular social contexts. We can use division of labor to explain the social significance of other divisions such as race, whereas class fails to be explanatorily useful. Young’s further claim that the gendered division of labor is central to relations of production promises to convert Marxism into a feminist theory. I cannot further investigate this claim here, but it illustrates the potential for a further and possibly fruitful type of alliance. Moira Gatens illustrates this potential in her account of the relation between feminism and philosophy in Chapter 5 of Feminism and Philosophy.8 The chapters in this volume investigate all of these types of coalition and alliance. The first part of the book contains those chapters that respond to current challenges to feminism stemming from its general alignment with radical politics. The second part contains those that develop theoretical perspectives on particular alliances. 1. Responding to Challenges Iris Marion Young’s paper “Complexities of Coalition” introduces a central question in the first chapter: Do we have to transcend difference to forge a more unified and effective movement? She considers strategic problems and benefits of uniting with other radical groups. Feminist activists’ attempts to forge some unity with labor movements, gay rights activists, and environmentalists have resulted in challenges from within and from outside the movement. This leads her to consider the conditions for a genuine and workable coalition. As Young explains, successful alliances are not easy to forge. Yet she believes that we should head in this direction. Coalition of radical groups in the scope of a politics of difference is possible and powerful, provided we respect differences and avoid the narrow pursuit of group interests that make coalition unworkable. Attempting unity under some common banner such as “People before profits” is not the answer either. Young draws her conclusions from a careful analysis of the specific history of radical movements in the United States. The conditions for workable political coalition require drawing on the variable experiences of oppressed groups such as single mothers, illegal immigrants, the unemployed, indigenous peoples, the disabled, gays and lesbians. In this way we can develop a deeper perspective on social injustice and the possibilities for ending it. Effective political unity is possible when we respect specificity and difference. Critical scrutiny of proposed alliances is always a necessary process within developing feminist theory. What this often reveals is masculine or sexist bias in theories presented as objective and as revealing the truth about human social relations. This bias presents a substantial problem for the mainstream theories that claim to be objective descriptions or explanations of the human situation and social relations, or of a common human nature. Exposing bias within mainstream theories ought to situate feminism at the cutting edge

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of contemporary philosophical and political theory. Instead, feminism’s critical tendency has triggered a backlash. Feminists’ attempts to rethink social relations, the family, and political ideals such as Reason and Justice have also resulted in attacks on different fronts. These include attacks based on political correctness, accusations that feminists are making a grab for political power and control in universities, and assertions of the right to express sexist perspectives on women and on social relations. Alison M. Jaggar discusses the reasons for the rise of attacks on feminism. Some detractors present their attacks as defending western democracy and ideals of freedom against a rising tide of political correctness. Critics accuse feminists of indifference to truth and as rejecting Western culture. Jaggar is well placed to provide a perspective on this reaction as her work lies centrally within the feminist project of critically examining the western philosophical and political tradition, and she has been subject to attacks in the media. Her book Feminist Politics and Human Nature is a foundational feminist text that looks critically at mainstream philosophical and political theories, and at feminist attempts to engage with them.9 Her critique reflects on common assumptions about gender ideals, the family, and women’s social roles. In Jaggar’s paper in this volume entitled “Whose Politics? Who’s correct?” she argues that attacks on feminism mistake critique for rejection. She argues that critique of established mainstream theories is necessary and that critique should be an educational ideal. So feminist scholarship does not devalue or reject Western philosophy. On the contrary, it employs the ideals of critical inquiry that developed within the Western philosophical tradition. Nor is it obvious that feminism is committed to any outright rejection of political values and ideals developed by nonfeminist philosophers. The question remains of what feminists should make of proposals to apply or extend to women principles of mainstream political theories. This question raises issues about the identity of feminism, issues addressed in Chris Beasley’s “Speaking of Feminism . . . What are we arguing about?” Beasley also considers some attacks on the current directions taken by feminists, but she considers them from a perspective different from Jaggar’s. Beasley focuses on questions of identity and meaning. She addresses questions about what feminism is, what it means to be a feminist, and what direction feminism is taking. These questions arise from a particular kind of challenge to feminism which is presented as coming from within, and as authoritative criticism and correction. This kind of challenge appears to represent more than a backlash response to criticisms of accepted theories and values since critics occupying a position of “knowing feminism” voice it. This kind of challenge raises crucial issues about the identity of feminism and about the production of meaning. Despite its internal diversity, feminism is not whatever anyone may define it as being. We need some mapping of the boundaries of what feminism is, and what it is not. This task is the

Introduction

5

focus of Beasley’s paper. Such mapping is also essential to the main problem of this volume, which is the problem of assessing strategic advantages and theoretical gains of alliances. With whom we should align ourselves? This issue is central to questions of feminist identity and direction. The question of which methodologies or insights we might usefully appropriate depends, in the end, on what makes a theory “feminist.” Beasley’s conclusion is that problems about delimiting the boundaries may be resolved without making problematic assumptions about a central “core” of feminist principles accepted by all. The search for unity might be misplaced, Beasley argues, and could unduly limit the scope for possible alliances. She argues, instead, for a mapping of alternative possibilities. Beasley’s mapping of the feminist terrain provides an assessment of the significance of challenges to feminism and the extent and direction of social change. While Jaggar’s contribution outlines a political position from which feminists may respond to the challenge of backlash critics, Beasley’s response to the task of defining and delimiting feminism is more pragmatic. It allows scope for strategic maneuver and use of methodologies drawn from different sources. 2. Rethinking Alliances Rethinking of past alliances necessitates a reconsideration of some basic philosophical issues. The second part of the collection investigates these as they arise from attempts to align feminism with other political and social theories. Janna Thompson locates problems for some feminist views in their foundations in nonfeminist theories. She asks what the purpose of politics is. This is more basic than questions about rights or the nature of justice. She argues that feminist attempts to answer it reveal a bias in Liberal political theory. We cannot combine Liberal theory with feminist concerns because the feminist concerns include a concern with intergenerational continua that Liberal theories have consistently ignored or downplayed. She investigates the consequences of including the perspectives of those concerned with care of others on political theory. This inclusion makes a radical difference in the way we conceive the purpose of politics. Care ethics is also a focus of Jason Pudsey and Susan Duggin’s paper on Bourdieu’s socioanalysis. They consider problems for the claim that this is the ethics for feminists. Associating caring with women appears to reinforce some of the central means of diminishing women’s power—stereotyping women as nurturing and responsible for others. Pudsey and Duggin present a new response to this objection to care ethics. It emerges from their investigation of Bourdieu’s socioanalysis, a social theory that has recently gained some attention from feminists. But these authors remain ambivalent about the potential of Bourdieu’s socioanalysis for feminism.

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Jacques Derrida’s account of language is the target of Jacqui Broad, Karen Green and Helen Prosser’s chapter. They ask, how should we understand the making of social meanings? How much control can we have of these processes? The theme of “production of meaning,” discussed in Beasley’s chapter, emerges in their assessment of Genevieve Lloyd’s thesis that a metaphorical association between masculinity and reason is at the origin of women’s social subordination. Their critique of this thesis focuses on Lloyd’s use of Derrida’s claims about metaphor. There has been little critical work done on the alliance between feminism and Derrida, although his conception of language has been extremely influential. It has contributed to a pessimistic view of the prospects for overcoming women’s exclusion from Philosophy and from broader cultural ideals such as Reason. This chapter is a serious attempt to identify weak points in the claims that underpin this common feminist theorizing of oppression. Green, Broad, and Prosser argue that Derridean theories of meaning cannot supply the foundation for an account of women’s lack of social power. Not only is there escape from metaphor, they say, but also scope exists for turning metaphor to our feminist ends. Their paper also explores an alternative theory of metaphor more in line with its uses by women who have contributed to cultural and scientific ideals. How feminists see political alliances often depends on their view of difference. One debate among feminists concerns the creation of sexual difference. How should we theorize the formation of sexual difference? Green, Prosser, and Broad scrutinize the uncritical use by feminists of Derrida’s notion of metaphor as formative of sexual difference and consider the questions: Does metaphor create sexual difference? Can we use it just as well to subvert it? In her chapter “Pornography and Power” Narelle Lydeamore considers claims by feminists such as Catharine A. MacKinnon that pornography is formative in shaping sexual difference. Does pornography create the power differential between the sexes, or can it be exploited by women for their sexual ends? She investigates the theoretical origins of the feminist position that argues against censorship of pornography and plots the ways divisions between feminists over censorship depends on divergent conceptions of sexuality and of social power. We can see so-called pro-sex feminists as allied with Nietzschean power theorists and this alliance is not, she says useful for feminist purposes. The positive perspective on pornography has as its foundation an account of power that will not provide a sound basis for feminism. Lisa Featherstone’s chapter “Foucault, Feminism, and History” also addresses questions about social power and the formation of difference. She discusses the uses made by feminist historians of the theses and methodologies of Foucault, showing that these alliances may be productive. Foucault may provide a methodology for investigating power that escapes the tendency of “totalizing” power theories to reinforce structures of dominance by presenting power as inevitable and rational.

Introduction

7

Some suggest, therefore, that alliances, which utilize conceptual resources, avoid those difficulties mentioned by Gatens and others with “topdown” alliances. This appears to be a strategic advantage of this more distanced variety of alliance. Featherstone argues that this feature of Foucault’s methodology for investigating social power makes it a valuable tool for feminist historical analysis. We may even use it to reveal operations of power, which conflict with his more theoretical conceptions of power. Inadequacies in Foucault’s theory of power need not mean feminists cannot make productive use of his techniques. In the final chapter, titled “Splitting the Difference” Marguerite La Caze considers the history of Liberal attempts to deal with difference and decides that they do not provide a useful foundation for feminist thought. She argues that a politics of difference such as Iris Marion Young’s is best able to attend to the concrete circumstances of women’s lives and can provide better arguments for feminist goals than alternatives. Her discussion of the debate between Young and Nancy Fraser on the significance of diversity is an attempt to move beyond current criticisms of identity politics and into a better feminist understanding of difference. La Caze provides a theoretical response to the program for practical action outlined by Young in the initial paper in the collection. 3. Conclusion This work demonstrates that the account of relations between feminism and other political theories is a complex one, not amenable to simple tracing of interconnections or easy generalizations about the benefits or disadvantages of alliances. Some of the options available to feminists are becoming clearer, and these chapters contribute to that process. Feminists have four kinds of options. One is the short-term, strategically oriented, working coalition whose advantages and difficulties Young discusses. She argues that real interactions between feminists and others in the political arena can lay the foundations for understanding and redressing social injustice. Second are alliances involving common theoretical commitments that apply nonfeminist theories to gender relations. Several of the chapters contribute to the critique of such alliances. As the papers by Duggan and Pudsey, Thompson, and Le Caze demonstrate, this work is essential to the task of refining and defining feminist theory. Third are utilizations of the resources of existing nonfeminist theories. Green, Broad and Prosser, Lydeamore, and Featherstone discuss some of the advantages and problems these face. The fourth type of alliance involves a critical engagement with a nonfeminist theory, reworking it from within. Whether the theory that emerges is a genuinely feminist one that contributes to the understanding of gender relations and social injustice is quite often an issue for debate. All of the chapters in the second part of the book contribute to debates about the feminist status of different theories. Beasley provides guidelines for deciding these debates in her chapter in the first part. Taken together, these

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chapters develop the conditions for a more mature vision of both the limits and the potential for alliance.

Notes 1. Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989). 2. Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 60. 3. Anne Phillips “Universal Pretensions in Political Thought” in Michelle Barrett and Anne Phillips, ed., Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1993); Linda J. Nicholson, “Feminism and Marxism” in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds., Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); and Catriona McKenzie “Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophy and/or the Female Body” in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth A. Gross, eds., Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1986). 4. Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. and trans. Howard Madison Parshley, (New York: Knopf, 1975). 5. Sandra Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 6. Karen Green, The Woman of Reason: Toward a Theory of Liberation (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1995). 7. Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), chap. 1. 8. Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1991,) chap. 5. 9. Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, (Sussex, Eng.: Harvester Press, 1983).

Part One RESPONDING TO CHALLENGES

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One THE COMPLEXITIES OF COALITION Iris Marion Young One audacity of Neoconservatives is their appropriation of the radical egalitarian rhetoric of the 1960s. In his recent book, The Affirmative Action Fraud, for example, Clint Bolick calls for a restoration of the Founding Fathers’ “civil rights vision.”1 According to Bolick and other conservatives, commitment to race and gender blindness was ensconced in the Constitution in 1789; while American practices did not always live up to these ideals, a steady progress brought us as a nation to real equality. Since the 1960s, a “politics of difference” has torn apart America’s common fabric, with groups claiming that they experience oppression, and demanding that we notice their social difference and cultural specificity. These groups call for “special rights” like affirmative action, comparable worth, ordinances forbidding discrimination against gays and lesbians, Indian fishing rights, and protections for labor organizing. America can only return to the road to happiness and prosperity if we restore the ancient “civil rights vision” that ignores differences of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or class. Neoconservative amnesia about slavery, the Civil War, exclusion of women, extermination of Native American Indians, discrimination against Jews, and suppression of Hispanics is disturbing. Portraying current protest groups as the creators of conflict over race, gender, and class to which their movements are a response, is laughable. More disturbing, is to hear respected leaders and writers of the Left sing a similar tune. In an article on third-party movements in the United States in February of 1996, In These Times editor James Weinstein asserts that the Left has been impotent since the 1960s because it has fragmented into gender, racial, and ethnic groupings.2 Politically correct calls to have women, African-Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, or people with disabilities represented, and their issues addressed have produced only bickering and hand wringing in all movement gatherings, but no significant Left electoral activity since the 1960s. Reduced to “rearguard damage control” in which each fragmented group tries to defend its turf, the American Left has been “mired for the past decade in the self-defeating morass of identity politics.”3 In his recent book The Twilight of Common Dreams, Todd Gitlin similarly bemoans what he regards as nearly three decades of wasted effort on the Left. According to Gitlin, political movements beginning in the late 1960s that asserted the specificity of gender or race oppression and the need to at-

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tend to these specificities to combat oppression, were “a very bad turn, a detour into quicksand.”4 While African-Americans, women, gays, and Latinos all legitimately complain about exclusion and discrimination, the emergence of group-based political enclaves has eroded the unified Left’s commitment to equality and its ability to organize Americans against capitalist greed and misery. Proponents of a politics of difference insist that individuals are no more than their labels, and elevate diversity to religious heights. Identity politics leads to a spiral of multiplied identities, to essentialist definitions of the group that suppress differences within, to the comforts of enclosed marginality, to a relativism in which no claims to truth and rightness have meaning, and finally to backlash. The only hope for a renewed Left is transcendence of difference and a common battle for a decent life for all. Have there been mistakes and excesses within and among the movements attending to group difference? Without a doubt: people within these movements have been among the first to criticize tendencies toward “essentialism” that marginalize some people and wrongly polarize individuals and groups. It only further confuses a project of progressive alliance to judge much of the thought and action of committed progressives for the last twenty years as One Big Mistake. Left critics of the politics of difference have their history wrong when they claim that public attention to group specificity has led to increasing division among Americans and a paralysis of political action. American society needs a progressive movement of those with no interest in enlarging corporate power, a broad movement of working and poor people that crosses gender, race, citizenship status, sexuality, and age. An inclusive movement cannot emerge from the search for a common good but only from careful attention by each vulnerable social segment to the specific experience and vulnerabilities of the others. 1. Increased Understanding, Not Increased Polarization The Left’s historical revisionism about the politics of difference is almost as seriously distorting as the Right’s. Gitlin’s account suggests, for example, that so-called identity politics has led to an increasing “hardening of the boundaries between groups” in the last twenty-five years.5 A more sensitive appraisal of the history of these movements since the 1960s would find an initial hardening of boundaries, followed by a reflective questioning of boundaries, and then increasing interaction, fusion, and exchange. Gender, race, ethnic, and ablement-specific movements arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s as people in the larger Left reflected on their specific experience of oppression. Each group developed an analysis of the structural workings of its oppression or exclusion. Each had to struggle to have this

The Complexities of Coalition

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analysis taken seriously by the others, and by a Left smugly convinced that we could reduce all other oppressions to that of the universal working class. Feminists struggled with labor organizations, socialist groupings, Black Power leaders, and American Indian activists to persuade them not only to take women’s issues seriously, but also to change their internal practices to include women as speakers and leaders. People of color struggled with feminists, socialists, and labor leaders to have racism taken seriously. Gays and lesbians struggled with all these movements, even to be recognized let alone to have their oppressions taken seriously. The “hardening” of group boundaries was born from the frustrations of dismissal and the more-oppressed-than-thou competition. They needed separate organizational and cultural space to withdraw from such arguments, develop solidarity with one another, and create alternative institutions to organize and provide services to their constituencies. We have forgotten, perhaps, how much work it took for each of these social movements to acknowledge the others as important, or for more traditional Left organizations to regard any of them as important enough to justify changing their analyses and practices. In the 1970s, each of these movements did champion a “politics of identity.” Each aimed to construct or recover a core set of experiences, values, and forms of community that defined women, or African-Americans, or Hispanics, and so on. From the beginning, identity politics was unstable, and the force of the movements themselves toppled its project. We did not need to wait for a Weinstein or Gitlin to recognize that group identity can be wrongly essentialist and exclusionary. Movement activists said this to themselves and each other by the late 1970s and early 1980s. Working-class women challenged the class bias in feminist definitions of women’s experience; AfricanAmerican gay men challenged the black movement’s definition of manhood, and so on. The result has been an irresolvable tension between the recognition of the generalities of social position and the affirmation of the multiple positionings of each particular person. Today, I would assert, these group-specific political tendencies draw less rigid boundaries around themselves than they did twenty or thirty years ago and they recognize a wider range of internal differences. This history leads me to claim that “politics of identity” is, today, largely a misnomer. In the meantime, the labor movement and more traditional Left organizations have recognized the specificity of gender, race, and sexual oppressions, and modified their analyses and programs accordingly. The text of the founding principles of the Labor Party adopted in Cleveland in June 1996 would have been unlikely for a group of labor activists in 1970.

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IRIS MARION YOUNG 2. Electoral Politics and Difference

The electoral arena is not the only or best place to assess the strength or weakness of Left influence on United States politics. But this is the measure that Weinstein and other Left critics of the politics of difference use, and even then they get their history wrong in claiming that this politics has meant impotence in the electoral arena. The decade of the 1970s saw some electoral success for African-Americans, but otherwise there was little significant activity bringing Progressives and Leftists together. The Citizens Party was an important experiment, abandoned by Left organizations that decided, mistakenly in my opinion, to work within the Democratic Party instead. By the early 1980s, it was possible for the diverse groupings of old and new Leftists, environmentalists, feminists, African-American activists, and other progressives who had persuaded one another of the importance of their issues to come together. In the decade of the 1980s, we called this formation the Rainbow Coalition. People associate this name so closely with Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns that they fail to credit the earlier campaigns that invented the concept. The first Rainbow Coalition formed in 1983 in Boston to try to win the Democratic Party mayoral nomination for Mel King. The coalition included African-Americans, Latinos, white labor leaders, Leftists and Progressives, feminists, and gay activists. Although King did not win the primary, he showed much more strength than the pundits predicted, proving that out-front Left-wing positions could win significant numbers of votes. The Harold Washington campaign in Chicago learned from this near success, brought together a similar coalition of groups, and in November 1983, elected the first black mayor of Chicago under the Rainbow Coalition banner. In retrospect, I look upon the 1984 Jackson presidential campaign as a trial run for the next one. Both Jackson and the campaign made many mistakes, some of them shameful, and there was not enough real grassroots organizing to reach the diverse constituencies needed for electoral success. This had changed by 1988. A genuine coalition of hardworking AfricanAmericans, labor activists, environmentalists, farm activists, Latinos, Native Americans, feminists, socialists, and gay and lesbian activists fuelled a blazing primary campaign. The Jackson message not only concentrated on issues of economic hardship and inequality, but also named the specific oppressions of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Jackson won seven million popular votes in 1988, more than the primary victor Walter Mondale had won four years earlier. By any measure, this was one of the most significant progressive electoral campaigns since World War II. This was some years ago. We must be careful not to interpret all roads as leading to the reactionary political field in which we find ourselves today. There remain other fields in this treacherous political terrain, and some roads not taken far enough. The Rainbow movement had many problems. Chief

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among them were leaders afraid of the grassroots and an ultimate commitment to the Democratic Party. But the Rainbow was a coalition of constituencies differentiated by social position and experience of oppression and disadvantage, where each recognized and affirmed the specificity of the others and the need to work together. This history falsifies Weinstein’s claim that there has been no significant Left electoral activity in the United States because the particularist social movements have hopelessly paralyzed us. The ideas and politics of the Rainbow Coalition had significant appeal with the American public. To be sure, the mass interest it elicited is partly attributable to its being a primary campaign with significant media attention. I contend that its appeal also derived from its diversity and because the different parts of the coalition organized their distinct constituencies. The coalition was possible precisely because the different groups had gotten beyond an identity politics in which each is worried only about its situation. Any future Left-wing electoral movement will have to assemble a similar coalition of groups and encourage a similar mutual recognition. 3. Beating Back Backlash Recent social movements have further polarized American life because they have motivated backlash. Many people claim, for example, that America has more racial polarization today than it had during the civil rights era. Naysayers blame assertive movements of African-Americans, Native Americans, or Latinos who claim equal economic opportunity and full political participation at the same time as they assert cultural affinity and reject assimilation. No doubt, the last twenty years has seen backlash on many fronts, and increasing organization among people who would reverse the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, even of the 1930s. Still this is a sign of the success of progressive movements, instead of the failure of a fragmented Left. Conservatives attack affirmative action, for example, partly because its principles are now embodied in the practice of many corporations and nonprofit institutions, and not only in the public programs conservatives wish to end. Even the most Orwellian imagination would not have dreamed of a Defense of Marriage Act in 1975, because the idea that gay men and lesbians might have the same privileges as heterosexual couples was unthinkable in mainstream America then. The idea is gaining acceptance today because the movement for gay and lesbian rights succeeded in changing many people and institutions. Conservatives today have set their well-organized, well-funded sights not only on reversing the gains of identity politics but also on targets the Left has regarded as strictly class matters, such as the welfare safety net and labor’s ability to organize and bargain. Gitlin and others suggest that identity politics is partly responsible for these attacks on labor and the poor,

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because in their quest for cultural self-realization, groups abandon concern for nuts-and-bolts material issues. This is absurdly false. One of the most important organized responses to the recent welfare cuts, for example, has come from feminists. What Weinstein says, that they have directed too much of their energy to such “rearguard damage control,” may be true. It would appear more appropriate to praise them for recognizing the damage than to hold their woman-centered politics responsible for relegating all of us to the rearguard. Conservatives exploit gender and racial rhetoric as a way of diverting attention from the economic restructuring that has been hurting most Americans. Racist anti-immigrant sentiment and sexist calls for “family values” focus attention on blaming other poor and disadvantaged people for shrinking labor markets and increasing social costs, thus setting the working people of America against each other. The Left should not play into this divide-andconquer game by suggesting that African-American-specific, women-specific, gay-specific, American Indian-specific, or immigrant-specific issues divert attention from capitalist domination. In doing so, we risk further marginalizing those who increasingly serve as scapegoats in American politics. We should reject this false dichotomy between attending to group specificity and organizing in response to the job insecurity, increased inequality, and decreased access to healthcare and housing that these many groups all experience in different ways. 4. Fragmented Left Weinstein, Gitlin, and others are correct that we are a long way from mass organizing on such issues today. It seems to me that less organization and energy directed at working for economic and social equality exists today than at any time since the 1950s. Progressives are fragmented, but to lay blame for such fragmentation on the politics of difference is disingenuous. As Weinstein noted in his February In These Times piece, in the last few years there have been new and interesting electoral efforts that potentially include all those who wish to challenge the hegemony of corporate interests.6 With the exception of the Campaign for a New Tomorrow, a predominantly African-American group, they all appear to be the class-oriented organizations that critics of identity politics are looking for. Yet many of these groups are inward looking and fragmented. The Labor party has an extremely strong, comprehensive program, but its leaders want the party tied so closely to labor organizations that they have forbidden local chapters from running candidates making it difficult for persons not affiliated with labor organizations to work with them. The New Party, on the other hand, which has had several successes in local elections around the country, appears politically amorphous. Its publica-

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tions express many generally good ideas, but its policy of sometimes supporting Democratic Party candidates, and its rhetorical distancing of itself from older socialist or even New Deal traditions keeps its vision elusive. The Independent Progressive Politics Network emerged from a meeting in Atlanta aimed at bringing together representatives from local, state, and national organizations in the United States working on progressive politics and interested in independent political work. Dozens of organizations sent representatives, but the Green Party and several states’ Independent Parties have been the most active participants in the National Slate of Independent Candidates. It intends not to be a party or even an organization, but only a coordinated coalition. Yet, despite some interconnections and communication, both the New Party and the Labor Party, two of the biggest progressive thirdparty efforts, have not become actively involved. We cannot lay this kind of fragmentation at the door of so-called identity politics. But the critics of the politics of difference may have something right insofar as attention to the many ways economic and policy decisions damage people can make it difficult to find priority issues around which to form coalitions. Still, as the above examples show, the fragmentation of progressives appears more attributable to a free-for-all spirit than to turf defense or ideological disagreement. Perhaps we lack commitment to the work that careful coalition building requires. 5. Learning from Difference Critics of the politics of difference assume that specificity in public life is necessarily only the expression of narrow and rigidly defined group interest. This inward looking pressing of interests, according to them, is precisely why the politics of difference makes coalition unworkable. The only alternative to such divisive bickering, they suggest, is for the majority of Americans harmed by global economic restructuring and neo-Liberal policies to transcend their differences of culture and social position and unite under the wide banner of “people before profits.” Nonetheless, this way of putting things poses alternatives too starkly. A third way between interest-group competition and a difference-bracketing commonality exists. This would require a coalition that draws on particular experiences and perspectives to construct an enlarged understanding of the depth of society’s injustices and the existing possibilities for addressing them. America is a big and complex society whose members have precious little shared experience other than what appears on their television screens. Only by listening to the voices of differently situated groups can a potential movement united for the sake of meeting people’s needs have a clear sense of what those needs are. Despite the dominant rhetoric in this country that depicts poor people as a group of lazy, irresponsible, black, single mothers, the real circumstances of

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poverty are variable, and analyses from social-group perspectives are crucial for understanding that variability. Latino and Asian movements and groups can explain and interpret one face of poverty, feminist analysis shows another, a rural perspective another, African-American experience of racist exclusion another, reservation Native American Indians another, older working-class white men in the former industrial heartland yet another. If each of these constituencies does not communicate its specific situations to the others, then the ruling powers can continue to co-opt one by using another as scapegoat. Similar reasoning applies to the quintessential class issue, decent jobs for decent pay. Contemporary economic restructuring has made good jobs more scarce and forced many people out of work into low-paying jobs or into two jobs. In this respect, many people have reason to unite behind programs for economic security and meaningful work. But a comprehensive program for work and income needs to develop its specifics from knowledge of the structurally different situation of people with respect to their abilities, proximity to employment, and the demands of their everyday lives. It needs to include young inner-city African-American men, newly arrived legal or illegal immigrants, low-skilled single mothers with little access to childcare, suburban married women with young children and large mortgages, able-bodied old people with small or non-existent pensions, and people who move in wheelchairs. Although jobs matter to each of these groups, their job needs are different, and the constraints on their lives have differences—differences, structured by racist, sexist, ageist, and ablest biases and privileges, and by class and education. Ignoring such differences risks reproducing the old Left’s marginalization of important segments of the working class. Unity and understanding for a new people’s movement will not come from pretending that group differences do not matter, but from understanding precisely how they do matter, so forging an inclusive picture of our social relations. We need to wake up to the challenge of understanding across difference instead of continuing to dream on about common dreams.

NOTES 1. Clint Bolick, The Affirmative Action Fraud (New York: Cato, 1996). 2. James Weinstein, “Third Party Foibles,” In These Times, February 1996. 3. Ibid. 4. Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams (New York: Metropolitan Books,1995). 5. Ibid. 6. Weinstein, “Third Party Foibles.”

Two WHOSE POLITICS? WHO’S CORRECT? Alison M. Jaggar Almost anyone who was a feminist in the late 1970s and early 1980s remembers the expressions, “politically correct” and “politically incorrect.” Feminists of that period never used the term “politically correct” to advocate views to which we were wholeheartedly committed or to describe people we genuinely admired. Instead, we always used it ironically or tongue-in-cheek, as a way of distancing ourselves from a view or a person, implying that the view in question was quite extreme (what Communists used to call “ultra-left”), or that the person was self-righteous, or inflexible or doctrinaire. Similarly, we never used the term “politically incorrect” to express serious criticism. It was typically a term of affectionate mockery, hinting not only at forgiveness for those whose wills were weak but also even at admiration for those who resisted orthodoxies. Around that time, a friend gave me a button with the words “Politically Incorrect.” She did not intend it as a badge of shame announcing that I had strayed from some supposedly “correct line.” I interpreted her gift as a gesture of humorous affection, a way of telling me that, even though my politics and practices were different from hers, we could still be friends and share a joke. When I first received the button, I wore it quite a lot. It captured my continuing sense of myself as someone who is often unable to live up to her ideals but who refuses either to rationalize her failure or to renounce her ideals. I do not remember just when I stopped wearing the button, but I know it was many years ago. It was probably when politically correct jokes faded away in my circles, and it began to appear more urgent to wear buttons with slogans like, “Just Say No to Contra Aid” or “No Blood for Oil.” No one has ever taken much notice of whatever buttons I have worn but my writing has had a little more influence—if only on the small world of academic philosophers who are my usual audience. Since the late 1960s, I have counted myself among those philosophers who examine the Western philosophical tradition from a feminist perspective and I have contributed to developing what by now has become an extensive critique of that tradition. This critique has drawn attention to male biases at many levels in the Western tradition, ranging from the overt contempt for women rationalized by such canonical figures as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to deeper and less obvious biases infecting many classical Western assumptions about reality, knowledge and value. Inevitably, such work has raised a

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few hackles and, in 1988, I was not too surprised to find it castigated in the journal Public Affairs Quarterly.1 The following year, a similar attack appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.2 Both attacks came from Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University in Massachusetts. Sommers was establishing her reputation as a defender of so-called traditional family values against those whom she called radical “gender feminists,” a term she invented to refer to any feminist who had moved beyond the ideas of nineteenth-century philosopher, John Stuart Mill. In rejecting gender, Sommers rejected one of the distinctive conceptual innovations of second wave Western feminism, which drew a theoretical distinction between sex, a set of physiological characteristics relating to biological reproduction, and gender, a variable collection of normative social identities assigned to sexed individuals. Second wave feminists disagreed about many things, including how they should draw the sex/gender distinction, but all agreed that the recognition of gender was a conceptual breakthrough that enabled them to pose many new questions and to articulate new insights. Because virtually all contemporary feminists frame their ideas in terms of gender, how anyone today can reject the concept of gender and still claim to be a feminist is difficult to see. Sommers maintains that she is a liberal feminist after the model of John Stuart Mill, but Mill’s radical critique of the family places him closer to most contemporary “gender” feminists than to Sommers. The conclusion that Sommers is an anti-feminist instead of a feminist is difficult to avoid. In the course of denouncing “gender feminism,” Professor Sommers accused me of claiming that all heterosexual dating was a form of prostitution and that women would never be truly equal with men until it was possible to surgically implant fertilized ova into their abdomens. She further asserted that gender feminists displayed a condescending attitude towards ordinary women, most of whom, according to Sommers, “still want and are willing to pay the price for many of the things—like family and motherhood—that gender feminists [according to Sommers] say they should not want.”3 Sommers even expressed fear that students would be so indoctrinated by gender feminist ideas that they would make personal choices harmful to themselves and their families and live unhappily ever after. I responded to these accusations with a mixture of amusement and annoyance. The views that Professor Sommers attributed to me were such utter distortions of what I had written that I thought nobody could take her allegations at all seriously—though I was soon to learn my mistake. Sommers’s accusation that feminist philosophers were a self-appointed vanguard promoting an ultra-left orthodoxy contemptuous of ordinary women definitely stung me. I wrote to The Chronicle of Higher Education, noting that feminist philosophy upheld no orthodoxy beyond its elementary commitment to eliminating male bias in philosophy; instead, I asserted that a variety of

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competing views characterized feminist philosophy, including views on such social issues as the family, sexuality, and reproduction.4 If anything unified philosophical feminism, I wrote, it was not by some set of dogmas about specific practical issues. Instead, feminist philosophy was: defined by its resolve to counter bias and distinguished by its commitment to giving voice to the hitherto silenced, its respect for the experience of ordinary people, and its concern for their authority and welfare.5 Several other philosophers also responded to Sommers’s piece, including the Executive Director of the American Philosophical Association.6 Eventually the editors cut off the debate, allowing Sommers the customary last word. All this occurred in the late 1980s and by spring 1991, I had more or less forgotten about what I thought was a storm in an academic teacup. Then suddenly I found my supposed ideas attacked again, this time not in academic periodicals but in the pages of general circulation magazines like Forbes, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Wall Street Journal. The new attacks echoed many elements in the earlier ones—unsurprisingly, since it turned out that the new attackers knew little of academic feminism beyond what Professor Sommers had written about it. The target this time was not only feminist philosophy or even feminist scholarship in general but also the broader movement with which academic feminism is associated, namely, the movement against academic racism and ethnocentrism that has come to be called multiculturalism. As one of the group that Roger Kimball called “tenured radicals,” I found myself listed among the academic thought police, “femifascist,” and even, according to Dinesh D’Souza, “A Visigoth in Tweed!”7 “Political correctness,” a fading term of irony among feminists, was suddenly revived as a household word used to smear social critics, intimidate students and alarm citizens; the ironic resonances of the term were completely lost. Most amazing of all to me, given my quite painful consciousness of my inability to live up to my own ideals, I was suddenly portrayed as a leader of a supposed political correctness movement “trying to turn campuses into authoritarian ministates.”8 As the media campaign against so-called political correctness on campus gathered momentum, the charges against it fell into several categories. (1) First, “tenured radicals” were accused of devaluing Western civilization and neglecting to study it in our courses.9 We were alleged to present Western culture and American society as “thoroughly and hopelessly racist, sexist, oppressive.”10 We were supposedly critical of the United States Constitution and of individual rights, especially the right to free speech.11 We failed to value the West’s tradition of civil liberties, realm of privacy, or individualism.12 We “jettison[ed] the study of West-

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ALISON M. JAGGAR ern culture”13 while imposing compulsory courses in non-Western or Third World cultures.14 Because we saw Western culture as so “evil and patriarchal,” we were supposed to advocate “discarding” it.15 (2) A second charge was that, as columnist George Will put it, “political indoctrination [was] supplant[ing] education in the nation’s universities.”16 Radical academics supposedly were evaluating the greatest literary, artistic, and scientific achievements of Western civilization against a rigid ideological standard that was anachronistic, dogmatic, and paid little attention to truth. It was said that we excused the failure of students admitted on a “preferential basis” by invoking political bias in the curriculum.17 Our critics asserted that it was our revisionist scholarship that was biased: “Multicultural education, in practice, gravitates towards myths and half truths.”18 “Campus feminists have undermined the university’s traditional search for truth.”19 I was said to view Copernicanism as a male plot;20 Sandra Harding was said to view scientific objectivity as a male plot.21 (3) In addition to ignoring objectivity in practice, critics alleged that radical academics, especially feminists, were anti-rational in principle. It was said that we attacked objectivity and intellectual rigor as strategies for defending the cultural and political supremacy of white heterosexual males,22 seeing rigor as “patriarchal and logocentric.”23 Feminists especially were portrayed as quasi-religious fanatics; Sommers asserted that the “sex/gender prism” functioned more like a religion than a science.24 We were said to ascribe disagreement to false consciousness on the part of others and to deploy false consciousness as a semi-mystical concept suggesting that disagreement cannot be discussed rationally. False consciousness was said to function similarly to “faith” or “enlightenment” for religious believers.25 In the same vein, feminist students were said to be brainwashed, “unreachable and scary . . . like Moonies,” and their teachers were “enemies of reason,” who engaged in “robotic sloganeering.”26 Feminists were said to advocate incoherence and illiteracy. (4) In addition to being anti-rational in principle, critics portrayed radical academics as inconsistent and hypocritical in practice. We were said to care nothing for the feelings of those with whom we disagreed but to care immoderately about the feelings of those we saw as oppressed.27 Our “diversity neglected the classics of Asia or Latin America in favor of popular or underclass perspectives.”28 We criticized the stereotyping of white women or gay people or members of United States ethnic or racial minorities but then ourselves stereotyped white, heterosexual men. We re-

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sisted censorship on the part of right-wing groups but then ourselves sought to impose it on others. 29 (5) Feminist and anti-racist scholars were also accused of being intolerant of interpretations of texts or images that were different to ours.30 We supposedly persecuted scholars with whose views we disagreed, especially those whose scholarship was alleged to be “Eurocentric,” violating their academic freedom and hurting their feelings.31 At the same time, we were said to protect the feelings of women and persons of color by supporting speech codes which prohibited speech that encouraged a “demeaning atmosphere.”32 We demanded intellectual conformity, enforced with harassment and intimidation.33 We presented our views as dogmas,34 we censored school texts and we forced dissenters to undergo thought reform.35 We were totalitarians, fascists of the Left, new McCarthyists36 said to be engaging in an “illiberal revolution.”37 “Lifelong liberals are repelled by the ferocity of their Politically Correct colleagues.”38 (6) Critics claimed that feminist and anti-racist academics promoted hatred, bigotry, and social divisiveness in the name of resisting oppression. Academic residences for ethnic minorities were said to create a kind of academic apartheid;39 African-American studies was said to characterize people of European descent as “ice people,”40 feminists were said to hate men.41 (7) “Tenured radicals” were alleged to hold crazy, ultra-left social views, unrepresentative of the taxpayers who paid our salaries.42 Feminists, for instance, were said to see all women as victims and to define “any sexual encounter not initiated or dominated by the female…as rape.”43 I was alleged to claim that dating was prostitution and to promote destruction of the family and technological reproduction.44 On this characterization of feminism, it became quite plausible to assert academic feminists were unrepresentative of ordinary women, “especially wives and mothers,” whom we were alleged to despise.45 Dinesh D’Souza wrote, “A new barbarism—dogmatic, intolerant and repressive—has descended on America’s institutions of higher learning. We who pay the bills ignore the outrages and subsidize those who would do us in.”46 (8) Finally, critics portrayed feminist and anti-racist scholars as puritanical, self-righteous, unpleasant people who made scapegoats of others. Feminists were portrayed as “homely girls,” ugly, unfeminine and/or ageing.47 We were said to lack a sense of proportion,48 to be arrogant and humorless49 and to be engaged in a dangerous grab for political power.

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I cannot discuss all of these accusations here but will address two of them briefly. I will then make some general comments about the political context from which they emanated. Each of the two accusations that I have chosen to discuss alleges disloyalty and treachery on the part of feminist and antiracist scholars. First, critics charged us with being traitors to Western civilization. Second, critics said we betrayed the trust of the taxpayers to whom we owe our salaries. Let us begin with the charge that scholarship such as mine disparages or even rejects the values of Western civilization. This accusation is a reaction against the critical re-evaluations of many great works of Western art, literature, and philosophy undertaken by humanities scholars in many disciplines. Such scholars have also scrutinized the values implicit in decisions as to what should count as the great works of Western art and literature. Historians have focused on aspects of our collective past overlooked by traditional Whiggish narratives, which presented Western history as an unwavering march of progress towards human freedom; and they have looked critically at the criteria for determining which human activities or events should count as historically significant. Observing that most people in the past did not spend much of their time engaging in warfare and diplomacy, they noted that members of disempowered or marginalized groups, including women, were also creators of history, though a history that had been so far neglected. Accordingly, they developed new scholarly fields such as labor history, women’s history, social history and so on. To construe this critical work as devaluing or rejecting Western civilization is utterly mistaken. Instead, we should regard the work as enriching our understanding of the achievements of Western civilization and extending its best ideals forward into the future. No scholarly enterprise is ever entirely value-free and this is especially evident in the humanities. The term “civilization” is an honorific term, gaining its meaning in contrast to derogatory terms like “savagery,” “barbarism,” or “primitivism.” Humanities scholars make evaluative judgments even in determining which activities, practices, and products should count as expressions of Western civilization. Interpretation and evaluation are integral to scholarship in the humanities, and each new generation must do such interpretation and evaluation afresh. This is what it means to make a cultural tradition one’s own. Until the mid-twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of humanities scholars were primarily, though not exclusively, men from the more privileged social classes. It was inevitable that their class and gender locations influenced the ideas of these scholars in some ways—though this does not mean that we can reduce their work to simple propaganda for their class or gender. After World War II, some men from working class backgrounds were able to obtain academic positions and, over the past fifty years, women have entered academic life in increasing numbers, often women from the more

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privileged social classes. People from racial and ethnic minorities are now finally trickling into the academy, though still in painfully small numbers. That scholars whose social experiences have differed markedly from those defined hitherto as standard or universal should appropriate the Western cultural tradition in new ways—for example, that they should notice assumptions or omissions that previously have gone unremarked—is inevitable. My discipline of philosophy has been affected by the entry of significant numbers of white, middle-class women, who have produced an extensive new literature on feminist philosophy, often published in such new professional journals as Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, The Feminist Review, and Australian Feminist Studies. These scholars have also founded several professional societies for studying feminist philosophy; they include The Society for Women in Philosophy, which has branches in several countries, the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers, the Society for Analytical Feminism, and the International Association of Women Philosophers. Feminist philosophers have observed that Western philosophy has often devalued women’s competence and contributions, and some feminist scholars are recovering work by forgotten women philosophers. Some feminists have argued that Western philosophy’s representations of such central concepts as individuality, reason and knowledge have often reflected experiences and perspectives that some regard as characteristically masculine. Even traditional definitions of philosophy’s constitutive problems and methods may reflect ways of thinking that are distinctively masculine and that exclude issues of special interest to women. For instance, Western political philosophy has insisted on a distinction between public and private life that has excluded the domestic realm from ethical and political scrutiny, so legitimating the domestic exploitation and abuse of women. Just as how the influx of relatively privileged women affecting philosophical scholarship is easy to see, so the relatively limited amount of philosophical scholarship utilizing the concepts of race, ethnicity, and class reflects the slower entry into philosophy of men and women from less privileged backgrounds, especially men and women of color. Construing feminist scholarship as devaluing Western philosophy or as rejecting it is perverse. Feminist philosophers would not devote our lives to critically re-evaluating the Western philosophical tradition if it were not a tradition about which we cared passionately. We are not saying, “Let us forget about Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel.” We are saying, let us see what Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, have to say to people at the turn of the twenty-first century—where “people” includes men from the less privileged classes and women from all classes. Developing critical perspectives on the Western philosophical tradition is no more to reject that tradition than developing critical perspectives on Ptolemy or Nicolaus Copernicus or Sir Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein is to

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reject Western science. Similarly, to develop new and critical perspectives on Western traditions of art or literature or history is not at all to reject that art, literature, or history, but to take our places as inheritors of these traditions, to appropriate them for ourselves—just as past generations have always done. Far from betraying Western civilization, two of Western civilization’s noblest ideals inspire feminist and other revisionist scholarship. One of these ideals is the spirit of critical inquiry, the suspicion of dogma and the refusal to take things on trust or at face value; the other ideal is that of democracy. Even though Western institutions have frequently betrayed those ideals in practice, they still stand in our tradition as recurrent standards of moral and political evaluation; both linked to other Western ideals of freedom and equality. When we recognize these ideals as central to the aspirations of the Western tradition, if not always to its historical practice, then it becomes obvious that the new revisionist scholarship produced by disciplines such as feminist studies, ethnic studies, and queer studies is not a betrayal of Western civilization but a natural development of it. When “tenured radicals” look with a critical eye at the intellectual and cultural traditions that we have inherited, we show more respect to our forebears than we would if we engaged in selfcongratulatory adulation of their achievements. After all, the greatest Western philosophers, artists, and scientists were radicals in their times—and their greatest achievements consisted precisely in their challenging the assumptions of prevailing philosophical, artistic and scientific traditions and breaking the boundaries of existing paradigms. Similarly, when conservatives suggest that the study of so-called minority or Third World cultures constitutes some kind of disloyalty to Western civilization, they forget that Western civilization, itself, is a multicultural achievement, generated precisely in response to the shock of culture clashing with culture, as trading across the Mediterranean Sea brought the previously isolated Greek cultures into contact with the older civilizations of Asia and Africa. The new revisionist scholarship directly continues the honorable Western tradition of pioneering and non-dogmatic critical enquiry and the Western democratic tradition. Historians tell us that the so-called New World Order, which has followed the collapse of the bureaucratic state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, is a triumph of democracy and that democracy is a lesson that non-Western nations must learn from Western ones. We know that this claim is, at best, considerably less than the whole truth, but we have no doubt that democracy is something we wish to nurture, especially in studying the humanities, through which we develop our fundamental understandings of ourselves and our culture. The new revisionist scholarship consists precisely in attempts by groups hitherto excluded from authority in interpreting Western civilization to assert that their history, their cultural products and their selfunderstandings are also part of civilization. For this reason, such scholarship is deeply democratic.

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Let me turn briefly to the charge that we Visigoths in tweed promote social views so radical that they are dangerous to our students, not to mention disloyal to the trust of citizens who pay us to educate their children. Few of those engaged in the new revisionist scholarship hold anything like the more outlandish views attributed to us but many do hold social views that are considerably to the left of most taxpaying citizens. I consider myself a case in point. The mildest negative response here is to remember that academicians still do not accept revisionist scholarship—hence the term “revisionist”—and to note those scholars who pursue it still in a minority; for instance, feminist philosophy remains on the fringe of the discipline. Even if feminist and antiracist academics subscribed to a political orthodoxy, and even if we wished to “take over” the universities, we are far from doing so. The threat we allegedly pose is a figment of the right wing imagination, a new version of the 1950s hysteria about a communist conspiracy that saw reds under every bed. More positively, the presence of a few radical academics is not an evil, the unfortunate price of academic freedom. Instead, I would argue that radical thinking and dissent should receive special encouragement in institutions of higher education because they are integral to both the research and the teaching missions of our colleges and universities. Taking research first, I have observed already that the achievements of Western civilization have always depended on challenging accepted modes of thought and practice, developing new perspectives, seeing old traditions in a new light. The heroes of Western civilization have always been rebels. Think of Socrates—another philosopher accused of subverting the youth he was educating, and eventually executed for this. Think of Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin, or Sigmund Freud—each in his lifetime viewed as subversive of Western civilization and sometimes persecuted on this account. Critical thinking is crucial to the research mission of colleges and universities, and equally indispensable to their educational mission. Colleges and universities are not primarily professional or vocational training schools whose task is to guarantee that their graduates have acquired practical skills or absorbed a demonstrable amount of technical information. They are not military or religious institutions, part of whose task may be to instill patriotic pride and religious fervor, nor museums whose mission is to glorify the Western heritage. Instead, the primary educational task of liberal arts colleges and universities is to provide an environment sheltered from the pressures of the larger society but rich in cultural and intellectual resources. Such an environment offers undergraduate students a unique opportunity to question their assumptions and develop their aesthetic, moral, and political commitments. Within this environment, radical social criticism has special value as a resource because it stimulates students to engage at the deepest level in the critical evaluation of themselves and their culture.

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Even though I do not personally believe that all heterosexual dating is a form of prostitution, that the Copernican revolution was a male plot, or that women’s liberation requires men to give birth to babies, I think it is highly beneficial for schools to expose students to such views—precisely because they are not the views of most taxpayers. Students do not come to college to learn the social views of average taxpayers, because they are already well aware of those views. Instead, students come to college, among other reasons, to discover perspectives that are not easily available in the world outside the university. As Mill almost said in On Liberty, if academic radicalism did not exist, it would have to be invented!50 If the contributions of feminist and anti-racist scholars are as valuable to the academy, as I am suggesting, then why are they the target of such vicious attacks? It took me a long time to answer—or even ask—this question. At first I assumed that the attacks were reactionary responses by conservative academics who did not want the trouble of rewriting their lecture notes and I did not take them seriously enough to make a public response. I also did not want to spend the scarce time I had available for writing in clarifying and defending previous work. I thought my record could speak for itself and I wanted to get on with new projects. I did take the time to mention to my two teenage daughters that no, I did not think all heterosexual dating was a form of prostitution—a charge that was printed on the front page of my university’s student newspaper. I also informed my neighbor that, regardless of what she had read in The American Scholar, I did not think the Copernican revolution was a male plot. For a long time I maintained a public silence, assuming that the attackers would go away if I ignored them. I also ignored the personal hate mail I received at that time, which included pornography featuring women sexually abusing men, accompanied by a note asserting that obviously I was a woman who understood the attractions of power. In the end, I felt forced to take the attacks more seriously. In a letter to the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Sommers complained that she had been “squelched and silenced” by “the American Philosophical Association’s feminist establishment,” including the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Women, which I then headed. Her letter set off fierce controversy within the American Philosophical Association.51 The publication of her book, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, was heralded with huge publicity in the mass media.52 I came to realize that the attacks on so-called political correctness by Sommers and others were orchestrated and funded by right wing foundations seeking to bring about fundamental changes in higher education. For instance, I learned that Sommers was the Boston president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, that Lynne Cheney, then president of the National Endowment for the Humanities, frequently cited her writing in speeches and that she was nominated as a candidate for the Board of the

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National Endowment for the Humanities. Sommers was also “one of five mostly conservative new appointees” appointed by then Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, to an advisory panel providing “oversight” to college accrediting groups that had been irritating the Education Secretary by asking colleges and universities embarrassing questions about such topics as their recruitment and retention of students and faculty of color. The conservative Bradley Foundation awarded Sommers $40,000 to support her book project on academic feminism, and the conservative Olin Foundation awarded her $20,000.53 I realized that the furor over so-called political correctness in the United States reflected a similar controversy over education under Conservative governments in Britain in the 1980s, although the main arena of political conflict in Britain was the inner city schools instead of the universities. Since the early 1970s, many teachers had worked in British schools to broaden the curriculum beyond an exclusively European content and focus and, during that decade, although multicultural policies were usually associated with the Left, they frequently received all-party support in locally elected education authorities. A consensus developed in favor of giving more emphasis to the history and culture of British Asians and Afro-Britons, who made up between 10 and 70 percent of the population in urban districts. Teachers in some classrooms studied gender, racial, and cultural stereotypes. In the middle 1980s, these educational reforms became objects of ferocious attack by a group of intellectuals closely associated with the ruling Conservative Party. Two prominent philosophers, Roger Scruton and Anthony Flew, led the group. These philosophers contrasted the high culture of Britain favorably with the cultures of the Third World, claiming that British culture was “based more in open communication and the feeling for the law than any slavish adherence to custom.”54 As in the United States, multiculturalism was equated with disparaging European and British culture and this theme was taken up with enthusiasm by the popular press who rejoiced in examples of supposed fanaticism on the part of what came to be called the “loony left.” In the late-1980s, the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Mail On Sunday ran a seemingly endless series of antianti-racist stories. They alleged, for instance, that left-wing London Education authorities had banned the nursery rhyme, “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” along with black garbage bags, and all references to black coffee in staff canteens. Similar reports were associated with local councils’ plans to “multiculturalize” London Street names. The Sun reported that Hackney Council, in east London, was going to transform Britannia Walk to Shaheed-E-Asam Nhagot Singh Avenue. Retractions sometimes followed these blatantly false reports but their cumulative impact was to create an atmosphere of immense public hostility to the “trendy” educationalists now believed to be teaching Britain’s youth to

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despise “British” culture. In addition, some publications portrayed multicultural reformers in Britain, as in the United States as fanatics, fascists, and Nazis. The outcome of all this was that, in 1988, the Conservative Party introduced a national curriculum with the explicit aim of giving top priority to the teaching of British achievements and civilization. The power of local educational authorities to develop their policies was severely limited and, since Britain has no commitment to the separation of church and state, school assemblies again became Christian in content, despite many British schoolchildren no longer being Christian. The 1988 Local Government Act made it an offence to portray “positive images” of homosexuality in British classrooms. The theme of much British education now is precisely that advocated by Christina Sommers and her allies in the United States, namely, the theme of “traditional values.” Although both the British and United States traditions include social criticism, equality, and democracy, as I argued earlier, the term “traditional values” has become code, in current political usage, for classist, racist, sexist, heterosexist and imperialist values. In Britain, as in the United States, the 1980s was a period of reaction. The violent crushing of the miners’ strike, denationalization of the power industry, and savage cutbacks in the National Health Service followed the war for the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands. In the United States, labor unions were defeated (starting with the air traffic controllers), real wages fell, sweatshops returned, casual employment increased as full-time jobs with benefits diminished, housing costs soared beyond the reach of many working people, and Black college attendance decreased until more young African American men were in prison than in college. Reproductive rights eroded, welfare, medical, social security, and unemployment benefits were cut, and incidence of child malnutrition increased. Meanwhile, the military budget multiplied and in some places more money was spent on prisons than on education. Many people became poor and a few people became rich at the ordinary citizen’s expense. Academic programs like feminist and ethnic studies are among the few achievements of the 1960 and 1970s that we have not seen entirely reversed or eliminated by the inegalitarian and anti-democratic changes of the 1980s, 1990s and the first years of this century. Scholars in these programs, along with the revisionist scholars in the established disciplines, have been among the few remaining voices continuing to challenge prejudice, injustice, violence, exploitation, and militarism. I believe that this is why conservative columnist George Will wrote in 1991 that then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s enemies in the Persian Gulf were far less dangerous than the domestic enemies faced by his wife Lynne Cheney, then head of the National Endowment of the Humanities. When George Will spoke of domestic enemies, he had in mind people like Paula Rothenberg, co-editor with me of Feminist Frameworks,55 and editor of

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the widely used reader Racism and Sexism.56 Lynne Cheney explicitly targeted Rothenberg in a speech given by at the National Press Club. Why anyone would consider people whose work is devoted to opposing racism and sexism to be dangerous enemies of the state is a question instructive to consider. Such a consideration raises fascinating questions of who controls the state and in whose interests they control it. The time is past due for feminist and anti-racist scholars to respond assertively to those who try to silence us, who create a chilling climate for our scholarship, and who push us to write defensively, or to constantly qualify and modify what we say in vain efforts to guard against misrepresentation. We need to respond not only in private but also in public and we need to respond not only defensively, by denying that we hold some outlandish views, but also offensively, by revealing the inconsistency and bad faith of our attackers. We need to point out that our critics are guilty of precisely those offences of which they accuse us. Many of our critics provide textbook examples of projection, in which people attribute to others the qualities that they most dislike or fear in themselves, qualities that take on dimensions larger than life, like monsters in nightmares. They condemn our work because of what they regard as its incorrect politics. They are intolerant of opposition and persecute those of us who dissent from them. They are inconsistent in their charges (for instance, by accusing us simultaneously of both relativism and dogmatism). They are intellectually dishonest, deliberately misreading our work. Their attacks on our competence and integrity, especially the competence and integrity of scholars presumed to be the beneficiaries of affirmative action, promote hatred, bigotry, and social divisiveness. Many critics of so-called political correctness even appear to have the unpleasant personal characteristics they attribute to us: they are often selfrighteous people with no sense of proportion or ability to recognize a joke. How much sense of proportion can people have who regard the handful of academics working in under funded programs like women’s studies or ethic studies as, “trying to turn campuses into authoritarian ministates?” How much sense of humor can they have to take an outdated expression of feminist irony, and turn it into a threat to Western civilization? We must avoid the temptation to remain on the mud-slinging level of those who are attacking us. Most important is to reveal the political and economic interests that are financing those attacks and to explore their larger political agenda. That agenda is not to achieve the openness and justice to which they pay lip service. One respect in which our conservative attackers are correct is in characterizing us as inheritors of the ideals of the 1960s and 1970s. Ideals held by many at that time have still influenced many younger scholars who came politically and intellectually of age in later decades. In the United States, they are the ideals held by those who fought the battles for African American civil

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rights and the war on poverty, who challenged the sexual objectification of women at the Miss America Pageant in 1968 and fought at Stonewall for an end to the persecution of gay people. They are the ideals of those who protested the most powerful state in the world waging high-technology warfare on an impoverished country on the other side of the world, which was just emerging from French colonialism and struggling simultaneously against a United States-supported dictator who took Adolf Hitler as his hero. The decades of the 1980s and 1990s moved many Western societies farther from, not closer to, achieving those ideals, but feminist and anti-racist scholars are among those struggling to keep them alive for a new generation, so that they can be reinterpreted in the twenty-first century. We, and not Dinesh DeSousa, Roger Kimball, Christina Sommers, Roger Scruton, Anthony Flew, or Dick and Lynne Cheney, are doing our best to move our societies closer to achieving the best ideals not just of Western civilization but of liberation movements throughout the world, the ideals of genuine liberty and justice, equality and democracy, truly for everyone.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper began as a panel presentation given at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I developed the ideas in discussions with Lori Gruen. Other panel members were Robin Jones and Manning Marable. In preparing this version of the paper, I am extremely grateful to Richard Jones for generous assistance in finding references.

NOTES 1. Christina Hoff Sommers, “Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?” Public Affairs Quarterly, 2:3 (July 1988), pp. 97–120. 2. Christina Hoff Sommers, “Feminist Philosophers Are Oddly Unsympathetic to the Women They Claim to Represent,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (11 October 1989). 3. Ibid. 4. Alison M. Jaggar, “Letters to the Editor,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (1 November 1989). 5. Ibid. 6. David A. Hoekema, “Letters to the Editor,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (1 November 1989). 7. Dinesh D’Souza, “The Visigoths in Tweed,” Forbes (1 April, 1991). 8. George Will, “Curdled Politics on Campus: Tenured Radicals are Trying to Turn Campuses into Authoritarian Ministates,” Newsweek (6 May 1991), p. 72. 9. Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Corrupted our Higher Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).

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10. John Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?” New York (21 January 1991). 11. Ibid., p. 35. 12. Ibid., p. 40. 13. Debra Cermele, “The Political Seduction of the University,” Campus, 2:2 (Winter 1991), p. 3. 14. D’Souza, “The Visigoths in Tweed,” p. 82. 15. Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?” p. 38. 16. George Will, “Curdled Politics on Campus,” p. 72. 17. D’Souza, “The Visigoths in Tweed,” p. 84. 18. Ibid., p. 83. 19. Article description inside cover, Campus, 2:3 (Spring 1991), p. 5. 20. Nellie Smith, “The Feminist Politicization of the University,” Campus, 2:3 (Spring 1991), p. 5. 21. Margarita Levin, “Caring New World: Feminism and Science,” American Scholar (Winter 1988), pp. 100–106. 22. Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?” p. 36. 23. Ibid., p. 40. (Quoting Christina Hoff Sommers.) 24. Christina Hoff Sommers, “The Feminist Revelation,” Social Philosophy and Policy, 8:1 (Autumn 1990), p. 157. 25. Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?” p. 35. 26. Ibid., p. 40. (Quoting Sommers.) 27. “Review and Outlook: Politically Correct,” The Wall Street Journal (26 November 1990), p. 11. 28. D’Souza, “The Visigoths in Tweed,” pp. 82–83. 29. Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?” pp. 34–35. 30. Camille Paglia, “Ninnies, Pedants, Tyrants and Other Academics,” The New York Times Book Review (5 May 1991), pp. 1, 29, 33. 31. “Review and Outlook: Politically Correct.” 32. William A. Henry, III, “Upside Down in the Groves of Academe,” Time (4 January 1991), p. 67. 33. “Review and Outlook: Politically Correct,” 34. D’Souza, “The Visigoths in Tweed,” p. 82. 35. Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?” p. 35. 36. “Review and Outlook: Politically Correct.” 37. Henry, “Upside Down in the Groves of Academe,” p. 67. 38. “Review and Outlook: Politically Correct.” 39. D’Souza, “The Visigoths in Tweed,” p. 86. 40. Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?” p. 39. 41. Ibid., 38. 42. Ibid., 38. 43. Thomas Ricks, “Woman’s Studies at Duke: A Case Study,” Campus, 2:2 (Winter 1991), p. 3. 44. Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?” p. 38. 45. Ibid., 38. 46. D’Souza, “The Visigoths in Tweed,” p. 81. 47. George Will, “Curdled Politics on Campus,” p. 72. 48. Ibid., p. 72. 49. Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?” p. 37.

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50. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1869). 51. This controversy can be traced in the “Letters” sections: The American Philosophical Association Proceedings and Addresses, 65:5 (January 1992), 65:7 (March 1992), 66:5 (February 1993), and 66:7 (June 1994). 52. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994). 53. “Olin Fund Gives Millions to Conservative Activities in Higher Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (22 January 1992). 54. Roger Scruton, “The Myth of Cultural Relativism,” in Frank Palmer, ed., Anti-Racism: An Assault on Education and Value (London: Sherwood Press, 1986). 55. Alison M. Jaggar, and Paula S. Rothenberg, Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations between Women and Men (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978). 56. Paul S. Rothenberg, Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).

Three SPEAKING OF FEMINISM . . . WHAT ARE WE ARGUING ABOUT? An Essay in the Politics of Meaning Chris Beasley In recent times, there have been some “authoritative” criticisms of and/or attacks on feminism in Australia and elsewhere in the Western world. While critical assessment of feminism is by no means new, these “authoritative” challenges do not present themselves as strictly antagonistic—they do not present as anti-feminist per se—but as “knowing” feminism and accepting supposedly central features of it, such as claims about, and rejection of, the existence of widespread, even systemic misogyny. Such challenges necessarily rely upon conceptions of feminism’s identity. They involve views of what feminism “is.” They are intimately engaged in the production of meaning and we cannot easily ignore them since they apparently offer both knowledgeable and critical judgment regarding the meaning of feminism. Inescapably, these “authoritative” challenges raise the question of definition or “characterization.” In a cultural climate where the term “feminism” is in common usage but also under siege, the question of defining and characterizing feminism takes on a measure of urgency. While I was alerted to the question of definition by the contributions of “knowing” critics, my efforts to clarify the term feminism in a book entitled What is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory revealed that the task is problematic and contentious.1 Unfortunately, what makes a particular group of writers “feminist” theorists—instead of some other sort—is not as obvious as might be imagined. Although I think we have reason to be wary of strict definition in the traditional dictionary-style sense, feminism is not a term entirely up for grabs. Feminism is scarcely a static label, but this does not mean that it has no boundaries.2 The use of words or labels, no matter how broadly and conditionally understood, does involve the inclusion of some things and the exclusion of others, even if the boundaries change over time, and are permeable or fluid instead of written in concrete. Defining feminism may be theoretically possible, but to reduce the broad concept to a single unambiguous definition appears unlikely. Characterization is by no means a straightforward intellectual endeavor. Considering the politics of whether to engage with characterizations of feminism produced by “knowing” critics—whether to contribute to a process of definition—does not merely involve undertaking a project of simple

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clarification. Considerable uncertainty exists among feminists (including some “insider” critics) whether feminism can or should be defined or characterized. Despite significant difficulties, we should attempt the task of definition. To refuse to engage in the political task of constituting meaning is a pedagogical, strategic, and analytical error. These pedagogical, strategic, and analytical problems indicate that we should pay greater attention to how we can understand the task of definition, instead of concentrating on the question of whether the task should be undertaken. In concluding this essay, I will briefly outline some methodological procedures for characterizing feminism. This paper has some adopted some self-imposed limits on considering the task of characterizing feminism. These include a focus on Western feminisms, and a focus on theory. The initial caveat regarding a Western feminist context arises out of my belief that it would be no simple task to provide a brief account of the issue of definition attending to both the diverse field of Western feminist thought and the enormous complexity of “Third World” feminist thinking. In relation to the second self-imposed limit, this paper examines the meanings attached to the term feminism from the point of view of a focus on feminist theory or thought and feminist theorists—it deals in ideas, assumptions, and frameworks. Some writers adopt the view that we should not conceive feminism in terms of ideas alone, since it also refers to political struggles. Others suggest we can describe feminism more broadly. Rosi Braidotti talks of “the means chosen by certain women to situate themselves in reality so as to redesign their “feminine” condition.”3 I have considerable sympathy with this expanded scope. The limits of this paper are such that I have chosen to concentrate upon systemic, publicly asserted feminist ideas—instead of on the historical development of feminist political movements, practical struggles, feminist sub– fields or modes of inquiry such as economics or cultural studies, or individual women’s negotiation of the “feminine.” I have undertaken an account of the term “feminism” that is already expediently but necessarily restricted. Such an apparently limited focus on ideas still yields an extensive field. 1. What is Seen to be the Problem with Defining Feminism? Can and Should Feminism be “Defined”? A. The (often unacknowledged) Complexity, Diversity, Difficulty The notion of “defining” feminism is a controversial one plagued by many problems. First, “feminism” is a term that encourages a great many people to express opinions, but what these people mean by the term “feminism” is not entirely obvious. Such lack of clarity is not a simple result of limited knowl-

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edge or of prejudiced misrepresentation. “Feminism” is a troublesome word, in part, because it defies simple explanation. While Western feminism is increasingly an accepted part of ordinary social and political life, now—as in the past—it entails a variety of widely differing approaches. In spite of this diversity, in everyday discussions and in lecture rooms, we hear Western feminism often represented as a single entity somehow concerned with “equality.” This limited portrayal is rarely challenged, partly because many forms of current feminist analysis require considerable previous knowledge and are sometimes only available in forms of academic language that are more incomprehensible than quantum physics and as inaccessible to the uninitiated. Despite a growing awareness of, and potential audience for, feminist ideas, feminist thought remains little understood— even within the academy. B. Borders: Where and How do You Draw “The Line”? In addition to the problems associated with a complex, shifting and sometimes inaccessible field, defining feminism involves coming to grips with the issue of its borders. Many feminists (from across the whole spectrum of feminist views) are nervous about any attempt to say that this or that theoretical framework, position, or issue is out-of-bounds, or has stepped over the border that divides feminism from “other” perspectives. This anxiety occurs because attempts to distinguish feminism suggest deciding in advance what feminism is for all feminists, deciding what is outside the feminist agenda, and telling feminists what they may incorporate in their work. This is not an esoteric or abstract problem. A small example of the practical consequences of signaling such borders is relevant here. In 1998, a lengthy debate arose in an Australian email listing devoted to feminism and politics on the subject of whether a major waterfront dispute as an appropriate topic for the discussion listing. The waterfront dispute in question arose in April 1998 after the stevedoring company, Patrick Stevedores, sacked its unionized workforce, and replaced them with contract workers in Melbourne. The Australian Federal Government supported the move by insisting that the waterfront was inefficient. The Maritime Union considered Patrick’s action and government support was intended to break a comparatively powerful union and unionism in Australia per se. The debate on the feminist email listing revolved around the question of whether the waterfront dispute was a “feminist issue” (or perhaps alternatively more of a “class” issue). Borders can generate discussion about the accuracy or usefulness of the demarcation, but they can also reiterate political differences between feminist approaches, which may even lead to accusations of authoritarianism and political censorship.

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CHRIS BEASLEY C. Policing and Fixity: Who Draws “the Line” and Why?

Concern about borders leads us to a more general caution. Feminists themselves are often reluctant to engage in the task of definition.4 Although many authors have considered feminist thought, current writers rarely attend to the issue they are discussing. They almost invariably assume or evade the meaning of the term, feminism. Most texts dealing with contemporary Western feminism tend to deal only with some aspects of feminism—such as focusing on more established (“modernist”) approaches, or only summarizing different “types” of thought named feminist, which does not explain why they are so named. In the main, feminists are inclined—frequently deliberately—not to define what they mean by feminism, sensing dangers like internal policing of the field and its advocates, and the potential to suffocate the unstable vitality of its meanings. Who, after all, can speak for all of feminism? Who can say what is permissible and what is not? Who can speak of feminism’s identity? While we often connect such concerns about pinning down the identity of feminism with the agenda of post-modern feminists, these feminists merely emphasize the point and are not the only ones who have indicated uncertainty about speaking “the truth” of feminism. Feminists attending to class and/or to raceethnicity may display similar concerns. 2. What Might be the Problems Associated with Not Engaging in the Task of Definition? Can or Should Definition be Refused? Although the problems associated with defining feminism are inclined to make one pause, refusing to engage in definition does not mean that we avoid the question of definition. If the production of meaning is inescapable, suggestions that we should resist attempts at definition become doubtful. That only the agenda of defining feminism produces undesirable consequences is untrue. Renunciation of explicit definition creates some serious problems related to the production of implicit characterizations. I will outline two of the problems that signal that we should pay greater attention to rethinking how we might view definition, instead of continuing to focus on whether to define or characterize feminism. Closer analysis of how we can understand definition will, in turn, generate and shape methodological discussion regarding how we might do this. A. Definition/Characterization Cannot be Avoided The difficulties that arise in this search for something distinctive, something definable, about feminism—and relatedly for some limits, or boundaries— may reveal the search, itself, to be no longer important or meaningful. We might ask in this context, “Does the process of characterizing feminism nec-

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essarily assume or demand a unity that feminism has never had and does not need?” On the other hand, if feminism’s distinctive characteristics are so unimportant or insubstantial, its diversity so limitless or ineffable, perhaps the label itself should be abandoned? Even if such issues are by no means easily resolved, we cannot entirely evade the precarious project of delineating feminism’s characteristics. As Denise Thompson notes, “[R]efusing to engage in definition does not mean that definition is thereby avoided altogether.”5 Reluctance to explicitly clarify the meaning(s) of feminism often derives from a concern to reject a fixed conception, which supposedly speaks for all, but inevitably excludes some. No matter how theoretically principled, this reluctance has the effect of leaving in place and reiterating claims to implicit knowledges which are supposedly available to “those in the know.” B. Implicit Definition Leads to Problematic Effects i. Pedagogical Problems: Exclusion Implicit knowledges are inclined to preserve the authority of an alreadyinformed elite making the complexity of feminist thought inaccessible to the broader community. Although we typically couch renunciation of explicit definition in an understandable concern to avoid policing and attempts to fix the meaning of feminism, such a renunciation does not evade the problem of exclusion. Explicit definition involves potential exclusions that are available for scrutiny. By comparison, renouncing definition reiterates implicit characterization, thereby producing exclusions that are less open to debate and more inclined to affect the uninitiated as these exclusions shore up the authority of the elite. Although the task of defining feminism is a controversial and difficult one plagued by many problems, definition, in the form of implicit knowledges, is unavoidable. Asserting that we can or ought to resist definition is over-confident and ignores the risks attached to such an assertion. Engaging in debates concerning the meaning of the term “feminism”—engaging in characterizing or defining feminism—may well incite authoritative exclusions, but to imply that exclusion rests solely in explicit language is dangerously misleading. Authoritarian exclusions are evident in implicit knowledges and may potentially be more problematic precisely because they are not explicit. A crucial element of this concern is that intellectual elitism inevitably tinges implicit “theoretical” knowledges of any sort. Still, we might assess the potential risks associated with implicit knowledges because they do raise serious pedagogical dilemmas. Those who feel they do not understand the term feminism, and wish to learn more about it, are likely to be excluded from debates about its meaning if we make no attempt to clarify how it might be presently characterized. This

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pedagogical concern to clarify need not invoke a narrow conception of “definition” that reduces the meanings attached to feminism by only recognizing what is supposedly always the same within feminist writings. In any case, perhaps we should not be too precious about the dangers of pinning feminism down. The assumption that clarifying the meanings of feminism inevitably requires a prescriptive search for unity, for a definitive, unshakeable universal core, prejudges the task of “definition.” I will return to this theme shortly. ii. Strategic Problems, for example, in Relation to “Knowing” Critics Feminism in Australia and elsewhere in the West has recently been the subject of several “authoritative” challenges or attacks. Such challenges or attacks do not represent themselves as anti-feminist per se but as the work of “knowing” experts providing an informed critique. We can view the issue of whether to engage in explicit definition of the term feminism as an “in-house” epistemological-political problem, but we can also see that these challenges or attacks involve a wide audience. Although “in-house” debates may not be quite on the same order of conversation as unequivocally “public” disputes about feminism, they interconnect in many ways. “In-house” conceptions of feminism may restrict its accessibility to a wider audience. In this setting, unequivocally public challenges or attacks regarding feminism provide a linked but different forum in which to consider whether we should resist explicit definition. The evidently public nature of “authoritative” challenges or attacks highlights pedagogical and strategic political problems associated with renouncing definition. Two main forms of this sort of public authoritative challenge or attack exist. Relatively antagonistic “outsiders” produce the first sort—typically, but not exclusively, produced by men who perceive themselves as at a distance from feminism and critical of it, but who also appear to acknowledge sexism and some of the restrictions of traditional sex roles.6 Like those offering similar attacks on Aboriginal self-determination, who eschew the term “racist,” and proclaim themselves to be supportive of Aboriginal people, these “outsider” critics present themselves as against sexism and supportive of women and families. Such critics attack feminism in terms that suggest its adherents, or their public leaders, belong to an homogeneous group that espouses a common anti-male and/or anti-family stance. Though the “outsider” critics acknowledge the problem of sexism, they either perceive feminism as profoundly misdirected in toto, or make some gesture towards its internal diversity by depicting it as presently captured by an outmoded extremism associated with “1970s” (radical?) feminism. Even in the second case, whether we regard throwing off the dominance of this past homogeneity as possible or capable of redeeming feminism in the eyes of these “outsider” critics remains decidedly unclear. Even this view that femi-

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nism is passé is not an invitation to reconfigure feminism. Overall, “outsider” expert critics decry feminism as irredeemable. Such authoritative “outsider” critics in Australia, as elsewhere, appear to be more confidently vociferous than ever and range from public intellectuals like Robert Manne to popular writers from the “men’s movement” such as Steve Biddulph, an Australian interpreter of Robert Bly’s “mythopoetic” approach.7 While these critics are quite different in many ways, they share an interesting inclination to present themselves not as anti-feminist per se—a stance which might appear too close to a rabidly pro-discrimination position from which they wish to distance themselves—but as legitimate critics. Their base their legitimacy on a knowledgeable stance that involves both an awareness and acceptance of crucial aspects of feminism regarding justice and equity, and their considered view that feminism is harmful. From this position Manne, upon accepting the position of co-editor of the respectable, conservative journal Quadrant, expressed his antagonism to “extremist ideologies” like radical feminism and gay liberation.8 In the past Manne has exhorted the Australian Labor Party, and the broad left, to cast off the “stranglehold” of an “old-style,” “1970s feminism” on the basis that it does not value women who work at home or aspire to do so.9 Recently he has reasserted that hoary old leftist view of feminism as bourgeois aberration in describing the continuous dominance of a “1970s feminism” removed from the realities of the working class. Manne does not entirely reject feminism per se, just its extremist forms, its homogeneous bourgeois past, and its present domination by that unfortunate past. He claims to know what feminists believe, what feminism was, and what feminism is. His “expert” advice regarding the meaning of feminism involves some tactical acknowledgment of its internal diversity in calling for a rejection of that which he views as extreme and/or narrow within it. By comparison, Biddulph speaks as the public and popular face of the men’s movement in Australia and is inclined to name feminism itself as more generally harmful. Though Biddulph opposes “sexism” and domestic violence, he provides an Australian articulation of mythopoetic discourse to argue that the men’s movement, instead of feminism, will end sexism; and that feminism is the enemy of men.10 Like Robert Bly, Biddulph claims in Manhood and Raising Boys that feminism has (in concert with inadequate fathering) contributed to the weakening of men.11 Biddulph offers a perspective common within mythopoetic discourse and now widespread in the popular media in which women’s emancipation from an oppressive gender positioning is endorsed, in principle, but feminism is rejected as harmful.12 This perspective relies on an understanding of feminism as homogeneous, immoderate, and anti-male. Manne and Biddulph are both at pains to represent themselves as supporting justice for downtrodden women—not as old-fashioned sexist blokes.

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Ironically, based on precisely this knowing about sexism and rejecting it, they are able to offer accounts of feminism which present it as largely or intrinsically problematic in the eyes of any reasonable person. Women who perceive themselves as having “insider” knowledge and who regard themselves as “insiders” produce the second main form of public authoritative challenge or attack. They are unsympathetic to what they judge to be either worrisome trends or outmoded elements dominant within contemporary feminism. Such disgruntled insiders either represent themselves as the old, or the new guard. While frequently some generational element in these positions exists, not all the representatives of the “new” are younger than those representing the supposed “old” traditions of feminism. Both groups draw upon assumptions concerning what feminism has been, and is now, and upon conceptions of what it “really is” or ought to be. “Old guard” feminists as disparate as Jean Curthoys and Eva Cox in Australia, Germaine Greer in Britain, and Gloria Steinem in the United States13 suggest that somewhere between the sexual revolution and the Spice Girls, present day feminists have lost the plot.14 Present day feminists in this analysis are described as young, and/or theoretically or culturally modish and/or commercial, while old guard feminists describe themselves in terms of being older or as upholding what they regard as feminism’s past (1960s and 1970s) history. Old guard feminists are inclined to contrast their history as feminists, and/or feminism’s history, with the problematic character of much of the dominant elements within contemporary feminism. They argue variously that present day feminism is (1) complacent about the changes 1960s and 1970s feminism has wrought; (2) naive and laissez faire about continuing structural forms of oppression or discrimination and the expansion of socially regressive government policies (in short, insufficiently political); and (3) individualistic and disinterested in collective political organization for social change. Current feminism is also frequently seen as (4) inclined to ethical relativism and as implicated in silencing the moral commitment associated with feminism in the past, or even as (5) captured by slovenly thinking and corrupt self-interest. The “old guard” suggests that in the 1960s and 1970s feminism had a framework that named the problem as systemic male power but that in recent times by some mysterious alchemy this framework reconfigured into a focus on “what is wrong with women (or more specifically, feminism).”15 Attention now is more often given to the question of women’s unwillingness or otherwise to use their power for themselves and to feminism’s unfortunate tendency to construct women as mere victims.16 For old guard feminists, a focus on individual women’s self-assertion and “individual entitlement” shorn of political, collective and moral context is a worrying development that threatens feminism and its aims.17 These feminists share the view that something of crucial significance to the meaning of feminism has been downgraded, re-

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pressed, or lost. In this sense, the old guard see themselves as the keepers of the feminist torch. If the “old guard” is a disparate grouping of authoritative critics (largely drawn from social liberal, socialist and radical feminisms), the supposed “new guard” critics are much more diverse (including postmodern, liberal and libertarian feminisms). By contrast with how they are represented by the old guard, the new guard do not see themselves as excluding crucial features of feminism and repressing its past history, but as adding to feminism. The new guard perceive themselves as speaking out against the exclusionary tendencies that feminism employed in the past and the continuing dominance of such an outmoded orientation. Feminism is described as still dominated by a stultifying, inappropriate or irrelevant perspective that is sharply criticized as either old-fashioned modernist or old-fashioned “victim” feminism. We can group the new guard primarily in terms of two main strands: (1) those that depict themselves as “young feminists” and/or indicate support for broadly postmodern agendas, and (2) those that identify themselves as supporting “power feminism” and/or “girl power.” Both strands talk in terms of plurality and are not necessarily committed to feminism as a label. They reject the singular sisterhood associated with an older feminism and its supposed grim focus on women’s restrictions or subordination in favor of an optimistic concern with fluidity, choice, individuality, fashion, and pleasure. The first strand, which includes young Australian feminists Catherine Lumby and Suzie O’Brien, refuses to accept the old guard’s depiction of young women feminists as disinterested in a socio-political agenda.18 Instead, such feminists argue that younger women have new issues requiring a reinterpretation of any notion of a singular agenda, let alone a collective revolutionary one. This perspective resonates with the work of some older feminists influenced by postmodern approaches who depict a relatively sharp distinction between so-called modernist feminist thinking in the 1960s and 1970s as against that in the 1980s and 1990s.19 The second strand of the new guard is marked by its rejection of focus on women’s social-sexual subordination as puritan and victim-oriented and a concomitant embrace and celebration of a “pro-sexual,” individualist ethos.20 This strand, which can be identified by the coverall term “power feminism,” includes well-known writers of different ages such as Camile Paglia, Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe, Rene Denfeld, and Natasha Walter.21 In an Australian context, Kathy Bail has coined a similar terminology— “Do It Yourself,” or “DIY feminism.”22 Women as various as Madonna and Margaret Thatcher can be described as heroines of feminism within this perspective. For example, Paglia has voiced enthusiastic advocacy of Madonna and Walter has defended Margaret Thatcher as feminist role models. New guard “power” feminists typically straddle the boundaries of academic and mass market feminism and have connections with popular and of-

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ten more strictly commercial conceptions like “girl power,” as espoused by the Spice Girls for example. The emphasis in mass marketing is on refusing to be a doormat, confidence, sexy style, fun and getting what you want. Both of the new guard strands—whether described as young postmodern or power feminists—display a strong concern with abandoning the outmoded, which includes the feminism of yesteryear and its advocates today. While the old guard keeps the torch alight, the new guard dashes water on it and lights others. All these attacks upon or challenges to “feminism” (whether from antagonistic critics or disgruntled insiders) rely upon conceptions of feminism’s identity; views of what feminism is. Even those insider “new guard” commentators who argue that feminism is fluid, and criticize other forms of feminism which do not accept such plurality, are making implicit claims about feminism. As they assert that we no longer have to be concerned about what feminism is, they offer a particular position, which assumes some characteristics for feminism and excludes others.23 In short, no matter what the positioning of such attacks or challenges, their authority rests precisely on their knowledge of feminism. The antagonists assume that they can attack feminism because they perceive it to be a largely a homogeneous and harmful thing. By contrast, the insiders challenge contemporary feminism on grounds that arise from its not being homogeneous (feminism is attacked for not being the same as it once was in its glory years, or for being too resistant to change and not keeping up). Whatever the form of the critique, the point is that these attacks or challenges are about the “meaning” of feminism. They involve definitions of feminism. They initially suggest that critiques of this sort generate definitions that we cannot easily ignore. They alert us to the significance of the issue of definition. Upon initial examination, the issue appears straightforward. Without some engagement with these “knowing” critics, without some debate over the forms of definition brought into play by them, public portrayals of feminism that cannot easily open up discussion remain. We ought to contest those public portrayals of feminism that either constitute it in a demonstrably inaccurate way or divide it up between “grumpy old crones” who want to tell us all what to do and “seductive young chicks” who do not want to be like their mothers. These portrayals compromise feminism’s possibilities in pedagogical, political, and other ways. We can no more leave the characterization of the field of feminism to men speaking as conservative public intellectuals, or as representatives of the men’s movement, than to media take-up of particular insider disagreements. Yet entering public debate about characterizations of feminism is not only fraught with the difficulties of speaking within the imperatives of the mass media but also raises serious concerns that are not only about getting the message across. Some post-modern feminists, following aspects of the work of JeanFrançois Lyotard and Michel Foucault, consider that entering the fray is by no means the obvious strategy and that speaking about what feminism “is” may

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involve a trap as restrictive as the limits of the public portrayals so far discussed.24 Contributing to debates concerning feminism’s meaning, debates that rely upon characterizations of feminism, raises the danger of overly fixing that meaning. Postmodern feminist approaches suggest that the assertion of authoritative knowledge (the confession of feminism’s identity) contains the problem of replicating hierarchical, and exclusionary ways of thinking present in mainstream thought.25 This reluctance to speak, to characterize or define feminism’s identity is associated with an intention to allow a fluidity of possibilities that may avoid totalitarian tendencies.26 While these concerns have merit, it cannot be assumed that the danger associated with speaking of feminism outweighs that of not doing so. The conclusion that speaking about the meaning of feminism is the most dangerous strategy is not self-evident. By comparison, an evident difficulty exists with not speaking in the context of current attacks upon, or challenges to feminism. Silence leaves only some characterizations in place. This hardly appears to allow for a fluid play of accounts of feminism. This diminishes the range and flexibility of the field of feminism. Not speaking involves some additional strategic problems. Relinquishing an authoritative position by remaining silent leaves in place existing elites—existing “authorities”—including both those that speak publicly and those that do not. We cannot presume that only engaging in characterization produces political or theoretical costs, and that renunciation of explicit definition is without costs and provides for openness. To refuse the task of characterizing feminism, of speaking about its meanings, is a risky strategic maneuver at best and a political mistake of considerable importance at worst. Again, the issue appears to be more a question of how, not whether, to engage in this task. Based on this assessment of strategic options other choices exist than those of hierarchical authority or silence. Like Jane Gallop, I see certain advantages in an alternative path, in explicit assertion and the adoption of a position of authority on the subject of feminism.27 This position of authority is undertaken in order to clarify the difficulties of doing so and relatedly to provide the opportunity to disperse that authority by indicating the impermanence of any such characterization. Such a position does not prematurely relinquish authoritative analysis— the presumption of “mastery”—before everybody else, but it does expose the illusions of that presumption. “Gallop’s idea [is] to invoke authority in order to legitimate an attack upon authority.”28 This form of engagement in debates about meaning is not so much concerned with correcting the “mistakes” of “authoritative critics,” as with opening up the field of feminism.

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CHRIS BEASLEY C. Refusal Relies on Questionable Analytical Assumptions: Characterizing/Defining Definition Itself

We can make a case for defining or characterizing feminism. Despite the evident problems of attempting this, the problems of not doing so are substantial and we cannot avoid them. Many of the problems seen to be associated with such a task involve analytical assumptions about “definition” that may be questioned. Not only pedagogical and strategic errors attached to evading explicit definition exist, but also specific analytical ones. Frequently we equate the task of defining or characterizing feminism with a search for unity, a central core that can provide the means to divide the authentic feminist from the traitor within. In this sense, we see the term “definition” as, in itself, necessarily indicating an agenda about fixity that some may be likely to use as a policing device to delegitimize some forms of feminist work as outside what is common within feminism; to delegitimize, for instance, those feminists interested in postmodernism, ethnicity, race, or class perhaps. Equating defining or authoritative speaking about feminism with pinning feminism down prejudges the task of definition. In rejecting fixity with regard to the term feminism, fixity is then overly invested in the meaning of the term “definition.” While potential problems attached to definition exist, these are not preordained. We find no reason why characterizing or defining a term is necessarily equated with discovering its supposed eternal essence. The question then is how one speaks about feminism, how one goes about the task of definition. The issue is one of form or methodology as much as content. 3. If Definition is Unavoidable, No More Problematic Than its Renunciation, and not Inevitably Reductive or Essentialist, How Might it be Undertaken? A. How to Attempt Definition or Characterization of the Field of Feminism What are the methodological procedures and problems that face us? While analyzing all relevant methodological issues in any depth is beyond the scope of this paper, I will touch on a few points. We can view the task of definition as a relatively modest enterprise; as a “clarifying device.”29 In this context, a “definition” of the term feminism cannot mean a dictionary-style definition. Since any brief, neat account of contemporary Western feminism is likely to be controversial, the form of such a “definition” is likely to be more of an exposition or “map.” Feminism’s protean qualities suggest a cautious, openended, and wide-ranging approach to exploring its characteristics instead of an attempt to find some central core. On this basis, I propose employing a

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methodological course that involves looking at the task of definition from different perspectives and provides the sense of a field alive with possibilities instead of focusing on locating a tidy answer. In my book, What is Feminism?30 I have approached the problem of definition from several directions. First, I indicate how feminism might be viewed as distinguishable from “other” forms of thought—the implications of negative demarcation and the question of “borders.” Second, I delineate the field in a several ways—by marking out both the dimensions and content of a positive terrain. The arena of dimensions and content is variously considered by outlining different approaches to a single theme (for example, the issue of “sexual difference”), some major “internal” debates, possible “overviews” including a list of elements and an account of feminism’s “scope,” and finally a typography of content described as contested on several grounds. I adopt some methodological procedures that inevitably generate different perspectives, thereby demonstrating a position of authority on the subject of feminism while simultaneously destabilizing any assumption of definitive access to feminism’s unshakeable core. This form of engagement in debates constituting meaning follows Gallop’s strategic stance in that it involves taking up a position of authority in order to undermine the pretensions of mastery. By indicating several ways of looking at the question of definition, we can make the field available to a wide audience that includes the uninitiated while rendering explicit the restrictions and difficulties associated with these several perspectives. As a result, the complexity of feminism is made more accessible but not through the usual mechanism of the expert’s revelation of its central “truth.” Instead, the politics of meaning becomes evident. Such an approach is not as directed at correcting the “mistakes” of “authoritative critics” from a position of supposedly greater authority, so much as highlighting the politics of their particular standpoints on feminism’s identity, precisely making explicit the limits of claims to higher authority, and claims to “know” what feminism really is. This yields a workable, if pragmatic, response to the problem of “defining” feminism. A pragmatic response allows for diversity and change as well as indicating potential difficulties attached to overly rigid or clear-cut definitions, which attempt to lay down the law regarding what is, and what is not “feminist” thought. Such an exposition enables further opportunities for opening up debates about the meaning of feminism. In short, we see pedagogical, strategic, and other advantages in the use of a variety of methodologies since different procedures will yield different views of feminism, enabling recognition of the politics of meaning. The methodological issues associated with “defining” any field of thought or form of political alliance, including feminism, require more fulsome debate.

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CHRIS BEASLEY B. An Illustration

The question is not whether to engage in defining feminism but how to speak of feminism and how to go about definition. I recommended a methodological approach that highlights different ways of characterizing the field. This calls for illustration. In What is Feminism? I undertake the task of defining the field from several standpoints.31 By contrast in this paper I will only deal in a cursory fashion with three aspects of the discussion advanced in that book in order to provide a condensed illustration of my argument and enable some brief concluding reflections on the contributions of “authoritative” critics. I will focus my discussion of how to speak of feminism by considering first its negative demarcation from other fields of thought and some problems with borders. I will then discuss one procedure for clarifying “internal” dimensions—an “overview” list of elements—and finally consider a method of clarifying content consisting of a typology. i. Negative Demarcation and Borders We can start “defining” feminism by considering that which different feminists describe as providing a point of departure. Feminists indicate what they mean by the term feminism as they point out what distinguishes it from “other” (non-feminist) bodies of thought. Feminists also differ markedly over the degree of departure they envisage, some considering feminism as located upon a continuum shared with traditional thought, while others perceive a distinguishable difference between them. Second, a range of opinion exists among those who are inclined to the latter view. Some perceive feminism’s borders as providing a definitive point of separation or moment of revolt. Others interpret these borders as shifting and permeable. The last argue that feminism theorists cannot refrain from, and we ought not prevent them from, making “tactical” use of any mode of thinking, including modes dependent upon masculine bias.32 Such a position effectively means that aspects of those bodies of thought supposedly “outside” feminism are, nonetheless, incorporated into feminism. This raises some issues. If feminists include “inside” feminism aspects of that which they have demarcated as non–feminist, how then is feminism in any sense distinguishable from these other forms of thought? In response, we can say that even in the work of those feminists who do not sharply demarcate feminism from the mainstream, the term feminism remains associated with a critique of mainstream assumptions concerning the centrality of Man and the related invisibility/marginality of women. While some feminists may sometimes recommend “tactical” use of the mainstream, this engagement apparently involves a simultaneous rejection of its entirety, the totality of its value framework. In sum, all feminists appear to regard femi-

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nism as different with regard to its content, and most feminists consider it different in kind, from traditional thought. The basis for distinguishing its difference in content and kind—whatever the interpretation of the difference— appears to revolve around refusal of the masculine bias of traditional thinking. Feminism has boundaries (feminism does involve some distinguishable meanings), but the interchanges between feminist thought and “other” forms of thinking which feminists criticize indicate that a strict, clear–cut dividing line separating them is unlikely. Perhaps the image of the Berlin Wall is helpful to illustrate this apparent inconsistency. The Wall no longer provides a physical barrier—people continuously breach it—yet this does not mean that East and West Germany are indistinguishable. Similarly, feminism has boundaries that may be permeable, but this scarcely implies that feminism is no different from any other form of thinking. The issue becomes not “where” feminism’s boundaries might be, but “how” we might understand them. Clarifying boundaries (how feminism departs from “other” bodies of thought) and their potential permeability (the ambiguities of that departure), are both part of the first steps in “defining” feminism. This point is relevant to the task of definition in relation to other fields of thought and forms of political alliance as well. ii. Internal Terrain—Dimensions: An “Overview” List of Elements A wide variety of feminist views regarding the relationship between feminism and traditional social and political thought exists. They range from a perspective that considers feminism and mainstream theory to be compatible and quite similar, to an approach that sees feminism as breaking down the categories found in traditional theory. If, as the second view suggests, feminism is in some way distinct, what is distinct about it? Feminism appears to challenge conceptions of women and sexual difference in traditional thought. The critique offered by feminism—the viewpoint that something inadequate and unjust characterizes traditional theory—is more straightforwardly encapsulated than what feminism offers as the alternative. What feminism offers, beyond its initial criticism of existing thought, is exceptionally diverse. The question remains, “What is feminism?” Even if everyone does not always regard feminism as separable from “other” modes of thought, how can we define it from “the inside?” We can describe feminism’s “internal” characteristics using several methods. For the purposes of this chapter I will reiterate one found in What is Feminism?—an “overview” list of elements clarifying feminism’s dimensions.33 The number of uncontroversial elements that we might identify as distinguishing feminist thought is quite small. Even these are neither fixed nor likely to generate a single interpretation. The field of feminism attends to or includes

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eight elements. The first describes borders, the boundaries of the “internal” terrain, and those that follow refer to the terrain itself. These elements are: (1) A critique of misogyny/sexual hierarchy that challenges assumptions of male supremacy and centrality (2) A focus on considering women as the subject of the analysis, which may include reference to differences between or within women, may even question the status of the grouping, and in any case is not necessarily exclusive (3) An expanded account of, and altered orientation towards, what may be discussed within analysis of social and political life, compared with traditional thought—for example, both domestic and “public” life is discussed (4) Diverse perspectives, represented by several typical debates— especially around whether feminism has or should have an abiding core, the degree of social change envisaged, and the extent to which feminism “belongs” to women to the exclusion of men (5) Some recourse to a “normative” imperative in relation to challenging sexual hierarchy (and frequently other intersecting social hierarchies) revolving around resistance to power and the privileging of men— recourse to the view that the status quo is unsatisfactory and ought to be changed—which may be implicit but more often is explicitly evident (6) Some minimal, collectivist, as opposed to individual, orientation (7) An inclination to view feminism as especially relevant to or resonate with women, though men may also be seen as benefiting from and (by some) as party to its concerns (8) A selection of identifiable approaches or “types” of feminism. (I identify seven main types in What is Feminism?34) One of the problems with the list method of characterizing feminism is that it does not appear to summon up the ever-growing volatile fluidity associated with the term. This plentiful exuberance, so distant from the seeming frugality of a mere listing of dimensions, is not easily susceptible to any form of description. Employment of such a listing might suggest an overstated commonality amongst feminists and an overly neat set of “core” elements for feminism. On the other hand, although a listing of elements does involve difficulties such as the potential for prescription in advance, different “cooks” stir and shake these ingredients, generating an intoxicating brew of interpretations.

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iii. Internal Terrain—Content: A Typology While the “overview” method of a listing of elements can suggest the lively complexity of the field of feminism and hint at its content, by far the most common method for characterizing feminism involves focusing on content alone, and on one particular representation of that content. In almost all extended analyses of the subject, authors define feminism by default by listing its constituent viewpoints, or by providing a catalogue of “types” of feminist thinking. This may not appear to be an especially analytical or insightful way of characterizing feminism, but it does offer a pragmatically inclusive account that allows all types of feminism developed thus far. The seemingly open-ended nature of a typological method does involve some debatable assumptions, such as presuming that we can understand feminist thought merely as the sum of a menu of existent constituent viewpoints. It does not answer the question whether any commonalities exist among viewpoints that explain their common designation as feminist. Alternatively, a typology of feminist thought may be said to impose an overly neat order on the current picture of feminist thought that obscures what feminism shares within it.35 Alternatively, a typology of feminist thought imposes a too-neat order on the current content of feminism, ignoring the difficulty that some viewpoints or aspects of them are not easily distinguished, and underestimating the current existence and continuing possibility of “cross-over” between viewpoints.36 The typological method yields a static picture, and does not assist in clarifying the development of viewpoints and debates, or how they might intersect, blur, or change over time. This limitation is worrisome in relation to a field of thought precisely marked by intricacy and innovation. Finally, practical issues exist that are associated with developing a typology related to different understandings of feminism. For example, how many types of feminism are there? What are the main ones? This is a matter of debate. Writers of overview texts such as Jean Bethke Elshtain, Alison M. Jaggar, Josephine Donovan and Rosemarie Tong describe between four to eight main feminist approaches,37 while I refer to seven: liberal, Marxist/socialist, radical feminisms, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic feminists (Lacanian psychoanalytic feminists include so-called French feminists), postmodern or poststructuralist feminists, and feminists concerned with race and/or ethnicity. Different assessments of even something as seemingly banal as the number of main types of feminism means that what one writer might include as a main type another may leave out.38 In addition, when writers agree about a main type, they may differ over what it includes.39 Such a range of opinion is also evident when writers describe where the major divides between types of feminism occur. For instance, Karen Offen and Elizabeth A. Grosz both recognize two major groups or strands within the field of feminism. Offen

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distinguishes between “relational” and “individualist” feminisms, while Grosz refers to “equality” and “difference” feminisms.40 The main types of feminist thinking may be located under four broad headings: modernist, “borderline,” postmodernist, and cross spectrum. Table 1 illustrates a typology including the main types and major groups or divisions within feminism as outlined above. We can also distinguish “minor” types of feminism, such as the “anarchist feminists” who, influenced by anarchism, are different from radical feminists. The intention of the diagram is not to present an exhaustive account of the “content” of feminism, let alone a sufficient characterization of the whole field of feminism. Like the two previous methods (the account of how feminism might be distinguished from “other” forms of thought and the list of elements) the typological diagram is not intended to stand alone. Apart from the limits associated with typologies, we see significant problems attached to providing an all-encompassing map of feminism. It may be simpler and more helpful to forgo the desire to see the whole picture. Advantages exist in laying out several different ways of characterizing feminism one after another. Nonetheless, the typological method is one significant technique for clarifying the field of feminism. Being the most common technique employed in characterizations of feminism, the method allows easy comparisons between most existing overviews. While the labeling in a typology downplays shared features within feminism or assumes discrete fixed types of feminism, such problems are not critical to those who are new to the field. Only those with specialized knowledge can discuss feminism without reference to such labels. The typological method can be a useful tool in exploring different political agendas attached to different representations of feminism if we make explicit its assumptions and limitations. 4. Having Provided an Illustration of How Feminism Might be Defined, and How Its Meaning Might be Understood, What Does It Contribute to a Dialogue with “Knowing” Critics? In the light of this condensed illustration of different ways of considering the meaning of feminism, I will now briefly return to the “authoritative” attacks on and/or criticisms of feminism by “knowing” critics. The approach I have adopted encourages recognition of the politics of all assertions regarding the meaning of the term and raises questions about any claims to know what feminism really is or ought to be. The “knowing” critics offer views of the meaning of feminism, which involve definitions of feminism. Responding to such definitions by claiming a greater authority, by making even stronger claims to expert credentials, or to know feminism’s “true” identity is not especially useful. Raising the expertise stakes hardly advances the dialogue with such critics. It capitulates by accepting a narrowed ground

MAJOR DIVISIONS STATUS SCHOOLS/ GROUPS TYPES MAIN WITH (SUBGROUPS)

MODERNIST MAINSTREAM

BORDERLINE MARGINAL

POST MODERNIST EMERGING POSTMODERN

LIBERAL

SOCIALISTS

Liberal Feminists

Socialist Feminists

(including individualist libertarian feminists)

(including Freudian socialist & eco feminists)

Race/ethnicity feminists

MARXIST Marxist Feminists

ANARCHIST Radical Feminists (including eco feminists)

Race/ethnicity feminists

PSYCHOANALYTIC Freudian Feminists

Lacanian Feminists

PostLacanian Feminists (including corporeal feminists) Post Colonial Feminists (race/ ethnicity)

Postmodern feminists (including “queer theory” feminists)

Post Colonial Feminists (race/ ethnicity)

A Typology of Feminism: Note that “Minor” types of feminism may also be distinguished, such as the “anarchist feminists” who— though influenced by anarchism—are different from radical feminists.

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for debates around meaning. A more helpful approach, in epistemological, pedagogical, and strategic terms, is to employ different perspectives gleaned from several methodological procedures in order to highlight the politics of the “knowing” critics’ standpoints on feminism. For example, antagonistic outsiders may assert agreement with feminism’s departure from misogynist thinking, but if we consider how feminism might be negatively demarcated from “other” modes of thought, then these outsider critics appear to part company with feminists over the rejection of misogyny. In short, outsider critics accept that misogyny be challenged in theory but appear discomforted by decentering men. The methodological procedure of the overview list of elements further clarifies this point. Outsider critics see decentering men as equivalent to antagonizing men. They are resistant to a focus on women as the subject of the analysis (1), and uncomfortable with any blurring of the public-private divide (preferring to maintain a distinction in which traditional gender roles are upheld) (2). Despite a hypothetical critique of the existing sexual hierarchy, they are apparently resistant to any normative imperative to change this hierarchy given their discomfort with destabilizing men’s positioning (or with altering present gender positions) (5). By way of example, Steve Biddulph opposes domestic violence by men against women and children, yet suggests that this can countered by strengthening masculinity.41 The outsider critics’ attack on feminism as largely homogenous, anti-male, and by extension anti-family, ignores or does not recognize debates within feminism, including those about the position of men within feminism (6 and 7). It ignores or does not recognize a range of types of feminism (8 and Table 1.). We can scrutinize the political stance of insider criticisms by using the methodological procedures I have suggested. Such criticisms challenge contemporary feminism on the basis that contemporary feminism is not homogeneous (it has gone downhill since its glory years or is now inflexible and oldfashioned). They are generally understood in terms of generational differences concerning the advantages or otherwise of continuity within feminism. If we look at the list of elements and the typology there might be another way of considering them. We can conceptualize these insider debates as new forms of unexceptional political dispute within feminism about the claim to speak for feminism, or as new attempts to claim authority over the term and capture its “truth.” Insider criticisms may be described as part of a process in which established traditions (liberal, socialist/Marxist, radical) attempt to muzzle emerging perspectives (postmodernist, Lacanian psychoanalytic), or in which a resurgence of mainstream traditions (liberal, individualist libertarian) remain stalwart against social reformist/revolutionary agendas (social liberals, socialist/Marxist, radicals, postmodernist).

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Perhaps both of these forms of dispute are occurring at once. Whatever the case, claims to speak authoritatively for feminism revolve around the issues of collectivism, feminism’s normative orientation, and the extent or kind of social change envisaged. Although disgruntled insiders acknowledge potentially heterogeneous feminist positions and types, they offer views of the meaning of feminism that give little legitimacy to their opponents. Ironically, like the outsider critics, they are uninclined to recognize the variety of feminism (see 4, 8, and Table 1.). This inclination to reject alternative views within feminism—arising from different accounts of political alliance and change, from different accounts of the relation between individual and society—is perhaps new in form, but not in kind. Such insider disputes represent new forms of unexceptional political dispute not just within feminism but within social-political theory more generally, since they appear to arise from differences regarding the classic problem of the relation between individual and society. These disputes represent different views that tend, like most views within social and political theory, to reiterate instead of question the individual-social binary by stressing one term at the expense of the other and by assuming that the terms are necessarily discrete and oppositional. For example, the “old guard” is inclined to trumpet solidarity, while the “new guard” typically associate collectivity with prescription and instead promote individuality and “choice.” Disputes around authority and legitimacy are long-standing within feminism. In presenting such disputes as political—as attempts to claim authority instead of as a matter of generational difference—I am not suggesting that they are somehow petty or merely “ideological.” My intention is to question the way in which we conceive such debates as matters of inevitable generational rebellion between mothers and daughters, and to question the way in which we naturalize the debates. Describing insider debates in naturalized terms simultaneously enables us to interpret them as indicating inbuilt and irrevocable problems within feminism, thereby providing further evidence for defeatism, for a counsel of despair regarding the future of feminism. This defeatism may be all too palatable and convenient in the present unfavorable political climate. By contrast, one crucial point that may be drawn from my brief illustration of how to characterize feminism—which is relevant to both outsider and insider criticisms—is that the form of difference within feminism I have discussed is unexceptional, ongoing, and apparently contributes to its vitality. We cannot inevitably equate difference, as it frequently is in traditional politics, with disunity and ruin. 5. Conclusion Debates about meaning are far from esoteric exercises. They involve pedagogical, strategic-political, analytical, and methodological questions. The

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questions raised by the controversial task of characterizing or defining the fraught terrain of the field of feminism alert us to the significance of meaning. These questions are not relevant to feminism alone, but have implications for all fields of social and political theory, and all forms of political alliance.

NOTES 1. Chris Beasley, What is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999). 2. Philipa Rothfield, “New Wave Feminism: Feminism and Postmodernism,” in Andrew Milner and Chris Worth, eds., Discourse and Difference: Post– Structuralism, Feminism and the Moment of History (Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Center for General and Comparative Literature, Monash University, 1990), p. 94. 3. Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1991), p. 147. 4. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 20. In addition, discussion of this reluctance to engage in definition may be found in Karen Offen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Perspective,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14:1 (1988), p. 121; and Denise Thompson, “Defining Feminism,” Australian Feminist Studies, 20 (Summer 1994), p. 171. 5. Thompson, “Defining Feminism,” p. 173. 6. Christine Williams, “So How Much of a Difference Has a Century Really Made to Women?” The Guardian (4 January 4 1999). 7. Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990). 8. Robert Manne, Editorial, Quadrant (March 1989). 9. Robert Manne, “Why Labor Must Break the Feminist Stranglehold,” Sydney Morning Herald (17 August 1998). 10. Steve Biddulph, Manhood: An Action Plan for Changing Men’s Lives, (Sydney, Australia: Finch Publishing Co., 1995), p. 5; and Ben Mudge, “Sexism and Stoicism: Theorising Profeminist Strategies,” (unpub. honors thesis, Women’s Studies Department, Flinders University, 1997), p. 14. 11. Biddulph, Manhood: An Action Plan for Changing Men’s Lives, pp. 3; 22; and Raising Boys (Sydney, Australia: Finch Publishing Co., 1997). 12. Michael Schwalbe, “Why Mythopoetic Men don’t Flock to NOMAS,” in Michael S. Kimmel, ed., The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Respond to the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement (and the Mythopoetic Leaders Answer) (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), pp. 323–324 (for feminist analyses of mythopoetry); Bell Hooks, “Men in Feminist Struggle—The Necessary Movement,” in Kay Leigh Hagan, ed., Women Respond to the Men’s Movement: A Feminist Collection (San Francisco, Calif.: Pandora, 1992), pp. 111–117; and Lynne Segal, “Changing Men: Masculinities in Context,” Theory and Society, 22:5 (1993), pp. 625–641. 13. Jean Curthoys, Feminist Amnesia: The Wake of Women’s Liberation (London: Routledge, 1997); Eva Cox, “Eva Cox,” in Jan Bowen, ed., Feminists Fatale: The Changing Face of Australian Feminism, (Sydney, Australia: Harper Collins, 1998); Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman (Sydney, Australia: Transworld, 1999). “Fizzing

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with PMZ, Germaine Boxes Some Ears,” Sydney Morning Herald (22 February 1999), p. 1; Gloria Steinem cited in Cilla Bulbeck, “A Fair Deal for the Fair Sex? Feminism in the Next Millenium” (Inaugural Professorial Lectures, 29 May 1998, University of Adelaide), p. 5; Ann Curthoys, “What is the Socialism in Socialist Feminism?” Australian Feminist Studies, 6 (Autumn 1988), pp. 17–23; Anne Summers, “Letter to the Next Generation,” in Damned Whores and God’s Police (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia: Penguin, 1994), pp. 505–528; Marilyn Lake, “Three Perspectives on Helen Garner’s The First Stone,” Australian Book Review, 174 (September 1995), p. 26; Kath Kenny, “Sex and Harassment: Live from the Mouths of Babes,” in Kathy Bail, ed., DIY Feminism (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996), p. 142; and Liz Kelly, Sheila Burton, and Linda Regan, “Beyond Victim or Survivor: Sexual Violence, Identity, and Feminist Theory and Practice,” in Lisa Adkins and Vicki Merchant, eds., Sexualizing the Social: Power and the Organization of Sexuality (Hampshire, U.K.: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 77–101. 14. Adapted from Suzi O’Brien, “Girl Power Goes Feral,” Sydney Morning Herald (7 August 1998). 15. Kenny, “Sex and Harassment: Live from the Mouths of Babes,” p. 142. 16. Kelly et al., “Beyond Victim or Survivor: Sexual Violence, Identity, and Feminist Theory and Practice,” p. 80. 17. Beverly Skeggs, “Women’s Studies in Britain in the 1990s: Entitlement Cultures and Institutional Constraints,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 18:4 (1995), p. 477. 18. O’Brien, “Girl Power Goes Feral”; Suzi O’Brien, “Horsetarts, Mullets and Slurries: Sexual Subject Positions Available to Young Women at Roseworthy College,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 19:1 (1998), pp. 89– 99; Catherine Lumby cited in Nadine Williams, “Feminism with a Changing Face,” Advertiser (27 April 1998), p. 19; Victoria Nicholson, “Summers of Our Discontent,” Refractory Girl, 46 (1993), pp. 17–18; and Virginia Trioli, Generation F: Sex, Power and the Young Feminist (Melbourne, Australia: Minerva,1996). 19. See, for instance Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips, eds., Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1993), Introduction, pp. 2–7; and Elizabeth A. Gross (Grosz), “Conclusion: What is Feminist Theory?” in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth A. Gross, eds., Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 190–204. 20. See Narelle Lydeamore, “Pornography and Power” this volume, chap. 8, for further discussion and criticism of this strand. 21. Camile Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture (London: Viking, 1993); Camile Paglia, Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993); Katie Roiphe, The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994); Rene Denfield, The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order (London: Simon & Shuster, 1995); and Natasha Walter, The New Feminism (London: Little Brown), 1998. 22. Bail, DIY Feminism. 23. Williams, “Feminism with a Changing Face.” 24. Rothfield, “New Wave Feminism: Feminism and Postmodernism,” p. 94. 25. Ibid., passim; Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1992), p. 108; and Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews

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and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed., Colin Gordon (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 209–222. 26. Judith Butler, “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytic Discourse,” in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 338. 27. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 21; and Rothfield, “New Wave Feminism: Feminism and Postmodernism,” p. 96. 28. Ibid., pp. 94, 96, 102. 29. Thompson, “Defining Feminism,” p. 172. 30. Beasley, What is Feminism? 31. Ibid. 32. Gross, “Conclusion: What is Feminist Theory?” pp. 190–204; and Rothfield, “New Wave Feminism: Feminism and Postmodernism,” pp. 96–97. 33. Beasley, What is Feminism? 34. Ibid. 35. Judith Grant, Fundamental Feminism: Contesting the Core Concepts of Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 4. 36. Jackie Stacey, “Untangling Feminist Theory,” in Victoria Robinson and Diane Richardson, eds., Introducing Women’s Studies: Feminist Theory and Practice (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 49–73. 37. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1983); Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism (New York: F. Ungar, 1985); Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); and Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, (St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 1998). 38. Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction, pp. 195–216, (existentialist feminism); and Tong, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, pp. 173–192, (existentialist feminism), pp. 246–277 (ecofeminism). 39. Tong, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, p. 63, (radical feminism); and Anita Perez Ferguson, “Sex War: The Debate between Radical and Liberation Feminists,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 10:1 (Autumn 1984), p. 109. 40. Offen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Perspective,” pp. 134– 136; Gross, “Conclusion: What is Feminist Theory?” pp. 190–204; Elizabeth A. Grosz (Gross), “The in(ter)vention of Feminist Knowledges,” in Barbara Caine, Elizabeth A. Grosz, and Marie M. De Lepervanche, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), pp. 92–104. (Grosz published under the name Gross before the late 1980s. For the sake of consistency I refer to her as Grosz in the text.); and Moira Gatens, “Power, Bodies, and Difference,” in Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips, Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1992), p. 135. 41. Biddulph, Manhood: An Action Plan for Changing Men’s Lives, pp. 3, 5, 86.

Part Two RETHINKING FEMINIST ALLIANCES

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Four THE PURPOSES OF POLITICS: A FEMINIST INQUIRY Janna Thompson 1. Introduction: Social Contract Theory and the Purposes of Politics A primary question for feminist political theory is what difference it would make to political thought and practice if women were full participants in the political life of their society, and if society fully incorporated their concerns and viewpoints into political thought. In particular, what difference would it make to political philosophy? Liberal political philosophers allow that the full inclusion of women into politics might bring about a change in some political practices or in the issues regarded as political. But they are inclined to doubt that it would much affect political philosophy. They think that they can regard women as citizens, bearers of political rights, or as included in a theory of justice without a significant revision of liberal concepts. Some feminists have doubted that this is possible and are, as a result, critics of liberalism. Many feminists, Carole Pateman for example, have concentrated on criticizing the critical liberal distinction between public and private.1 Other feminists have argued that liberalism leaves out the moral voice concerned with care. In this chapter I will argue that feminists should be critical of liberalism, but not because liberal theories of justice or rights are mistaken. I criticize liberal theory primarily for what it leaves out more than for what it puts in. Liberalism downplays or inadequately treats aspects of social life and human concerns central to political thought and practice—namely the relationship between the generations and concerns of individuals as participants in an “inter-generational continuum.” A reasonable explanation for the failure of liberal theory to focus on these concerns and give them their due is that traditionally men have made liberal theory by and for themselves; this is what I term “masculinist bias.” The case for claiming that masculinist bias exists in liberal theory begins with an examination of social contract theory, classical and contemporary. Although not all liberals regard contract theory with favor, and many feminists criticize it, it has a few useful attributes. One of the virtues of contract stories is that they illuminate what political philosophers of the past and present identify as the purposes of political society. They tell us what they think we should accomplish by political cooperation and for what purposes we

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ought to use political power. They tell us how these purposes are related to the motivations, self-conception, and interests of individuals who are supposed to be political actors. The question, “What is politics for?” is more basic than is the question “What is justice?” or “What are our political rights?” We do not exhaust the purposes that political organization ought to serve by presenting the catalogue of rights or principles of justice that the state is supposed to uphold. This fact about social contract theory is likely to prove useful to feminists who find discussions about rights or justice too limited. So a feminist investigation of liberal political philosophy can usefully begin by paying attention to social contract stories and the conceptual tensions that they contain, paying attention to what is pushed aside or inconsistently treated, and to the conclusions they reach. 2. Parents and Individuals Once upon a time the masters of households, motivated by the insecurities of the state of nature and their desire to obtain the benefits of cooperation, got together to establish a political society capable of maintaining justice and peace in their territory. The participants in this process of founding a political society were self-interested, rational individuals with diverse and sometimes conflicting interests. But they also recognized each other as equal possessors of natural rights. Their objective, therefore, was to establish a political order in which they could protect these rights. In particular, they agreed that protection of liberty is a basic function of government, and that they should deprive no individual of any more liberty than necessary for the sake of peace and good government. With this in mind, they proceeded to found a state with its constitution, form of government, laws, and institutions. This is a brief summary of the story of the social contract, as told by John Locke in the second of his Two Treatises on Government;2 one of many attempts of political philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries to found political authority on rational consent. Women play no part in such stories. The stories assume that the masters of households are men. But the absence of women in the social contract story is only a symptom of a deeper problem. In Locke’s version and in other classical theories, an unexplained shift of perspective occurs in the story. He first identifies those who make the contract as heads of families. They are representatives—they are supposed to be concerned not just with their interests but the interests of family members and other dependents. We can reasonably assume that they are not merely, or even primarily, self-interested. They are not unattached individual atoms. Responsibilities burden them, and it would be natural to assume that one motivation for making a social contract is these responsibilities. We can reasonably suppose that one of their concerns is to ensure that the social contract assists

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them in adequately fulfilling their family and household responsibilities. When making the social contract they should want to consider whether some of their responsibilities could be better carried out using the collective resources that a political society can provide; for example, their responsibility for the education of their children or for ensuring a safe, healthy environment for the raising of children. This is not merely a private concern. A political society is an intergenerational association, not merely an association of presently existing adults. Contractors will want not only to ensure that they can live in peace and have their rights protected but also that peace and the protection of rights be assured for their children and future generations. This requires not only good laws and institutions but also devoting attention to how society raises and educates its children. As soon as these heads of families turn their minds to the social contract though, they become self-interested individuals appearing to have nothing more to do than to pursue their personal ends. The desire to protect their rights as individuals and their desire to achieve as much scope as possible for furthering self-interests entirely consumes their political motivation. Nothing in the social contract reflects their identity as heads of families. This shift of perspective is responsible for a well-known inconsistency in classical liberalism. Women, and many men, did not have recognition as political actors because they were not heads of families. The only relevant element is that the contract is not between individuals as heads of families, but between individuals conceived as rational agents who have rights and interests of their own. How then can the exclusion of women be justified? If women are capable of rationality, argued Mary Wollstonecraft, then denying that they have rights is inconsistent, and if they have rights, then they should be citizens.3 Feminists have won that point, but the basic problem created by the shift in perspective remains. John Rawls asks us to imagine what agreement about principles of justice for their society would be made by agents who are rational and “disinterested,” as far as their relations to others are concerned, but do not know any particular facts about their situation.4 The result are principles that make equal liberty a priority but also allow to each a share of socially created resources. The agents who make the contract in Rawls’s hypothetical situation appear to be individuals, each of whom, “desires to protect his capacity to advance his conception of the good.”5 The principles they arrive at reflect this preoccupation. Later though, Rawls suggests that we can think of the parties in the original position as “heads of families.”6 Two related reasons why he uses this conception emerge. One of them is that children cannot participate in the contractmaking process and require representation by others. The other is that principles of justice necessarily include justice between the generations. In reasoning

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about the latter Rawls puts “fathers” behind the veil of ignorance. They are required “to ascertain how much they should set aside for their sons by noting what they would believe themselves entitled to claim of their fathers.”7 Susan Moller Okin and others have criticized Rawls for his use of the anachronistic idea that fathers or heads of families represent their dependents.8 But this is not the main problem. Heads of families can be relied on to have a concern for the welfare of their children and grandchildren. This concern does not play any obvious role in the derivation of the basic principles of justice. By representing children, Rawls appears to mean representing the interests they will have as adult members of society—not their existing interests as dependents. We see that the contractors give no attention to the treatment of children as dependents. For example, when Rawls uses the idea that agents are heads of families in his reasoning about the equal liberty principle, he assumes that heads of families are concerned about the ability of their children, when they become adults, to pursue their personal good. He does not ask them to think about the needs of their children as dependents.9 The makers of the contract proceed as if what is acceptable to them as “disinterested” individuals will be in their children’s interests. Justice between generations is a separate topic. This is why most readers find it reasonable to assume that the agents Rawls makes responsible for determining the basic principles are individuals who are concerned about their interests as individuals. If individuals are supposed to be concerned for the welfare of their children at one stage in their reasoning, then should they not be so all the time? Why should they not be concerned with their interests as dependents instead of merely as the adults whom they will become? If they did have these concerns from the beginning, then it might well make a difference to their reasoning about political principles. Agents who regard themselves as burdened with family responsibilities might want goods that they cannot adequately obtain by their efforts from their political society, for example, a healthy and secure environment for their dependents. They might regard such goods as having a priority higher than, or equal to, the good of individual freedom. Even if their concerns do not cause them to reason differently about principles of justice, they are likely to think that the purpose of politics should include the achievement of other ends. Rawls, to be sure, allows that political society can have other purposes than the establishment and maintenance of just relations. Justice is, “the first virtue of social institutions” though not necessarily the only one. Nonetheless, he and those who have focused on his theory are so entirely preoccupied with questions about justice that other possible virtues or purposes have disappeared from view. Suppose that we did truly think of the social contractors from the beginning as parents. This change of script would create problems of another kind for liberals. Most liberals, including Rawls, think that a political society

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should not favor the interests or idea of the good of any particular individual or group of individuals. All should receive equal treatment as far as their attachments or ideas of the good are concerned. The veil of ignorance that prevents individuals from knowing anything about themselves, including their interests and ideas of the good, is supposed to ensure that the principles on which we base political society are neutral. So if those who have the interests of parents are favored, then cannot single people and couples who have no children reasonably complain that they are not receiving equal respect for their interests? Cannot they legitimately protest that their state should not force them to make sacrifices for the sake of a good that they do not share? Rawls, himself, appears open to this objection when he favors the interests of fathers in the second part of his contract theory or when he suggests that the contractors are from the beginning heads of families. We do not merely find these difficulties in social contract theories. Liberals present themselves as advocates of the independent, self-determining individual. They judge social life and political policies according to whether they promote individual freedom or autonomy to the extent that their opponents often accuse them thinking of individuals as atoms without any essential attachment to each other or their society. On the other hand, liberals assume that individuals care for the members of their families and others, and are often acting not for their self-interests but the interests of their family and friends. We cannot properly understand the defense of property and rights of inheritance historically associated with liberalism without acknowledging the concern individuals have for their families and the future of their children. This is true in Locke’s case. He argues that the duty that parents have to their children gives children a natural entitlement to a share of their parents’ property.10 So after all the liberal individual has relations with others that are basic to his or her identity and ideas about obligation. We tend to suppress or forget this identity when matters of political philosophy are under consideration. In liberal political theory, the agent appears in two guises. He (and more recently, she) is both a representative of his family and an independent selfinterested individual. One problem with liberal theory is that the relationship between these identities is never clear. The tensions between them are never resolved. The second, and more serious, problem is that the second identity automatically takes precedence. In politics, the agent as family representative tends to disappear from view. He or she is reborn as an individual with no explanation or justification for this transformation given. Why does this change of identity occur? What would political philosophy, and political practice, be like if the agent conceived as a self-interested individual were not privileged? A common feminist idea about why the individual replaces the head of family as a subject for politics is that the public/private distinction basic to liberal theory requires it. The relations between the head of household and his

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dependents are a private matter—not something the state should interfere with—and so is the way he carries out his responsibilities for his dependents. But to attribute the inconsistency to the public/private distinction is not so much an explanation as another way of stating the problem. If parents have responsibilities that they cannot adequately carry out by themselves, then the question of how they can cooperate to achieve their ends counts as a public concern. Since the state is an inter-generational association, how it perpetuates institutions deserves to be a basic public issue. If the public/private distinction is the reason for ignoring the concerns of citizens as parents then this distinction is irrational, per se, from their point of view. Carole Pateman suggests that we can best understand the public/private distinction, as liberals have traditionally employed it, as a political deal. The social contract is predicated on the sexual contract. The willingness of men to subordinate themselves to requirements of the state depends on not challenging their patriarchal rights. The question remains whether this arrangement is rational for men as parents.11 One way of answering the second question of what politics and political theory would be like if the self-interested individual were not privileged, is to reconsider the purposes of politics from the perspective of the parent, or more generally, from the perspective of those responsible for dependents. We can then consider what they would regard as a good collective approach to the fulfillment of their responsibilities. Feminists who are concerned with care as a political and moral responsibility have done or started to do this—notably Joan Tronto, Virginia Held, and Selma Sevenhuijsen.12 Several results emerge from their discussions. If, from the beginning, we think about the purposes of politics from the perspective of those with responsibilities of care, then we are not likely to be uncritical supporters of existing welfare states. The welfare state is the result of the state taking over, sometimes reluctantly and inadequately, tasks that families, or some families, are not able to discharge themselves. It has done this by using or expanding institutions, laws, and centralized systems of management that were originally developed to deal with other kinds of problems. Those who think of care as a foundational responsibility of political life are likely to have alternative ideas about what institutions and forms of management are appropriate. Tronto thinks that institutions providing care ought to be more democratic—that those receiving care should be involved in the administration of social services.13 Sevenhuijsen thinks that more people should be involved in providing care and that adequate caring requires a public discussion in which people who are often marginalized can express their needs.14 Others are inclined to advocate decentralized, community-based institutions that are responsive to the needs and situations of individuals.15 If, from the beginning, we consider the purposes of politics from the perspective of those concerned with care, we are not likely to end up with a

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position identical to the philosophy of welfare liberalism. Philosophical defenders of welfare liberalism tend to think of welfare as underwriting the ability of individuals to exercise their individual rights. They point out that liberty has no meaning unless individuals have real opportunities and are in the position to make free choices—and that they are not in this position if they are impoverished, disabled, hungry, or homeless. The central value in this justification for welfare remains liberty or autonomy of individuals. 16 But in a society that regards care as fundamental, citizens would be predisposed to accept restrictions on their freedom for the sake of establishing and maintaining such things as secure, healthy environments for children and other dependents. But what we advocate in the name of care is going to depend on what exactly care is and how it relates to the way in which people perceive themselves and their relation to others. In discussing the political dimensions of care, Tronto and Sevenhuijsen want to broaden the concept and shift it away from what we usually consider it to be—a concern for the well-being of children and other dependents. Tronto defines it as a “species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.”17 I want to do something similar, not by re-defining care, but through a reconsideration of the purposes of politics. So let us return to the social contract and consider another shift of perspective that occurs in the classical story. 3. Liberals as Traditionalists The main objective of the individuals who make the social contract is to guarantee as much freedom for themselves as is compatible with peace and order. This suggests that they will want political arrangements that allow them to change their goals and relationships and keep their options open— arrangements that are loose and flexible. They will probably not want institutions or regulations that are fixed or permanent. A modus vivendi capable of periodic review appears most compatible with their interests. Given that persons do not stay the same, and that new individuals are continually entering the political scene, a social contract with a limited life span might be the best idea. Some social contract theorists have suggested this. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet insisted that, “No constitutional law should remain in force for longer than the life span of a generation,” and Thomas Jefferson later agreed with this idea.18 In most versions of the story, this is not what the contractors decide to do. Usually they assume that constitutional rights and bodies of law are perpetual. They create institutions meant to be permanent features of their society. These arrangements are not only made once and for all as far as the contractors are concerned, but are also supposed to be inherited by their children—a situation that leads to the familiar problem of justifying the political

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obligations of those who have not consented to the laws and institutions of their society. The contractors have, in this way, brought about a political state of affairs less free than it would need to be and that they should want it to be, given what kind of individuals they are. By supposing that they do this, liberal political philosophers have created a problem for themselves. Conservatives or traditionalists often criticize liberals, especially social contract theorists, for turning their back on the past, and whatever wisdom it contains, and trying to start afresh. In reality, social contract theorists are traditionalists too—only in a forward-looking way. The social contract marks the beginning of a tradition for themselves and their successors, a tradition to which they expect themselves and their successors to adhere. But if politics is supposed to rest upon the consent of free individuals instead of tradition, then how can traditionalism—even of the forward-looking kind—be justified? Why do we find this inconsistency within social contract theory? One explanation has to do with the concern that heads of families are assumed to have toward their descendants. Consider again Rawls’s approach to justice between the generations. The heads of families he has in mind are not supposed to be concerned exclusively with the fate of their children (the veil of ignorance is supposed to prevent this). They are supposed to take the standpoint of people who belong to a system of social cooperation, value the relationships it makes possible, and want their children to enjoy them too. The inheritance they want to pass on to their children is a social one. Rawls’s primary concern is to determine what each generation ought to save for the sake of generations of the future. But the transfer of resources that the heads of families endorse requires an institutional framework. We can assume that they want their just relations transferred along with the resources. They would not be happy about saving for their predecessors if they thought that one social group might appropriate the wealth they passed on. To pass on just relations and transfer resources from generation to generation requires that heads of families favor the establishment of persisting institutions and laws. The standpoint of a head of family is going to be that of a maintainer of tradition—whether one that comes from the past or one newly established. Two shifts of perspective occur in the social contract story. The first is the shift from the standpoint of a head of family who represents his dependents to the standpoint of the independent individual. The second is the shift from the standpoint of the independent individual to the standpoint of the head of family. This second shift of perspective is not a shift back to the original standpoint. The heads of families, who consider what they owe to their successors or what their successors require, are adopting a social instead of private orientation. They want to ensure for their successors in their political society specific social and political relationships.

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These standpoints or perspectives correspond to ideas about the purposes of politics. The independent individual who wants political society to protect his rights, especially his freedom to pursue his personal ends, occupies center stage. The political purposes of the person concerned about his or her dependents has never been fully articulated or represented in liberal political theory. Presumably those who do think about politics from this perspective (as some feminists have) will want the state to provide, or facilitate, collective solutions to problems of care—those problems that families or other private social groups cannot solve for themselves. Those who take the third perspective want to perpetuate specific social and political relationships and to maintain inter-generational relations of cooperation. Theorists have always acknowledged this as one of the purposes of politics, though liberal theory has never paid it a great deal of attention. It has always been a side issue, an addendum (as in Rawls’s theory of justice). Though all these perspectives have a presence in liberal theory, they are not given equal treatment. Nor are they brought together in a coherent way. 4. Intergenerational Relationships Let us examine more closely the third perspective that appears in the social contract story: the standpoint of the head of family who wants to pass on a social-political inheritance. Rawls requires his contractors to adopt this perspective in order to reason about just relations between generations because “disinterested” individuals are not likely to regard themselves as having duties of justice to future people. The problem is not one of ignorance—a lack of awareness of how our actions can hurt or benefit people of the future. Disinterested individuals will acknowledge that they have benefited from the actions of their predecessors and that what they do can help or harm their successors—that they see a political society as a system of cooperative relationships spanning the generations. But such individuals have an interest in cooperating with others only as far as they can get something out of it. No point in making sacrifices for others exists if these others are not capable of reciprocating. Neither the dead nor the unborn are capable of reciprocity, so disinterested individuals have no reason for thinking that they have duties to future (or past) generations. A solution to this problem for political philosophers who think that people in a political society ought to be concerned about the welfare of their successors—and the one Rawls adopts—is to assume a perspective from which attachments between individuals of different generations are essential to individual identity. A head of family by nature is someone who is concerned about the well-being of his successors. We can regard this traditional masculine perspective as a patriarchal form of caring—a traditionally masculine perspective. To describe the perspective I am criticizing as “masculine” or to suggest that “feminine” alterna-

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tives exist is fraught with well-known difficulties. We can more properly describe the views embedded in liberal political philosophy as the views of a particular class of men belonging to European culture. The alternatives are not necessarily those that women or only women would advance. I describe the views I criticize as masculine only because they correspond to views about masculine ways of thinking common in our culture. This is perhaps why Rawls resurrected the classical supposition that fathers are making the contract. The word “parent” would not have had the right connotation. Heads of families, as imagined by Rawls, are concerned about their children, but not the care of children as dependents—not nursing, nurturing, or the other tasks that are traditionally assigned to mothers of families. What they focus on are the interests their children will have as adults, as members of a political society, as their fathers’ heirs. The goods they are concerned to pass on are not private or familial, but political and social. What appears in the social contract story is not merely a bifurcation between the interests of the head of family and the interests of the individuals, but two ideas about care. Let us look more closely at this “masculine” idea of care. First, the masculine idea of care is about the passing on of things from one generation to another—wealth, laws, and institutions. It abstracts from the people who do the passing on or who have things passed to them, and pays insufficient attention to what makes the passing on of institutions and laws possible. The reproduction of society not only requires the reproduction of people, but also requires the reproduction of citizens, of individuals who have the right attitudes and values. They have to learn to respect and appreciate their inheritance. This means that we cannot separate the care with which women have been traditionally associated from the concerns of the head of family. There has to be a coming together of the concerns of mothers of families and fathers of families. A division of labor that relegates women to the private aspects of care and men to its public aspects is fraught with difficulties as far as the reproduction of society is concerned. Many feminists have pointed this out. How can women be good mothers, asks Wollstonecraft, if they are not citizens? Okin wonders how individuals who respect justice can possibly be the product of an institution in which women are disadvantaged and subordinate.19 More important, the masculine idea of care says nothing about how individuals should regard themselves in respect to their predecessors and successors: how they should conceive of themselves as participants in an “intergenerational continuum.” It does not show how being part of such a continuum could be crucial to the way in which an individual thinks about herself and her responsibilities, and how particular responsibilities can arise out of this self-conception.

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For proponents of this kind of care, political society appears to consist of generational segments. In each segment individuals determine their good and pursue their life plans without reference or regard to other segments, except that society expects them to lay resources aside for the benefit of their successors. Their duty in respect to other generations is to make this transfer. But why should individuals who are so preoccupied with the affairs of their generational segment accept that they have a duty to people of the future? This is one problem. A further problem is that the masculine idea of care does not make intelligible or provide a basis for the idea that we can have duties in respect to citizens of past generations—a duty to keep their promises, to make restitution for their injustices, or to honor those who contributed to our society. To suppose that we have such duties is plausible, and it should be possible to consider what they might be. A way of understanding these problems is this. The perspective of most liberal theory is synchronic, in particular social contract theory: it is centrally concerned with relations between co-present individuals, with what these individuals would consent to, or what their form of cooperation entails as far as their political obligations are concerned. Liberal theorists assume that these individuals are preoccupied with how they are going to live their lives, and how they determine and pursue their personal good: that is, they assume they are preoccupied with their lifetime interests. The design of their political relations gives them as much freedom to pursue these ends as possible. Most liberals recognize that this perspective is inadequate. Members of a political society have to be concerned with the perpetuation of their institutions. They have to accept responsibilities for their successors. So liberals try to add what could be called a “diachronic perspective” to their theories—a perspective that requires individuals to have concerns beyond their lifetime, and to think of their society as consisting of not just co-present individuals. Since the privileged perspective of political philosophy remains that of individuals with their lifetime interests, the diachronic aspect of their theory is pushed into the background. Its relation to the main body of the theory is unclear or even inconsistent. The contents of the diachronic addendum, what I have called the masculine conception of care, are themselves problematic. Liberal theory does not explore what it means for members of a society to regard themselves as participants in a generational continuum. 5. Individuals in an Intergenerational Society The independent individual motivated by his lifetime interests is not inclined to think that he has duties to either future or past generations. Liberals try to solve this problem by supposing individuals are motivated now and then by their concern for their children or by a more disinterested moral concern for individuals who will happen to live in the future.

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What we need is not another theory about justice between generations so much as a different conception of individuals and their motivations. A more satisfactory way of thinking about our moral obligations as citizens of an inter-generational society should start with a theory of the individual. I want to explore two approaches to the development of a more adequate basis for relations of obligation between the generations in a political society. Both begin with an attempt to broaden or change our ideas about who we are, thereby changing what counts as rational and morally responsible behavior. The first is Annette Baier’s idea of individuals as “second persons.” Lorraine Code also uses the idea of a second person to criticize liberal theory in What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge.20 The activities of past generations do not merely benefit (or hurt) us, according to Baier. They make us who we are. A society that provides us with a culture, a language, a stock of concepts, and a body of knowledge nurtures us. Our personalities and ways of knowing and valuing are the result of this inheritance. “Persons are essentially successors, heirs to other persons who formed and cared for them, and their personality is revealed both in their relations to others and in their response to their recognized genesis.”21 According to Baier, as second persons: [W]e acquire a sense of our place in a series of persons, to some of whom we have special responsibilities. We acquire a sense of ourselves as occupying a place in an historical and social order of persons, each of whom has a personal history interwoven with the history of a community.22 For Baier this self-understanding is not a simple addendum to the selfcentered on personal interests and experiences. She insists that it ought to be our primary self-conception. We are persons among others, formed and sustained by our relations with others. These relations are relations in time and space. The activities of our predecessors formed us as we will form individuals of the future. If we see ourselves as second persons, she suggests, we see ourselves as depending on others—not merely on our contemporaries. We think of ourselves as part of a community that extends in time and space, and as she also suggests, this conception is likely to encourage the idea that we have responsibilities that transcend our location in time. Baier’s attempt to make us regard ourselves as second persons has several advantages. The first is that second persons, whether parents or not, will be predisposed to think that they have responsibilities to future members of their society. This responsibility will not only belong to heads, or parents, of families. Second, second persons will conceive of their responsibility as consisting not merely in passing on political institutions and laws but in ensuring that children are properly raised and educated—that they receive the inheri-

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tance that they need as second persons. They will naturally conceive of this as a collective responsibility. Third, second persons will appreciate their relation to the past. They will understand their culture and political society as an inheritance and will relate their interests and values to this inheritance. They will be disposed to regard the benefits they receive with gratitude and perhaps be disposed to take responsibility for the harms done by their community in the past. Political relations and practices will reflect these ideas about responsibility they are prepared to endorse. The second attempt to reconceive the individuals who are the subjects of politics is to show that a “diachronic perspective” is, or should be, fundamental to how individuals view themselves and their lives—as fundamental as the identity favored by liberals—the individual as an autonomous self. The autonomous self takes a synchronic perspective. Autonomous individuals look forward to lives that they can shape and direct. They focus on short or long-term life interests and are concerned about how co-present individuals hinder or contribute to these goals. What they should want from their political society, according to the liberal view, are protection of rights, equal opportunity, and a fair share of social resources. Individuals are not always or forever able to shape or direct their lives. They become ill, old, disabled, and eventually they die. What happens to them, their projects, possessions, and reputations depends upon the actions of others. Individuals who reflect on the fact that they are vulnerable to contingencies and subject to time and fate will be inclined to take a perspective that goes beyond their individual lives. They will be predisposed to think diachronically. When they do so, they are likely to have “posterity-directed desires”—desires about how they should be treated in old age, about their posthumous reputations, the continuation of projects they think have significant value, the survival of things they value, about the moral obligations they leave unfulfilled, or the wellbeing of their children and other people they love. They will be predisposed to think that some of these desires are so important that their successors ought to fulfill them. But if they think that their successors have moral obligations to fulfill some of their posterity-directed desires, then they will have to accept a corresponding obligation to fulfill relevantly similar posterity-directed desires of their predecessors.23 Individuals who see themselves as vulnerable to fate will be inclined to regard themselves as part of an inter-generational community of obligation in which members of each generation not only have obligations in respect to their successors but also in respect to their predecessors. Those who take this perspective will see themselves as participants in an inter-generational continuum of obligation and respect. They will want their political society to underwrite conventions that enable people to communicate with their successors and pass on responsibilities from generation to generation. They will under-

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stand and value their society as an inter-generational continuum and will be inclined to regard themselves as responsible for the inheritance that they receive from its past and passing on what they value to citizens of the future. For example, citizens who take a diachronic perspective will be predisposed to think that they have inherited obligations to keep the promises of their political predecessors and undo injustices they have committed. I will not try to make a judgment about which of these two ways of reconceiving the individual as the subject of politics is likely to be more fruitful. Perhaps thinking of them as complementary instead of as rival conceptions is best. Neither is incompatible with the more familiar actor of liberal political philosophy—the autonomous individual. An individual who regards himself or herself as a second person and locates himself or herself in the framework of an inter-generational community is still free to determine his or her values and live his or her life according to the values that she has chosen. That person also recognizes that being a valuing subject depends upon others and is aware of how personal values relate to heritage as a social individual. An individual whose inter-generational obligations arise from recognition that life is vulnerable to fate is also an individual who can have individual, personal interests and goals. Having interests and goals that transcend individual life or ability to fulfill them is what predisposes the individual to have posterity-directed desires. The idea of the individual at the heart of liberal theory is inadequate, and I have tried to show how this inadequacy reveals itself in the inconsistencies and limitations of liberal political philosophy. Like many other feminists, I suspect that the inadequacies are traceable to a masculinist paradigm—a disinclination of male subjects, the makers of political theory and politics, to see themselves as dependent or vulnerable. The solution is not to jettison liberal ideals and put something else in their place, but to reconsider and redefine these ideals from the perspective of individuals who acknowledge their dependence on each other and their responsibilities as participants in intergenerational communities. A more adequate theory would not only present a consistent and complete account of the purposes that a political society should serve. It would also enable us to integrate concerns of care with advocacy of individual freedom, the pursuit by individuals of their goals with an acceptance of intergenerational obligations.

Notes 1. Carole Pateman, “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,” in Anne Phillips, ed., Feminism and Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 2. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (1690). 3. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (New York: Norton, 1967).

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4. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 12ff. 5. Ibid., p. 12. 6. Ibid., p. 128. 7. Ibid., p. 289 8. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 92. 9. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 208. 10. Locke, Two Treatises on Government, I.88. 11. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988). 12. Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care (London: Routledge, 1993); Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago, Ill.: Chicago University Press, 1993); and Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics (London: Routledge 1998). 13. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 176. 14. Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care, pp. 135–139. 15. For a description of ideas about the meaning of women’s citizenship see Wendy Sarvasy, “Social Citizenship From a Feminist Perspective,” Hypatia, 12:4 (1997), pp. 54–73. 16. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, pp. 162–163. 17. Ibid., p. 103. 18. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, “Sur la Necessite de Faire Ratifier la Constitution par les Citoyens” (1789), in A. Condorcet, Arthur O’Connor, and M. F. Arago, eds., Oeuvres de Condorcet, vol. 9, (Paris: 1847–1849), pp. 415–416. Reprinted in The Political Theory of Condorcet, ed. and trans. Fiona Somerlad and Iain Mclean, (Working Paper) (Oxford: Social Studies Faculty Center, January 1989), p. 319. 19. Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, pp. 197ff. 20. Annette Baier, “Cartesian Persons,” in Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); and Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). 21. Ibid., p. 85. 22. Ibid., p. 90. 23. I say more about this view in Janna Thompson, “Inherited Obligations and the Value of Community,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 29:4 (December 1999), pp. 493–515.

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Five FOUCAULT, FEMINISM, AND HISTORY Lisa Featherstone Michel Foucualt’s contribution to postmodern history has been widely discussed, critiqued and admired. Several major theoretical works have addressed the idea that theorists can appropriate Foucauldian theory for feminist means. I wish to merge these two areas of analysis and consider the use (and abuse) of Foucault for feminist history. In order to do so I offer a two-fold examination: first, of the significance of Foucauldian modes of analysis for feminist theorists; and second, a consideration of Foucault’s relevance for feminist historians. The aim is to examine the potential for a feminist alliance with Foucault and to explore its political ramifications. This task contains a fundamental paradox within it. While we may analyze, question, and dispute the use of Foucauldian theory for feminist history, Foucault rejects the use of an overriding theory, a meta-narrative. Foucault questions the master narratives about Western society, including Marxism and liberal humanism, claiming that an outdated juridico-discursive model of power forms the foundation for them. In his “Two Lectures,” Foucault questioned the emancipatory potential of liberalism and Marxism, as both are totalitarian theories devoid of an understanding of difference.1 In the same way, Foucault would have rejected any notion of an all-encompassing convergence of feminism and his work, though the localized, specific, historical use of his work would be in keeping with both the postmodern and the feministpostmodern project. Foucault not only questioned the meta-narratives of philosophical writing, but also challenged traditional history and historiography. He rejected the idea of a total history, of a single theory that explained the past in terms of a simple, linear progression. His work is a direct response to modernist history in that he wants to rescue history from the confines of “scientific” metanarratives such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. The modern reverence for the “scientific” is perceived as severely disabling, as it has more to do with a search for knowledge, and so power, than with any form of resistance or search for emancipation.2 Foucault described his earlier work as an “archaeology,” wherein he rewrote historical moments, in terms of their discursive elements. In his later work, from The History of Sexuality onwards, he uses genealogy as his form of analysis.3 Foucault defines genealogy as “the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of

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struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.”4 Genealogy is a painstaking accumulation of sources, a scholarly search over “a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times,”5 an attempt, through examination of the local and specific, to emancipate history from meta-narratives. Genealogy attempts, not to offer a deep-seated analysis of origins, or even of “what really happened,” but to carefully and painstakingly document the movements involved within the chosen situation. Genealogy also describes how established theories operate and gives an analysis of their relations to power and to knowledge. What Foucault offers is not so much a history, but a theory, or an anti-theory. Ironically, Foucault described the writing of history itself as a desire for knowledge and a route to domination.6 His concerns, as he summarizes them, are with “the rules of right, the mechanisms of power, the effects of truth or if you like, the rules of power and the powers of true discourses.”7 He wishes to examine philosophical abstracts such as “truth,” “power,” and “reason,” but in the light of particular historical conditions. Each work (with the exception of The Archaeology of Knowledge8) uses a specific historical locale to examine a mode of discourse, a technique of power, infused in contemporary social practices. What Foucault does uncover is a “certain fragility . . . in the very bedrock of existence.”9 He offers us no certainty, no natural universal foundation that lies beyond the social order. His work is “freedom-giving” in the sense that it allows us to re-evaluate established ways of thinking, including his own. There may be a clue here to the problems of forging alliances with feminism, for his work allows an examination of the Other, those generally marginalized in mainstream history—the madman, the homosexual, the prisoner (what about the woman?) —while at the same time freeing us from modernist conceptions of the self, “truth,” and history. Just as his aims are in direct opposition to the search for the “truth” of the modernists, so too is his style radically different from theirs. His rejection of scientific narratives has led him to reconsider traditional methods. Foucault does not offer a chronological assessment. He is anti-empiricist, and offers a history not of dates, but of “ruptures,” of “minute deviations” of key changes to the social order, monitored through a study of discourse.10 For example, The History of Sexuality is not a history of sexuality itself but a study of the discourses on sexuality, and their relationship to pleasure, knowledge and power.11 The History of Sexuality lacks closure and does not have a linear construction. His tone is often ironical and subversive with a postmodern blurring of genre boundaries; a juxtapositioning of the historical, the cultural, the literary, and the philosophical is evident.12 The specific historicity of his work does not disallow the application of his theories to other times and places. He would never claim to wish for an all-inclusive historical theory, and he would be little interested in the applica-

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tion of his theories to feminism. Feminism is too close to an over-arching theory for the postmodern man. As Meaghan Morris suggests, Foucault is not much of a “ladies’ man.” He is little interested in the workings of gender, and any appropriation of Foucault’s work must take this into account.13 Having said this, why would feminists desire a tete a tete with Foucault? Feminists should be critical of Foucault, but some of his methodological insights may be useful to feminists. It might be possible to make careful use of his methodologies, especially genealogy. David Shumway says Foucault provides us not with theories or even with methods, or truths or solutions. What he offers is “a box of tools,” a kit for a variety of subversive purposes.14 His idea is that Foucault provides tools that might be used in a practical way to investigate power, knowledge and discourse in general. This “toolkit” metaphor permits the feminist writer to appropriate Foucault’s ideas as an instrument. “Toolkit” might suggest gender issues of its own as the term has masculine connotations, but we can appropriate tools from men and use them for feminist projects. The use of Foucauldian “tools” would allow the feminist writer to investigate social power without permitting Foucault’s preferred use of them to override the agenda and without allowing Foucault to speak for everyone. This appears to be what Foucault himself has in mind when he writes: All my books Histoire de la Folie, or Surveiller et Punir are, if you like, little toolboxes. If people want to open them, use a sentence, an idea, an analysis as a screwdriver or a spanner in order to shortcircuit, disqualify and break systems of power, including if need be those that have given rise to my own books, well, so much the better.”15 Nevertheless, the relationship between Foucault and feminism is problematic at a fundamental level since Foucault does not identify gender as a site of power. As feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky notes, “Foucault treats the body throughout as if it were one, as if the bodily experiences of men and women did not differ.”16 This appears overwhelmingly problematic for feminism, for feminist scholars, whatever their individual persuasion, believe that the sexed body is a basic site of power relations. Theorists have long conceptualized power from a masculine standpoint that protects male privilege and ignores the continued subordination of women. The Foucauldian analysis of power is no exception since his “modern” power operates on apparently unsexed (or defeminized) bodies. The relationship (or lack thereof) between gender and power is a fundamental point of conflict between feminism and Foucualt as well as other postmodern theorists. A subtlety exists in Foucault’s examination of power and discipline. On one level, much of his work locates power in the shaping of the body. He considers power as produced through the “disciplined” body of the soldier, the

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prisoner, the patient, the schoolchild. He does focus on the way power operates on sexed bodies (witness his work on the homosexual and the hermaphrodite). In his later work, he acknowledges the effects of power in male/female relations, most directly in “The Subject and Power” where he mentions “the opposition to the power of men over women.”17 He is aware of gender difference but does not consider the connection between power and gender or the ways in which the female sexed body is constrained by power. This indifference or refusal to engage in a detailed way in the politics of power between the sexes makes an alliance with Foucault problematic. In addition, Foucault’s postmodern deconstruction of representation makes any alliance between him and feminism problematic. Cynically, one could suggest that just as subordinated groups define themselves in terms of universal “truths,” these ideologies are deconstructed and withdrawn. Once the object becomes subject, the rules of subjectivity are changed.18 Because men no longer speak for “mankind,” women should no longer speak as representatives of a unified group. Poststructuralist theories in this instance veer surprisingly close to that of liberalism. As Linda Alcoff suggests, for the poststructuralist, class, race and gender are all constructs, and underneath these imposed constraints, we are “all the same.” This view is remarkably similar to the liberal view that class, gender, and race are ultimately irrelevant, for again, “we are all the same.” 19 While criticism of feminist movements of the past as exclusively white and middleclass is justified, and while feminism must come to celebrate diversity and even an element of disunity, to negate the category of “woman” altogether could make women’s subordination invisible. As Biddy Martin suggests, Foucault’s challenges could easily render the question of “women’s oppression obsolete.” She also points out though that feminism’s multiplicity, its fragmentation, may well be a more effective response in a society where power is not monolithic or centralized.20 While Foucault does not deny the concept of “woman” as explicitly as do other poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, his refusal to engage in the politics of gender is a major omission. The absence of the category of “woman” offers feminists fewer avenues of resistance (“How can we speak out against sexism as detrimental to the interests of women if the category is a fiction?”21). Feminists who appropriate Foucauldian theory need to be wary that feminism does not become merely an endless round of deconstructions, offering no suggestions for transformation, but merely a fragmentary commentary on woman as a de-gendered non-subject. Similarly, Foucauldian theory (as with other structuralist and poststructuralist theory) is problematic in that it offers little agency to individual players. It views society in terms of discursives or signifiers, instead of individual agents. Individuals act as part of a system of power and knowledge, but are

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unable to act with any genuine autonomy: we are bodies “totally imprinted by history,”22 and “vehicles” constituted through power.23 Ultimately, this means Foucault provides little hope for transformation or any significant type of social change. When one interviewer asked Foucault what might replace the present system, Foucault replied that to ponder a new system was to remain complicit in the present system, and added that destruction, such as that caused by Joseph Stalin, must follow.24 Foucault emphasized resistance to power over transformation or change. This is fundamentally troublesome for feminists since feminism is an emancipatory politic, based in both political activism and theoretical criticism. Foucault took an almost nihilistic attitude towards notions of emancipation while he claimed his position led, not to “apathy, but to a hyper and pessimistic activism.”25 Though he was personally involved in penal reform, pessimism appears to be the dominant response to his work. His idea that power is everywhere, therefore nowhere, leads one to wonder if any hope for resistance exists. As Nancy Hartsock says, “Foucault suggests that if our resistance succeeded, we would simply be changing one discursive identity for another and in the process creates new oppressions.”26 Having examined the deficiencies of Foucault for feminist writing, we need to address the question, what is to be gained by an alliance? I have suggested that a critical reading of Foucault, and a careful application of his analytic tools, may extend and enhance our understanding of gender and power. For this to be possible, we must not permit the postmodern project to overcome the feminist agenda. We can do this if the limits of the postmodern are clearly defined. Foucault has challenged dominant thought patterns questioning the basic philosophical tenets of the Enlightenment in ways that are useful for feminism. He claims Western humanism has a privileged masculine elite, while negating the experience of all others.27 The construction of a legitimate, “true” self is seen as merely a construct of humanist ideology.28 The humanist ideologies of the West are not freedom giving, but maintain the status quo by offering false universals of “truth,” “freedom,” and “justice.” This pattern, then normalized, appears “natural.” A convergence with feminism is evident. Feminists have critiqued humanism as inherently masculine and have shown that the emancipatory narratives of the Enlightenment offer freedom only to those already dominant in culture, while the aspirations and desires of the oppressors are universalized. Feminist theorists have also questioned the manner in which traditional philosophy has presented the white middle-class masculine voice as genderneutral and universal. The authority of this male voice was established and maintained through philosophical concepts such as “truth” and “reason.” We could claim that Foucault is a part of the problem. His lack of gender analysis serves to perpetuate the system of masculine privilege in the philosophical tradition, and continues to subordinate the bodies of women through

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public discourse. Even Jean Baudrillard (not exactly a feminist icon himself) speaks of Foucault’s work as “the mirror of the powers he describes.”29 Partly because of his failings, Foucault’s notion of the proposed transcendental voice may be useful to feminists. The feminist historian needs to be continually aware of the dangers of replacing one distortion for another; replacing the white, middle class, male academic as universal with the white female middle class feminist in the position of power. For example, early second wave feminists, with their essentialist notions of a feminine superiority, in effect devalued other forms of oppression, including class and race, ethnicity, age, sexual preference and marital status. Their works homogenized women into a single universal and ahistorical category of “Woman.” That these and later feminists replicated many of the problems of traditional scholarship, offering an ethnocentric and homogenic view of the world, in effect marginalizing non-white, non-middle class feminists is ironic. The feminist historian concerned with eliminating these tendencies finds useful tools available for investigating social power found in Foucault’s methodologies. Foucault claims power is not to be located in a single entity, such as the State, but instead is “a composite result made up of a multiplicity of centers and mechanisms.”30 Power is elusive, multifarious, haphazard, and omnipresent: Power must be analyzed as something which circulates . . . it is never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization.31 The new concept of power, which Foucault develops, associates it with knowledge. Power both originates in, and duplicates, discourse: There can be no possible exercise of power without a particular economy of discourses of truth that operates through, and on, the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except though the production of truth.32 Power relations constitute a field of knowledge and knowledge constitutes power relations. Foucault uses this conception of power in his study of the way medical and scientific discourses become functions of knowledge, and so power.33 This methodology for investigating power is especially useful to the feminist historian, for it allows a consideration of areas usually viewed by traditional historians as neither disciplinary nor a sphere of power: the family, marriage, medical institutions, the media, even the body itself.

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Foucauldian analysis sees the body (if not specifically the female body) as a site of power. According to The History of Sexuality, the body is controlled, in one instance, through a surveillance of sexuality. Sex is not an instinctive drive, nor a repressed instinct, but a social construct and a regulating agent. A system of control operates through normalizing agents such as the Church, the medical profession and psychiatry, keeping the body docile and passive. Like feminists, Foucault includes the personal in the political; the domination in the private sphere is significant for the public sphere. Like feminist history, Foucauldian analysis does not work in the usual binary oppositions. History does not equal the public world, the masculine, constructed in opposition to the private sphere, and the feminine. Modern institutions control the body also, and its discipline. The discipline of the army, the penitentiary, schools, hospitals, and the factory produces what Foucault calls “docile bodies.”34 Again, Foucault’s customary blindness is problematic for feminist appropriation, for the female body is subject to specific disciplines. Historically, the female body has been more “docile” than that of the male, and any use of Foucauldian theory should consider this. Despite his limitations and gender ambiguities, feminist sociologists and philosophers have used Foucault, but he has been less popular with feminist historians. Some have appropriated his methods, but always in an extremely cautious and measured manner, as his work deserves. I will now explore the ways that three feminist historians have utilized Foucauldian analysis, in terms of power, knowledge, agency and the body. In particular, feminist historians have found Foucauldian notions of sexuality useful. For example, Judith A. Allen, in Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1800, expands and elaborates on the ideas found in The History of Sexuality.35 She too finds sex to be a key to history, but she takes a gendered approach which analyzes society not only through a proliferation of discourses surrounding sex, but also through the secrets of the society. Sex is not only discursive, but also silent, especially in reference to crimes of sex against women, such as rape and incest. Even when women attempt to verbalize this abuse in the criminal justice system, the result is generally the familiar, “No witnesses; no corroboration; no evidence; no case to answer; case dismissed.”36 Allen’s emphasis on these “hidden” crimes, atrocities committed in private, in silence, throws into question Foucault’s theories of power in regards to gender. In addition, the lack of prosecution by police of (female) crimes including infanticide, abortion or even prostitution, leads to questions regarding the omnipotence of surveillance and control, and subverts the notion of an ever-present discourse. Allen is more concerned with feminist analysis, than postmodern analysis, given the centrality of gender to her study. In Sex and Secrets she interacts with and offers challenges to Foucault’s work on sexual-

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ity, providing a good example of a feminist historian considering, using, and elaborating on the work of Foucault. One feminist historian quite clearly influenced by Foucault is Judith R. Walkowitz. Her study, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State, was inspired by The History of Sexuality.37 Walkowitz is especially interested in the Foucauldian notion that control over sex is a fundamental form of power in modern society, and sees his theories as “embodied” in her area of interest, the Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869.38 Designed to stem the spread of venereal disease in garrison and post towns, these acts allowed for the internal examination of any woman identified as a “common prostitute.” If found to be suffering from a sexually transmitted disease, authorities could enforce compulsory hospitalization of a woman for up to nine months.39 Walkowitz uses Foucauldian notions of the technologies of power to reveal the institutionalization of techniques of surveillance and confinement. As Foucault argues in The History of Sexualty, no single site or locus of power exists, and power is not localized within the State.40 Walkowitz shows that power over prostitutes and other working class women was operated through multifarious means, including the state, the medical profession, the police, the judicial system, and even middle class feminists, purity groups, and social reformers. The technologies of power included the internal examination with the speculum, the registration of women as prostitutes, daily surveillance by police, and attempts to impose middle class sexual morality on working class women.41 Power was constituted by the systematic surveillance and control over sex and female sexuality, and took a variety of forms including legal-judicial reforms, medical confinement, and the internalization of social purity campaigns. Walkowitz’s analysis of forms of confinement, including the lock hospital for women with venereal disease, is especially Foucauldian. Using his study Madness and Civilization,42 she equates the institutionalization of prostitutes with venereal disease as another instance of the confinement of “deviants.”43 Discipline was both physical (isolation, restricted diets etc), and mental (spatial constraint, discipline of time, training in subordination). The hospital “reproduced the patriarchal and class order of Victorian society.”44 She suggests there was a “public network of control and confinement,” wherein prostitutes were forced into the dreaded workhouse due to pregnancy or ill health. Thus confined, they were separated, stigmatized, subject to lessons in deference and subordination, and denied contact with the outside world.45 Walkowitz’s departures from a Foucauldian analysis are interesting and help to delimit the terms of a workable alliance. This emerges in three ways. First, while she concentrates most on the working class nature of prostitution, she does offer a gender analysis. She points out (as Foucault fails to do) that power and discipline operate differently on sexed bodies. The Contagious Disease Acts worked to institutionalize and reinforce a double standard of sexual immorality.46 She also points out that the fear of venereal disease leads

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to specific controls over only the female body, while the bodies of their (male) clients were not scrutinized. Walkowitz’s second point of departure from Foucault consists in her allowing some degree of agency to individual women. While the women to whom she refers were constrained by social institutions, (they were, for instance, prevented from earning a reasonable independent wage), she feels prostitution was a conscious, rational decision. In a time when laboring women worked for fourteen hours a day, to earn, at best, half the wage of their male counterparts, some women felt it was better to earn a living wage, working for shorter hours. Though prostitutes’ income was unstable, and they were at risk of violence, syphilis, and alcoholism, they had a higher standard of living than that of other poor women working as slave labor as domestics, milliners, or dressmakers.47 While social conditions encouraged prostitution, individual women made the all-important decision.48 Finally, Walkowitz does not show the same postmodern concern for the local and specific. While she does offer a detailed analysis of two specific areas, Plymouth and Southampton, she sees them as a “microcosm” for the national situation. She draws conclusions (however accurately) outside of her particular area of study. This is the antithesis of Foucault’s emphasis on specificity. The relation to Foucauldian theory is less explicit and more measured in Joy Damousi’s work, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality, and Gender in Colonial Society.49 Using the case study of female convicts in Australia, Damousi examines the intersection between masculinity, femininity, race and class, sexuality, familial relationships, order, cleanliness, and deviancy.50 Depraved and Disorderly is a sophisticated and theoretically informed study that uses gender as its primary category of analysis. Historians do not merely add women to the convict period, but gender is used to frame questions and present answers. This revisionist history focuses on the way we make and remake cultural meaning through an examination of cultural signs and symbols. Feminist has more influence on Damousi than it has on other feminist historians. In addition, cultural studies informs a significant portion of the text, especially the work of Mary Douglas.51 Damousi is much concerned with the relationship between “purity” and “contamination,” and in particular, the links between physical filth and moral depravity, as these concepts are imposed on the bodies of convict women. Convict women are a site for sexual anxiety amongst white, middle class men. Yet post modern theorizing also influences Damousi, especially regarding a challenge to “the certainty and closure” implied in convict history.52 In studying convict women, a group not generally considered in modernist histories, she is also interested in those perceived as the “other” in terms of gender, class, and deviancy. Damousi’s debt to Foucault is difficult to decipher. Like other feminists, she is critical of his lack of gender analysis.53 By taking gender as a fundamen-

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tal category in her work she is replicating, analyzing, and critiquing the biases inherent in colonial society. For example, while both male and female convicts were seen as polluted, only the female body was sexed.54 While sexual promiscuity, drunkenness, swearing, and smoking was accepted as the norm for male convicts, these acts were seen as thoroughly offensive in female convicts because they transgressed bourgeois notions of feminine respectability.55 Damousi does use Foucault for specific purposes. Using the Foucauldian notion that culture is inscribed on the body, she discusses the use of head shaving as a punishment for female convicts. While male convicts were subject to all manner of physical violence for a repudiation of order, authorities perceived head shaving as the most “effective” mode of punishment for female convicts. It was the one form of discipline that the women especially disliked because it stripped them of their culturally imposed femininity.56 The bald head of convict women was a cultural symbol for all that was deviant in womanhood, especially their lack of passivity, subordination and respectability. Damousi also makes use of Foucault’s work on the penal system explored in Discipline and Punish.57 Surveillance was seen to be the key to maintaining control over convict women, and as the era progressed, penal reformers were increasingly impressed by the ideas behind Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. A female prison should contain and restrain both moral and physical disorder, and keep the women, as potential pollutants, segregated from the rest of society. Within this jail, there should be both continuous surveillance and isolation in the hope that the woman would be moved to moral consciousness and ideological reform.58 Through punishments including silence, solitary confinement, and darkened cells, the prison produced Foucault’s “docile bodies,” and more specifically, docile female bodies.59 Further, Damousi is interested in the control over sexuality as a form of power as expressed in The History of Sexuality.60 The sexuality of female convicts was a source of considerable anxiety to colonial authorities, for it represented a subversion of order and rationality. In a period when all female sexuality (outside of reproduction) was representative of disorder, the promiscuity and prostitution of convict women was a especially visible reminder that discipline was scarcely maintained. Authorities attempted to impose harsh controls and continual surveillance over the sexuality of these women, for both heterosexual and lesbian “offences.” Power was, in this way, maintained over the bodies and minds of women. At the same time, Damousi is also interested in Foucauldian notions of resistance. Her view is that pleasure, in the forms of dancing, singing, acting and swearing, were a subversion of authority, an appropriation of the gender order.61 Following Foucault, she feels a power structure as rigid and despotic as that of a penal society would necessarily produce such forms of resistance: repression inevitably generates resistance.62 But she is critical of the ideas of other historians in this area, for they notice only male resistance. With power

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emanating from a range of entities, resistance, too, was plural. Damousi, unlike Foucault, suggests these women acted with a degree of agency in their resistance. Their specific forms of counteraction suggest that these women were autonomous to some degree.63 These brief examples, taken from a complex body of work, indicate that Damousi does make use of Foucault’s methodology and analysis of power as a tool in her feminist history. But her reading of Foucauldian theory is directed by her commitment to a gendered analysis, which at all times remains her priority. The value of Foucault to the feminist historian is as a toolkit, which we can appropriate, critique, alter, use, and even abuse. The lack of a coherent feminist-Foucauldian genre may be its strength, as the historian is not tied to the over-reaching disciplines opposed so vehemently by Foucault himself. Instead, a commitment to feminist theory, in all or any of its forms, can act as a basis for the feminist historian, with a Foucauldian analysis acting as a point of reference, information, and conjecture. In many ways, history provides the ideal point of convergence between feminism and postmodernism. Historical writing provides the local, specific situation required by postmodern theory. As much historical work is grounded in a specific time and place, the feminist theorist is less likely to slip into essentialism or ethnocentrism. Foucault’s insistence on the “local, the noncentralized”64 will allow conceptions of the female subject, and an analysis of the material and ideological constraints of female existence, to be examined without constructing an eternal, essentialized “feminine.” As Linda Alcoff suggests, a historical reading of femaleness can overcome some incongruities between feminism and postmodernism: We can say at one and the same time that gender is not natural, biological, universal, ahistorical, or essential, and yet still claim that gender is relevant because we are taking gender as a position from which to act politically.65 Feminist history can appropriate Foucauldian forms of analysis, and when combined with gender specific theorizing, a Foucauldian inspired feminist history can be most useful. Though Foucault would object to a feminist historical discourse as merely another example of knowledge or power, I do not see this as incurably problematic as long as the relationship to power is made explicit. I think we can do no more. We must not let feminist writing be paralyzed by postmodern anxieties, for the only answer then will be deafening . . . silence.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 202.

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2. Ibid., 205. 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans., R. Hurley (London: Pantheon, 1976). 4. Foucault, “Two Lectures,” p. 203. 5. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans., Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 76. 6. Jana Sawicki “Feminism and the Power of Foucauldian Discourse,” in Jonathon Arac, ed., After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 164; and Harry D. Harootunian “Foucault, Genealogy, History: The Pursuit of Otherness,” in Arac, After Foucault. Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, p. 112. 7. Foucault, “Two Lectures,” p. 211. 8. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 9. Foucault, “Two Lectures,” p. 202. 10. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 81. 11. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. 12. Frances Bartowski, “Epistemic Drift in Foucault,” in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, eds., Feminism & Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 1988), p. 49. 13. Meaghan Morris, “The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminists and Philosophers, or Maybe Tonight It’ll Happen,” in Diamond and Quinby, Feminism & Foucault, p. 26. 14. David Shumway, Michel Foucault (Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1989). 15. Cited by Clare O’Farrell, Foucault, Historian or Philosopher? (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 110. 16. Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Feminity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power” in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, eds., Feminism and Foucault. Reflections on Resistance (Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 1987), p. 63. 17. Michel Foucault “The Subject and Power” in Michel Foucault, Power: The Essential Works, vol. 3, ed., trans. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin Press,1983), p. 329. 18. Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (London; Routledge, 1990), p. 163. 19. Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism,” in Dirks et al., Culture/Power/History, p. 107. 20. Biddy Martin, “Feminism, Criticism and Foucault,” in Diamond and Quinby, Feminism and Foucault, p. 3. 21. Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism,” 106. 22. Foucault, cited by Alcoff, Ibid., p. 103. 23. Foucault “Two Lectures,” p. 214. 24. Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” pp. 167–168. 25. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics; an overview of work in progress,” in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 343. 26. Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” 27. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, eds., “Introduction,”in Feminism and Foucault. Reflections on Resistance (Boston, Mass: Northeastern University Press, 1988), p. x 28. Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” in Culture/Power/History, pp. 96–122, esp. p. 103.

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29. Quoted by Frances Bartkowski, “Epistemic Drift in Foucault,” in Diamond and Quinby, Feminism & Foucault, p. 45. 30. Cited by Martin, “Feminism, Criticism and Foucault,” p. 6. 31. Foucault, “Two Lectures,” p. 214. 32. Foucault, “Two Lectures,” p. 211. 33. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans., A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1973). 34. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans., A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York; Pantheon,1977), p. 138. 35. Judith A. Allen, Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women since 1800 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990). 36. Ibid., pp. 1–2. 37. Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 38. Ibid., p. 4. 39. Ibid., p. 2 40. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 33–34. 41. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 32, 203, 211, 252–253. 42. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon, 1965). 43. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. 44. Ibid., p. 221. 45. Ibid., p. 156 46. Ibid., p. 70 47. Ibid., p. 195 48. Ibid., p. 21 49. Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality, and Gender in Colonial Society (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 50. Ibid. 51. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Conceptions of Pollution and Taboo (London: Penguin, 1966). 52. Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly, p. 6. 53. Ibid., p. 103. 54. Ibid., p. 43. 55. Ibid., p. 48, 95. 56. Ibid., p. 31. 57. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 58. Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly, p. 98. 59. Ibid., p. 103. 60. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. 61. Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly, p. 61. 62. Ibid., p. 65. 63. Ibid., p. 84. 64. Foucault, “Two Lectures,” p. 202. 65. Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism,” p. 116.

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Six EMASCULATING METAPHOR: WHITHER THE MALENESS OF REASON? Jacqui Broad, Karen Green, Helen Prosser Feminists have pointed out that within the text of philosophy, reason has often been associated with masculinity, while its others—passion, body, madness, and intuition—have been deemed co-relatively feminine. The force binding the pair “masculine” and “feminine” to the contrast between reason and its others, is that of metaphorical association. Susan Bordo, who dubs this “the masculinization of reason,” thinks that this metaphorical force reflects an underlying fact.1 Object relations theory suggests that men experience themselves as isolated rational egos reflecting from an objective standpoint a world of alien material fact.2 Women are not rational egos in this sense. The empirical thesis that men and women think and experience themselves in different ways has had considerable appeal. Despite this appeal, it suffers from some weaknesses, and these include especially the difficulty of disentangling in these associations what is ideology, what is metaphor and what is literal fact.3 Other feminists, more or less influenced by Jacques Derrida, have not depended on empirical data to make their case, but have associated feminism’s critique of masculine reason with Derrida’s critique of logocentrism. Genevieve Lloyd, in particular, made us aware of the “maleness of reason.”4 Lloyd does not take the association between masculinity and rationality, femininity and reason’s opposites, to describe a literal fact. Woman is not mad, irrational, passionate, or intuitive. Lloyd accepts that this is a metaphorical association, and uses Derrida’s work on metaphor to argue that this association is integral to philosophy. Philosophy constitutes itself in opposition to women, and the dominance of a metaphorical masculinization of reason makes it the case that, “Women cannot easily be accommodated into a cultural ideal which has defined itself in opposition to the feminine.”5 The masculinization of reason may only be a metaphor, but metaphors have power. In his paper “The White Mythology,” Derrida uses metaphor to emasculate philosophy’s pretensions. By bringing metaphor to the fore, he forces philosophy to question itself and its own objective “reason.” Philosophy has defined itself, since Plato, as the pursuit of timeless objective truth in opposition to the illusory ephemera of the sophists and poets. Derrida argues that philosophy cannot escape metaphor. It requires metaphor in order to uphold the defining distinction between metaphor and literal truth. Feminists have interpreted this as showing that metaphor takes upon itself the powers of literal truth.

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Those who believe in an unambiguous distinction between metaphor and literal truth will say that the masculinization of reason is only a metaphor. In light of this Derridian deconstruction, what they repress with this “only” is complicity with a metaphorical power without which metaphor’s magic would not work. Like the sleight of hand of a conjurer, this power must be hidden and denied. Even when the sleight of hand is exposed, the illusion still keeps us in its thrall. The power of this metaphor determines feminism’s uneasy relationship with philosophy and reason. It stands like a giant illusion before the gates of rational authority frightening us off with its degendering breath. But from whence does metaphor derive such masculine power? Is metaphor the hidden power out of which philosophy conjures its objective truth? Or is it time to emasculate this dominating metaphor? The position occupied by the feminist advocates of deconstruction stands in some tension with Derrida’s thinking on sexual difference. He speaks in places of a multiplicity of gendered voices, implying the kind of refusal of identity politics which is articulated in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.6 An influential school of Australian deconstructive feminists is troubled by this vision of a dispersal of identity at the historical moment at which women appear to be successfully articulating their sense of identity.7 They see women as being constructed through the metaphors that associate women with dispersal or unreason. Lloyd speaks of the metaphors, “playing a role . . . in the formation of ideas and stereotypes of maleness and femaleness.”8 Roslyn Diprose suggests more strongly that ‘“metaphors” are constitutive of the bodies of women. “The bodies of women (real-life women), their habits, desires, and experiences, are constituted by social discourses and practices which position women as other to privileged identity.”9 Elizabeth A. Grosz suggests, “‘Real’ women are the products and effects of discursive practices that cannot be confined to misogynist (mis)representations.”10 How did metaphor acquire such power? Between Lloyd’s talk of metaphor, “playing a role . . . in the formation of ideas and stereotypes,” and Diprose’s claim that bodies are constituted by metaphors, came a rejection of the sex-gender distinction which allowed earlier theorists to distinguish ideological gender from bodily sex.11 Two steps take us from a stereotypical representation to a lived reality. The distinction between metaphor and literal truth is undermined, and abstract gender is replaced by lived bodily reality. Metaphor acquires the power of creating the literal truth about women. Yet what are the powers of metaphor? Could metaphor, such a subtle sweet child, have sold its sinews to a discourse that binds us to madness and non-identity? Perhaps the trope “woman” is a false trollop, who gives us poisons wrapped as gifts to cure metaphorical hypochondria. The issues raised by the feminist use of philosophical metaphor are complex.

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What is metaphor? Is there any literal truth? What is the relationship between metaphorical and literal language? We cannot hope to answer these questions adequately in a single paper. We will show that feminists may have succumbed too quickly to an illusory power. Some accounts of metaphor enable us to distinguish metaphors from literal truths. On a recent account, which we need to take seriously, the powers of metaphor are, plausibly derived from the literal. Even if philosophy cannot escape metaphor, neither can metaphor escape the literal. Metaphor can, and has, offered its services equally to men and women. It need not be slave to man’s pretensions. It will offer its fertile bounty to anyone who, with a modicum of wit, will sew from its threads, a new analogy. Our argument will have three parts. One part is critical. It looks at Derrida’s claims for metaphor and the use that Lloyd makes of them. If we accept that Derrida has shown that philosophy cannot escape metaphor, one plausible interpretation of Lloyd’s claim requires that literal truth can be distinguished from metaphor. Derrida’s analysis appears to disallow this possibility. In addition, Lloyd moves too quickly from Derrida’s claim, which is that philosophy cannot escape all metaphor, to the conclusion that masculinizing metaphors are constitutive of philosophy. The next part is historical. It looks at some metaphors from female philosophers, in order to demonstrate how flexible metaphor is, and how easily transformed for feminist purposes. The last part is exegetical. It outlines a recent theory of the structure of metaphor and argues that it accounts well for what is going on in the metaphors we have extracted from philosophers and feminists. It provides reasons for thinking that what Derrida has to say is not the last word on metaphor. It gives an alternative explanation for the ubiquity of the masculinizing metaphors. We argue that these particular metaphors are not constitutive of philosophy, but reflect the historical reality of women’s subjection. Together these three parts show that the masculinizing metaphor is not a constituting power. Metaphor clothes itself in the garments of literal truth, and since it depends for its powers on the literal, it can wear any fashion that suits the times. 1. Derrida and Lloyd on Metaphor and the Pretensions of Philosophy In the paper “White Mythology,” Derrida argues that philosophy sets itself up as a search for timeless truth in contrast to rhetoric and poetry deemed ephemeral and illusory. Philosophy’s foundation is in metaphor. It cannot express its central propositions, the search for clear and distinct ideas, or the escape from the cave of illusory appearance into the sunlight of reality, without the aid of metaphor that it claims to despise and shun. Christopher Norris

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expresses Derrida’s conclusion as, “The discourse of philosophy is everywhere subject to a play of rhetorical signification which exceeds all the bounds of intentional restraint.”12 As Genevieve Lloyd points out, why the use of metaphor should automatically undermine philosophy’s claim to be the pursuit of truth is not entirely obvious. Derrida appears to accept Aristotle’s warning that analogy can be misleading.13 Derrida then suggests that Aristotle’s appeal to the clarity, or obscurity, of an argument shows that philosophy’s distinction between the literal and the metaphorical itself depends on a metaphor. By Aristotle’s lights, an argument that involves a metaphor like “obscure” is inadequate. Philosophy cannot make out its central distinction without depending on metaphor, and so fails its own test of philosophical rigor. Aristotle warns of the inadequacy of arguments that involve metaphor, and, as we will see below, his warning is still pertinent. Aristotle says: Another rule is to see if he [the arguer] has used a metaphorical expression, as, for instance, if he has defined knowledge as unsupplantable, or the earth as a nurse, or temperance as a harmony. For a metaphorical expression is always obscure. It is possible, also, to argue captiously against the user of a metaphorical expression as though he had used it in its literal sense; for the definition stated will not apply.14 As Lloyd acknowledges, the use of metaphor to make an independently true point need not undermine the truth expressed. According to Lloyd, when the metaphor is “effaced” things become problematic. A metaphor is “effaced” when, “It is not at all clear that the philosophical point is external to, or extricable, from the metaphor.” She uses as an example of this Socrates’ claim that philosophy is a higher form of procreation. Lloyd suggests that this is a shifty use of metaphor, “which brings philosophy into closer connection with the values and beliefs of its surrounding culture.” We do not recognize effaced metaphors as such. Terms such as “grasp” and “comprehend” are originally metaphors, taken to be literal, and these metaphors cannot “be governed by philosophy, for they are constitutive of it.”15 Lloyd’s claim is that the maleness of reason is an effaced metaphor that constitutes philosophy. Yet saying that the metaphoric masculinization of reason is “effaced” is odd. Unlike words like “grasp” and “obscure,” which we do not immediately recognize as metaphors, the metaphors associating men with form and rational mastery, and women with formlessness, matter, or nature, are manifest on the surface of texts. Some texts claim that reason is an ideal for both men and women, while reading the relationship between reason and the inferiors that it should govern (such as body, sense-perception, appetite, or matter) through the relationship of man to woman. In the Timaeus, for example, Plato’s ideal society is one in

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which women are Guardians, but male and female are associated with form and the formless.16 Lloyd does not spend much time explaining what it means for a metaphor to be effaced, nor exactly why this is problematic. In Derrida’s text, an effaced metaphor is a word like “obscurity” as applied to arguments. We no longer recognize the metaphorical origins of this usage as such. Another way in which we can efface a metaphor is if it comes to provide the basis of an argument. This is a specious argument of the sort against which Aristotle warns us. Specious arguments of this kind are rife in philosophy. For example, Plotinus is an especially rich source, in particular the Sixth Tractate.17 The metaphorical maleness of reason is likely to lead to just such an argument. The metaphor may derive from the analogy between reason governing and directing the body, and men governing and directing women. When used as a premise in an argument for excluding women from higher learning, its metaphorical character is “effaced.” As Aristotle warns, metaphors and analogies provide insecure bases for argument. If this is Lloyd’s point, the point is well taken. But this point involves maintaining the distinction that Derrida is interested in undermining. This is the distinction between the precise literal use of words appropriate for sound argument and the metaphorical and analogical extensions of words that are not. Whether Derrida has a convincing argument for the impossibility of maintaining this distinction depends on whether the kind of effaced metaphor that he finds in philosophy is still a metaphor. If we think the danger of effacement is the danger that Aristotle warned of, Lloyd’s suggestion that metaphor becomes dangerous only when effaced requires a distinction between literal and metaphorical language. According to Derrida this distinction involves a philosophical metaphor. Still, if we agree that Derrida has established that metaphysics is, “a mythology which assembles and reflects Western Culture,” and that, “the white man takes his own mythology . . . his logos—that is the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that which it is still his inescapable desire to call Reason,” then the maleness of reason may appear to fit especially well into that myth.18 Whether reason, or the maleness of reason is a myth is a bit obscure; as is the power of this myth to constitute our bodily reality. Despite these doubts, the moral drawn is obvious. That reason ought to govern, govern women, and keep them enslaved within its metaphoric bonds is constitutive of this mythic discourse. Are things so simple? The above quote from Derrida summarizes the conclusion of Anatole France’s essay, “The Language of Metaphysics.”19 Like the early logical positivists, France is critical of metaphysicians, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who use words that have lost any precise sensory meaning. His sketch of the metaphysician’s wearing away of sensory vocabulary, so as to produce abstract philosophical terms, ends with the claim that metaphysics is a white mythology: anemic, because the original sensory meanings of its terms have been effaced; and mythic, because once the original

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sensory meaning of the terms is restored, philosophy sounds like a Vedic hymn. A particular theory of meaning lies behind this dismissal of metaphysics. It has two parts: the meaning of a word is the sensible object or quality to which it refers, and its original sensory use determines the real meaning of a term. Derrida alludes to a similar thought in Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who says, “Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses.”20 But Derrida can hardly accept such a theory of meaning. He has often insisted that meaning is not fixed, that no fixed boundary between proper and improper usage exists, and so, apparently, no place for finding a proper sensory meaning effaced in an improper abstract use exists. Derrida acknowledges this.21 France’s theory of meaning privileges etymology over system. Ferdinand de Saussure has shown how the synchronic structure of language as much as its diachronic development results in words having the meaning that they do. The “exergue” with which Derrida begins his paper is effaced by the later discussion that asserts that the distinction between the proper sensory meaning of a term and its metaphorical extension cannot be maintained.22 Derrida’s purpose in relating the conclusions of these philosophers is not so much to endorse them, but to show that the concept of metaphor is a philosophical concept which presupposes an untenable philosophical account of meaning. By philosophy’s account, central philosophical terms are metaphors, yet metaphor is a notion that depends on philosophy’s metaphors. Philosophy and metaphor are inextricably intertwined.23 Something odd remains in Derrida’s use of these philosophical texts. He argues that central philosophical terms are metaphors, “Philosophy is less in the philosophical text . . . than the philosophical text is within metaphor.”24 His central contention is that philosophy cannot do without metaphor because the structure of signification in general is not fundamentally different from the structure of metaphor, and because we cannot characterize signification and metaphor without the use of metaphor. If this is true, it cannot be a criticism of philosophy that it fails to escape metaphor. Analytic philosophers such as Henry Nelson Goodman have also claimed no fundamental distinction exists between literal and metaphorical uses of language for more or less the same reason as Derrida.25 The use of all language is fluid. No properties exist independent of language. Therefore, no proper sensory meaning exists to contrast it to the metaphorical. Having no proper meaning, we cannot criticize philosophy for being a white mythology from which the robust sensory meaning has been effaced. The political reading Lloyd and others impose on this passage from France is possible, but, on this reading, no justification for the political claim emerges. We agree with Derrida and Goodman that behind our ability to use metaphor, a fluid and open-ended capability to perceive similarities exists,

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without any political consequences following from this. If we cannot circumscribe proper or literal use of words, this kind of critique of effaced metaphors on which Lloyd relied will be unavailable. If Derrida’s point in saying that philosophy cannot escape metaphor is to show that philosophical argument can never achieve the criterion of soundness that it sets for itself, there will be little point in attempting to expose effaced metaphor, for escape from metaphor will be impossible. To say, as Derrida does, that philosophy is constituted by metaphor is not to say that particular metaphors constitute philosophy but merely to say that philosophy cannot state its truths without using some metaphor. Lloyd needs something stronger in order to argue that the particular metaphor that associates maleness with reason constitutes philosophy. Derrida might also think that particular metaphors are ineliminable. The metaphor of the sun, which provides a natural light, the heliotrope around which philosophical discourse turns, is one.26 If this metaphor is deemed masculine then, as Luce Irigaray does, one might find the light of reason already male, but this is not a line of thought developed by Lloyd.27 Even if we cannot escape all metaphor as Derrida contends, the next section of this paper will illustrate that to escape or transform particular metaphors is easy. We will argue, more strongly, that we can distinguish the literal from the metaphorical use of sentences, and that not metaphor, but the literal social relations that form ground for metaphors are difficult to change. 2. Metaphor in the History of Philosophy In this section, we will focus on one metaphor that has acted as a companion to the masculinization of reason: the personification of nature as female. The symbolic association between nature and femaleness is common in seventeenth-century writings in which a mechanistic worldview superseded the Medieval and Renaissance conception of nature as an organic cosmos.28 With the rise of Cartesianism and the new science, many philosophers no longer regarded the natural world as an intelligent entity, alive, vital, and capable of self-motion. In the writings of the period, nature was typically personified as a passive female, completely devoid of intellect—a resource to be manipulated and exploited for the good of society. Alternatively, in some instances, writers described nature as a disorderly and recalcitrant woman—an unruly force we must control and dominate. In both cases, the “man of reason” is encouraged to transcend or conquer nature, and the “feminine” is associated with what we must transcend or conquer. In the work of early modern women philosophers, we can find some positive conceptions of the relation between reason and nature, men and women. Their use of figurative language shows that when metaphor serves a

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new mistress, she can wear a new livery and puts herself busily to work for the valorization of nature and the feminization of reason. The philosophical writings of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, for example, reveal that the alignment between femaleness and nature can be affirmative, and that we can incorporate this affirmation into a cogent materialist philosophy. Cavendish, an English philosopher and woman of letters, was an outspoken opponent of Cartesian dualism and the experimental philosophy of the Royal Society. She was also a strong defender of her sex, and lamented the exclusion of women from serious learning. Cavendish’s eighth published work, the Philosophical Letters (1664), is a collection of epistles criticizing the opinions of “famous and learned authors,” including Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes. In this work, Cavendish adopts a strong anti-dualist and anti-mechanist position. She believes that the mind and body are not two distinct things, but are both made from the same material substance. Every particular creature, Cavendish says, contains a thorough intermixture of three different kinds of matter: the rational and the sensitive (which are animate), and an inanimate kind of matter. According to her theory, every human being, animal, vegetable, and mineral is endued with “Life and Soul, Sense and Reason.” Cavendish denies that the mind can be separated from the body and subsist without it. What Descartes calls the mind, she says, is only rational and sensitive matter, “the living and knowing parts of Nature.” In her view, for any individual to transcend the senses and the body is impossible. Cavendish believes that no single particle of the material world is dead or inert, “there is no part of Nature that hath not life and knowledge,” she says, “For there is no Part that has not a co-mixture of animate and inanimate matter.”30 To illustrate these philosophical claims, Cavendish says: though Nature is old, yet she is not a Witch, but a grave, wise, methodical Matron, ordering her Infinite family, which are her several parts, with ease and facility, without needless troubles and difficulties; for these are only made through the ignorance of her several parts or particular Creatures, notwithstanding their Mistress, Nature, and her actions and government, for which they cannot be blamed; for how should a part understand the Infinite body, when it doth not understand it self; but Nature understands her parts better, then they do her.31 She says that nature does not have to be conjoined with an immaterial substance in order to move or exert a causal influence: For Nature is not a Babe, or Child, to need such a Spiritual Nurse, to teach her to go, or to move; neither is she so young a Lady as to have need of a Governess, for surely she can govern herself; she needs not a

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Guardian for fear she should run away with a younger Brother, or one that cannot make her a Jointure.32 In these metaphors, Cavendish avoids exploiting the male-female distinction to express the domination of reason over nature. Instead, she expresses the dominant-subordinate relation in terms of a mother’s authority over her family. Nature is the “mistress” or the “matron” of a large brood. She governs or directs her creatures, not the other way round. Cavendish’s figurative expressions have no alignment between passivity and femininity. Cavendish’s intention is not to denigrate the natural world by regarding it as an autonomous woman. From her feminist viewpoint, a mature woman is perfectly capable of organizing and governing her affairs. She can be as free in her actions as any man. Nature is not a witch, an elderly woman to be reviled or victimized; she is “wise” and intelligent. Cavendish does not identify reason with masculine power or control. Instead nature is “the chief Mistress,” and human knowledge or “art” is the “Drudgery-maid.”33 She says that nature cannot “be heightened or diminished by Art; for Nature will be Nature in despite of her Hand-maid.”34 Cavendish mocks masculine achievements and casts doubt on the possibility of a universal knowledge. She says that being only a finite part, men could never know the infinite whole. She suggests that their pursuit of knowledge is due to their fears and insecurities about nature’s unpredictability. “As for Mathematicians,” she says: they endeavour to inchant Nature with Circles, and bind her with lines so hard, as if she were so mad, that she would do some mischief, when left at liberty. Geometricians weigh Nature to an Atome, and measure her so exactly, as less than a hairs breadth; besides, they do press and squeeze her so hard and close, as they almost stifle her.35 In response to the work of the chemist Jan-Baptiste van Helmont, she says, when he saith, that Nature first being a beautiful Virgin, was defiled by sin; not by her own, but by Mans sin, for whose use she was created; I think it too great a presumption and arrogancy to say that Infinite Nature was not onely defiled by the sin of Man, but also to make Man the chief over all Nature, and to believe Nature was only made for his sake; when as he is but a small finite part of Infinite Nature, and almost Nothing in comparison to it.36 In the first instance, scholars are condemned for their violations against nature. Van Helmont characterizes scientific inquiry as a type of kidnapping and sexual assault. In the last instance, the balance of power is reversed. Men do

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not have the power to defile nature, she suggests, since they are only insignificant parts of a larger whole. In both cases, the moral superiority lies with nature, not the man of reason. In the later half of the seventeenth century, Mary Astell also wrote in defense of “mother nature.” Another ardent feminist, Astell is best known for her scheme to establish an all-female academic institute.37 In a later work, Astell attacks A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, written in 1708 by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury.38 Responding to some of his remarks, she says: We may assure ourselves that Nature has no Malice. Nothing but IllHumour either Natural or Forc’d, can bring a Man to think amiss of her. The more we search into and familiarly examine her, we will be the more convinc’d, that she is the most inoffensive, harmless, sweetest, compassionate, good-natur’d, best sort of a Gentlewoman, that any one can settle with himself a Notion of. She is the farthest in the World from Stateliness and Moroseness, or any thing that may make us uneasie. From Provocation or Offence, Anger, Revenge, Jealousie in point of Honor, or Power, Love of Fame, Glory, and the like, which belong only to limited Beings and are necessarily excluded in a Being Universal. She’s never out of Humor, good Lady!39 Although Astell draws on the traditional female virtues of sweetness and complaisance, her characterization is in contrast to those depictions of nature as wild and disorderly. Like Cavendish, she emphasizes that nature is not a perverse or terrible “other,” but a benevolent maternal figure. Astell also defends nature against the manipulations and examinations of scientists. On the mining of mineral resources, she says that gold and other jewels are “nothing but Trumpery”: For were they really Good, they wou’d not be such Rarities, our Indulgent Mother Nature, wou’d have bestow’d them on all her Children, made them as Common and Universal, as Earth and Air, Sun and Water. She seems indeed rather to think them hurtful to us, by the Care she takes to hide them in the Earth, and to put them out of the reach of most People.40 Again nature is portrayed as an intelligent female, capable of rational behavior. We can also find some instances of women writers personifying reason as feminine. Mary Chudleigh, the author of the feminist polemic The Ladies Defense, writes of “the greatest part of Mankind,” that, “Reason has no Superiority over them; her Voice is too soft, her Whispers too low to be heard.”41 But she preaches that, “Truth is valuable though she appears in a plain Dress; and I hope

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they will not slight her because she wants the Ornaments of Language.”42 In the eighteenth century, another champion of women, Mary Wollstonecraft, says: reason has, at last, shown her captivating face, beaming with benevolence; and it will be impossible for the dark hand of despotism again to obscure its radiance, or the lurking dagger of subordinate tyrants to reach her bosom. The image of God implanted in our nature is now more rapidly expanding; and as it opens, liberty with a maternal wing seems to be soaring to regions far above vulgar annoyance, promising to shelter all mankind.43 Lloyd suggests that a cultural ideal which has defined itself in opposition to the feminine cannot easily accommodate women” with the same reference.44 But historical feminists have had no difficulty reconstructing the ideals of philosophy to associate them with the feminine. These women’s metaphors have not been as dominant as the men’s have, but their philosophy has not received the same kind of intellectual scrutiny. It has not had the institutional backing of an army of editors, translators, commentators, and critics. Without an audience, these alternative metaphors have languished in obscurity. But is that intrinsic to philosophy or metaphor? Philosophy written by men may comprise metaphors that valorize masculinity, but philosophy can easily adapt to a different metaphorization. 3. A Theory of Metaphor If we are to escape the metaphorical bogey of masculine reason, we need to understand how metaphor works. As with most difficult questions, this is an area of great dispute. The subject matter is not clearly defined. Is any analogy a metaphor? Does sound literally, or only metaphorically, travel in waves? Are dead metaphors, such as “the mouth of the river” still metaphors? In a sense, these questions can only be answered from within a theory of metaphor, but then a danger exists that different theorists will be arguing at cross-purposes having defined their subject matter differently. Although Derrida discusses the views on metaphor of many writers, he leaves one with little grasp of what metaphor is. He assumes that expressions like “natural light of reason” are still metaphors, although from one perspective they are dead as metaphors, and have become literal expressions with metaphorical ancestors. If philosophy is to meet Derrida’s challenge, it will have to show that we can distinguish between the use of metaphor that leads to specious argument, against which Aristotle warned, and a use that does not undermine philosophy’s claim to have developed a reliable method for discerning the truth. That physics speaks of light traveling in waves does not transform physics into literature because light is only metaphorically a wave. In argument,

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we can always replace this metaphor with the mathematical equation that encapsulates the “wave-like” pulsation of light. Similarly, if we can show that we can replace the metaphor of obscurity by some precise characterization of the fault that makes an argument obscure, we will have shown that metaphor is, in principle, eliminable from sound philosophy. We cannot accomplish that task here, but we will outline one theory of the structure of metaphor especially illuminating and promising as a means for approaching it. This theory developed by Roger White in his book The Structure of Metaphor is robust enough to explain both why a particular metaphor will reappear in many different contexts, and to show that this is not because that particular metaphor is fixed or ineliminable from philosophy, but because some literal truths remain constant.45 White’s theory does not show that metaphor is eliminable from philosophy per se, but it does show that the difficulty in eliminating the dominant metaphor, which associates masculinity and reason, has little to do with the power of metaphor to constitute literal truth, and more to do with the power of social relations to constrain metaphor. It also suggests that the metaphors that are ineliminable are a special class, and that the masculinity of reason is not among them. White’s theory, a version of the interactionist theories of metaphor that some other theorists have proposed, is distinctive in that it takes the idea from Winifred Nowottny that we should understand the interaction as taking place between two sentences. Theorists of metaphor often concentrate on individual words used metaphorically, but White points out that this does not do justice to the way in which whole passages can develop a metaphor, nor to the fact that in different contexts the same word can participate in very different metaphors. The two literal sentences, which interact within a metaphor, White calls the primary and secondary sentence. The primary sentence of the metaphor, “gives us a straightforward literal description of the actual situation.”46 The secondary sentence describes a hypothetical situation that is compared with the situation described in the primary sentence. Demonstrating how to construe metaphorical passages on this account is the easiest way of seeing what this method of analysis involves. White uses two styles of underlining in order to indicate the elements of the two interacting sentences found in a metaphorical passage. The underlining shows that some expressions in the sentence are playing a role in both sentences. To take the first part of the passage from Wollstonecraft: Reason has, at last, shown her captivating face, ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ beaming with benevolence ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ White uses the standard underscore to identify words that contribute to the primary sentence, and the wavy underscore to indicate the secondary sen-

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tence. We can then extract these in order to obtain two partial literal sentences. In this case, Reason has, at last, shown . . . . . . has, at last, shown her captivating face, beaming with benevolence. We fill out the primary sentence by making some natural and appropriate substitutions such as: Reason has, at last, shown the (good and beautiful) truth. A lady has, at last, shown her captivating face, beaming with benevolence. Both of these are now literal sentences. The first, the primary sentence is the literal claim that lies behind the metaphor. The secondary sentence is a possible situation not asserted, but used to draw out the comparison between the first and second situations. So reason, which shows us the truth, which is good and beautiful, is compared with a woman, who has at last let us see her good and beautiful face. By comparing these two situations Wollstonecraft also undercuts, or subverts, the more usual metaphor which makes reason a ruler and so, since men characteristically rule, a man. She is using the philosophical tradition, Plato’s identification of truth with beauty and goodness, to make reason, which reveals this truth and beauty, a woman who reveals her face. If this is right, we may be able to explain why reason is so often characterized as male. In the sentence, which is already a metaphor, Reason rules the passions, ^^^^ it is natural, in a patriarchal society, for the primary sentence, Reason determines what the passions will do to be compared to one or other of the secondary sentences: Man rules women or, Man rules his slaves When a philosopher like David Hume asserts that reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, the metaphor is reversed. If, as Hume claims, the passions determine what reason will do, then reason is the metaphorical slave.

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We do not need to use a masculinizing metaphor to express the proposition that reason should determine on which passion we should act (“rule” or “govern”). In King Lear, of Cordelia is said: It seem’d she was a queen Over her passion; who, most rebel-like, Sought to be king o’er her. (4.3.26). We can extract from this a primary and secondary sentence: She was a queen over her passion; who, most rebel-like, sought to be ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ king o’er her. ^^^^^^^^^^^ The primary sentence when filled out in a natural way is: She was in control of her passions which sought to overwhelm her. The secondary sentence is: She was a queen over a man who sought most rebel-like to be king over her. In this case the ruler is feminine, the ruled a male usurper. If this has not been the dominant form of this metaphor, this is because men have usually ruled women. 4. Conclusion White’s account of the structure of metaphor does not show how we can eliminate all metaphorical elements from philosophy. To construct a primary sentence completely free of metaphorical elements is sometimes difficult. No doubt, “to be in control of one’s passions” is originally a metaphor. But White’s account does offer the possibility of distinguishing sound arguments, which depend only on the concepts to be found in the primary sentence, from specious arguments, in which elements from a secondary sentence are treated as though part of a literal truth. We will not be able to eliminate metaphor when we can find no literal completion for a primary sentence, and the comparison offered in the secondary sentence is the only means we have for saying what we want to say. This form of ineliminability interested Aristotle and is one that Derrida finds especially significant.47 Where such metaphors occur philosophy may have to concede to Derrida that it has not yet made its concepts unambiguous. But the metaphors

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which have interested feminists are not constitutive and ineliminable from philosophy in this sense. White shows that our ability to represent one situation in the light of another is only limited by our imagination and the similarities that we can discover between disparate situations. The fact that common literal facts suggest obvious metaphors places constraints on metaphorical construction. We cannot successfully assert: Reason is a child governing dolls. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Although the secondary sentence, x is a child governing dolls, is perfectly comprehensible, to extract a plausible primary sentence is difficult. In some contexts, we might be able to take from this the claim that reason is ineffectual, or perhaps reason is less important than it thinks, but no obvious interpretation suggests itself. When Cavendish says that, “Nature is old, yet she is not a Witch, but a grave wise methodical Matron, ordering her Infinite family,” she uses a secondary image, the wise old matron who governs her family, to express the proposition that nature is timeless and self-governing. This image has been less popular among male writers than among female, and has only had the status of an occasional metaphor because the hypothetical situation is not one to which men have wanted to draw attention. As the incidence of men in governing positions becomes less ubiquitous, and the authority of women grows, is it not time to turn our backs on men’s archaic metaphors and replace them with a new feminization of reason? Men rule, sometimes as elected representatives, quite often through the power of military force. The daily grind of cooking, cleaning, and mending, and ignorance still too often chain women’s reason. Those, like Wollstonecraft, who believed in the possibility of feminine reason thought that, if feminine reason were to rule, that kind government would be no more onerous than a wise mother’s would be. Should we be afraid of this reason, because men have attempted to steal feminine authority by dressing it in masculine garb? We wonder why, when women, two and three hundred years ago, had no trouble putting metaphor to their use, we should now think ourselves so powerless in the face of tired and outdated metaphors. True, many have done bad things in the name of universal reason, and this should make us afraid to force reason’s truths on others. A reason that must use force is no longer a pure reason. While one might wonder whether a feminine reason could rule in the face of so much masculine power, we should not fear the masculinization of reason, but the literal truth that men still mostly monopolize power and rule.

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1. Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays in Cartesianism and Culture (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1987). 2. Among the foundational texts of such thinking are Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978); Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1978); and Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). 3. See, for example, Margaret Atherton, “Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason,” in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds., A Mind of One’s Own (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993); and Susan Moller Okin, “Thinking Like a Woman,” in Deborah Rhode, ed., Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 145–159. 4. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984). 5. Ibid., p. 104. 6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990); Jacques Derrida, “‘Choreographies’: An Interview with Christie McDonald,” in Peggy Kamuf, ed., Between the Blinds (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 441–456; and Jacques Derrida, “Women in the Beehive,” in Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, eds., Men in Feminism (New York: Methuen, 1987). 7. A different expression of this can be found in Roslyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment, and Sexual Difference (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 65–81: and Rosi Braidotti, “Envy: Or with Your Brains and My Looks,” in Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, eds., Men in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 237. 8. Genevieve Lloyd, “Texts, Metaphors and the Pretensions of Philosophy,” Monist, 69 (1986), p. 96. 9. Diprose, The Bodies of Women, p. 78. 10. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1995), pp. 63–64. 11. See, for example, Genevieve Lloyd, “Sex, Gender and Subjectivity,” Australian Feminist Studies, 10 (1989), pp. 13–21; Also Moira Gatens, “Woman and Her Double(s): Sex, Gender and Ethics,” Australian Feminist Studies, 10 (1989), pp. 33– 65; and “A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction,” in Sneja Gunew, ed., A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 139–157. 12. Christopher Norris, The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 55–56. Quoted in Lloyd, “Texts, Metaphors and the Pretensions of Philosophy,” p. 90. 13. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History, 4 (1974). Reprinted in Margins of Philosophy, trans., Alan Bass (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 251–252. 14. Aristotle, Topics VI, 2, 139, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1, ed., Jonathan Barnes, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 236. 15. Lloyd, “Texts, Metaphors and the Pretensions of Philosophy,” pp. 92–93.

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16. Plato, Timeaus, trans., Francis Cornford (Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1959), 50c–51b. 17. Plotinus, Plotinus’ Enneads, trans., Stephen MacKenna (London: Faber & Faber, 1956). Extracts are reprinted in Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans., Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 168–179. 18. Quoted by Lloyd, “White Mythology,” in Lloyd, “Texts, Metaphors and the Pretensions of Philosophy,” p. 99. 19. Anatole France, “Aristos and Polyphilos on the Language of Metaphysics,” in The Garden of Epicurus: The Works of Anatole France, eds., Fredric Chapman and J. Lewis May (New York: John Lane, 1908), pp. 207–228. 20. Quoted in Derrida, “White Mythology,” p. 217. 21. Ibid., p. 215. 22. Ibid., pp. 217–219, 252–253. 23. Ibid., pp. 225–229. 24. Ibid., p. 258. 25. Henry Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1981), p. 80. 26. Derrida, “White Mythology,” pp. 268–271. 27. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, pp. 267–276. 28. On this topic, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (London: Wildwood House, 1980). 29. Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters: Or, Modest Reflections Upon some Opinions in Natural Philosophy, Maintained by Several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age, Expressed by Way of Letters: By the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, The Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: n.p., 1664), p. 59. 30. Ibid., pp. 98–99 31. Ibid., pp. 302–303. 32. Ibid., pp. 149–150. 33. Ibid., p. 36. 34. Ibid., p. 279. 35. Ibid., p. 490. 36. Ibid., pp. 278–279. 37. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest (London: R. Wilkin, 1694). 38. Mary Astell, Bart’lemy Fair: Or, An Enquiry After Wit; In Which Due Respect is had to a Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, To My LORD *** (London: R. Wilkin, 1709), p. 102; and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (London: J. Morphew, 1708). 39. Astell, Bart’lemy Fair, p. 102. 40. Ibid., p. 103. 41. Mary Chudleigh, Essays Upon Several Subjects in Prose and Verse (orig., 1710), in The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, ed., Margaret J. M. Ezell(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 305. 42. Ibid., p. 247. 43. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it has Produced in Europe (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975), p. 22. 44. See Lloyd, The Man of Reason, p. 104.

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45. Roger White, The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 46. Ibid., p. 78. 47. Derrida, “White Mythology,” p. 244.

Seven CARE ETHICS, POWER, AND FEMINIST SOCIOANALYSIS Susan Duggin and Jason Pudsey 1. Introduction Despite the continuing feminist interest in post-1968 French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu has only recently come to the attention of feminist scholars. Bourdieu’s “reflexive socioanalysis” attempts to understand all forms of subjectivity (including that of the intellectual) as the ongoing corporeal and mental interiorization of multiple social locations (or fields). By reflexively showing subjects their socially constituted nature, in effect revealing the “social within” (and thus the use of the term “socioanalysis”), Bourdieu argues that we can give some measure of autonomy and agency to subjects. While Bourdieu has failed to examine gender relations in any substantive detail, the few feminists who have engaged with his work have employed his concepts of “habitus,” “symbolic violence,” “reflexivity,” “field,” and “capital,” to understand the reproduction and internalization of oppressive gender practices.1 Although these attempts to develop a feminist socioanalysis have provided new and insightful perspectives on the relationships between gender, power, and practice, they have also faced difficulties that relate back to the heart of Bourdieu’s paradigm. Our question is whether what might be termed a “feminist socioanalysis” which employs these concepts can provide a means of understanding and resisting dominant gender structures. This paper critically examines the theoretical shift towards Bourdieu’s work within some areas of feminism, and questions the directions and ramifications of this conceptual alliance. Using care feminism as an example, we argue that although the feminist adaptation of Bourdieu’s work offers effective responses to some theoretical dilemmas, feminist socioanalysis is not a panacea for feminism’s conceptual ills. Reliance on Bourdieu’s understanding of culture and his philosophical anthropology limits feminist socioanalysis. 2. Bourdieu’s Reflexive Socioanalysis Over the last twenty-five years, Bourdieu has developed a series of epistemological concepts such as “habitus,” “field,” “capital,” “doxa,” and “symbolic

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violence,” in an attempt to make sociology a politically effective and reflexive tool for emancipatory politics. These concepts show that the intellectual gaze is both political and partial: by constructing the bodily and mental being of subjects it helps to reproduce conditions of oppression and political domination. In this section, we outline the key concepts of Bourdieu’s reflexive socioanalysis that feminist theorists have recently applied to gender relations. Bourdieu came of intellectual age in the mid-1950s, the time of the great confrontation in the French intellectual field between the subjective existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the objectivist structuralism of Claude LeviStrauss. Bourdieu understands by “subjectivism” epistemologies based primarily on the experiences and views of individuals. Besides Sartre’s work, this includes approaches such as phenomenology, ethnomethodology, methodological individualism, and voluntarism. By “objectivism,” Bourdieu refers to approaches such as French structuralism, structural Marxism, and functionalism, in which the level of analysis concerns macro-level social regularities and structures instead of individuals. At the heart of Bourdieu’s work is his attempt to overcome the opposition between these two schools of thought. Initially, Bourdieu saw within Structuralism an attractive model of “objective” social science.2 It was his extensive ethnographic research in Algeria from 1957 to 1960, a period coinciding with the Algerian War of Independence, that ended Bourdieu’s days as a “blissful structuralist.”3 His failed attempts to gain an adequate understanding of Kabyle cosmologies by applying structuralist methodology, along with his realization during the Algerian War of the privileged position of the “detached” intellectual and its associated moral and political problems, led him to reflect his sociological gaze back upon the social researcher and their activities.4 The result of such reflection was his rejection of both subjectivism and objectivism, and the dualism between them. To transcend this dualism, Bourdieu began to argue for a more reflexive understanding of the practice of agents which avoids the limitations of each epistemology. Subjectivism’s reliance on the primary experience and perspective of the agent formed the basis of its limits. This emphasis meant that subjectivism overlooked the wider, objective relations between agents, and the manner in which their viewpoints are dependent on, and vary according to, their position in social space. Bourdieu gives epistemological priority to objectivism that avoids this mistaken “projection” and emphasis on experience. He questions the commonsense or “doxic” view of the world. For Bourdieu, this is a necessary questioning if one is to have a critical understanding of society:5 However, objectivism has a number of problems of its own: . . . it is not sufficient for anthropology to break with native experience and the native representation of that experience: it has to make a second break and question the presuppositions inherent in the position of an outside ob-

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server, who, in his preoccupation with interpreting practices, is inclined to introduce into the object the principles of his relation to the object.6 Because objectivism separates itself from the social world and the practical knowledge of agents within it, it creates what Bourdieu calls a “sovereign view” of the world.7 This means that the, “distance secured by externality” turns the researcher into an impartial spectator, condemned to see all practice merely as spectacle and as the following of predictable social rules.8 This sovereign view often gives the observer a feeling of superiority over the observed. Bourdieu notes that he rejected this “cavalier” position of superiority when studying the Kabyle peasants because he had grown up with quite similar peasants and this sensitized him to its artificiality.9 Such a detached view also misses the strategic nature of social action and practice. Bourdieu holds that the importance of strategies derives from agents’ command over the time-intervals between socially obligatory moments (such as “gift exchange”) and their control of the tempo of interaction.10 Time is a dimension of social life used and employed by agents. Bourdieu describes an “art of living,” not based on the mechanical following of “rules” as objectivism believes, but on agents’ strategies and manipulation of time through their practices. The innovation of Bourdieu’s work (and its main departure from Cartesianism) lies in its view that such strategies are rarely the product of conscious thought or scheming. A continual process of decoding what we perceive, but do not consciously note, forms the basis of the practical mastery of social life. From where does this practical mastery and practical knowledge that agents use come? How do agents know which strategy to employ at any given time? Bourdieu’s answer to these questions revolves around his use of his key concepts, field, capital, doxa, and “habitus.” 3. Habitus For feminist scholars using Bourdieu’s work, the concept of habitus has been most crucial. Habitus, unlike “habit,” is the “feel for the game,”11 a structuring mechanism which operates within agents.12 Just as a great tennis player can “instinctively” judge the moves of his opponents and appears to react without thinking, so the habitus is a skilled collection of practical responses, a sixth sense for understanding social processes.13 Habitus is a strategy-generating principle based on past experiences which gives agents a disposition or propensity, which in turn gives them the ability to deal with changing situations and fulfill varied tasks. It produces agents’ “moves” by organizing them as strategies without there being a conscious strategic intention.14 The habitus is made up of historical relations internalized within individuals in mental and bodily schemes of perception and

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action. The habitus works as a “socialized subjectivity”15 which avoids falling back into substantialist subjectivism.16 Practices, as shaped by the habitus, reproduce the objective structures through which they were produced: the tendency toward self-reproduction of the structure is realized only when it enrolls the collaboration of agents who have internalized its specific necessity in the form of habitus and who are active producers even when they consciously or unconsciously contribute to reproduction. Having internalized the immanent law of the structure in the form of the habitus, they realize its necessity in the very spontaneous movement of their existence. But what is necessary to reproduce the structure is still a historical action, accomplished by true agents.17 This “sense of the game” is internalized in the body, in what Bourdieu calls the “body hexis”—the way agents walk, look, speak, and act.18 For Bourdieu, “The body is in the social world but the social world is also in the body.”19 The body is a memory, and by being embodied, the habitus is beyond the immediate grasp of consciousness. The body, not separate from society, instead is a socialized entity containing the creative ability to generate action. The subject (individual agent) and the object (society) are not separate, but have “mutual possession,” based in the habitus. 4. Fields For Bourdieu, the habitus always forms in particular “fields.” A field is a set of objective, historically conditioned relations between agents which are structured by the common pursuit of a particular “good.”20 These relations can exist at the micro- and the macro-level, for example, the relationship between artist and audience, artist and artist, producer and consumer. They structure a space in which agents exist and struggle, with success in this struggle depending upon their position within that space. The field can be seen as a battlefield or game where “players” try to gain control of the object, or “capital,” valued in that field, such as, for example, scientific “truth” in the intellectual sphere. This struggle between agents means that the shape of the field changes over time.21 Every field is a “structure of possibilities.” Bourdieu rejects that there ever exists total domination in a field, because resistance and struggle always continues. He believes that this premise allows him to avoid the pitfalls of functionalism and systems theory. Examples of fields in Bourdieu’s work include the political field, religious field, literary field, academic field, and the cultural field. Most important, the overall “field of power” is a “meta-field” encompassing the other fields and the state.22 He argues that modern societies witness a complex differentiation of fields, and that this entails a “plurality of logics” with different

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types of thought, different kinds of “commonsense,” and different habituses operating within them.23 The relation between a field and habitus has two dimensions: first, the field conditions the habitus, which becomes the embodiment of the necessary properties and logics of the field. Second, habitus “cognitively constructs” the field as meaningful. It gives the sense of, or a “feel” for, the game and that the game is worth playing; that an interest in investing in it exists.24 5. Capital In order for an agent to become engaged in a field, it has to have an “interest” in doing so. For Bourdieu, interests (what he also terms illusio or libido) refer to the way in which some things within a field are valued, motivating practice within that field. Each field values different objects, and the agent’s habitus must be socialized within that field to give them value.25 The agent must become sensitive to these objects, and then pursue them.26 “Capital” is that object or thing at stake in the struggle within a field.27 Ownership of capital is both the precondition of playing the game and the element which shapes and structures the relations between agents.28 Bourdieu’s use of the concept of capital (or “power” as he often calls it) takes several forms, namely, economic, cultural, social, and symbolic.29 Economic capital refers to those material resources that we can convert into money and property. Cultural capital (or what Bourdieu also calls “informational capital”), refers to forms of knowledge and skills, which can be embodied in the agent, or objectified in the form of books and artistic objects, or in the institutionalized state, in the form of educational qualifications. A positive correlation between economic capital and cultural capital exists. Only some people can afford the money or time to acquire the luxury of selfimprovement. Social capital is the total number of resources that agents accrue through a durable network of relationships and acquaintances.30 Social capital is the “connections” that an agent has. All three forms, economic, cultural, and social capital, can take on the role of symbolic capital. Symbolic capital is the form capital takes when we “misrecognize” it; when it is not seen as capital but as an innate property of an agent. The purpose of the concept of symbolic capital is to avoid the capitalist reductionism of economism. Bourdieu developed this concept by trying to understand how the “archaic” economy of the Kabyle operated without capitalist self-interest, but in terms of honor and honesty: in an economy which is defined by the refusal to recognize the “objective” truth of “economic” practices, that is, the law of “naked self-interest” and egoistic calculation, even “economic” capital cannot act unless it succeeds in being recognized through a conversion that can render unrecognizable

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This does not mean that symbolic capital and the pursuit of it do not have a logical development: even when they give every appearance of disinterestedness because they escape the logic of “economic” interest (in the narrow sense) and are oriented towards non-material stakes that are not easily quantified, as in “pre-capital” societies or in the cultural sphere of capitalist societies, practices never cease to comply with an economic logic.32 The amount of capital, along with the distribution of the different types of capital they possess over time, affects the position of an agent within a field.33 Though all positions depend, to some extent, on other positions in the field, not all positions are dependent to the same degree. Some positions are more powerful than others are. “In chess the future of the queen may depend on the insignificant pawn, but the queen nevertheless continues to be much more powerful than any other piece.”34 The amount of capital that agents hold, and have held, and their perception of the current play in the field, all based on their position in it, also shape their strategy.35 The habitus, the internalization of the field from a particular position within it, develops strategies which can gain or lose capital. Such success or failure places the agent in a new position within the field, a position that reorients the habitus: [S]ocial agents are determined only to the extent that they determine themselves. But the categories of perception and appreciation which provide the principle of this (self-) determination are themselves largely determined by the social and economic conditions of their constitution.36 The state of play in the field, its balance of forces, and distribution of “capital,” are apprehended by the agent, not as a conscious subject, but as mediated by the internalization of their position or posture within the field; their habitus.37 Social reality exists in a twofold sense, “in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside of agents.”38 Agents create the social world, but they do so based on their knowledge and “practical sense” of the conditions and workings of the social world, which, in turn, is based on the position they occupy within it. In this way, particular logics of the field, based on position and habitus, operate through agents. Social life is reasonable and predictable without being the product of rational calculation or obedience to omnipotent rules.

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6. Doxa Every field contains its doxic understanding of what is being “played” out within it, an “official fiction” which is the basis of the relationship between players in the game, a sort of collusion in opposition, or what Bourdieu calls a “consensus in dissensus.”39 This doxa is the tacit, taken-for-granted aspects of social life. It makes the world appear “naturally” so and indisputable. For Bourdieu, doxa is the feeling of individual agents that they have nothing to do except what they are doing and they are doing what they ought.40 Such a doxa is embodied through the habitus as the structures of the field become “real” for the agent. Bourdieu believes this doxic link between social and mental structures fulfils political functions.41 “Symbolic systems” (ideas, worldviews, ideologies) are not only ways of knowing the world, but also forms of domination. They promote social integration of individuals into an arbitrary and historically constructed social order. These schemes of classification which individuals use to see the world show social structures as natural, not as the result of historical power struggles between groups, and a social order tends to naturalize its arbitrariness: What appears to us today as self-evident, as beneath consciousness and choice, has quite often been the stake of struggles and instituted only as the result of dogged confrontations between dominant and dominated groups. The major effect of historical evolution is to abolish history by relegating to the past, i.e., to the unconscious, the lateral possibles that it eliminated.42 This political “abolition” of history Bourdieu terms “symbolic violence,” the, “violence which is exercized upon a social agent with his or her complicity.”43 It refers to the disguised and “gentle” violence, enacted when overt violence is impossible. It is a form of intimidation lacking an act of intimidation.44 It operates through the control of symbolic capital. Those holding a large amount of symbolic capital, agents Bourdieu calls nobiles (“people who are known”), are in a position to impose perceptual and classificatory schemata which are favorable to their position, usually because they monopolize institutions, such as the education system, which legitimate rank and hierarchy, insisting that such classificatory schemata are “natural.” The internalization of such schemata into the constitutive process of the habitus is where symbolic violence is most effective. Such internalization often sees the dominated collaborate in their domination by misrecognizing the basis of that domination, embracing it instead, as “natural” and “deserved.” Bourdieu sees one of the main tasks of reflexive socioanalysis as the revelation of how doxa operates within a field through misrecognition and symbolic violence, thereby creating “heterodox” alternatives to dominant “orthodoxies”:

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If doxa is the universe of the undiscussed and therefore undisputed, heterdoxy and orthodoxy are competing poles in the realm of opinion which arises after a crisis has dislocated the fit between objective structures and subjective aspirations, that is, when doxa loses its undisputable character. Orthodox discourse is the official way of speaking and thinking about the world and it aims at restoring as much as possible to the state of doxa. It faces heresy which offers “competing possibilities.”46 For this reason: the theory of knowledge is a dimension of political theory because the symbolic power to impose the principles of the construction of reality— in particular, social reality—is a major dimension of political power.47 In Bourdieu’s eyes, socioanalysis is a thoroughly political analysis of strategies and mechanisms of symbolic and corporeal domination.48 7. Reflexivity In addition to combating the symbolic violence imposed on and internalized by dominated groups, Bourdieu sees reflexive socioanalysis as clarifying and critiquing the practice of the intellectual.49 The concepts of habitus, field, capital, and doxa can and should be used on the socioanalysts themselves.50 Bourdieu believes that reflexive socioanalysis should be based on the constant unmasking of intellectuals’ presuppositions, and “unthought categories of thought,” one of the most important of which is the desire for an absolute view of reality.51 This brings us back to the main limitations of objectivism. Objectivism’s emphasis on the opus operatum, on the result of practice more than on practice itself, occurs because the social researcher has a different relation to practice than to the practicing agent. They ask non-practical questions, theoretical questions based on their intellectualist disposition, or habitus.52 The intellectual has the social privilege and time, to accumulate information which cannot be known by one single agent engaged in practice, gaining, “the privilege of totalization.”53 Bourdieu calls this the “scholastic fallacy”: this fallacy, encouraged by the situation of the schole, leisure and school, induces them to think that agents involved in action, in practice, in life, think, know and see as someone who has the leisure to think thinks, knows and sees.54 Bourdieu pinpoints a dualism between theoretical logic (what he often terms “logical logic”) based on consistency and monothetic thinking, and practical logic based on contradictions and polythetic thinking. This dualism

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explains why the theoretical logic of the observer misses the ambiguities and uncertainties of social life that exist from the point of view of the agent engaged in practice. The social observer constructs models that are consistent, but artificial. Their theoretical logic misses the “fuzziness” of practice and social life as experienced by the agent. Practical logic is based on a loss of rigor for the sake of the simplicity and generality needed for the practical accomplishment of varied interests in varied situations.55 The intellectual, through the employment of theoretical logic, unwittingly constructs a theoretical model which exists only through this unconscious construction and which excludes the practice and practical interest of the agent.56 The intellectual’s rationalized abstraction loses the practical view of the agent. The innovation of Bourdieu’s approach lies in his argument that the dualism between subjectivism and objectivism is an epistemological problem of intellectual abstraction produced by the synchronizing and totalizing worldview of intellectuals. The position of the intellectual as “spectator” instead of that of the “player” in social life is at the bottom of these apparent dualisms. By concentrating on a diachronic analysis which examines the interplay of agency and structure, and combining objectivist and subjectivist epistemologies within the unfolding of time—empirical history—he believes a more accurate and “scientific” understanding of agents’ practices can be reached. Bourdieu attempts to develop a socioanalysis that overcomes the limits of theoretical knowledge or rationality, by reflexively objectifying itself and its relation to the object under analysis.57 Intellectuals must reflexively examine their “detached” position and the habitus it produces, to overcome the limitations of this position. As part of this reflexivity, the researcher must expose not the individual unconscious of the researcher, but the epistemological unconscious of their discipline. Individual social researchers should constantly be reflexive and open to the criticisms of colleagues and adversaries who have a competitive interest in pointing out their assumptions and partial perspectives.58 By analyzing intellectual life as a field in which agents occupy positions which imbue them with particular dispositions and practices, Bourdieu wants to show the hidden logics of the “game” being played within the intellectual field, a field crucial to the wider politics of the symbolic system. 8. A Feminist Socioanalysis? Having so far outlined the concepts developed by Bourdieu, we now turn to the ways in which a growing number of feminist scholars have employed these concepts to develop a feminist socioanalysis. These scholars, like most other feminists using “malestream” theorists, attempt to apply the insights of Bourdieu’s work while being critical of its gender blindness. Each has argued that Bourdieu’s work provides concepts that contribute to feminism’s under-

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standing of gender oppression, but that his work is not directly applicable to gender relations without some degree of modification. The degree of such modification varies between writers. For Diane Reay59 and Beate Krais,60 the degree of modification is slight. Reay sees Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field and capital offering feminism a way of conceptualizing class subjectivity in a relevant and everyday sense: Feminist theory needs to reclaim social class, not in the male Marxist mode, but as intricate daily practices which, intertwined with race and gender, are inscribed on women’s bodies and played out in their social interactions.61 For Reay, Bourdieu’s work, despite its minimalist approach to gender, enables this sort of reclamation because it proposes a “multi-faceted subjectivity.” By seeing subjectivity as simultaneously produced within a variety of relatively autonomous fields, Bourdieu’s work highlights the different influences and processes shaping individuals. Their position in the economic field, and the dispositions resulting from it, should not be given omnipotent explanatory power, but neither should they be neglected. Similarly, Krais believes that Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus offers feminism productive tools for understanding gender relations. She argues that the concept of symbolic violence provides a viable solution to the question of why gender oppression and inequality continues to exist in advanced capitalist societies despite the formal and legal “freedom” of women. Using Bourdieu’s understanding of the dialectic between social structures and mental structures, of how any vision of the world is also a “division” of the world, she argues that the binary distinction between male and female pervades the symbolic system and is embodied by subjects: the differentiation of male and female shapes the body, the hexis, and the habits of the body; guides perception of one’s own body and of others’ bodies; and determines the agent’s relation to his or her body and its sensual perceptions and expressions, and therefore determines identity in a very fundamental, “bodily” sense. The body cannot be thought of if not as “male” or “female.” With this bodily point of reference and with its embodiment (in the real sense of the word), the division of labor between the genders is not only as deeply rooted in the social agent as is possible; it also seems to refer to nothing but “nature.” Krais argues that we should see the male-female differentiation as the doxic state within most societies, advanced capitalist societies included. The male-female differentiation is reproduced through the habitus of gendered bodies as modes of practice, perception, and anticipation. Only by disrupting

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such doxa, by introducing heterodoxy into gender relations, can new forms of embodiment and habitus be possible: The importance of symbolic aspects in gender domination suggests that a “socioanalysis” of the social practice and thereby a denaturalization of the division of labor between the genders is a conditio sine qua non for the liberation of women. 64 Carla Risseeuw and Leslie McCall’s work includes other critical applications of Bourdieu’s concepts to issues of gender. Risseeuw attempts empirical application of Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and power to the changing position of women in Sri Lanka..65 Using Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, doxa, and his emphasis upon temporality, she shows how Sri Lankan men and women have adopted particular strategies based on their sense of limits. Sri Lankan doxic perceptions and material/property conditions in which these agents live and move have created these limits. She finds Bourdieu’s highlighting of the prejudice and elitism involved in “false consciousness” arguments and his insistence that both dominated and dominant are invested with power especially useful.66 She is critical of his lack of analysis of “countercultures” among dominated groups which can be used as the basis of collective identity and articulate forms of normative and political resistance. For her, resistance, especially in relation to gender, needs further development within Bourdieu’s framework. Despite this, she argues that Bourdieu offers the insight that most women around the globe are not even in the position to enter “heterodoxy,” lacking the economic and conceptual resources to contest doxa. If feminism is to become a truly global force for gender transformation, it must reflexively question its doxa and engage in new ways with agents who have little scope for dialogue. Leslie McCall illustrates that Bourdieu’s work offers insight into the relation between subjectivism, objectivism, and the position of theory and intellectualism in social struggle. She believes that his work falls prey to a gender bias by seeing economic and cultural forces as the basis of the social position of agents. By attributing occupation and familial background as primary determinants of life-chance, he neglects gender itself as a form of capital. Criticizing Bourdieu’s refusal to push the logic of his concept of embodied cultural capital to its limit, McCall argues that all forms of capital are always gendered, transmitted along gender lines and opening—and closing— different strategies and paths for men and women.67 Women entering the sites or fields of explicit masculinities (such as the economy or academia) are forced into a conscious awareness of their “inferiority,” the hysteretic effect of their gendered habitus which is not at home in such an environment. Despite this gender blindness in Bourdieu’s oeuvre, McCall believes that his concepts remain valid and fruitful for the understanding of gender relations.

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They allow us the possibility to develop a feminist habitus, a habitus that relates to research and the social world in a specific emancipatory manner. Such a feminist habitus would involve a central concern with womens’ lives, and a reflexive self-consciousness which involves looking for “androcentric biases and other unthought assumptions.”68 McCall makes a claim for the site of feminist resistance in the arena of symbolic politics; a feminist habitus which is concerned with binary gender oppositions. She seeks to challenge them “either by eliminating them, bypassing them in favor of a diverse field of gendered dispositions, or reversing the valuations associated with them.”69 Like these feminist thinkers, we see Bourdieu’s work, if modified, as potentially useful for understanding gender relations. We agree with the general direction in which these feminists have moved, conceptualizing gender as habitus. Bourdieu’s work allows us to see gender as an embodied preconscious source of strategic and everyday practice formed in many fields (not just, as McCall argues, in the economic field). Gender is a form of doxa. Gender requires, as Krais points out, a form of socioanalysis in order to be disrupted and denaturalized. We suggest further modifications than those proposed by Reay, Krais, Risseeuw and McCall. We will clarify these modifications and what Bourdieu’s work offers for an analysis of gender relations by relating his work to care feminism. Bourdieu’s concepts allow us to reconceptualize care as a socially produced, judged practice, and avoid some unhelpful debates surrounding care feminism. In the spirit of McCall’s argument for a feminist habitus, we argue that any such feminist habitus must include an awareness of care and sharing to prevent it from falling into what we see as Bourdieu’s Hobbesian view of the world. We argue that although Bourdieu’s work does offer ways of reconceptualizing the problems facing care feminism, a feminist socioanalysis can also benefit from the insights of care feminism. 9. The Relationship between Feminist Socioanalysis and Care Feminism Care feminism has been the subject of many criticisms, the most important of which is that Carol Gilligan’s work contributes to the subordination of women by reinforcing stereotypical perceptions of women and their nurturing roles.70 Linda K. Kerber,71 Catherine G. Greeno and Eleanor E. Maccoby,72 Zella Luria,73 and Carol B. Stack74 all critique Gilligan on the basis that a separate morality for women is a backward political step, “Women have been trapped for generations by people’s willingness to accept their intuitions about the truth of gender stereotypes.”75 Related charges of essentialism in Gilligan’s work can be found in Lois McNay76 and Michele M. Moody-Adams.77 Others such as Susan J. Hekman have charged that the care perspective fails to acknowledge the complexity of power relations and the social construction of gender.78 Similar criticisms have been leveled at theories of care

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based on the mother-child bond. Sarah Lucia Hoagland, for example, uses the work of Nel Noddings79 to highlight some of the problems of a feminist ethic based on care.80 Hoagland argues that the fundamentally unequal relationships, which underlie some paradigms of care feminism, are ethically problematic. We need to challenge, not maintain the power in, for example, the teacher-student, parent-child, and therapist-client relationship. Instead of promoting dependent relationships that frame both the feminine and masculine in particular ways, Hoagland argues, “A truly radical ethics will challenge not only the masculine but also the feminine.”81 A feminist socioanalysis operating with the concepts of habitus and field, while not overcoming such criticisms completely, can guard against reductionist readings of care feminism. It does this in two ways. First, it sees care as a particular, learned practice, not an essential dimension of the female self. Second, it sees the devaluing of caring roles and the feminine as a product of symbolic violence and political struggle. The debate around the “essentialist” connotation of Gilligan’s work becomes unnecessary if we conceptualize care as a practice and disposition linked to a “caring habitus,” produced and reproduced within particular cultural and material conditions. By thinking about a caring habitus, we are better able to understand the temporal, relational, and embodied nature of caring which makes apparent how care arises and operates. Like any practice, care is an art, something that takes time, energy, and prioritization to “master.” As Risseeuw has noted, Bourdieu’s understanding of time is useful for thinking about the “gift” of care; the devoting of time to family members and others.82 We suggest that time is central to the process of learning to care, of internalizing the practice and the time needed to practice it. The concept of a “caring habitus” captures more precisely the learned mastery that allows it to become “natural,” or a “sixth sense,” taken-for-granted by women and men. This is not to see all women as caregivers or “masters” of the practice, but to emphasize that care is a process, operating in and over time. The practice of caring is full of failures as much as successes. Its embodied nature has visceral emotional effects. It appears “easy” and “natural,” to the self and the other, only after practice and negotiation. Care is not an essentialist given, but the result of an experiencing of the world from particular relational positions. This experiencing is simultaneously at the level of consciousness, emotionality, and corporeality. It involves negotiating how to live amongst limited options in the world in some form of meaningful way. Seeing care as a practice connected to a specific disposition provides a partial response, we believe, to criticisms (such as those made by Judy Auerbach83) which allege that care feminism fails adequately to address how women reach moral maturity. Critics accuse Gilligan of maintaining the dichotomy between justice and care, reproducing a link between women and caring, and subordinate roles. This epistemological (and political) dualism is not the product of care

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feminism, but of a series of “malestream” theoretical moral assumptions (most plainly articulated in Lawrence Kohlberg’s work84) to which Gilligan is responding. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence clarifies this. Care feminism should not be conceptualized as a statement of essentialist virtues or as based on immutable boundaries, but instead as a form of symbolic politics. Gilligan and others are struggling over the evaluation of care within the symbolic order and gender “field.” Care feminism is a form of political hermeneutics which contests the interpretations, readings, and understandings of morality which designate care, particularity, and attachment, to the level of the “immature.” Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence explains why care has the evaluative position it has within the gender classification system. If all practices, all events, are interpreted, scrutinized and classified within the symbolic realm, usually via those with power or symbolic capital, then the epistemological evaluation of care in traditional “malestream” thought as irrational or emotional, is an act of symbolic violence. Cultural and political forces, not biological ones, associate care, which is a social practice, with women. The subordination of care to justice is the result of its evaluation within a classificatory hierarchy that privileges masculine and essentialist worldviews. By incorporating the concept of symbolic violence within its lexicon to show how interpretations of care and morality are implicated in the symbolic order instead of the biological, care feminism would be strengthened. In this way, we should see care as a practice that is more or less encouraged, allowed, and legitimated within specific contexts. The moral and epistemological interpretation of these contexts is at issue within care feminism. Bourdieu’s analytical framework suggests ways in which we can rethink a further criticism raised against care feminism. Some critics have alleged that care feminism fails to give sufficient attention to factors such as class,85 race,86 sexuality,87 and culture. Elizabeth V. Spelman, for example, argues that care feminism fails to examine the complexity of situations in which women have dominated other women.88 As Reay’s work indicates, one of the main strengths of Bourdieu’s work is his stress upon the multifaceted nature of subjectivity.89 Bourdieu has consistently argued throughout his work that agents are always located in multiple fields simultaneously, and that this shapes their available options and strategies. His work indicates that we must contextualize the life-trajectory of any one subject in relation to the economic field, the symbolic/cultural field, the meta-field of power, and a host of “secondary” fields that shape a biography. Although, with McCall, we would question the labeling of the field of gender “secondary,”90 Bourdieu’s work does point towards the relational and positional nature of subjectivity. All agents develop a disposition directly related to their more or less shifting position within multiple fields over time.

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In addressing criticisms made against care feminism’s privileging some experiences, the self’s position in a field is always determined by its relationship to others. For example, within the gender field, a black woman may be located in a similar position to a white woman (as dominated), but she is always simultaneously located differently within the field of race because of the color of her skin. Within one field, their similar lack of possession of a phallus (the main asset/capital within the field of gender) relationally places them in a disempowered position. The “whiteness” of skin pigmentation (another form of capital) of one woman, places her in an entirely different position with relation to her black counterpart in the field of race relations. Unlike Bourdieu, we do not see any field as having primary determinant capability. A subject experiences all fields simultaneously at both the level of consciousness and habitus while the subject is located within them. We believe care feminism explicates an argument about the relational nature of care. As Joan Tronto,91 Charlene Haddock Seigfried,92 and M. Briton Lykes93 have illustrated, care could well be the product of internalizing the inferior side of a social relation. Tronto states, in a most “Bourdieuian” tone: Insofar as caring is a kind of attentiveness, it may be a reflection of a survival mechanism for women or others who are dealing with oppressive conditions, rather than a quality of intrinsic value on its own. Another way to understand caring is to see it as an ethic most appropriate for those in a subordinate social position.94 We can see care as a practice related to a disposition developed through the occupation of particular positions in social relations, most notably the dominated position. In this way, we can see it as a meaningful way of simultaneously constituting self, negotiating limiting conditions, and making sense of hurt, disappointment and suffering felt by self and others in such situations. A feminist socioanalytical use of Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, symbolic violence, and field offers a variety of ways to rethink some of the alleged problems with care feminism. By seeing women as occupying multiple fields simultaneously, developing particular dispositions/habitus, one of which is a practice of care, we can avoid the essentialist and privileging aspects of some readings of care feminism. By seeing care feminism as a necessary heterodoxic contestation of the doxa surrounding moral theory, we can reorient its usefulness as a political tool for combating gendered symbolic violence. 10. Limitations of Feminist Socioanalysis Our overview of an emergent “feminist socioanalysis” and its possibilities for dealing with some problems facing care feminist thought may give the impression that a modified application of Bourdieu’s work to gender relations

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could be an unambiguous step forward for gender politics. We do not believe this is the case. Although Bourdieu’s work has much potential for developing reflexive understandings of gender dynamics and oppression, especially in relation to the dialectic between subjective and objective forces, the role of time and doxa in social life, and the problems of the theoretical gaze, there remain some substantial problems which straightjacket any feminist theory too strongly reliant on his work. A feminist socioanalysis needs to embrace issues surrounding care and cooperative, loving relations in order to guard against Bourdieu’s understanding of culture and the philosophical anthropology associated with it. One of the main criticisms raised against Bourdieu’s socioanalysis, is that it “economizes” social life generally, and culture in particular.95 This claim is raised because, although Bourdieu sees economic practice as only one type of practice, all practices follow the basic logic of economics. In order to understand practice in its totality, Bourdieu argues that we should abandon the dichotomy between economic and non-economic realms. Bourdieu’s socioanalysis attempts: to carry out in full what economism does only partially, and to extend economic calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation.96 Bourdieu criticizes what he describes as an ethnocentric view of contemporary economics and sociology that believes that the logic of economics have only become significant in modernity.97 He argues that pre-capitalist practice always involved economic calculation, but that such calculation was not limited to the economic sphere. Symbolic interests and goods such as honor, information, and distinction, have always been subject to the logic of economics. Economic practice, as defined by modern economism, is only one part of a general theory of the economics of practice. This model of the “economy of practice” presents two main problems. The first of these problems is, as Edward LiPuma98 and Bridget Fowler99 have observed, that such a model does not show the ways in which some goods and objects become meaningful to agents. Within this economistic model, Bourdieu is not concerned with the content of the symbolic product; only with the act of transmission. He would presumably argue, instead, that “meaning” is achieved when a form of “capital” comes to be valued by an agent’s habitus, and can only be examined at the empirical level. Bourdieu realizes that the subjective and objective can only be reunified at the empirical level, which means including the subjective meaning. His socioanalysis only makes sense as an applied set of concepts, not as abstract ontology.

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This realization is the source of his constant concern to make sure that we apply his work, not merely theorize it. Our primary concern and criticism lies with the ways in which we perceive subjective meaning within this framework. This brings us to the second problem with Bourdieu’s model of the “economy of practice.” Bourdieu argues that the concepts of habitus and practical logic are meant to overcome the conception of Homo Economicus as a conscious, rational subject, by emphasizing that practice is “reasonable without being the product of a reasoned design, still less of a rational calculation.”100 Still, these concepts do not completely overcome the problem of economism in his work because two main characteristics exist whereby Homo Economicus, the philosophical anthropology at the heart of economism, can be identified as a species. One is that Homo Economicus is a conscious, rational subject, which Bourdieu overcomes with his emphasis upon the “unconscious” logic found in the habitus. The other is that Homo Economicus is motivated, because of scarcity, towards constant acquisition. Bourdieu’s “economy of practice” does not address the second characteristic, but instead appears to be based on it, a situation observed by Axel Honneth: As his mode of argument indicates, Bourdieu is guided by utilitarian motifs in overcoming structuralism. He proceeds from the assumption that symbolic constructions, which the anthropologist focuses in order to study the social order of tribal societies, should also be conceived as social activities performed from the point of view of utility maximization.101 Such a conception limits Bourdieu’s view of social reality (and the applicability of his concepts) by limiting his view of human beings and their practice. Why do we need symbolic goods and why do they become valued? According to Bourdieu’s socioanalysis, mainly because they are rare, and because they bring prestige, honor, distinction, and ultimately, power to those who monopolize and accumulate them. The meaning of such objects is political. Agents gain satisfaction from the triumph of accumulation. For Bourdieu meaning is always the meaning of power, the enhancement of “social being.”102 Despite his claims to the contrary, Bourdieu’s work necessarily assumes an ontological position through a particular philosophical anthropology. This philosophical anthropology sees the basic meaning of human life as the accumulation of diverse forms of symbolic capital. This is a “historical ontology,” in that the object/capital sought and accumulated changes from society to society, epoch to epoch; an ontology which shapes the ways in which Bourdieu applies his concepts, and to what areas of social life he applies them.103 This restricts his analysis by delineating what he considers as social reality. It limits Bourdieu’s view of human beings, their practice, and

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the social reality of which they are a part. Within this ontology, humans take the form of Homo Potestas—beings constantly striving for power and authority. The first problem with seeing this notion of “capital-accumulation” as the basis of meaning and motive in social life, is the definition of “value” as something which is “rare.” Both economic and symbolic goods have to be valued for us to seek them, but it does not logically follow, therefore, that only “rare” objects or states will be valued. For example, as care feminism has shown us, aspects of social life such as friendship, love, caring relations, or ethics, are not “rare” social objects in the sense that possession by some means that others will have them denied. Obviously, most social agents value them. Bourdieu responded to this criticism by arguing that love, compassion, and the like, are “symbolic capital.” After all, symbolic capital is capital not seen as such by agents.104 Perhaps, then, what is necessary in order to see the “truth” about friendship and compassion, is to break with the doxa of the social world, to employ a “radical doubt,” by seeing relations of care and friendship, not in their practical sense, but as “objects” to be “constructed” for analysis. It would then be possible to apply Bourdieu’s concepts to them and to recognize the misrecognition that masks them as a form of capital. We are not convinced that Bourdieu’s ontology of Homo Potestas allows us to adequately examine such relationships, as we do not believe that such relationships are solely about power and acquisition, although they obviously can be. As care feminism elucidates, the “economy of love” can be about gain, possession, and accumulation. Unlike other economies, the “economy of love” is also about giving. Love is as much about giving power as about seizing it. Bourdieu’s understanding of human beings does not account for the self-sacrifice, the self-affirmation, or the meaning involved in caring human relations. We believe there are some ethical concerns over analysing these sorts of relations. Why should we do it? Will it improve such relations, or merely open them up to exploitation? To imagine the first is difficult, but to imagine such an analysis increasing cynicism and manipulation in such relationships is easy. We must ask ethical questions about the consequences of what is constructed as an object of analysis before we do the analysis. The construction of caring relations as forms of capital is an excellent example of why this is the case. A second problem with Bourdieu’s reduction of human beings to Homo Potestas is that symbolic and material objects can be valued for reasons other than scarcity. They can be valued because they make sense of life, alleviate suffering, or make life worthwhile. The struggle for social being—for “symbolic life and death”—is not the only way in which society provides meaning. Is the accumulation of goods/capitals, both material and symbolic, all being human entails? Is it all that provides meaning to human life? We argue that relations of care or giving are also extremely important in making life mean-

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ingful. Not only does Bourdieu not appear to deem as vital the fact that society provides such relations, but his ontology excludes them as possibilities. Ironically, we best overcome such problems by turning to feminist insights. For example, care feminism shows patently that a philosophical anthropology such as Homo Potestas overlooks the dimensions of human life that involve giving, sharing, and altruism. Feminism has taught us that some things in life cannot, and should not, be seen as forms of “capital.” For this reason, a feminist socioanalysis remains viable, insightful, and useful, as long as the moral and theoretical insights of the heritage found in its prefix is not lost. 11. Conclusion This chapter has examined recent development of a feminist socioanalysis based on the work of Bourdieu. We have argued that Bourdieu’s work contains some useful concepts for meeting some of the criticisms made of some forms of feminism, in particular care feminism. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and symbolic violence offer feminism a sophisticated understanding of subjectivity and its simultaneous mental and corporeal internalization and production of social relations, including the gender regime. The conception of reflexivity promoted by feminist socioanalysis allows an understanding of the positional and dispositional nature of all feminist intellectual work, and the embodied and everyday character of gender structures. Such reflexivity attempts to ground all knowledge in particular contexts and to reveal and critically examine at a conscious level the taken for granted assumptions of the self. It also highlights the relational nature of reflexivity; that we can only truly attain reflexivity via dialogue with the other and their criticisms. Through this constant emphasis upon dialogic reflexivity a feminist socioanalysis and contemporary feminism in general can assure that the politically conservative labeling of feminism as authoritarian, rigid, and “politically correct,” remains far from the truth. IThe conomistic reductionism of culture and view of human beings as Homo Potestas limits Bourdieu’s work, a situation that can only be rectified by keeping in mind those issues central to care feminism, namely loving and caring relationships. We conclude that feminist socioanalysis is worth pursuing as a form of gender analysis and politics if these provisos are met.

NOTES 1. Leslie McCall, “Does Gender Fit?: Bourdieu, Feminism, and Conceptions of Social Order,” Theory and Society, 21:6 (1992), pp. 837–868; Beate Krais, “Gender and Symbolic Violence: Female Oppression in the Light of Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Social Practice,” in Pierre Bourdieu, Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, eds., Craig J Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1993),

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pp. 156–177; Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity,” in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993); Carla Risseeuw, “Bourdieu, Power and Resistance: Gender Transformation in Sri Lanka,” in Kathy Davis, Monique Lejenaar, and Jantine Oldersma, The Gender of Power (London: Sage Publications, 1991); Diane Reay, “Feminist Theory, Habitus, and Social Class: Disrupting Notions of Classlessness,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 20:2 (1997), pp, 225–233; and Lois McNay, “Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity,” Theory, Culture and Society, 16:1 (1999), pp. 95–117. 2. Pierre Bourdieu, “Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject,” Social Research, 34 (1967), pp. 162– 212; and In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans., Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1990). 3. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1990), p. 9. 4. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 60. 5. Pierre Bourdieu, “Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge,” Social Research, 35 (1968), pp. 681–706, esp. 691. 6. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, U.K.: University Press, 1977), p. 2. 7. Ibid., p. 96. 8. Ibid., p. 14. 9. Ibid., p. 21. 10. Ibid., p. 81. 11. Pierre Bourdieu and J. D. Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 122. 12. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 63. 13. Ibid., p. 11. 14. Ibid., pp. 62–63. 15. Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 126. 16. Bourdieu, “Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge,” p. 705. 17. Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 140. 18. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 94. 19. Bourdieu In Other Words, p. 190. 20. Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, pp. 96–97. 21. Ibid., p. 104. 22. Ibid., p. 76. 23. Ibid., p. 97. 24. Ibid., pp. 127–128. 25. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 194. 26. Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, trans., Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1993), p. 17. 27. Ibid., p. 17. 28. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in John G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 242. 29. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 128. 30. Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 119.

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31. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 118. 32. Ibid., p. 122. 33. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 128. 34. Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” in Michael F. D. Young, ed., Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education, trans., S. France (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971), p. 174. 35. Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 101. 36. Ibid., p. 136. 37. Bourdieu, “Men and Machines,” in K. Knorr-Cetina and A. Cicourel, eds., Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an integration of Micro- and Macrosociologies (Boston, Mass.: Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 315. 38. Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 127. 39. Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” p. 183. 40. Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 74. 41. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 25. 42. Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory, 12 (1994), pp. 1–18, esp. p. 15. 43. Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 167. 44. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed., John B. Thompson, trans., Gino Raymond, and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1991), p. 51. 45. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 135. 46. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 169. 47. Ibid., p. 165. 48. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 180. 49. Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 195. 50. Ibid., p. 214. 51. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 33. 52. Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, p. 43. 53. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 106. 54. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 112. 55. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, pp. 261–262. 56. Ibid., p. 11. 57. Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 70. 58. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 36. 59. Reay, “Feminist Theory, Habitus, and Social Class.” 60. Krais, “Gender and Symbolic Violence.” 61. Reay, “Feminist Theory, Habitus, and Social Class,” p. 231. 62. Ibid., p. 231. 63. Krais, “Gender and Symbolic Violence,” p. 161. 64. Ibid., p. 173 (emphasis added). 65. Risseeuw, “Bourdieu, Power and Resistance.” 66. Ibid., p. 174. 67. McCall, “Does Gender fit?” p. 846. 68. Ibid., p. 859. 69. Ibid., p. 857. 70. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

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71. Linda K. Kerber, “Some Cautionary Words for Historians,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 11:2 (1986), pp. 304–310 (This paper was originally presented at: On In a Different Voice: An Interdisciplinary Forum). 72. Catherine G. Greeno and Eleanor E. Maccoby, “How Different is the ‘Different Voice’,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 11:2 (1986), pp. 310–316 (This paper was originally presented at: On In a Different Voice: An Interdisciplinary Forum). 73. Zella Luria, “A Methodological Critique,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 11:2 (1986), pp. 316–321 (This paper was originally presented at: On In a Different Voice: An Interdisciplinary Forum). 74. Carol B. Stack, “The Culture of Gender: Women and Men of Color,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 11:2 (1986), pp. 321–324 (This paper was originally presented at: On In a Different Voice: An Interdisciplinary Forum). 75. Greeno and Maccoby, “How Different is the ‘Different Voice’,” p. 315. 76. McNay, “Gender, Habitus and the Field.” 77. Michele M. Moody-Adams, “Gender and the Complexity of Moral Voices,” in Claudia Card, Feminist Ethics (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1991). 78. Susan J. Hekman, “Moral Voices, Moral Selves: About Getting it Right in Moral Theory,” Human Studies, 16 (1993), pp. 143–162. 79. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984). 80. Sarah Lucia Hoagland, “Some Thoughts about Caring,” in Claudia Card, Feminist Ethics (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1991), pp. 246–263. 81. Ibid., p. 280. 82. Risseeuw, “Bourdieu, Power and Resistance: Gender Transformation in Sri Lanka,” p. 167. 83. Judy Auerbach, Linda Blum, Vicki Smith, and Christine Williams, “Commentary on Gilligan’s In a Different Voice,” Feminist Studies, 11:1 (Spring 1985), pp. 149–162, esp. 153. 84. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1981). 85. Reay, “Feminist Theory, Habitus, and Social Class.” 86. Uma Narayan, “Colonialism and Its Others: Considerations on Rights and Care Discourses,” Hypatia,10:2 (1995), pp. 133–140. 87. Claudia Card, ed., Feminist Ethics (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1991); and Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value (Palo Alto, Calif.: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1988). 88. Elizabeth V. Spelman, “The Virtue of Feeling and the Feeling of Virtue,” in Card, Feminist Ethics. 89. Reay, “Feminist Theory, Habitus, and Social Class.” 90. McCall, “Does Gender fit?” 91. Joan Tronto, “Women and Caring,” in Alison M. Jaggar and Susan Bordo, Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reductions of Being and Knowing (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 172—187. 92. Charlene Haddock Seigfried. “Pragmatism, Feminism and Sensitivity to Context,” in Mary M. Brabeck, ed., Who Cares? Theory, Research and Educational Implications of the Ethic of Care (New York: Praeger, 1989), pp. 64–83.

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93. M. Briton Lykes, “Gender and Individualistic vs. Collectivist Bases for Notions about Self’ Journal of Personality, 53:2 (1985), pp. 356–383. 94. Tronto, “Women and Caring,” p. 184. 95. Scott Lash, “Pierre Bourdieu: Cultural Economy and Social Change,” Bourdieu, Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives; and Axel Honneth, “The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms: Reflections on Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” Theory, Culture and Society, 3 (1986), pp. 55–66. 96. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 178. 97. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, pp. 112–113. 98. Edward LiPuma, “Culture and the Concept of Culture in a Theory of Practice,” in Bourdieu, Bourdieu.” 99. Bridget Fowler, “The Hegemonic Work of Art in the Age of Electronic Reproduction: An Assessment of Pierre Bourdieu,” Theory, Culture and Society, 11 (1994), pp. 129–154. 100. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 50. 101. Honneth, “The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms,” p. 56. 102. Pierre Bourdieu, “Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual Works,” in Bourdieu, p. 274. 103. Ibid., p. 273. 104. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 112.

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Eight PORNOGRAPHY AND POWER Narelle Lydeamore In the past, feminists have united in condemning pornography although they have differed in their assessment of its social significance and its effects on women. The emergence of anti-censorship, pro-pornography feminists is a relatively recent development. It reveals deep divisions within feminism. When we examine the reasons for this development, we uncover divergent perspectives on sexuality and power. We need to investigate the arguments for these views since the outcome of this debate will shape the future directions of feminist theory. In the first section of this paper, I consider the reasons for the emergence of this division between feminists over the issue of pornography. The second section will examine the concept of transgression that the self-styled “prosex” (i.e. anti-censorship) feminists use to validate their position. The third section will provide an analysis of power relations compatible with the prosex position. In the fourth section, I link this with Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s conception of master and slave morality. This suggests that the pro-sex arguments concerning pornography make the most sense when we adopt a conception of discursive power, such as that proposed by Nietzsche. In the final section, I argue that, despite a level of superficial appeal, such a conception of power should have no place in a feminist movement. “Pornography,” in this discussion, will refer only to mass produced, sexually explicit material that marketed specifically and solely for arousing sexual desire. I will not explore questions regarding the merits or dangers of sexually explicit art or literature here. In 1986, American Booksellers v. Hadnut, litigated in Indianapolis, challenged a bill proposed by Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in which they define, “documented harms pornography does as violations of equality rights.” The bill would have made pornography actionable as discrimination.1 The Federal Court struck down the Dworkin-MacKinnon Bill because it violated the first amendment principle of freedom of speech. The Supreme Court upheld this ruling. What makes Hadnut significant is that the Feminist Anti-censorship Taskforce (F.A.C.T.) played a key role in the court’s decision that the Bill constituted a violation of the equality rights of women.2 Hadnut was seen as a definitive victory for anti-censorship feminism at the time. At this point the anti-pornography feminists were forced to acknowledge the existence of an emerging group of anti-censorship feminist

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who were in favor of pornography. Before Hadnut, the focus of the pornography debate had been on the Millian arguments of liberty and harm in censorship. Most assumed that feminists all opposed the content of pornography, and the issue was how to deal with it. Post Hadnut, the debate is between those feminists who oppose pornography and those who support it. 1. The Feminist Divide over Pornography The focus of this paper will be on those feminists who view the pornography debate as one of central importance to the cause of feminism. In a sense both sides of the debate under examination can be characterized as “radical” in that sexual oppression is seen to be the main source of oppression for women within our society. Both sides of the pornography debate view pornography as being tied to the politics of sexuality and the politics of sexuality as underpinning the wider politics of gender. Rosemary Tong suggests that Radical Feminism has divided over the issue of sexuality and that two groups, which she refers to as Radical-Cultural and Radical-Libertarian, are emerging.3 RadicalLibertarian feminists, who often refer to themselves as “pro-sex,” are characterized by their rejection of any theoretical or legal attempt to restrict the free expression of sexuality in the media, and any morally driven attempt to stigmatize individuals’ chosen sexual behavior. They argue that the freedom of consenting equals to explore all aspects of sexuality is a primary right essential to the empowerment of women. Radical-Libertarian feminists view attempts to limit the pornographic industry as regressive and, ultimately, dangerous for women because they believe that in our society: Heterosexual as well as other sexual practices are characterized by repression. The norms of patriarchal bourgeois sexuality repress the sexual desires and pleasure of everyone by stigmatizing sexual minorities, thereby keeping the majority “pure” and under control.4 One of the strongest complaints against the anti-pornography feminists is that they refuse to acknowledge or validate the voices of those women who enjoy or “use” pornographic materials. When this objection is made, albeit infrequently, the suggestion that some women genuinely enjoy pornography, and are aroused by it, is either dismissed by anti-porn feminists as too rare to bother with, or put down to a form of bad faith or false consciousness. Those “few” women who do enjoy porn, or who choose to make a living from it, have been brainwashed by patriarchy so that they have become willing victims of its oppression. In this way, some critics have made women aroused by pornographic imagery feel guilty at best and stupid at worst. Radicallibertarian, or pro-sex, feminists argue that they are giving those women who

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have been silenced by the anti-pornography movement a voice with which to express themselves. Radical–Cultural feminists such as Dworkin and MacKinnon approach sexuality from a perspective different from the Radical-Libertarians. They emphasize its dangers for women. They claim that sexuality, as manifest within our society, is predicated on notions of inequality and domination. Heterosexuality has at its core misogyny and male sexual violence against women. On their view, homosexuality, extending beyond the bedroom, is the force generating and reinforcing sexual oppression throughout our society, and it does so by sexualizing inequality. (“Heterosexual” in this case does not carry the conventional meaning. It refers to any form of polarized sexual expression in straight or gay relationships.) Pornography defines sexuality as the erotization of the subordination of women. Sheila Jeffreys comments that pornography makes it apparent that, “Inequality [is] sexy and the sexiness of this inequality [is] the grease that oil[s] the machinery of male supremacy.”5 Radical-Cultural feminists actively repudiate any forms of sexual expression or sexual practices that reinforce power relations detrimental to women. They are anti-pornography. Critics often also regard them as “antisex,” because of their conception of sexuality as potentially dangerous for women. Radical-Cultural feminists reject this label. In Tong’s words, their aim is: [to] reclaim control over female sexuality by developing a concern with our own sexual priorities . . . that is more concern with intimacy and less with performance. The ideal sexual relationship is between fully consenting, equal partners who are emotionally involved and do not participate in polarized roles.6 Radical-Cultural feminists object to the eroticization of power difference perpetuated by pornography; not sex per se. Jeffreys states that, “heterosexuality as an institution is founded upon the ideology of ‘difference.’”7 Difference, seen as natural, is one of power. This assertion that sexuality is the institutionalization of power difference points to a different understanding or emphasis in the way the two kinds of feminists use the term “sexuality.” For the Radical-Cultural feminist who opposes pornography, sexuality is a social system of division and hierarchy. For the Radical-Libertarian feminists “sexuality” applies primarily to an individual’s experiences and desires. For these feminists, the emphasis is on the power and pleasure of the individuals’ experienced sexuality instead of the oppression and danger of the social structure of sexual difference. Closely connected to the issue of how feminists should conceptualize sexuality are questions regarding the nature of female sexuality, its difference from masculine sexuality, and the social causes and consequences of those differences. These issues are significant, but beyond the scope of this discussion.

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One central pro-sex argument is that pornography helps women discover their sexuality. In “Bad Girls: Women who Use Pornography,” Loretta Loach catalogues the responses of a wide range of women who openly admit that they enjoy pornography, and argues that it has been through their discovery of pornography that these women have gained sexual satisfaction and lost the guilt or nervousness that had affected their early sexual experiences. Pornography, she points out, not only provides basic biological and practical information but it stimulates desire in both women and men. From the pro-sex perspective anything that can help women explore their sexuality is of value.8 Pro-sex feminists, such as Susan Sontag and Caroline Vance, also applaud what they see as the instructive nature of pornography. They point to the stereotypes that pornography breaks in its depictions of women who actively enjoy and initiate sex. Much contemporary pornography reverses the age-old conception of women as asexual, passive creatures that put up with sex for the sake of their men-folk, but for whom the whole thing is quite embarrassing. The actively sexual woman frequently cast in dominatrix scenarios is the current staple. This, pro-sex feminists suggest, is potentially liberating for all women in that it allows them to view themselves as sexual creatures and to put aside any guilt or other negative feelings that constrained and limited their sexual initiations. In the introduction to her anthology Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Vance asks: are we purely victims, whose efforts must be directed at resisting male depredations in a patriarchal culture? Must our passion await expression for a safer time? When will that time come? Will any of us remember what her passion was? . . . when pleasure occupies a smaller and smaller public space and a more guilty private space, individuals do not become empowered; they are merely cut off from the source of their own strength and energy.9 This endorsement of pornography, while having some merit, is not a serious counter to the anti-porn feminist assertion that pornography is inherently dangerous. Anti-pornography feminists argue that while the re-appropriation of sexual imagery may allow some women to explore their sexuality, that reappropriation will be constrained, inevitably, by the patriarchal conception of sexuality within which the material is produced and consumed. Images are not value free, and in most cases, no amount of re-interpretation, deconstruction, or appropriation will separate them from the misogynistic values that generate them. To experience sexual liberation via such material is not liberation at all— there is more to freedom than an orgasm.10

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2. Transgression A popular objection raised by pro-sex feminists against the feminist anti-porn movement focuses on the anti-porn’s alignment with the religious Right. Nadine Strossen is one of the pro-porn theorists who suggest that this partnership does not stem only from convenience, the joining of forces in order to overcome the pornographic enemy, but stems from a similarly repressive conception of sexuality. The religious Right’s objection has always been to the immorality of pornography instead of its harm for women, and one could raise the objection that the anti-pornography feminists do not adhere to the same moral code. This appears to be an essential difference, yet the pro-sex feminists suggest that the condemnation amounts to much the same thing in each case. By presenting sex as something that should be feared and controlled, and something that women in particular should be protected from, anti-porn feminist are playing into the hands of those who would delineate good, monogamous, procreative sex from bad sex (all other forms), and they are doing so on moral grounds. Strossen argues that pornography’s, “subversive quality challenges the entire status quo, including social structures that inhibit women’s freedom.”11 Her position derives largely from what she terms the “political anxiety” and “moral concern” that pornography has generated. She notes, for example, the connection drawn by political figures such as Nixon between pornography and social anarchy.12 Her argument for the transgressive nature of pornography appears to depend upon this perceived connection being genuine, without any detailed analysis to convince us of that. What exactly is so intrinsically subversive about enjoying sex? The prosex feminists are not claiming that sexual acts are themselves inherently radical, but that sexuality can function as a catalyst for social change by empowering women from within. By reversing stereotypes such as female sexual passivity, pornography can serve a broader social function as it challenges traditional morality and social niceties. The religious Right’s objection has always been to the immorality of pornography in that it flagrantly reveals what should remain hidden and presents a “depraved” version of sexuality as promiscuous, hedonistic, and impersonal. The traditional religious conception of sexuality is that it exists solely for procreation within marriage, and should be contained within the private (and male controlled) sphere and not exploited for money or pleasure. Pro-sex feminists argue that flaunting these limiting and ultimately oppressive values will liberate and empower women. We can argue on these grounds that pornography is progressive: it flouts moral values that would construct women as housebound, asexual, and submissive to a dominant husband. It challenges conventional notions of good and bad and, in particular, it offers a conception of femininity completely removed from the passive “nice girl” image that has limited women for so long.

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Nor are pro-sex arguments for pornography limited to the “softer” genres of pornography. The emphasis on the disruption of social conventions and judgments mean that no such thing exists as good or bad pornography: all pornography can be satisfying and liberatory. Strossen suggests: just as sex itself has enormous power to break down individual and social boundaries, so speech about sex threatens all manner of accepted bounds; the more unconventional the sexual expression is, the more revolutionary its social and political implications become.13 This subversive quality, Strossen suggests, is the cause of social conservatives’ fears. For this reason, women should be supporting pornography. Feminists, she argues, should be in favor of anything that disrupts and challenges sexual conventions. Other pro-sex feminists, such as those represented in Caroline Vance’s anthology Pleasure and Danger, and in Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh’s Sex Exposed, also focus on this apparently subversive quality of pornography. These theorists argue strongly for the re-appraisal of pornography by feminists. They argue that pornography is a powerful tool women can use to subvert the social systems that oppress them.14 While pro-sex feminists such as Strossen do have an argument that pornography could destabilize sexual conventions and values, and though they may be right about the benefits of rocking the political boat, something fundamental appears to be missing from their argument concerning transgression. They make the leap from upsetting the moral sensibilities of politicians and priests to creating genuine social change with little or no explanation. The response may be that pornography’s power lies in its sexually liberating effect on consumers. We need to ask the question, how does an awakened sense of personal sexual awareness translate into behavior that disrupts existing social relations? While proponents of pornography, such as Strossen, frequently use the terms “transgression,” “subversion,” and “empowerment,” they have paid insufficient attention to the mechanics of such a transition. This is not to say that such an explanation does not exist: this section of the paper will offer a possible account of the operation of transgression as conceived by the pro-sex argument. Many of the anti-pornography critiques of the pro-sex arguments for the transgressive nature of pornography have focused on whether we can deem pornography “transgressive” in any sense at all. One initial critique of the prosex feminist arguments for pornography suggests that the belief that pornography is transgressive must be mistaken. A glance at the economic statistics relating to the consumption and production of pornography conflicts with the pro-sex feminists’ claims that pornography is socially unacceptable to any serious extent. It would be difficult to argue that society as a whole genuinely frowns on an industry that generates more money than the legitimate film and

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music industries combined. Instead of focusing on social disapproval, as Strossen tends to, the more sophisticated arguments presented by theorist such as Caroline Vance and Linda Williams focus on the notion of “transgressive” as meaning producing an experience of the reversal of the usual power roles existing in our culture. In pornography, we see the dominatrix instead of the sexually submissive women for example. Anti-porn theorists such as MacKinnon and Jeffreys argue that the content of pornography does not challenge the sexual stereotypes deeply entrenched in existing power relations. Its sexual explicitness might be new to some women but the message is still one of objectification, dominance and submission and humiliation. These feminists argue that pornography, having nothing liberating, revolutionary or transgressive about it, is the purest distillation of attitudes already current in society. To suggest that this is the first time society has cast women as sexual objects is inaccurate. The objectification of women within pornography is consistent with the objectification of women in all forms of media—it follows stereotyped plots that reflect the same non-egalitarian notions of gender and sexuality that are evident everywhere. The message of the anti-pornography feminists is that “sexually explicit” is not synonymous with “transgressive.” An obvious reply for the pro-sex feminists is that although pornography has been around in a myriad of easily accessible forms for decades, for women to indulge in it or act in pornography in positions of power is transgressive. Any traditionally male domain is transgressive when women appropriate and enjoy it. Loretta Loach explores the idea that pornography is transgressive in “Bad Girls: Women Who Use Pornography,” pointing to the increasing numbers of women who are investigating and enjoying the traditionally male oriented materials.14 What MacKinnon points out is that the one social message not transgressed by pornography is the only one worth transgressing—the sexualization of inequality. While some contemporary pornography may reverse settings and roles, the essential message it maintains is the message that patterns of dominance and submission form the basis for sexuality. The pornography industry has adopted a marketing strategy that attempts to convince women that they are engaging in something so bad as to be revolutionary whilst feeding them the same oppressive lies they have been raised on—but in an exciting new package. 3. A Parallel Division in Power Theory Arguments that pornography is transgressive require a closer examination. The apparent inadequacies of the arguments of “pro-sex” feminists do not mean that we can ignore this perspective. Images of the “post-feminist superwoman” that can use her sexuality as a weapon and get everything she wants,

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when she wants it, by her efforts saturate mass media. The Madonnas, Xenas, Spice Girls and Buffys offer an extremely seductive version of pro-sex feminism. The sexy, wealthy powerful woman who can access male privileges without having to sacrifice anything does not bear comparison with the version of female empowerment currently offered by the anti-pornography feminist movement. Emma Goldman’s comment, “If I can’t dance I don’t want your revolution” springs to mind when these two faces of feminism are discussed.15 The current proliferation of pro-sex images and heroines in our media suggests that something compelling about this new version of feminism exists. In order to understand the basis of the pro-sex position it will be necessary to take the discussion into the area of power. Just as two divergent perspectives on sexuality emerge in the debate between pro- and anti-pornography feminists, two different perspectives on power also exist. In her book Wittgenstein and Justice Hannah Pitkin formulates a distinction that has become quite influential in power theory between what she labels “power-over” and “power-to.”16 The “power-to” of human agents constitutes their ability to effect a change in their environment. “Power-over” involves the ability to control, to influence, or to dominate another agent. Power-to is not relational but power-over is a relationship between agents, or groups. It can take the form of one agent making another agent do something that he or she does not wish to do or preventing another agent from carrying out an action option that he or she would otherwise have adopted. The relevance of this distinction lies in the alignment of the power-over and power-to division with the division between those who emphasize sexuality as a social system as opposed to those who regard it as an individual experience. For the anti-pornography theorists the emphasis is on power-over; on patriarchy’s power over women’s lives. According to this perspective, women cannot have individual power-to until they deal with the social powerover issue. As pornography is central to the maintenance of this power-over, women will not be free or empowered while it still thrives. The pro-sex movement argues that pornography can empower women individually, giving them the power-to that can then enable them to escape from the social powerover that oppresses them. In this way, they argue, pornography can challenge the social oppression of women. If we are to either condemn pornography for its maintenance of negative social power, or vindicate it for its disruption of the same, then we need to have an understanding of what “social power” means to feminists on both sides of the debate. Thomas E. Wartenberg, in his book The Forms of Power, supplies an ontology of social power that will help to clarify the arguments of the pornography debate.17 The first type of power that he discusses is force. An act of force may be an act of physically making someone do something against his or her will—pushing an individual over a cliff for example. This expression of power, while realized in the actual incident, is also frequently linked to the

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second form—that of coercion. Coercion involves getting someone to do something by way of a threat of some description. “If you do not clean your room I will tan your hide” would be an example of a mother’s coercion of her child. In order to coerce, the dominant agent can use threat of force or a threat of withholding something valuable to the dominated agent. The Australian “Youth Work for the Dole” program implemented by the Howard government can be seen in terms of this form of coercion—if you do not perform “volunteer” work the government will withhold your living allowance. Force need not act as a direct threat to back up an act of coercion. Take the example of a school bully who demands lunch money from his or her classmates each day. If I have heard rumors that this bully beats up those who resist or complain to teachers, then the bully may exert power over me without personally threatening me with violence at all. These Mafia-style tactics guarantee dominance without much explicit force or menace: a point which will be of importance at a later stage of the discussion. Finally, Wartenberg discusses the power of influence. This involves the use of information, true or false, to affect an agent’s behavior. Influence need not be a negative form of power. For example, a warning from the weather service that storms might break during the day is likely to influence my plans. The role of influence in malignant power relationships is of concern here. An instance of dominative influence, “fulfils the interests of the dominant agent by having his power over a subordinate agent misrepresented.”18 This use of influence to distort or hide information includes some forms of ideology. While force and coercion function with the subordinate agents’ awareness of their situation, the danger is that they will find a way of resisting or rebelling against the dominant agent. In order for a dominant group or agent to maintain its systematic domination of another agent or group it must prevent the subordinates from fully realizing their position. If the subordinate agent can be made to feel that something is gained from the relationship, or better still, be kept unaware that domination is taking place at all, then they are far less likely to resist or challenge the relationship—they might even help to maintain it. Influence then is a purely discursive form of power that acts to stabilize negative power relationships by disguising or naturalizing the other types of power operating concurrently. Manipulative influence has the added danger of allowing the dominating agent to believe at some level that what they are doing is in the interest of all concerned. A boss operating in an area with high levels of unemployment may dominate employees by extracting long, hard hours with little remuneration but feel that he or she is doing a real service to the employees, and their community, by providing those jobs. This, in turn, further stabilizes and naturalizes the relationship. In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, MacKinnon argues that the oppression of women is structural, systematic, and based on the social con-

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struction of sexuality according to patriarchal values.19 Pornography, as the most overt and public expression of this form of sexuality, plays an integral role in the maintenance of women’s oppression. In order to understand MacKinnon’s position on pornography we must examine her theory of social power and domination. Wartenberg’s tripartite account of social power is useful here. We can argue that in MacKinnon’s theory of social power, coercion, supported by force, creates a structure of social oppression based on sexuality maintained by the discursive power of influence. Pornographic material acts as a fundamental part of this discursive influence. By sexuality MacKinnon means sexualized inequality—the construction of gender/sex in such a way that establishes a hierarchy according to sexual difference with men (or masculinity) occupying the dominant position and requiring that women (or femininity) occupy the submissive, subordinate role. According to MacKinnon’s theory of patriarchy, men obtain the benefits of female subordination by ensuring that patriarchy regulates female access to social goods. Coercion may take two forms: that of threatened force and the threat of withholding benefits or necessities of life. Domestic violence is a prime example of the use of force or the threat of force to maintain male power within the home. In The Female Fear Margaret Gordon and Stephanie Riger explore the consequences for women’s role in society that our well-founded fear of rape raises.20 Their analysis explores how even the covert threat of sexual abuse modifies women’s behavior and limits their options. Fear of male violence if women do not behave in a prescribed manner secures female servitude and submission in one form or another. This is an unambiguous example of coercion based on the threat of force. Coercion based on the withholding of benefits is not as easy to identify, but this does not mean it is non-existent. Still a wide range of economic and social needs and benefits can be withheld from women depending on their social context, age, race, and class. The progress that feminism has made in, for instance, establishing financial independence for many women in the developed world has meant that this aspect of coercion is possibly less successful and for this reason, the power of influence must operate even more effectively to mask the operation of coercion. According to this conception of social power, influence operates to hide the extent and nature of unequal relations of social power. In the case of patriarchy, ideology achieves this in two ways. It can attempt to naturalize the lack of balance—life is just this way. The implication is that the differences between men and women necessitate a set of behaviors and social organization.21 Normalization of male lust by pornography is an excellent example. Images of women as sex objects in advertising, movies, situational comedies—even women’s magazines—convey the idea that for men to objectify women is natural and healthy.

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Influence can also operate where the subordinate party is convinced that they are consenting parties, benefiting from the power relationships that oppress them. In this way, a dominant party can enlist the help of the subordinate agents to maintain a power imbalance. This aspect of influence is of great importance to MacKinnon’s criticism of the pro-sex feminist movement. MacKinnon asserts, for example, that patriarchal ideology has indoctrinated women who work in the sex industry and claim to enjoy their chosen occupation. She asserts that patriarchy exploits these women as sex objects and manipulates them into an acceptance of the arrangement. The crucial question of the role played by influence, or discursive manipulation in the maintenance of social power separates pro-sex and anti-porn theorists. Coercion, according to the MacKinnon perspective, is the primary exercise of power that establishes the unequal relations between the sexes, while influence reinforces and stabilizes the structure. An alternative conception of social power, derived from the work of Nietzsche, fits well with prosex feminism. This account places the emphasis almost entirely on discursive manipulation instead of coercion as the source of social power-over. 4. Nietzsche and the Pro-Sex Feminists In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche challenged the usual conceptions of the foundations of morality.22 By contrasting different moral codes and historical conceptions of morality he explores the socially constructed nature of morality and in the process deals with the relationship between morality and power in a way especially relevant to our discussion. The distinction between master morality and slave morality forms the basis for Nietzsche’s discussion of social and individual power. According to Nietzsche, master morality is borne out of the delight and self-affirmation of the ruling classes’ position of power. “Good” and “bad” refer to that which aids in an individual’s will to power and that which does not aid in the will to power. What he calls “Slave Morality” is borne out of the resentment of the lower class for those with power. This distinction between good and evil has “good” referring to those practices which best serve the “herd” and “evil” those Nietzsche identifies with the practices of the “noble” individual. According to Nietzsche, the values of slave mentality form the basis of social power. Sanctioned morality becomes, in this way, “powers over” the individual determining what they are and are not supposed to do. Social power is, therefore, discursive. The role of influence, under the Nietzschean conception of power, is to not only maintain and naturalize oppressive social control as in MacKinnon’s conceptualization. For Nietzsche, ideological discourse equates to social power or “power over.” The hold that slave morality, or power-over, has is constituted via discourse, so that an individual or group can, as Wartenberg puts it, “come to think of itself in terms created by the

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perspective of another group without realizing it.”23 In this way a discursive network of imperatives and judgments are established which limit and oppress the individual. Nietzsche believed that the only escape from the oppression of this discursive power-over lies in the role of individual transgression. We must challenge and invert the constructed order and established values of society. If “evil” refers to the practices of the strong, then we should embrace those values formerly perceived as “evil.” Principles accepted as “good” which have been defined according to the values of the herd, operate at the expense of individual freedom and power-to. The development of individual powers requires a violation of “order.” The “will to power,” or “power-to,” is the only way to escape from the discursive “power-over” that society constructs. A conception of discursively constructed social power of this Nietzschean variety can provide a compelling account of the transgressive nature of pornography and so suggest a foundation for the pro-sex position. The pro-sex defense of pornography often argues for a connection between the established social order and religiously derived morality. For Nietzsche this connection is essential, as the religious justification gives slave-morality its influential/discursive hold. The judgments and ideals sanctioned by this morality are those designed to keep the herd under control. They are, therefore, weak, and we ought to reject and reverse them. In the case of pro-sex arguments for pornography, we must subvert the sexual stereotypes and conventions in order for women to free themselves from social power-over. Pornography can help women to break free of the discursive control of slavemorality by encouraging their sexual empowerment and deviance: [I]f social convention, backed by religion and law, confines sexuality to the heterosexual, monogamous, marital, familiar, and reproductive, then the ambisexual, promiscuous, adulterous, selfish, and gratificationcentered world of pornography is a charter of sexual revolution that is potentially liberating rather than confining for women.24 Obviously, a reading of Nietzsche can help illuminate the pro-sex conception of pornography as transgressive. His theorized counterpart to slavemorality, the noble or master-morality is also useful in an investigation of the pro-sex position. We might model the pro-sex emphasis on the significance of transgression of accepted social morals and prescriptions on Nietzsche’s master-morality. Those finding themselves in a subordinate position must reject their internalized version of reality and morality and recognize their own desires. To focus on the evils of oppression is, by this standard, to remain trapped with a slave-morality borne out of a preoccupation with powerover. This assertion parallels the pro-sex movement’s criticism of

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MacKinnon that suggests she is making women “eternal victims” instead of empowered individuals. For Nietzsche, the difference between the strong or noble individual and the weak individual or group is that those who allow themselves to be dominated are weak, while those who succeed in defining themselves by means of “triumphant self-affirmation” are the masters. The pro-sex feminists choose to focus on female empowerment, the power-to define ourselves, the power-to realize our desires and the power-to rise above the repressive conceptions of morality that have tied women down for so long. By transgressing against the version of morality and femininity historically used to oppress women, prosex feminists could actively claim the master mentality that will allow them to reconfigure power relationships. If the discourse of the ruling group creates social power, then we must upturn existing social values, arguments, meanings, and judgments. If they were designed to keep women weak and oppressed then to disrupt and reverse them should result in liberation and strength. We might use pornography as a tool for transgression and liberation by helping to enfranchise women sexually. 5. A Critique of the Nietzschean Conception of Social Power Nietzsche holds that the way to obtain freedom and the “noble” way of life is to eliminate the “lies” used by those (the priests) who, lacking true strength, seek to repress the “noble” minority by indoctrinating them with a “herd mentality.” The way in which the “herd” exerts its influence is to construct a version of reality that discriminates against genuinely “noble” values: this is the essence of discursive power. The ideal Nietzschean society, as Wartenberg points out, is one that has managed to free itself from this discursive social control, the lies of ideology, and has replaced it with pure force, where: [T]he strong are those who are able to do what they choose and who can simply overcome the weak when they wish. The weak are objects to be used by the strong, or else pitied for their lack of strength. In cases where they interfere with the actions of the strong, they are simply crushed.25 For Nietzsche the power of the individual to assert him or herself and challenge social control via transgression should overcome the power exerted by ideology. Such a thesis sounds, at first reading, amenable to a broad Liberal political perspective on the value of freedom. We need to ask the question whether the we can valorize power of “the noble individual” without repressing the freedom of the mass of other individuals. Nietzsche’s theory of power entails far more than just an emphasis on individual strength, an emphasis that few feminists would object to. The other side of his theory is that it asserts that not all people have the potential to wield power. Nietzsche endorses the

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idea that the herd will always remain the herd and what is at stake is who rules; those with the herd’s values based on ideological lies, or those with “noble” values of self-empowerment and individual liberty. This morality rejects all of the ethical ideals embraced by feminists, including justice, equality, ideals of caring, sympathy, and empathy. It opposes claims of feminists who argue that the central values of a feminist ethics should be protection of the vulnerable and care for those in need,26 and is at odds with views of feminists who argue that social justice demands recognition of the rights and needs of those who are often ignored, such as the disabled.27 The similarity of many of Nietzsche’s views to the ideals of pro-sex feminists does not necessarily mean that those feminists are committed to the repression of the weak. On the other hand, an emphasis on the role of individual rights and empowerment as the means by which social power will be broken assumes a definition of social power, which at minimum parallels that of Nietzsche. Pro-sex feminists then, run the risk—by ignoring the limitations of individual power—of effectively (although not consciously) promoting a twotier revolution; freeing a minority at the expense of the majority. For the super-woman, sexual transgression, fueled by pornography, may very well spark a form of empowerment. The woman of “the herd,” who is unable to achieve self-empowerment, and unable to break the discursive hold, is ignored. Prosex feminists who base their arguments on a Nietzschean paradigm need not endorse this implication or even recognize it. We can cite some examples, such as the political correctness debate, to illustrate how such a situation can arise from the pro-sex conception of power. The similarities between some of the recent attacks made on “political correctness” by pro-sex feminist and Nietzsche’s disgust with “modern thinking” are interesting. Muriel Dimen, in a paper entitled “Politically Correct? Politically Incorrect?” raises the question, “Why [do] . . . people want to say and do politically correct things?” Dimen gives the response: there are irrational forces which motivate political correctness, springing, for example, from the fear of separateness that makes conformity compelling . . . it plays on the seductiveness of accustomed ways of living, the attractiveness of orthodoxy. Its social armoring can lead the person away from self-knowing authenticity.28 Instead of observing that what is called, dismissively, political correctness began as a reaction to a discriminatory and limiting “orthodoxy,” and that it continues to challenge such discriminatory attitudes, Dimen’s comments appear to imply that people are uniformly treating each other with too much “respect,” and that we need to get offensive again in order to gain some sort of “authenticity.” This criticism parallels Nietzsche’s discussions of the “herd mentality,” where he asserts that “modern Socialistic thought” produces

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a “degenerative, waning sort of man” who needs to be given rules and finds comfort in following the herd because he is too weak to stand as an individual and define his personal path.29 Nietzsche is referring to the political correctness of “modern thought” that was suggesting that we should take better care of those less fortunate than ourselves. His objection that those who cannot stand up for themselves deserve to be trampled. To help them, which is to act correctly, weakens society. Some pro-sex feminists suggest that if we keep within the restrictive boundaries of political correctness women will not learn to stand up for themselves and men will continue to see them as weak. To accept Nietzsche’s line of thought involves ignoring the implications of his theory. He is not arguing that society will be weakened if individuals do not learn to fight for themselves. His point is that most people will always be weak, and that the strong need to cast aside the weak so that the strong can succeed. This epitomizes survival of the fittest. Political correctness, with its emphasis on community concern and equality, stands in direct opposition to the Nietzschean will to power. The Nietzschean account of discourse and influence, as the source of social power cannot adequately explain the concrete nature of sexual oppression. It ignores the systematic use of force and the role of coercion within our society. A woman may be empowered by her sexuality, and improve her life considerably in the process, but she will still face many forms of oppression. Discursive manipulation plays a crucial role in the oppression of women, but it is secondary to the construction of inequality forged by force and coercion. Pornography does not challenge any concrete form of oppression: it operates as a discursive mask hiding and maintaining the oppressive operation of coercion and force. The Neo-Nietzschean conception of power is also dangerous in that it diverts attention away from challenging social structures. By focusing on individual empowerment at the expense of change to structures this conception of power leaves the organization and politics of our society intact. It focuses on individual empowerment at the expense of real social change. The pro-sex theoretical alliance with Nietzschean conceptions of power could also result in a loss of the ground that feminists have gained. In the context of pornography and sexuality, the pro-sex position confirms and reinforces the patriarchal values of dominance/submission by eroticizing them. The individualistic Nietzschean paradigm operates by offering power to a few at the expense of the “masses.” A pornographically driven sexual revolution is likely to benefit only a select group of women and to be (at best) irrelevant to those who are socially disadvantaged.

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Divisions that have emerged within the feminist ranks concerning the issue of pornography and sexuality reflect a fundamental difference in the way that the two groups conceive of social power. The anti-pornography movement insists that the version of sexuality propagated by pornography is inherently dangerous and oppressive due to its predication on the eroticization of inequality. On the other side, the pro-pornography, pro-sex feminists insist that pornography empowers women by allowing them to transgress social boundaries. The arguments presented by the two sides arise from differing conceptions of sexuality and have their source in extremely different conceptions of social power. While the anti-pornography arguments, articulated most thoroughly by Catharine MacKinnon, depend on a conception of power as coercion stabilized by ideology, the pro-sex arguments have a very different angle. The emphasis on transgression, re-interpretation, and individual empowerment based on pleasure and self-definition has resonances with a Nietzschean conception of power as discursively constructed. The debate between these two may affect the future of feminism in a profound way if the pro-sex conception of power is used to undermine feminist attempts to alter the social structures that lead to sexism. The anti-pornography position, which argues that true female empowerment, (“power to”), can only be obtained by destroying the social “powerover,” may have flaws and inadequacies but provides the beginning of a systematic account of sexual oppression. If this anti-pornography movement wishes to maintain their ground, let alone make any progress with the next generation of feminists, they must acknowledge the seductive nature of the pro-sex theory and provide a more thoroughgoing critique of the pro-sex position than has been offered to date. Accusations of false consciousness are no longer adequate. The theoretical foundations of the pro-sex movement require a more serious investigation. The alliance with a Nietzschean paradigm of power is inadequate, misleading, and potentially regressive for feminism.

NOTES 1. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (London: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 65. 2. Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography (New York: Scribner 1995), p. 80; and MacKinnon, Only Words, pp. 65–69. 3. Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought (St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen and Unwin, 1998), p. 63. 4. Ibid., p. 63. 5. Sheila Jeffreys, “Pornography” in Elizabeth Frazer, Jennifer Hornsby, and Sabina Lovibond, eds., Ethics: A Feminist Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 462.

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6. Tong, Feminist Thought, p. 63. 7. Jeffreys, “Pornography,” p. 471. 8. Loretta Loach, “Bad Girls: Women Who Use Pornography,” in Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 326–334. 9. Caroline S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston, Mass.: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 7. 10. Jeffreys, “Pornography,” p. 476. 11. Strossen, Defending Pornography, p. 176. 12. Ibid., p. 177. 13. Ibid., p. 176. 14. Caroline S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston, Mass.: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); and Segal and McIntosh Sex Exposed. 15. Loach, “Bad Girls: Women Who Use Pornography.” 16. Hannah Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice. (Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1972). 17. Thomas E. Wartenberg, The Forms of Power (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1990). 18. Ibid., p. 104. 19. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State: Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 20. Margaret Gordon and Stephanie Riger, eds., The Female Fear (New York: Macmillan, 1989). 21. Steven Goldberg, The Inevitability of Patriarchy. (London: Temple Smith, 1977). 22. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed., Douglas Smith (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1997). 23. Wartenberg, The Forms of Power, p. 132. 24. Strossen, Defending Pornography, p. 174; quoting Sullivan 25. Wartenberg, The Forms of Power, p. 134. 26. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984). 27. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). 28. Muriel Dimen, “Politically Correct? Politically Incorrect?” in Caroline S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston, Mass.: Mass. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 141. 29. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 64.

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Nine SPLITTING THE DIFFERENCE: BETWEEN YOUNG AND FRASER ON IDENTITY POLITICS Marguerite La Caze 1. Introduction Arising from radical movements in the 1960s and 1970s, identity politics, in which groups affirm their identity, whether that be of a class, sex, or ethnicity, has come to the forefront of the political scene in the first decade of this century. Out of it has come the feminist politics of difference, founded on the idea that we should recognize, celebrate, and appreciate the differences between social groups, especially women and men. Other feminist politics, which refuse to recognize and deal with such differences, face some unfortunate consequences. Between feminists who adopt different political theories, such as liberalism, communitarianism, socialism, or a politics of difference, there can sometimes be substantial agreement about a concrete political goal, such as political representation for women. Nevertheless, there can be very different ways of justifying and achieving that goal. In this paper, I will show how a politics of difference, in particular that of Iris Marion Young, can give a much more robust justification for feminist goals than other political philosophies, especially Liberalism. Nonetheless, Nancy Fraser has made several cogent criticisms of Young’s conception of identity politics; I will also address these, revealing how the politics of difference can be “split” into different differences. 2. Justice and the Politics of Difference The feminist politics put forward by Iris Marion Young in Justice and the Politics of Difference is able to articulate and recognize the experiences and position of women and the requirements for change in a way that does not imply the assimilation of women to men. Although she is quite concerned with women as a group, she believes that analysis of, and action against the oppression of women as a group needs the same response as to the oppression of other groups. Her theory is an interesting and significant one that argues for us to hear diverse voices and to take them seriously. The aim of her theory is selfdevelopment and self-determination for different groups. Justice, as Young

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understands it, is overcoming domination and oppression. She advocates a political philosophy that incorporates difference through a principle of group differentiation and group-differentiated policies. This argument for the recognition of difference takes place against the background of an acceptance of the equal worth of all people, and with the aim of social equality as equal participation and inclusion in institutions. Young is careful to define groups not in terms of essential natures or special interests, but instead in terms of differences, “as the product of social processes.”1 For her: A social group is a collective of people who have affinity with one another because of a set of practices or way of life; they differentiate themselves from or are differentiated by at least one other group according to these cultural forms.2 Diversity instead of opposition forms the basis for relations between groups, and affinities, not a set of shared characteristics, form the basis for relations within groups.3 If we accept that some people belong to a group we do not have to infer that they share no similarities with members of other social groups. Young’s concern is with oppressed groups instead of political or interest groups. For example, feminists do not form a social group in Young’s sense, but women do. In a more recent paper, Young argues for a refinement of her understanding of women as a group. She distinguishes between a group and a series, thinking of a group as a more self-conscious and active formation and a series as structurally formed regardless of the identification of the members as members of a group.4 The main idea is that some oppressed groups or series should receive different or special treatment in some circumstances, by comparison with the dominant group. Young defines oppression as, “the institutional constraint on self development.” Domination is one constraint on self-determination, and may exist without oppression. For her, oppression is a kind of “cluster” concept with five “faces”: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Oppressed groups may confront any or all of these forms of oppression. Young argues that women face exploitation of their labor, nurturing, and sexual energies by men. Women experience powerlessness. Cultural imperialism takes the form of marking women’s difference from men as deviance, and women have reason to fear violence in the form of rape and sexual assault. Women do not experience marginalization as a group, but single mothers do.5 This concept of oppression allows for differences within and between groups, and for the interaction of different forms and degrees of oppression. Young’s position is a gynocentric, or women-centered one, in that she argues women’s history and culture should be celebrated, not marginalized,

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whether that culture is thought to be based on biology or social construction. Gynocentrism involves an assertion of the specificity and positive nature of women’s experiences and values, instead of an acceptance of an ideal of assimilation to men. Gynocentrism has several aspects: first, a celebration of women’s traditional crafts, history, myths, and music. Second is the development of autonomous women’s institutions and services, such as health centers, rape crisis centers, and shelters. Finally is a valuation of the “caring, nurturing, and cooperative approach to social relations . . . found associated with women’s socialization.”6 This position does not entail ignoring differences between women, or expecting women to conform to one particular ideal. Within this view, we can take feminist work on differences in psychology and moral reasoning seriously in a way that it cannot based on other theories. Young’s position differs from a conservative position on differences between men and women because it does not privilege men and because it does not tie differences between men and women to traditional or even particular social roles. Gynocentrism is opposed to both conservative assimilationist politics (in which proponents expect women to become more like men) and more nuanced forms of humanism. Some humanists argue that their position does not entail that women should become like men. They argue that their ideal would have institutions and behaviors be altered to become truly neutral in order to avoid bias. Susan Moller Okin, for example, says that, “Major transformations are necessary for women to be included as equals in any formerly patriarchal theory or practice.” Although Young believes this ideal is better than a conformist ideal of assimilation, she argues that it still holds that we can never regard group differences as positive. In her view, ignoring group differences has oppressive effects, given that differences exist in speech, lifestyle, interests, behavior, and outlook. First, under the assimilationist ideal, any difference from the supposedly neutral standard will be constructed as a disadvantage or disability. Second, positing a neutral standard, which is the standard of the dominant group, means that that group does not acknowledge its specificity. Finally, the construction of difference as disability makes it likely that oppressed groups will internalize this denigration. Differences, already operating in these ways, means that recognizing differences cannot make things worse, and will make things better. Her three main examples of special rights based on relevant differences between groups are pregnancy and birthing rights for women, bilingualbicultural rights for people whose first language is different from an official language, and Native American rights. She also argues that oppressed social groups should have guaranteed political representation. I will focus on Young’s recognition of difference and the question of political representation for women.

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Most feminists would accept that in the present state of things there are differences in moral reasoning between women and men and some differences of a biological and psychological sort. What feminists differ on is how important they think the differences are, and what they think we should do about them.8 One feminist response, such as that of Shulamith Firestone, is to say that these differences are not morally relevant, and that we should eliminate or ignore them.9 This response can take many forms. The most influential version is found in liberal feminism. For example, Susan Moller Okin sees the origin of the differences in moral standpoint and reasoning between women and men as the differing assignments of duties within the family. She says that women, having been responsible for housework and child rearing, have developed different moral concerns than men. If men participated more fully in these activities, they would come to share women’s moral concerns. Correspondingly, Okin argues that with women’s greater participation in what society has considered male preserves, women would take on some of the characteristics of male psychological and moral development. The result would be a gender-free society (a society without institutionalized sexism) with, “conceptions of relations between self and others that . . . would . . . be more or less evenly shared by members of both sexes.”10 She thinks that we can achieve this result by taking an impartial standpoint on how we should organize society. Young shows that there are problems with the liberal model of an impartial or neutral standpoint for decision making. This model assumes that we can assume the point of view of the other.11 She thinks that the ideal of impartiality is Utopian because no one can, “adopt a point of view that is completely impersonal and dispassionate, completely separated from any particular context and commitments.”12 If one takes this approach, what happens in practice is that the more powerful groups and individuals have their interests served because they are in a better position to press their claims. Under this model, we can only regard differences as deviations from the norm. The differences act only to disadvantage women and other oppressed groups. Taking differences as positive and constructing institutions around that idea is the way to overcome this problem. It does not commit one to arguing that these differences are somehow natural, or essential. Feminist political philosophy based on group differences is also committed to basic changes in institutions. Young writes, “These changes must include group representation in policy making and an elimination of the hierarchy of rewards that forces everyone to compete for scarce positions at the top.”13 One fundamental aspect of Young’s proposal for political organization is what she calls a dual system of rights; a general kind of right involving rights that are the same for everyone; and a specific kind of right involving

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rights and policies that apply to particular groups.14 The general rights are basic civil and political rights. For example, everyone is entitled to equal pay for equal work. Not everyone is entitled to leave from work to have a child. Liberalism rules out such considerations because ignoring all kinds of difference, including sexual difference, and focusing on non-discrimination forms its basis. Young’s position differs from communitarianism in key ways. First, communitarianism does not have a commitment to basic rights; a problem that liberal feminists have pointed out.15 Second, feminist communitarianism is much more likely to promote traditional social roles that do not celebrate women’s specificity. As Young argues, the ideal of community, based on a common culture, often operates to exclude people perceived as different. The idea of non-discrimination means that any women’s rights must be gender-neutral. In the next section I compare Young’s justification of guaranteed political representation for women and rights to maternity leave with that of liberal feminism, to show that a politics of difference can give these rights a stronger basis. 4. Pregnancy and Political Representation The two issues of political representation and maternity leave share an interesting connection in that how one understands pregnancy has a significant effect on the kind of arguments one gives for political representation. A comparison of Young’s conceptualization of pregnancy with how liberal feminism conceives it shows how she is able to accept the importance of having children in women’s lives. She does not present pregnancy as a disadvantage to women but as a very important contribution to society and as an enriching experience for women. This is a good example of the way in which the ideal of assimilation constructs any difference as deviance. The rights she has in mind for women are leave for childbirth and job security, but she does not base these rights on the notion of disability. She shows how we can understand the place of pregnancy and the upbringing of children in terms that do not regard it as merely a burden or something that women will overcome in the future. Many feminists agree that women should have political representation in institutions, especially in parliament. Looking at previous attempts, we see that justifying this view within the terms of liberal theory is quite difficult. In The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought, Karen Green gives one of the better liberal arguments for women’s representation. She goes back to the roots of liberalism and feminism, to discover in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft a liberalism that accommodates feeling and sympathy. Green’s book is interesting because she responds to many of the major criticisms of liberal feminism. Her approach is to accept that liberalism (in

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some of its guises) makes false assumptions about human nature but goes on to argue that these are not a necessary concomitant of liberalism.16 As observed by Green, one of the interesting details of Wollstonecraft’s views is that she advocates the political representation of women as a group. In the Vindication of the Rights of Woman she states, “I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.”17 Wollstonecraft is careful to add that such a change should only occur within the context of representation for working people. Green endorses this goal, yet we identify several significant flaws in her argument for the guaranteed representation of women. First, she takes as her basis the idea that women are at a disadvantage because of their responsibility for childcare. She interprets Wollstonecraft as presenting the view that the state should protect the weak, or disadvantaged. Green says that political representation can be justified because women’s duties of childcare put them at a disadvantage in free competition, and we can overcome this can only by guaranteed representation in “state apparatuses.” This argument is at odds with another central goal. In Green’s view, Wollstonecraft would also welcome the idea of shared parenting. Yet, if Wollstonecraft’s views, and liberalism generally, are supposed to give us a justification for shared parenting, we can hardly argue at the same time that women are disadvantaged through their greater childcare duties. One may be able to argue this at first, but once more men started to share parenting, then it would no longer be a strong argument. A possible response to this point would be that we would need to make special guarantees for women’s political representation until women and men share parenting, and then equal representation should occur automatically. This is being too sanguine about possible changes in society—it posits an unlikely equilibrium where we no longer have to be concerned about the representation of women and other oppressed groups. Such equilibrium appears improbable in the near future, and suggests an element of Utopianism in the liberal view at this point. If childcare is still to be the responsibility of the parents in a nuclear family, childcare is likely to fall disproportionately on one partner, so differences in life situation would remain. It also fails to consider single-parent families. It means that women’s political representation can be justified only if women’s having to rear children puts them at disadvantage. If women do not have to bear this responsibility, then Green’s justification for women’s political representation disappears. The logical outcome of her proposal appears to be political representation for “primary caregivers” even though primary caregivers do not represent a particular social group. Green notes that liberalism is often criticised because of its commitment to abstract individualism, but believes that Wollstonecraft’s views are im-

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mune to this criticism because she is, “centrally concerned with the fact that individual character is deeply affected by society.”18 Yet the problems that emerge with this example of political representation show a sense in which abstract individualism is framing the discussion. The goal is to eliminate differences between men and women in relation to childcare in order to make individuals the same. Women are not considered to be different from men except insofar as they are expected to look after children. Without believing that women bring something different to bear on institutions, to argue that they should have guaranteed political representation is difficult. Green’s attempt at humanizing liberalism shows that abstract individualism is a symptom of a deeper problem at its heart. Making the individual less abstract by adding a more complex moral psychology still leaves the problem that liberalism cannot recognize and respond to difference. A further problem with this approach is evident. Saying that women, as a group, are at a disadvantage because of childcare not only makes the argument for political representation quite fragile and vulnerable to changing circumstances, but is also a misleading and detrimental way to think about childbirth and childcare. It fails to regard childbirth and childcare as both a positive experience and meaningful contribution to society. Several other feminist philosophers share the goal of political representation, but have different justifications for it. For example, Michèle Le Dœuff argues that sexual balance in institutions is necessary to realize the rights of women and men.19 Liberal feminists are committed to arguing that pregnancy has nothing inherently unique. They say that pregnancy is analogous to experiences that men undergo. The only candidates for such analogous experiences are illness and disability, so pregnancy, so they liken it to these negative experiences, instead of characterizing it as a positive and enriching experience. Young argues that because pregnancy is a central part of life for many women, because it is unique, and because childbirth is socially necessary work, it is wrong to categorize it as a disability. She rightly accepts that parental leave should be gender-neutral. Young’s politics of difference can both accommodate having children as something worthwhile for the individual and for society, and give a justification for women’s political representation, even with shared parenting. The other fundamental aspect of a politics of difference is group representation in decision-making. Young argues for three main principles of such representation: (1) Self-organization of group members, (2) “[G]roup analysis and group generation of policy proposals in institutionalized contexts,” and (3) “[G]roup veto power regarding specific policies that affect a group directly, such as reproductive policy rights for women, or land use policy for Indian reservations.”20 Representation of this kind applies not only to parliament and government organizations, but also to organizations and institutions in general. Young’s idea of group representation only applies to oppressed groups, since

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non-oppressed groups enjoy sufficient representation. Such a principle gives guaranteed political representation to women without making it dependent on casting women as disadvantaged by childcare responsibilities. This approach focuses on the situation of women, as it currently exists, instead of on an unlikely future. It avoids the tension between the goal of representation and shared parenting. We could suggest that if all the aspects of oppression were to disappear, then women would not need guaranteed political representation. This is possible, but the point is that we are not in such a situation now. We can argue for both political representation and for greater support for childcare, both from the state and from individual men. The considerable advantage of a politics of difference is that it provides a deep and consistent justification for both these concrete goals without denigrating women and without conceiving pregnancy on a disability model. Part of the disagreement between feminists is whether the achievement of these goals is enough. Most might agree that they are necessary, but if traditional values remain unquestioned, these goals are not a sufficient achievement. A feminist politics of difference is critical of existing structures, so does not face this problem. One still needs to respond to several criticisms of Young’s work. 5. Questions about Difference Defining oppressed groups, deciding which groups are entitled to such representation, determining the nature and adequacy of rights, and how we can implement Young’s principles are all questions that require further discussion. Within the context of the American legal, historical, and political context, she thinks out some ideas about the kind of rights that need to be recognized. Political philosophy needs to be sensitive to differences between particular countries in relation to such factors. We cannot directly apply principles from one country to another, although it may be useful to draw models from other countries in thinking specific issues through. In a discussion of Young’s work in Justice Interruptus, Fraser argues that we need to differentiate between differences that we wish to abolish because they are the result of oppression, differences which should be universalized because they are crucial, and differences that should be enjoyed as expressions of diversity.21 Fraser calls her position “post-socialism,” which is a socialism that takes into account contemporary concern with identity. Her view is that Young treats all differences as expressions of diversity that we should celebrate. Fraser argues that recognizing difference is not an adequate response to economic problems; for that, one needs redistribution of resources. Even worse, she believes that recognition of difference may interfere with the economic im-

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provement of the lives of the oppressed, because oppressive economic arrangements are often the basis of group specificity. In Fraser’s view, Young implicitly uses ethnic groups as the paradigm of a group, and this distorts her understanding of both women as a group and other groups.22 For example, she thinks that justice might require undermining group differentiation in the case of women as a group in order to undermine the gendered division of labor. Fraser also argues that women do not necessarily constitute a group in the sense of shared affinity.23 Young addresses this problem in “Gender as Seriality” by showing that we can think of women as a group without thinking of women as a homogenous group, since groups are partially formed by how they are seen by others or by a set of structural constraints. Fraser believes that working against the gendered division of labor and working against women’s cultural oppression would be in conflict with each other because in one case, we are trying to abolish differences, and in the other case, we are trying to celebrate them. First, distinguishing between different differences appears like a necessary refinement of the politics of difference. We should not recognize and celebrate all those features that are the result of oppression. For example, women should not perpetuate having to influence events indirectly. This point is not incompatible with Young’s views. We need to get clear about what kind of differences we should celebrate. Eliminating oppression does not necessarily mean eliminating the existence of a group. For example, we hardly have reason to celebrate if the difference between an oppressed and non-oppressed group is that members of the oppressed group are condemned to live lives of abject poverty. Yet even Fraser’s example of the working class, that does not necessarily want to celebrate or even continue its position in society, leaves out the way in which working class culture has specific tastes, activities, and lifestyles that it might well celebrate even with greater prosperity. Young’s proposal is not that we ought to celebrate all qualities associated with oppressed groups but that we ought to recognize that different social groups have a unique contribution to make to public life. In the case of women, having a special right to pregnancy leave hardly appears like a homogenizing move. We would not force women to take it, nor would it set a norm. Concerned with economic aspects of women’s oppression, pregnancy leave is an extremely important part of Young’s political philosophy. Another significant aspect of the politics of difference is that reassessment results in the gendered division of labor recognizing not just women, but the culturally feminine as well. Through attending to difference instead of gender-blind criteria, work typically associated with women, such as childcare, is recognized and re-evaluated. A re-evaluation of culturally feminine work would make generalization of ideal differences easier. Focus on breaking down the division of labor leaves these evaluations intact. Young

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even argues that synchronized swimming ought to get more support, but in my view, this is going too far! Fraser acknowledges that breaking down the gendered division of labor would not eliminate women as a group because many affinities between women beyond this division still exist. The kinds of differences Young points out are not necessarily all differences to be celebrated. We can agree that we ought to generalize a co-operative approach to social relations, that we ought to eliminate features of women’s oppression like subjection to violence, and that we should celebrate women’s differing relation to history. Such recognition does not entail that all women celebrate the same qualities. We should not assume a static view of differences. We need not catalogue all differences in advance, because we may come to see some celebrated differences as harmful and vice versa. We may contest how we understand a difference. Young has two tiers to her political structure: in one, everyone receives equal treatment, and in the other, difference is recognized. Knowing the contexts in which to recognize difference is as important as knowing what differences to recognize. She gives the example of the differences between wheelchair-bound people and others, which we should recognize only in some contexts such as athletics, healthcare, and social service support.24 In other contexts, distinctions should not be made. There appears to be little danger that we would celebrate the negative concomitants of oppression in the context of institutional decision-making. Fraser’s solution to oppression is that identities ought to be deconstructed, “Deconstruction opposes the sort of sedimentation or congealing of gender difference that occurs in an unjustly gendered political economy.”25 Such an approach hardly appears appropriate to those coming to terms with their identity. The approach is removed from the reality of oppression. Her view is that we must take a transformative approach to identities instead of an affirmative one. She argues that a politics of recognition is in conflict with the need to deconstruct the group as a group. This suggestion ignores the importance of identity to oppressed groups. Telling people who are discovering who they are that they ought to transform their identity is to disregard the importance of people’s selfconcepts. She notes this when she says that both deconstructive and socialistfeminist economic politics are far removed from the immediate interests and identities of most women, as these are currently culturally constructed.26 This aspect of her work suggests an element of Utopianism. Another way of understanding the problem with Fraser’s views is that she neglects the point that the first step towards deconstruction is the affirmation of the devalued. Young’s response to Fraser’s criticisms is to argue that we should not separate so radically recognition and distribution, symbolic or cultural change and economic change. Fraser says that ethnicity and sexual orientation are

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rooted in culture alone and class is rooted in political economy.27 She notes that women cut across these groups and that gender encompasses economic and cultural dimensions but appears to undermine her claim that cultural and economic oppression are implicated in each other. It makes sense to work on both these fronts together. Although Fraser says that splitting the economic and symbolic apart is a heuristic device, it has serious effects on her conception of how they work. Trying to think through their inter-relation is a much more fruitful approach. Young argues that to rely on only two categories to understand the complexity of social organization is both reductive and arbitrary. She designed the “five faces” analysis of oppression to overcome such a reductive approach, by having a range of categories and by having categories implicated in both dimensions, like marginalization. We increase our understanding the workings of oppression by analyzing the relation between culture and economics, instead of separating them. I am not arguing that there would be no practical difficulties in implementing Young’s ideas, nor conceptual difficulties in understanding group oppression and the recognition of differences. Recognizing that difference raises expectations of women’s distinctive contribution to public life, which could put inappropriate pressure on an individual woman, is risky. As things are, we already expect individual women to make a difference, whereas if women had representation in significant numbers, perhaps they would make a difference. Young’s work provides an example of how we can begin the process of formulating a political philosophy that recognizes oppression and gives historical and social reasons for treating some groups differently. Fraser’s point about distinguishing between differences is also relevant to liberal views, such as those of Okin and Green. Okin claims that although what are thought to be women’s special qualities are a result of social constructions, they are qualities that men ought to cultivate. Here she should distinguish between those qualities which are unfortunate results of oppression and those which are desirable characteristics for both sexes. Young’s gynocentric position does not entail that men cannot adopt feminine characteristics considered desirable, it just entails a celebration of, and attention to, particular aspects of difference, instead of assimilation to a pre-existing norm. Affirming differences between groups always carries the risk that some may regard differences as signs of inferiority. Yet, given that theories and practices that ignore difference make use of ideas that can perpetuate disadvantage for oppressed groups, and that differences continue to exist, feminists must articulate the positive aspects of differences and consider them within political philosophy. Post-socialists like Fraser should concentrate more on the cultural aspects of oppression, and the value of celebrating specificity.

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The politics of difference is able to overcome the difficulties that face other feminist political philosophies, both in justifying particular political goals and in the diagnosis of and response to oppression. Recent developments in feminist philosophy and the experience of assimilation policies have led to a questioning of the ideal of assimilation. We cannot accommodate the kind of important considerations that have emerged within the framework of liberalism, Fraser’s post-socialism, or communitarianism, but must rely on a critical politics of difference. Political representation for women and other oppressed groups can only be properly justified by such a political philosophy. A feminist politics of difference does not base its arguments on the vision of a utopian future, but on the concrete circumstances that we face today.

NOTES 1. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 157. 2. Ibid., p. 186. 3. Iris Marion Young, “Gender as Seriality: Thinking About Women as a Social Collective,” in Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 12–37. 4. Young Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 37. 5. Ibid., pp. 48–65. 6. Ibid., p. 162. 7. Susan Moller Okin, “Feminism and Political Theory,” in Janet A. Kourany, Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 125. 8. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978). 9. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970). 10. Susan Moller Okin, “John Rawls: Justice as Fairness—For Whom?” in Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman, eds., Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1991), p. 195. 11. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 105. 12. Ibid., p. 103. 13. Ibid., p. 167. 14. Ibid., p. 174. 15. Okin, “Feminism and Political Theory,” p. 143. 16. Karen Green, The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1995). 17. Ibid., p. 265.

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18. Ibid., p. 181. 19. Michèle Le Dœuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc, trans., Trista Selous (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 248–249. 20. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 184. 21. Nancy Fraser, “Debate: Recognition or Redistribution? A Critical Reading of Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 3:2 (1995), p. 180; reprinted in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997). 22. Ibid., p. 173. 23. Ibid. 24. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 171. 25. Fraser, Justice Interruptus, p. 30. 26. Ibid. 27. Fraser, “Debate: Recognition or Redistribution?” p. 172.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS CHRIS BEASLEY is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Adelaide. Her interests span social and political theory, cultural studies, especially film studies, international studies and ethics. Her books include Sexual Economyths: Conceiving a Feminist Economics (Allen & Unwin, 1994), What is Feminism?: An Introduction to Feminist Theory (Sage, 1999), and Gender & Sexuality: Critical Theories, Critical Thinkers (Sage, 2005). She is currently working on a book on the politics of film and further articles concerned with the ethics of interconnection/community. JACQUELINE BROAD teaches in the Philosophy Department at Monash University, Melbourne, and the author of the forthcoming book Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century. LYNDA BURNS teaches Philosophy at Flinders University and is also in the Centre for Applied Philosophy at Flinders. Her main areas of research are Feminist Theory and Philosophy of Language. She has published a book in the area of Philosophy of Language and also articles on Gender Theory, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. She is currently working on a book on Feminist Theories of Power to be published by Sage. SUSAN DUGGIN is an Adviser and Policy Analyst for the South Australian Labor Party, and is currently researching the relationship between love, political theory and feminist politics. LISA FEATHERSTONE is working on motherhood in Australia from 1880, with a special interest in medical and gynacological constructions of women. She teaches Australian History in the Modern History Department at Macquarie University. KAREN GREEN is senior lecturer in Philosophy at Monash University. She is the author of The Woman of Reason (Cambridge: Polity, 1995) and numerous articles on feminism. She also writes on philosophy of language. Her book Dummett: Philosophy of Language appeared with Polity Press in June 2001. ALISON M. JAGGAR is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University Of Colorado at Boulder. She was a founding member of the Society for Women in Philosophy and is past chair of the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Women. She has

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worked with many organizations for peace and justice and she sees feminist scholarship as inseparable from feminist activism. Her books include Living with Contradictions: Controversies in Feminist Social Ethics, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Totowa, N.J: Rowman & Allanheld, and Brighton, U.K: Harvester Press, 1983 and Sex, Truth and Power: A Feminist Theory of Moral Reason. (in progress). Alison Jaggar is co-editor (with Virginia Held) of a book series, Feminist Theory and Politics, published by Westview Press. She is co-editor, with Iris Marion Young of The Blackwell Companion to Feminist Philosophy, Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1998 and also Feminist Frameworks, co-edited with Paula Rothenberg, (Mcgraw Hill, 3/E 1993). At present, her main interests are in moral reasoning, especially in contexts of inequality and cultural difference, and in the gendered aspects of global justice theory. MARGUERITE LA CAZE has lectured in philosophy at the University of Tasmania and is presently on a research fellowship at the University of Queensland. Her research interests include Feminist Philosophy, Moral Psychology and Aesthetics. She has published primarily in Feminist Philosophy, including papers on the work of Simone de Beauvoir in Australian Feminist Studies and on Michelle Le Doeuff in Michelle Le Doeuff: Operative Philosophy and Imaginary Practice. Her book The Analytic Imaginary examines the role of images and the ways in which imagery can contribute to the exclusion of women and feminist work (Cornell University Press). She is currently working on the ethics and politics of sexual difference. NARELLE LYDEAMORE studied Philosophy at Adelaide and Flinders University and is now in Social Work and Planning at Flinders University. She also works in a Rape Crisis Centre in Adelaide and is involved in education programs about sexual violence and in training programs for crisis care. She has also taught in the Aboriginal Aid program at Adelaide University. HELEN PROSSER published "Metaphor and Thought" in the July 2000 issue of Philosophy Today and a review of Turning toward Philosophy by Jill Gordon in February 2001 issue of Philosophy in Review. JASON PUDSEY lectures in Sociology at the Flinders University of South Australia. His previous research has included critiques of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the sociology of gender, and the role of consumerism in young people’s lives. He is working on a book entitled: 'The Limits of Reflexivity:

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Bourdieu and moral sociology and he has written a number of review articles for the social theory journal, Thesis Eleven. His main concern in his work has been with the construction and reconstruction of meaning in human life. JANNA THOMPSON is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at La Trobe University and is the Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Issues at Melbourne University. She has for many years participated in the Women's Studies Program at LaTrobe University. She has written articles feminist political theory, Justice and Reconciliation and historical obligations. Her books include Justice and World Order (Routledge, 1992), Discourse and Knowledge: a defence of a Collectivist Ethics (Routledge, 1998) and Taking Responsibility for the Past (Polity, 2002) IRIS MARION YOUNG is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is on the Faculty Boards of the Center for Gender Studies, the Human Rights Program, and the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism. Before coming to the University of Chicago she taught political theory for nine years in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Her specializations include theories of justice, democratic theory, and feminist theory. Young's books include Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, 1990; Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy, Princeton University Press, 1997; Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2000 ; and forthcoming, On Female Body Experience, Oxford University Press, 2004.

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INDEX abortion, 1, 83 abuse (of women, sexual), 25, 83, 142 activist(s), 13, 14 African-American a., 13, 14 feminist a., 1, 3 gay rights a., 3, 14 left wing a., 1, 3 Native American Indian a., 13 Adamson, Matthew, 128n2, 129n44 Adkins, Lisa, 57n13 affirmative action, 11, 15, 31 The Affirmative Action Fraud (Bolick), 11, 18n1 African-Americans, 11–15 inner-city male, 18 African American Studies, 23 age, 12, 31, 73, 82, 142 agendas feminist a., 37, 38, 81 about fixity, 46 socio/political a., 31, 43 agent(s), 64, 65, 80, 110–119, 122, 124, 126 dominant/subordinate, 140, 141 in field, 113, 114 habitus of, 124 regulating a., 83 Alcoff, Linda, 80, 87, 88nn19 21 22 28, 89n65 Alexander, Lamar, 29 Allen, Judith A., 83 Sex and Secrets, 83, 89nn35 36 alliance(s) between feminists and other political positions, vii, 2, 3, 6–8, 12, 47, 49, 55, 56, 77, 80, 81, 84, 109, 147, 148 American Booksellers v. Hadnut, 133 American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Women, 28, 177 American Philosophical Association, Executive Director of, 21

American Scholar, 28, 33n21 anthropology, philosophical, 109, 110, 124–126 anxiety, sexual, 85 Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 78, 88n8 Aristotle, 19, 25, 94, 95, 101, 104, 106n14 art of living (Bourdieu), 111 assault, sexual, 99, 152 Astell, Mary, 100, 107nn37 38 39 Bart’lemy Fair, 100, 107nn38 39 40 Atherton, Margaret, 106n3 Atlantic Monthly, 21 attentiveness. See caring Auerbach, Judy, 121, 130n83 Australian Federal Government, 37 authoritarianism, 37 awareness, sexual, 138 backlash, 4, 5, 12, 15 Bail, Kathy, 43, 57nn13 22 Barrett, Michèle, 8n3, 57n19 Bartky, Sandra Lee, 79, 88n16 Bart’lemy Fair (Astell), 100, 107nn38 39 40 Bartowski, Frances, 88n12 Baudrillard, Jean, 81 Beasley, Chris, 4–7, 35 What is Feminism?, 47–50, 56n1, 59nn30 31 33 34 Beauvoir, Simone de, 2, 8nn3 4 behavior, sexual, 134 Bentham, Jeremy, 86 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 143, 149nn22 29 bias, 2, 3, 13, 21, 85, 153 androcentric , 120 gender/sexist, 3, 18, 20, 48, 49, 61, 118 Biddulph, Steve, 41, 54 Manhood, 41, 56nn10 11, 58n41 Raising Boys, 41, 56n11 binary, individual-social, 55 Blum, Linda, 130n83

180 Bly, Robert, 41, 56n7 bod(y)(ies), 8n3, 58n40, 82, 95, 130n91 defeminized b., 79 docile b., 83, 86, female b., 81, 86, 92, 106nn7 9, 118 mind and b., 98 b. in philosophy, 91 sexed/gendered b., 79, 80, 84, 85, 118 Bolick, Clint, The Affirmative Action Fraud, 11, 18n1 borders, 37, 38, 47, 48, Bordo, Susan, 91, 106n1, 127n1, 130n91 boundar(y)(ies) of feminism concepts, 4, 5, 35, 38, 43, 49, 50, 58n40, 122 genre b., 78 b. between groups, 12, 13 moral b., 75nn12 13 16 of political correctness, 147 b. between proper and improper usage (rel. meaning), 96 social b., 138, 148 Bourdieu, Pierre, vii, 2, 109–113, 115– 127, 127n1, 128nn2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33, 129nn34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58, 131nn96 97 102 103 104 Bowen, Jan, 56n13 Bradley Foundation, 29 Braidotti, Rosi, 36, 56n3, 106n7 Bulbeck, Cilla, 57n13 Burns, Lynda, 1 Butler, Judith, 58n26, 92, 106n6 Calhoun, Craig J., 127n1 Campaign for a New Tomorrow, 16 capital (power) (Bourdieu), 109, 111, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 123, 124, 127, 128n28 symbolic c., 114, 115, 122, 125 Card, Claudia, 130nn77 80 87 88

Index care, 5, 61, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 109, 120–122, 124, 126, 146, 147 c. of children, 70 (see also childcare) justice and, 121, 122 masculine idea of, 70, 71 morality and, 122 as political/moral responsibility, 66 theories of, 120 relational nature of, 123 care ethics, 5, 75nn12 14, 109, 120, 130n92 caregivers, 156 caring, 66, 69, 121, 123, 126, 130nn79 80, 146, 149n26, 153. See also attentiveness associated with women, 5, 121, 130nn91 94 patriarchal form of, 69 Cartesianism, 97, 106n1, 111 Cavendish, Margaret, 98–100, 105 Philosophical Letters, 98, 107nn29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 censorship, 23 anti-censorship, 133, 134 political c., 37 c. of pornography, 6 Cheney, Dick, 30 Cheney, Lynne, 28, 31, 3 childbirth, 155, 157 childcare, 18, 156–159 children, 18, 27, 63–65, 68 British school c., 30 c. and contract-making process, 63 education of c., 27, 72 importance of to women, 155 rearing/care for c., 71 violence against c., 54 well-being of, 63, 67, 73 Chodorow, Nancy, 106n2, 162n8 Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 Chudleigh, Mary, 100, 107nn41 42 citizens, 21, 27, 63, 67, 71 concerns of c., 66 future c., 74 moral obligation of c., 72 reproduction of c., 70

Index citizens (continued) taxpaying c., 27 women as c., 61 Citizens Party, 14 citizenship, 75nn12 14 c. status, 12 women’s c., 75n15 civil liberties, 21 civil rights vision, Founding Fathers’, 11. See also rights civilization, Western, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 31, 32 coalition(s), 1–3, 7, 11, 14, 15, 17 Rainbow Coalition, 14, 15 Code, Lorraine, 72, 75nn20 21 22 What Can She Know?, 72, 75n20 coercion, 141–143, 147, 148 Communists, 19 communitarianism, 151, 155, 162 compassion, 126 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, 67, 75n18 consciousness, 112, 115, 121, 123 false c., 22, 119, 134, 148 moral c., 86 self-c., 120 conservatives, 11, 15, 16, 26 Neo-c., 11 social c., 138 consensus in dissensus (Bourdieu), 115 constructions, symbolic, 125 Contagious Disease Acts, 84 contestations, heterodoxic, 123 continua, intergenerational, 5 contract(s), social, 63, 67, 68 sexual c., 66, 75n11 c. stories, 61, 68–70 contractarianism, 1 contract-making process, 63 contractors, 63–65, 67–69 fathers as, 70 contract theory, social, 61–63, 65, 66, 68, 71 convict(s), Australian female, 85

181

Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, 100, 107n38 Copernicus, Nicholaus, 25 cosmolog(y)(ies), Kabyle, 110 Cox, Eva, 42, 56n13 crime(s) c. by females, 83, 89n35 (see also prostitution) c. of sex against women, 83 critics of feminism/feminists, 4, 5, 12, 14, 17, 22–24, 31, 35, 40, 41, 43, 101, 121, 122 authoritative c., 45, 47, 48 knowing c., 35, 40, 44, 52, 54 new guard c., 43 of identity politics, 16 of liberalism, 61 of political correctness, 31 of politics of difference, 16 social c., 21 cultural imperialism, 152 cultural specificity, 11 culture(s), 17, 26, 27, 72, 73, 75n12, 87n1, 88nn19 28, 94, 106n1, 109, 122, 124, 130n95, 131n98, 139, 152, 153, 161 American c., 57n21 clash of/melding with c., 26, 29 common c., 155 counter- c., 119 economics and, 127, 161 Entitlement c., 57n17, 81 European and British c., 30, 70 of gender, 130n74 c. inscribed on the body, 86 patriarchal c., 136 Third World c., 26, 29 Western c., 4, 21, 22, 95, 127n1 working class c., 159 Curthoys, Ann, 57n13 Curthoys, Jean, 42, 56n13 Daly, Mary, 106n2

182

Index

Damousi, Joy, 85–87, 89nn49 52 53 54 55 56 58 59 61 62 63 Depraved and Disorderly, 85, 89nn49 50 52 53 54 55 56 58 59 61 62 63 Discipline and Punish, 86, 89n34 57 Darwin, Charles, 27 Davis, Kathy, 127n1 De Lepervanche, Marie M., 58n40 deconstruction, 136, 160 Derridian d., 92 Foucault’s postmodern d., 80 Deleuze, Gilles, 109 democracy, 4, 26, 30, 32 Democratic Party, 14, 15 candidates of, 17 Denfield, Rene, 57n21 Depraved and Disorderly (Damousi), 85, 89nn49 50 52 53 54 55 56 58 59 61 62 63 Derrida, Jacques, vii, 6, 80, 91–97, 101, 104, 106nn6 13, 107nn20 21 22 23 24 26, 108n47, 109 Descartes, René, 98 desires, 81, 92, 134, 135, 144, 145 posterity-directed d., 73, 74 Diamond, Irene, 20nn12 13 16 20 27 29 difference(s), vii, 2, 3, 5–7, 13, 56n2, 77, 151, 152, 154, 158–161 as deviance, 154, 155 d. between feminist approaches, 37, 48–50, 55 feminist understanding of, 7 generational d., 54, 55 group d., 154, 161 ideology of d., 135 d. in life situation, 156 politics of d., 3, 7, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 149n27, 151, 155, 162nn1 2 4 5 6 11 12 13, 159, 162, 163nn21 22 23 24 power d., 135 sexual d. (between men and women), 6, 47, 49, 80, 92, 106nn3 7, 135, 142, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159, 160 biological/psychological d., 154

moral reasoning in d., 154 d. as sign of inferiority, 161 social d., 11, 18 between strong/weak, 145 Dimen, Muriel, 146, 149n28 Diprose, Roslyn, 92, 106nn7 9 Dirks, Nicholas B., 87nn1 2, 88n19 disability(y)(ies), 11, 153, 155, 157 childbirth as d., 157 difference as d., 157 discipline, 83, 84, 86 Discipline and Punish (Damousi), 86, 89n34 57 discourse(s), 56n2, 57n18, 78, 79, 81, 82, 92, 143, 147 care d., 130n86 feminist historical d., 87 Foucauldian d., 88n6 ideological d., 143 mythic (mythopoetic) d., 41, 95 orthodox d., 116 philosophical d., 94, 97 psychoanalytic d., 58n26 d. of ruling group, 145 scientific d., 82 d. surrounding sex, 83 discrimination, 11, 12, 41, 42, 133, 155 diversity, 2, 4, 7, 12, 15, 22, 36, 37, 39– 42, 80, 152, 158 division of labor, 2, 3, 70, 18, 119, 159, 160 gendered, 3, 159, 160 dominance, 6, 40, 41, 43, 91, 139, 141, 147 domination, 78, 115, 116, 118, 135, 142, 152 over agent or group, 141 capitalist d., 16 gender d., 118 d. by the past, 41 political d., 110 d. of reason over nature, 99 total d. in a field, 112 dominatrix, 136, 139 Donovan, Josephine, 51, 58n37 Douglas, Mary, 85, 89n51 doxa (Bourdieu), 109, 111, 114–116, 118–120, 123, 126

Index doxic view of the world/perceptions (Bourdieu), 110, 114, 115, 118 Sri Lanken, 119 D’Souza, Dinesh, 21, 23, 32n7, 33nn14 17 18 28 34 39 46 dualism Cartesian d., 98 epistemological and political d., 121 d. between subjectivism and objectivism, 110, 117 d. between theoretical logic and practical logic, 116 Duggin, Susan, 5, 109 Dworkin, Andrea, 133, 135 Dworkin-MacKinnon Bill, 133 economism (Bourdieu), 113, 124, 125 economistic model, 124 economy, 119 archaic Kabyle e., 113 cultural e., 130n95 e. of love, 126 political e., 160, 161 e. of practice (Bourdieu), 124, 125 education(al), 18, 29 e. authorities, locally elected, 29, 30 British e., 30 e. of children, 63 cultural politics of, 57n18 higher e. (university/college), 22, 27, 28, 34n53 moral e., 130n79, 149n26 multicultural e., 22 sociology of, 128nn28 34 e. system, 115 educationalists, 29 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 51, 58n37 emancipation, 77, 81 e. from oppressive gender positioning, 41 empowerment, 77, 81, 134, 140, 144, 145–148 environmentalist(s), 1, 3, 14 epistemology, 110 equal liberty principle, 64

183

equality, 11, 12, 26, 30, 32, 37, 52, 74n1, 146, 147 in- e., 14, 16, 118, 135, 139, 142, 147, 148 social e., 16, 152 erotization of the subordination of women, 135 essentialism, 12, 87, 120 ethnicity, 11, 25, 38, 46, 51, 53, 82, 151, 161 ethnomethodology, 110 ethos, pro-sexual individual, 43 Existentialis(m)(t) (theory), 1, 2, 110 experience(s), 72, 79, 110, 122, 123, 135, 140, 151 African-American e., 18 e. of agent, 117 e. of assimilation policies, 162 e. of marginalization, 152 e. of men/women, 91, 92, 152, 155, 157 past e., 111 e. of power/powerlessness, 139, 152 sexual e., 136 social e., 125 exploitation, 25, 30, 126, 152 Ezell, Margaret J. M., 107n41 fallacy, scholastic (Bourdieu), 116 family, 4, 8n5, 20, 21, 23, 65, 75nn8 19, 82 anti-family stance, 40, 54 duties in f., 154 head of f., 68–70 members of f., 62, 121 mother’s authority over f., 99 nuclear f., 156 values of, 16, 20 fascists, 23, 30 fathers, 64, 65, 70 Faubion, James D., 88n17 Female Fear (Gordon and Riger), 142, 149n20 femifascist, 21 feminism, vii, 1, 5, 21, 35, 36, 40–42, 44, 54, 56n2, 57nn13 18 21 23 24 25, 58nn26 27 28 32 35 37 40,

184

Index

feminism (continued) 74n1, 92, 106n6, 109, 118, 119, 127, 127n1, 130n92, 134, 140, 142, 148, 149n19 anti-censorship of, 133 boundaries/definition of, 36–41, 44–49, 52, 55, 56nn4 5, 58n40, 59n29, 133 Bourdieu and, 109, 117–121, 127n1 care, 109, 120–123, 126, 127 criticisms of (attacks on), 4, 52 knowing c., 52, 54, 55 outsider c., 54 Derrida and, 6 difference vs. equality f., 52 do-it-yourself (DIY) f., 43, 57nn13 22 Ecofeminism, 1, 58n38 f. as emancipatory politic, 81 Foucault and, 77–80, 88nn6 12 13 16 20 27 29 30 history of, 42 leftist view of, 41 liberal/libertarian f., 43, 154, 155 Marxism and, 8n3 men in f., 106nn6 7 philosophy and, 3, 8n8 political theories and, 7, 49, 162nn7 15 16 17 postmodernism and, 87 poststructuralism and, 88nn21 28, 89n65 power f., 43 pro-sex f., 140, 143 radical f., 41, 43, 51, 58n39, 106n2, 134 relational vs. individualist f., 52 science and f., 33n21 Western f., 37, 38, 46 Feminism and Philosophy (Gatens), 3, 8n8 feminists, 1, 2, 4–7, 13, 14, 16, 19–23, 25, 36, 38, 41, 42, 48–51, 54, 56n13, 58n39, 61–63, 66, 69, 70, 74, 79–83, 85, 91, 93, 105, 109, 117, 120, 133, 138, 140, 151, 152, 154, 161 anarchist f., 52

anti-censorship f., 133 deconstructive f., 92 disagreement among f., 158 gender f., 20 historical f., 101 liberal f., 155, 157 middle class f., 84 old guard f., 42, 43 philosophy and f., 88n13, 93 post-modern f., 38, 44, 46 post-structuralist f., 51 power f., 43, 44 pro-, anti-pornography f., 133, 134, 136– 140 psychoanalytic f., 51 radical/cultural f., 135 radical/libertarian f. (pro-sex), 6, 52, 135–139, 143, 145–148 types of f., 53 young f., 43 Feminist Anti-censorship Taskforce (F.A.C.T.), 133 Feminist Frameworks (Jaggar and Rothenberg), 31, 34n55 Ferguson, Anita Perez, 58n39 field (Bourdieu), 109, 111–113, 120, 123 examples of types described, 112, 120 gender f., 122 habitus and, 113, 116, 118, 121, 128n1, 130n76 intellectual f., 117, 128n34, 129nn39 42 meta- f., 112, 122 self’s/agent position in, 114, 115, 122 social f., 2 Firestone, Shulamith, 154, 162n9 Flew, Anthony, 29, 32 Forms of Power (Wartenberg), 140, 149nn17 18 23 25 Foucauldian “tools,” 79 Foucault, Michel, 2, 6, 7, 44, 57n25, 77– 87, 87nn1 2 3 4, 88nn5 7 8 9 10 11 17 22 23 30 31 32 33 34 40 42 57 60 64, 109 Archaeology of Knowledge, 78, 88n8

Index Foucault, Michel (continued) History of Sexuality, 77, 78, 82–84, 86, 87n3, 88n11, 89nn40 60 Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 84, 89n42 Fowler, Bridget, 124, 131n99 France, Anatole, 95, 96, 107n19 Fraser, Nancy, 7, 151, 158–162, 163nn21 22 23 25 26 27 freedom, 24, 145. See also power-to f. of consenting equals, 134, 136 ideal of, 4, 26 individual f., 64, 65, 144 of speech, 133 of women, 118, 137 Freud, Sigmund, 27 friendship, 126 Galileo Galilei, 27 Gallop, Jane, 45, 47, 58nn27 28 Gatens, Moira, 1, 3, 7, 8nn2 8, 58n40, 106n11 gays, 3, 11 African American men, 13 gender, 8n5, 11–13, 16, 20, 24, 106n11, 118–120, 127n1, 130nn74 77 90 91 93, 139, 142, 161 g. as doxa, 120 g. as habitus, 120, 130n76 g. ideals, 4 oppressive positioning of, 41, 54 order of, 86 politics of, 8n3, 80, 123, 134 power and, 57n25, 58n26, 75nn8 19, 79, 109, 123 g. as seriality, 159, 162n3 g. /sex distinction, 20, 22, 92, 106n11, 142 traditional roles of, 54 gender analysis, 84, 85, 87, 127 gender blindness, 11, 117, 119, 159 gender studies, vii Gender Trouble (Butler), 58n26, 92, 106n6 genealogy (Foucault), 77–79, 88nn5 6 10 25

185

Gill, Gillian C., 107n17 Gilligan, Carol, 106n2, 120–122, 129n70, 130n83, 162n8 girl power, 43, 44, 57nn14 18 Gitlin, Todd, 11–13, 15, 16 Twilight of Common Dreams, 11, 18nn4 5 Goldman, Emma, 140 Goodman, Henry Nelson, 96, 107n25 goods, 64, 70, 124, 126 social g., 142 symbolic g., 124, 125 Gordon, Colin, 58n25 Gordon, Margaret, Female Fear, 142, 149n20 government, 105, 157 Howard g., 141 policies of, 42 Grant, Judith, 58n35 Green Party, 17 Green, Karen, 2, 6, 7, 8n6, 91, 155–157, 161 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 74n3, 156 Woman of Reason, 8n6, 155, 162n16 17 Greeno, Catherine G., 120, 129n72, 130n75 Greer, Germaine, 42, 56n13 Gross, Elizabeth A. See Grosz (Gross), Elizabeth A. Grosz (Gross), Elizabeth A., 51, 52, 58n40, 92 group(s), 1, 8, 12, 13, 17, 18, 65, 68, 69, 152, 154, 156, 160 accrediting g., 29 boundaries between g., 12, 13 coalitions of diverse g., 14–16 defining characteristics of g., 152, 153, 154, 159, 161 dominant vs. dominated g., 115, 116, 119, 141, 152, 153 ethnic g., 11, 159 formed by how seen by others, 159 fragmented g., 11, 16 homogeneous/shared affinity of, 40, 159 g. identity, 13

186

Index

group(s) (continued) left/right-wing g., 23 marginalized g., 24, 26, 152 oppressed g., 3, 11, 151–154, 156–162 paradigm of, 159 power struggles between, 80, 115, 154 protest g., 11 radical g., 3, 21, 151 relations between, 140, 143, 152 g. representation in decision-making, 157 ruling g., 145 self-determination for, 151 self-organization of, 157 specificity of, 159 strong vs. weak g., 143 of women/men, 2, 80, 147, 151, 152, 156, 157, 159–161 Gruen, Lori, 32 Gunew, Sneja, 106n11 gynocentric position, 161 gynocentrism, 153 habitus, 109, 111–121, 123–125, 127, 128n2, 129nn59 61, 130nn76 85 89 Hagan, Kay Leigh, 56n12 Harootunian, Harry D., 88n6 Hartsock, Nancy, 88nn18 24 26 healthcare, 16, 160. See also care Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 19, 25, 95 Hekman, Susan J., 120, 130n78 Held, Virginia, 66, 75n12 Helmont, Jan-Baptiste van, 99 herd, 143–147 following the h., 147 mentality of h., 145, 146 values of the h., 144, 146 hermaphrodite(s), 78 heterodox alternatives, 115 heterodoxy, 118, 119, 123 heterosexual, nonconventional meaning of, 135 heterosexuality, 135 hexis, body, 112, 118

historian(s), 24, 26, 86, 87, 88n15, 129n71 feminist h., 6, 77, 82, 83, 85, 87 historical practice, 26 historiography, 77 history, 24, 26, 77, 78, 80, 83, 87n1, 88nn5 6 10 19 28, 89n42, 115, 129n71, 153, 160 abolition of, political, 115 of British Asians/Afro-Britons, 29 convict h., 85 empirical h., 117 feminist h., 6, 42, 56n2, 77, 83, 87 labor h., 24 of movements, 3, 12, 15 personal h., 72 of philosophy, 97 postmodern/modernist h., 77 revisionist h., 85 of sexuality (see sexuality, history of) Western h., 24, 26 women’s h., 24, 152 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 77, 78, 82– 84, 86, 87n3, 88n11, 89nn40 60 Hoagland, Sarah Lucia, 120, 121, 130nn80 81 87 Hobbes, Thomas, 98 Homo Economicus, 125 Homo Potestas, 125–127 homophobia, 14 homosexuality, 30, 78, 135 Honneth, Axel, 125, 130n95, 131n101 Hooks, Bell, 56n12 humanism, 153, 155, 162n16 liberal h., 77 Western h., 81 human nature, 3, 4, 8n9, 58n37, 156 Hume, David, 103 Hypatia, 25 ideals, 11, 19, 21, 24, 26, 144 of critical inquiry, 4 cultural and scientific i., 6 educational i., 4 ethical i., 146

Index ideals (continued) of freedom/liberty, 4, 32, 74 gender i., 4 of the 1960s and 1970s, 31, 32 of philosophy, 101 political i., 4 of pro-sex feminists, 146 Western i., 26, 32 ideological disagreement, 17 ideolog(y)(ies), 80, 91, 115, 141, 142, 148 of difference, 135 extremist i., 41 humanist i., 81 lies of i., 145, 146 patriarchal i., 143 Western i., 81 illusio (libido), 113 illusion(s), 45, 92 truths as, 96 imagery, sexual, 136 impartiality, 154 Independent Parties, 17 Independent Progressive Politics Network, 17 Indians, Native American, 11, 18 indifference, 80 to truth, 4 individual(s), 62, 65, 70, 74, 98, 143, 145, 157, 158, 161 liberal i., 65 noble i., 143, 145 autonomous/independent/selfdetermining/self-interested i., 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74 self-assertive i., 145 sexed i., 20 strong/weak i., 145 theory of i., 72 individualism, 21, 110, 156, 157 individual-social binary, 55 inequality, sex/gender, 118, 135, 139, 142, 147 eroticization of, 148 infanticide, 83. See also crime(s), by females

187

International Association of Women Philosophers, 25 Irigaray, Luce, 97, 107nn17 27 isolationism, 1 Jackson, Jesse, 14 Jaggar, Alison M., 4, 5, 8, 19, 32n4, 34n55, 51, 58n37, 130n91 Feminist Frameworks, 31, 34n55 Jardine, Alice, 56n4, 106nn6 7 Jefferson, Thomas, 67 Jeffreys, Sheila, 135, 139, 148n5, 149nn7 10 jokes, politically correct, 19 Jones, Richard, 32 Jones, Robin, 32 justice, 2, 4, 5, 8n5, 32, 41, 61, 62, 70, 75nn12 19, 81, 130n84, 146, 159 j. between generations, 63, 64, 69 in- j., to women, 1, 3, 7, 17, 30, 31, 71, 74 principles of j., 63, 64 Rawls’s theory of j., 68, 69, 75nn4 5 6 7 9, 162n10 Justice and the Politics of Difference (Young), 149n27, 151, 162nn1 2 4 5 6 11 12 13 14, 163nn20 21 22 23 24 Justice Interruptus (Young), 158, 163nn25 26 Kabyle peasants, 111 Kamuf, Peggy, 106n6, 19, 25 Kant, Immanuel Kelly, Liz, 57nn13 16 Kenny, Kath Kerber, Linda K., 120, 129n71 Kimball, Roger, 21, 32, 32n9 Kimmel, Michael S., 56 King, Mel, 14 knowledge, 19, 25, 37, 72, 75n20, 78, 82, 83, 88nn6 8, 94, 99, 113, 114, 13n91 authoritative k., 45 and control, 128n34 erudite k., 77 feminist k., 106n11 k. grounded in context, 127

188 knowledge (continued) historical k., 77 insider k., 42 power and, 78–80, 82, 87 (see also power/knowledge (Foulcault)) practical k., 111 search for k., 77, 99 sociological k., 128nn5 16 specialized k., 52 theory of, 116, 117 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 121, 130n84 Krais, Beate, 118, 120, 127nn60 63 La Caze, Marguerite, 7, 151 labor organizing, 11 Labor Party, 13, 16, 17, 41 Lacan, Jacques, 80 Ladies Defense (Chudleigh), 100 Lake, Marilyn, 57n13 Lash, Scott, 130n95 laws, 62, 63, 68, 70, 72 Le Dœuff, Michèle, 157, 163n19 Left, the, 11, 12, 15, 16, 23, 29 American L., 11 positions of, 14 Leftists, 14 Lejenaar, Monique, 127 lesbians, 3, 11 Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (Cooper), 100, 107n38 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 110 liberalism, 2, 61, 63, 65, 67, 77, 80, 151, 155–157, 162 welfare l., 67 liberals, 23, 54, 61, 65–68, 71, 73 liberation, 145 gay, 41 sexual, 136 of women, 8n6, 28, 56n13, 119 liberty, 32, 62, 67, 101 equal l., 63 equal principle of, 64 individual l., 146 Millian arguments of, 134 libido, 113

Index LiPuma, Edward, 124, 127n1, 131n98 Lloyd, Genevieve, 6, 91–97, 101, 106nn4 5 8 11 12 15, 107nn18 44 Loach, Loretta, 136, 139, 149nn8 15 Local Government Act, 1988, 30 Locke, John, 62, 65, 75n10 Two Treatises on Government, 74n2 logic, 114, 116, 117, 119, 124, 125, 128nn3 31, 129nn31 32 55 56, 131nn97 100 logocentrism, 91 love, 73, 10, 126 Lumby, Catherine, 43, 57n18 Luria, Zella, 43, 57n18 Lydeamore, Narelle, 6, 7, 57n20, 133 Lykes, M. Briton, 130n93 Lyotard, Jean-François, 44 Maccoby, Eleonor E., 120, 129n72, 130n75 MacKenna, Stephen, 107n17 MacKinnon, Catharine A., 6, 133, 135, 139, 141–143, 145, 148, 148nn1 2, 149n19 madness, 91, 92 Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 84, 89n42 males, heterosexual, 22 manhood, definition of, 13 Manhood (Biddulph), 41, 56nn10 11, 58n41 Manne, Robert, 41, 56nn8 9 Marable, Manning, 32 marginalization, 18, 152, 161 Marriage Act of 1975, 15 Martin, Biddy, 80, 88n20 Marxism (Marxist theory), 1–3, 8n3, 77, 110, 118 M. feminis(m)(ts), 1, 51, 53, 54 maternity leave, 155 McCall, Leslie, 119, 120, 122, 127n1, 129n67 68 69, 130n90 McIntosh, Mary, Sex Exposed, 138, 149nn8 14 McNay, Lois, 57n25, 120, 128n1, 130n76

Index meaning, 4, 6, 12, 36, 38, 39, 45–47, 49, 52, 54–56, 96, 124–126, 135, 139, 145 Merchant, Carolyn, 157n28 Merchant, Vicki, 57n13 meta-narratives, 77, 78 metaphor(s), 6, 93–97, 99, 101–105, 106nn8 12 13 15, 107nn18 45 emasculating m., 91, 92 masculinizing m., 104 metaphorical passage(s), 102 metaphysicians, 95 militarism, 30 Mill, John Stuart, 20, 28 On Liberty (Mill), 28, 34n50 Milner, Andrew, 56n2 minorit(y)(ies), 146 m. cultures, 26 “noble” m., 145 racial/ethnic m., 22, 23, 25 sexual m., 134 misogyny (sexual hierarchy), 50, 54, 135 modernity, 56n4, 124 morality sexual m., 84 slave- m., 133, 143, 144 Morris, Meaghan, 79, 88n13 mother-child bond, 120 mothers, 23, 44, 70 rebellion between daughters and, 55 single m., 3, 17, 18, 152 movement(s), liberation, 3, 11–13, 15, 17, 18, 21, 32 ablement-specific m., 12 feminist m., 36, 80, 133, 135, 137, 140, 143, 144, 148 gay and lesbian m., 15 labor m., 3, 13 Latino and Asian m., 18 left m., vii, 15 liberation m., 32 men’s m., 41, 44, 56n12 radical m., 3, 151 The Rainbow m., 14 multiculturalism, 21, 29

189

Narayan, Uma, 130n86 National Association of Scholars, 28 National Endowment for the Humanities, 28, 29 nature, 62, 94, 97–100, 118. See also human nature characterized as wild/disorderly, 100 as organic cosmos, 97 personification of as female, 97, 100, 105 valorization of, 98 New Party, 16, 17 New World Order, 26 Newton, Sir Isaac, 25 Nice, Richard, 128nn3 6 7 8 9 10 26 27 Nicholson, Linda J., 8n3, 58n26, 88n18 Nicholson, Victoria, 57n18 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 88nn5 10, 96, 133, 143–147, 149n2 Beyond Good and Evil, 143, 149nn22 29 Noddings, Nel, 120, 130n29, 149n26 Norris, Christopher, 93, 106n12 Nowottny, Winifred, 102 object(s), sexual, 139 object relations theory, 91 objectification of women, sexual, 32 objectivism, 110, 111, 116, 117, 119 objectivity, 22, 106n1 O’Brien, Suzie, 43, 57nn14 18 O’Farrell, Clare, 88n15 Offen, Karen, 51, 56n4, 58n40 offences, heterosexual and lesbian, 86 Okin, Susan Moller, 2, 8n5, 64, 70, 75n8, 19, 106n2, 153, 154, 161, 162nn7 10 15 Oldersma, Jantine, 127n1 Olin Foundation, 29 On Liberty (Mill), 28, 34n50 ontolog(y)(ies), 124, 125 of Homo Potestas (Bourdieu), 126 of social power, 140 oppression, sexual, 13, 134, 135, 147, 148 oppressors, 81 Other, 78

190

Index

Paglia, Camile, 33n30, 43, 57n21 parenting, shared, 156–158 parliament, 155, 157 Parshley, Howard Madison, 8n8 passion, 91, 103, 104, 136 passivity, female sexual, 137 Pateman, Carole, 8n3, 57n19, 61, 66, 74n1, 75n11, 162n10 patriarchy, 134, 140, 142, 143, 149n21 phenomenology, 110 Phillips, Anne, 8n3, 57n19, 58n40, 74n1 philosophers, 4, 19, 29, 83, 88n13, 96, 97 feminist p., 20, 25, 32nn2 3, 157 political p., 61, 62, 68, 69 Western p., 26 Women (female) p., 25, 93, 97 Philosophical Letters (Cavendish), 98, 107nn29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 philosophical writing, 77, 98 philosophy, vii, 8n3, 25, 81, 91, 106nn12 13, 107n29, 128n2, 130n84, 149n22 feminism’s relation to p., 3, 8n8, 92 feminist p., 20, 21, 25, 27, 162 political p., 25, 61, 62, 65, 70, 71, 74, 152, 154, 158, 159, 161, 162, 162nn3 7, 163n19 Western p., 4, 24, 25 women’s (female) p., 6, 25 Pitkin, Hannah, Wittgenstein and Justice , 140, 149n16 Plato, 25, 91, 94, 103, 107n16 Timaeus, 94 Pleasure and Danger (Vance), 25, 91, 94, 103, 107n16, 149n28 Plotinus, 95, 107n17 policies, group-differentiated, 152 political correctness, 4, 21, 28, 29, 31, 146, 147 political life, 37, 50, 61, 66 political orthodoxy, 27 political representation, 151, 153, 155– 158, 162 political struggle, 36, 121 political tendencies, group-specific, 13

political theory, vii, 4, 8n3, 55, 56, 57n19, 65, 66, 74, 75n18, 116, 162nn7 10 15 feminist, 1, 61 Liberal, 5, 65, 69 social-, 55 Politically Incorrect, 19, 146, 149n28 politics, 1, 3, 5, 7, 19, 31, 55, 64–69, 73, 74, 75n12, 117 in academics/education, 32nn8 9, 33nn16 47, 57n18 American (U.S.) p., 14, 16 p. of difference, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 149n22, 151, 155, 157–159, 162, 162nn1 4 11 12 13 14, 163nn20 21 22 23 24 emancipatory p., 110 feminism and, 8n9, 35, 37, 54, 58n37, 61, 151, 158 of gender, 8n3, 80, 123, 127, 134 of identity p., 7, 11–13, 15–17, 92, 151 of manhood, 56n12 of meaning, 35, 47, 52 of the Rainbow Coalition, 15 radical p., 3 symbolic p., 120, 122 woman-centered p., 16 pornography, 6, 28, 57n20, 133–140, 142, 144–148, 148nn2 5, 149nn7 8 10 11 12 13 15 24 postmodernism, conversgence with feminism, 87 Postone, Moishe, 127n1 post-socialism, 158, 162 power, 2, 8n2, 28, 50, 57n13, 78, 81–84, 86, 87, 87n1, 88nn17 18 19 24 26 28, 100, 109, 118, 125, 126, 127n1, 129nn65 66, 130n82, 141, 143, 149nn17 18 23 25 balance of p., 99, 143 as capital, 113, 119, 122 corporate p., 12 and feminism, 57n18 gender p., 5, 42, 57nn21 25 40 81 99, 105

Index power (continued) illusory p., 93 individual p., 143, 144, 146 juridico-discursive model of, 77 knowledge and, 79, 80, 87 of literal truth, 91, 92 of metaphor, 91–93, 102 of military force, 105 negative form of, 141 Neo-Nietzschean conception of, 147 Nietzschean paradigm of, 147, 148 patriarchal p., 88n16, 140 pornography and, 6, 57n20, 133, 135, 138, 139 pro-sex conception of, 146, 148 social p., 2, 6, 7, 79, 82, 142–148 symbolic p., 129n44 power/knowledge (Foucault), 2, 57n25 powerlessness, 152 power-over, 140, 141, 144, 148 power-to, 140, 144, 145, 148 pregnancy, 84, 153, 155, 157–159 prejudice, 30, 37, 119 promiscuity, sexual, 136 prostitutes, 84, 85 prostitution, 20, 23, 28, 83–86, 89nn37 41 43 (see also crime(s), by females Prostitution and Victorian Society (Walkowitz), 83, 89nn37 38 39 41 43 44 45 46 47 48 psychoanalysis, 77, 106n3, 162n8 Public Affairs Quarterly, 20, 32n1 public/private distinction, 65, 66 Pudsey, Jason, 5, 7, 109 Quadrant, 41, 56n8 qualifications, educational, 113 Quinby, Lee, 88nn12 13 16 20 27 29 race, 3, 11–13, 15, 25, 38, 40, 51, 53, 80, 82, 85, 118, 122, 123, 142 racism, 13, 14, 31 academic r., 21 anti- r., 34n54

191

Racism and Sexism (Rothenberg), 31, 34n56 racist exclusion, Rainbow Coalition, 14, 15. See also coalition(s) Raising Boys (Biddulph), 41, 56n11 rape, 23, 83, 142, 152, 153 rationality, 63, 86, 91, 117 Rawls, John, 2, 63–65, 68–70, 75nn4 5 6 7 9, 162n10 A Theory of Justice, 75nn4 5 6 7 9 reason, 4, 6, 8n6, 22, 25, 78, 81, 89n42, 91, 95, 98, 99, 101, 103–105, 106n4, 107n44, 155, 162n16 Cartesian r., 106n3 feminization of, 98–100, 105 masculinization of, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 101, 102 personification of, 100 universal r., 105 reasoning, 18, 64 between men and women, 154 moral r., 154 Reay, Diane, 118, 120, 122, 127n1, 129nn59 61 62, 130nn85 89 reflexivity, 109, 116, 117, 127, 128n1 reform, ideological vs. bodily sex, 92 relations, gender, 27, 109, 117–120, 123, 127 relationship(s), 65, 67, 68, 112–114, 121, 122, 126, 127, 135 familial r., 85 intergenerational r., 61, 69 power r., 140, 141, 143, 145 sexual r., 135 repression, 86, 134, 146 responsibilities, family/household, 63, 64 revolution, 23, 140 Copernican r., 28 French r., 197n43 scientific r., 197n28 sexual r., 42, 144, 146, 147, 162n9 Rhode, Deborah, 106n3 Richardson, Diane, 58n36 Richardson, John G., 128n28

192

Index

Riger, Stephanie, Female Fear, 142, 149n20 rights, 1, 5, 11, 21, 30, 62, 67, 69, 73, 130n86, 146, 153, 154, 157 constitutional r., 67 political r., 61, 62, 155 women’s r., 74n3, 133, 152, 153, 155–158 equality r., 133 Risseeuw, Carla, 119–121, 127n1, 129nn65 66, 130n82 Robinson, Virginia, 58n36 Roiphe, Katie, 43, 57n21 role(s), traditional sex, 40, 144 Rothenberg, Paula, 30, 31 Feminist Frameworks, 31, 34n55 Racism and Sexism, 31, 34n56 Rothfield, Philipa, 56n2, 57nn24 25, 58nn27 28 32 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 110 Sarvasy, Wendy, 75n15 satisfaction, sexual, 136 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 96 Sawicki, Jana, 88n6 Schwalbe, Michael, 56n12 Scruton, Roger, 29, 32, 34n54 Secretary of Education, 29 Segal, Lynne, 56n12, 138 Sex Exposed, 138, 149nn8 14 Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 123, 130n92 self-consciousness, 120. See also consciousness self-determination, 151, 152 Aboriginal, 40 self-empowerment, 146. See also empowerment separatism, feminist, 1 seriality, 159, 162n3 Sevenhuijsen, Selma, 66, 67, 75nn12 14 sex(es), 57nn18 21, 82–84, 135–138, 151, 154, 161, 162n9 s. acts, 137 early experiences of, 136 s. vs. gender, 20, 22, 92, 106n11, 142

s. and harassment, 57nn13 15 s. industry, 143 s. objects, 142, 143 procreative vs. bad s., 137 Sex and Secrets (Allen), 83, 89nn35 36 Sex Exposed (Segal and McIntosh), 138, 149nn8 14 sexiness, 135 sexism, 14, 16, 34n56, 40–42, 56n10, 80, 148, 154. See also bias, sex(ist)(ual); misogyny sexist perspective(s), 4 sexual energies, exploitation of, 152 sexual explicitness, 133, 139 sexual objectification of women, 32 sexuality, 6, 12, 21, 57n13, 78, 82–86, 122, 133–137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 147, 148, 149nn9 14 28 depraved s., 137 history of, 77, 78, 82–84, 86, 87n3, 88n11, 89nn40 60 homo- s., 30 polarized s., 135 sexually transmitted disease(s), 84 sexual practice/expression, 134, 135, 138 sexual preference (orientation), 82, 161. See also heterosexuality; homosexuality sexual revolution, 42, 144, 147 Shanley, Mary Lyndon, 162n10 Shumway, David, 79, 88n14 Riger, Stephanie, 142, 149n20 Skeggs, B., 57n17 slavery, 11. See also labor, slave Smith, Douglas, 149n22 Smith, Nellie, 33n20 Smith, Paul, 106nn6 7Paul, Smith, Vicki, 130n83 social contract theory, 61, 62, 68, 71 Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory, 2 social order, 72, 78, 115, 125, 127n1, 144 social position, 13, 15, 17, 119, 123 social regularities, macro-level, 110

Index social relations, 2–4,18, 97,102,123,127, 138, 153,160.See also relationship(s) socialists, 1, 13, 14, 53 societ(y)(ies), 17, 27, 67, 68, 70, 80, 83, 84, 86, 97, 110, 112, 125, 126, 134, 135, 138, 139, 142, 144, 147, 154–157, 159 American s., 12, 21 colonial s., 85, 89n49 individual and, 55, 157 capitalist s., 114, 118 Nietzschean ideal s., 145 patriarchal s., 103 penal s., 86 Plato’s ideal s., 94 political s., 61–65, 68–73 Victorian s., 83, 84, 89nn37 38 39 41 Western s., 77 Society for Analytic Feminism, 25 Society for the Study of Women Philosophers, 25 The Society for Women in Philosophy, 25 socioanalysis, reflexive, feminist (Bourdieu), 5, 109, 110, 116, 117, 119–121, 123–125, 127 socio-sexual subordination, 43 Socrates, 27, 94 Sommers, Christina, 20–22, 38–32, 32nn1 2 3, 33nn23 24 26 Who Stole Feminism?, 28, 34n52 Sontag, Susan, 136 sovereign view of world (Bourdieu), 111 Spelman, Elizabeth V., 122, 130n88 Stacey, Jackie, 58n36 Stack, Carol B., 120, 130n74 Steinem, Gloria, 42, 57n12 stereotypes race/gender/sexual, 29, 92, 120, 136, 137, 139, 144 Strossen, Nadine, 137–139, 148n2, 149nn11 12 13, 149n24 structuralism, 110, 125, 128nn5 16 French s., 110 objectivist s. (Levi-Strauss), 110 post-s., 56n2, 88nn19 21 25 28, 89n65

193

subordination, 6, 43, 79, 80, 84, 86, 120, 122, 135, 142 subversion, 86, 106n6, 138 Summers, Anne, 57nn13 18 sweatshops, 30 tenured radicals, 21, 23, 26, 32nn8 9 Thatcher, Margaret, 43 A Theory of Justice (Rawls), 75nn4 5 6 7 9 In These Times, 11, 16 Throwing Like a Girl (Young), 2, 8n7 Thompson, Denise, 39, 56nn4 5, 58n29 Thompson, Janna, 5, 7, 61, 75n23 Thompson, John B., 129n44 Timaeus (Plato), 94 Tong, Rosemarie, 1, 8n1, 51, 58nn37 38 39, 134, 135, 148nn3 4, 149n6 Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (MacKinnon), 141, 149n19 transgression, 133, 137, 138, 144–146, 148 Trioli, Virginia, 57n18 Tronto, Joan, 66, 67, 75nn12 13 16 17, 123, 130nn91 94 truth(s), 4, 12, 22, 26, 38, 54, 78, 79, 82, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 103, 105, 112, 126, 127 central t., 47 literal t., 91–93, 102, 104, 105 material vs. symbolic t., 124 objective t., 91, 92, 113 Twilight of Common Dreams (Gitlin), 11, 18nn4 5 Two Treatises on Government (Locke), 74n2 ultra-left, 19, 20, 23 unemployment benefits, 30 United States Constitution, 21 universities, 4, 22, 27, 29 Utopianism, 156, 160 values, 4, 13, 19, 70, 73, 74, 94, 145 family v., 16, 20 imperialist v., 30 misogynistic v., 136 moral v., 137

194

Index

values (continued) patriarchal v., 142, 147 personal v., 74 political v., 4 repressive v., 137 sexual v., 138 of slave mentality, 143 traditional v., 30, 158 of Western civilization, 24 Vance, Caroline, 25, 91, 94, 103, 136, 138, 139, 149nn9 14 Pleasure and Danger, 25, 91, 94, 103, 107n16, 149n28 venereal disease, 84. See also sexually transmitted disease veto power, group, 157 Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Green), 74n3, 156 violence, 39, 85, 141, 152, 160 domestic v., 41, 54, 142 fear of male v., 142 v. against female convicts, 86 sexual v., 57nn13 16, 135, 152 symbolic v. (Bourdieu), 109, 110, 115, 116, 118, 121–123, 127, 127n1, 129nn60 63 voluntarism, 110 wage(s), 30, 85 Walkowitz, Judith R., 83 Prostitution and Victorian Society, 83, 89nn37 38 39 41 43 44 45 46 47 48 Wall Street Journal, 21 Walter, Natasha, 43, 57n21 Wartenberg, Thomas E., 140–143, 145, 149nn17 18 23 25 Washington, Harold, 14 welfare state, 66 What Can She Know? (Code), 72, 75n20 What is Feminism? (Beasley), 47–50, 56n1, 59nn30 31 33 34 White, Roger, 102, 104, 105, 108nn45 46 Who Stole Feminism? (Sommers), 28, 34n52

Will, George, 22, 30, 32n8, 33n16, 33nn47 48 Williams, Christine, 56n6, 130n83 Williams, Linda, 139 Williams, Nadine, 57nn18 23 will to power, 144, 147. See also power; power-over; power-to Witt, Charlotte, 106n3 Wittgenstein and Justice (Pitkin), 140, 149n16 worldviews, 115 Wolf, Naomi, 43, 57 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 63, 70, 74n3, 101– 103, 105, 107n43, 155, 156 women, 1, 2, 4–7, 11–13, 16, 18–20, 22–25, 28, 31, 32, 34, 36, 40–43, 45, 49, 50, 54, 56–58, 61–63, 70, 75, 79– 86, 88, 89, 91–95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103–107, 118–123, 125, 128– 130, 133–145, 147–149, 151–162 w. in academic life, 24 as convicts, 85, 86, 89n35 exclusion and/or representation for w., 11, 61–63, 95, 98, 151, 155, 156, 158 liberation of, 28, 56, 113 marginarlity of, 12,48 in multiple fields vs. single group, 82, 123 social roles and power/equality issues vis-à-vis men, 1, 2, 4–7, 18, 19, 25, 41, 70, 79–81, 84, 85, 88nn18 24 26, 93, 104, 119–123, 130nn91 94, 134, 135, 137, 140–142, 147, 148, 151–161 as victims, 23, 42, 83, 145 Woman of Reason (Green), 8n6, 155, 162n16 workers, contract, 37. See also contract(s), contract theory, social Worth, Chris, 56n2 Young, Iris Marion, 3, 7, 11, 151–155, 157–161 Justice Interruptus, 158, 163nn25 26

Index Young, Iris Marion (continued) Justice and the Politics of Difference, 149n27, 151, 162nn1 2 4 5 6 11 12 13 14, 163nn20 21 22 23 24 Throwing Like a Girl, 2, 8n7 Young, Michael F. D., 128n34 “Youth Work for the Dole” program, Australian, 41

195

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Messay Kebede, Meaning and Development

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Michael H. Mitias, Editor, Philosophy and Architecture.

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90. Sandra A. Wawrytko, Editor, The Problem of Evil: An Intercultural Exploration. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 91. Gary J. Acquaviva, Values, Violence, and Our Future. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 92.

Michael R. Rhodes, Coercion: A Nonevaluative Approach

93. Jacques Kriel, Matter, Mind, and Medicine: Transforming the Clinical Method 94. Haim Gordon, Dwelling Poetically: Educational Challenges in Heidegger’s Thinking on Poetry. A volume in Philosophy of Education 95. Ludwig Grünberg, The Mystery of Values: Studies in Axiology, Edited by Cornelia Grünberg and Laura Grünberg 96. Gerhold K. Becker, Editor, The Moral Status of Persons: Perspectives on Bioethics. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 97. Roxanne Claire Farrar, Sartrean Dialectics: A Method for Critical Discourse on Aesthetic Experience 98. Ugo Spirito, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Translated from Italian and Edited by Anthony G. Costantini. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 99. Steven Schroeder, Between Freedom and Necessity: An Essay on the Place of Value 100. Foster N. Walker, Enjoyment and the Activity of Mind: Dialogues on Whitehead and Education. A volume in Philosophy of Education 101. Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein 102. Bennie R. Crockett, Jr., Editor, Addresses of the Mississippi Philosophical Association. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies

103. Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contribution of Günther Anders 104. Giambattista Vico, Universal Right. Translated from Latin and edited by Giorgio Pinton and Margaret Diehl. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 105. Judith Presler and Sally J. Scholz, Editors, Peacemaking: Lessons from the Past, Visions for the Future. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 106. Dennis Bonnette, Origin of the Human Species. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 107. Phyllis Chiasson, Peirce’s Pragmatism: The Design for Thinking. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 108. Dan Stone, Editor, Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 109. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, What Is the Meaning of Human Life? 110. Lennart Nordenfelt, Health, Science, and Ordinary Language, with Contributions by George Khushf and K. W. M. Fulford 111. Daryl Koehn, Local Insights, Global Ethics for Business. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 112. Matti Häyry and Tuija Takala, Editors, The Future of Value Inquiry. A volume in Nordic Value Studies 113.

Conrad P. Pritscher, Quantum Learning: Beyond Duality

114. Thomas M. Dicken and Rem B. Edwards, Dialogues on Values and Centers of Value: Old Friends, New Thoughts. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 115. Rem B. Edwards, What Caused the Big Bang? A volume in Philosophy and Religion 116. Jon Mills, Editor, A Pedagogy of Becoming. A volume in Philosophy of Education

117. Robert T. Radford, Cicero: A Study in the Origins of Republican Philosophy. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 118. Arleen L. F. Salles and María Julia Bertomeu, Editors, Bioethics: Latin American Perspectives. A volume in Philosophy in Latin America 119. Nicola Abbagnano, The Human Project: The Year 2000, with an Interview by Guiseppe Grieco. Translated from Italian by Bruno Martini and Nino Langiulli. Edited with an introduction by Nino Langiulli. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 120. Daniel M. Haybron, Editor, Earth’s Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil. A volume in Personalist Studies 121. Anna T. Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub: A Modern Sufi Odyssey 122. George David Miller, Peace, Value, and Wisdom: The Educational Philosophy of Daisaku Ikeda. A volume in Daisaku Ikeda Studies 123. Haim Gordon and Rivca Gordon, Sophistry and Twentieth-Century Art 124. Thomas O. Buford and Harold H. Oliver, Editors Personalism Revisited: Its Proponents and Critics. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies 125. Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein 126. Robert S. Hartman, The Knowledge of Good: Critique of Axiological Reason. Expanded translation from the Spanish by Robert S. Hartman. Edited by Arthur R. Ellis and Rem B. Edwards.A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 127. Alison Bailey and Paula J. Smithka, Editors. Community, Diversity, and Difference: Implications for Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 128. Oscar Vilarroya, The Dissolution of Mind: A Fable of How Experience Gives Rise to Cognition. A volume in Cognitive Science 129. Paul Custodio Bube and Jeffery Geller, Editors, Conversations with Pragmatism: A Multi-Disciplinary Study. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values

130. Richard Rumana, Richard Rorty: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Literature. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 131. Stephen Schneck, Editor, Max Scheler’s Acting Persons: New Perspectives A volume in Personalist Studies 132. Michael Kazanjian, Learning Values Lifelong: From Inert Ideas to Wholes. A volume in Philosophy of Education 133. Rudolph Alexander Kofi Cain, Alain Leroy Locke: Race, Culture, and the Education of African American Adults. A volume in African American Philosophy 134. Werner Krieglstein, Compassion: A New Philosophy of the Other 135. Robert N. Fisher, Daniel T. Primozic, Peter A. Day, and Joel A. Thompson, Editors, Suffering, Death, and Identity. A volume in Personalist Studies 136. Steven Schroeder, Touching Philosophy, Sounding Religion, Placing Education. A volume in Philosophy of Education 137. Guy DeBrock, Process Pragmatism: Essays on a Quiet Philosophical Revolution. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 138. Lennart Nordenfelt and Per-Erik Liss, Editors, Dimensions of Health and Health Promotion 139. Amihud Gilead, Singularity and Other Possibilities: Panenmentalist Novelties 140. Samantha Mei-che Pang, Nursing Ethics in Modern China: Conflicting Values and Competing Role Requirements. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 141. Christine M. Koggel, Allannah Furlong, and Charles Levin, Editors, Confidential Relationships: Psychoanalytic, Ethical, and Legal Contexts. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 142. Peter A. Redpath, Editor, A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Étienne Gilson. A volume in Gilson Studies

143. Deane-Peter Baker and Patrick Maxwell, Editors, Explorations in Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 144. Matti Häyry and Tuija Takala, Editors, Scratching the Surface of Bioethics. A volume in Values in Bioethics 145. Leonidas Donskis, Forms of Hatred: The Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature 146. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Editor, Interpretation and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz 147. Herman Stark, A Fierce Little Tragedy: Thought, Passion, and SelfFormation in the Philosophy Classroom. A volume in Philosophy of Education 148. William Gay and Tatiana Alekseeva, Editors, Democracy and the Quest for Justice: Russian and American Perspectives. A volume in Contemporary Russian Philosophy 149. Xunwu Chen, Being and Authenticity 150. Hugh P. McDonald, Radical Axiology: A First Philosophy of Values 151. Dane R. Gordon and David C. Durst, Editors, Civil Society in Southeast Europe. A volume in Post-Communist European Thought 152. John Ryder and Emil Višňovský, Editors, Pragmatism and Values: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume One. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 153. Messay Kebede, Africa’s Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization 154. Steven M. Rosen, Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 155. Albert A. Anderson, Steven V. Hicks, and Lech Witkowski, Editors, Mythos and Logos: How to Regain the Love of Wisdom. A volume in Universal Justice 156. John Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska, Editors, Deconstruction and Reconstruction: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Two. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values

157. Javier Muguerza, Ethics and Perplexity: Toward a Critique of Dialogical Reason. Translated from the Spanish by Jody L. Doran. Edited by John R. Welch. A volume in Philosophy in Spain 158. Gregory F. Mellema, The Expectations of Morality 159. Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins 160. Stan van Hooft, Life, Death, and Subjectivity: Moral Sources in Bioethics A volume in Values in Bioethics 161. André Mineau, Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics Against Human Dignity 162. Arthur Efron, Expriencing Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Deweyan Account. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 163. Reyes Mate, Memory of the West: The Contemporaneity of Forgotten Jewish Thinkers. Translated from the Spanish by Anne Day Dewey. Edited by John R. Welch. A volume in Philosophy in Spain 164. Nancy Nyquist Potter, Editor, Putting Peace into Practice: Evaluating Policy on Local and Global Levels. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 165. Matti Häyry, Tuija Takala, and Peter Herissone-Kelly, Editors, Bioethics and Social Reality. A volume in Values in Bioethics 166. Maureen Sie, Justifying Blame: Why Free Will Matters and Why it Does Not. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 167. Leszek Koczanowicz and Beth J. Singer, Editors, Democracy and the Post-Totalitarian Experience. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 168. Michael W. Riley, Plato’s Cratylus: Argument, Form, and Structure. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 169. Leon Pomeroy, The New Science of Axiological Psychology. Edited by Rem B. Edwards. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 170. Eric Wolf Fried, Inwardness and Morality

171. Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 172. Charles C. Hinkley II, Moral Conflicts of Organ Retrieval: A Case for Constructive Pluralism. A volume in Values in Bioethics 173. Gábor Forrai and George Kampis, Editors, Intentionality: Past and Future. A volume in Cognitive Science 174. Dixie Lee Harris, Encounters in My Travels: Thoughts Along the Way. A volume in Lived Values:Valued Lives 175. Lynda Burns, Editor, Feminist Alliances. A volume in Philosophy and Women