Fortunes of Feminism (27 page)

As I argued, pragmatics models insist on the social context and social practice of communication, and they study a plurality of historically changing discursive sites and practices. As a result, these approaches offer us the possibility of thinking of social identities as complex, changing, and discursively constructed. This in turn seems to me our best hope for avoiding some of Kristeva's difficulties. Complex, shifting, discursively constructed social identities provide an alternative to reified, essentialist conceptions of gender identity, on the one hand, and to simple negations and dispersals of identity, on the other. They thus permit us to navigate safely between the twin shoals of essentialism and nominalism, between reifying women's social identities under stereotypes of femininity, on the one hand, and dissolving them into sheer nullity and oblivion, on the other.
³⁸
I am claiming, therefore, that with the help of a pragmatics conception of discourse we can accept the critique of essentialism without becoming postfeminists. This seems to me to be an invaluable help, for it will not be time to speak of postfeminism until we can legitimately speak of postpatriarchy.
³⁹

^*
I am grateful for helpful comments and suggestions from Jonathan Arac, David Levin, Paul Mattick, Jr., John McCumber, Diana T. Meyers, and Eli Zaretsky

1
See Chapter 2 of this volume, “Struggle over Needs.”

2
I group these writers together not because all are Lacanians—clearly only Kristeva and Lacan himself are—but rather because, disclaimers notwithstanding, all continue the structuralist reduction of discourse to symbolic system. I shall develop this point later in this chapter..

3
To appreciate the importance of history, consider how little the fund of interpretive possibilities available to me, a late twentieth-century North American, overlaps with that available to the thirteenth-century Chinese woman I may want to imagine as my sister. And yet in both cases, hers and mine, the interpretive possibilities are established in the medium of social discourse. It is in the medium of discourse that each of us encounters an interpretation of what it is to be a person, as well as a menu of possible descriptions specifying the particular sort of person each is to be.

4
See Elizabeth V. Spelman,
Inessential Woman
, Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.

5
See Denise Riley,
“Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History
, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

6
See Jane Jenson, “Paradigms and Political Discourse: Labor and Social Policy in the USA and France before 1914,” Working Paper Series, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Winter 1989.

7
See Chapter 3 of this volume, “Struggle over Needs,” and Riley,
“Am I That Name?''
On the struggle to create such new public spheres, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in
Habermas and the Public Sphere
, ed. Craig Calhoun, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, 109–142, and “Tales from the Trenches: On Women Philosophers, Feminist Philosophy, and SPEP,”
Journal of Speculative Philosophy
26:2, 2012, 175–84.

8
Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci
, eds. and trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1972.

9
For a critique of “cultural feminism” as a retreat from political struggle, see Alice Echols, “The New Feminism of Yin and Yang,” in
Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality
, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983.

10
Fernand de Saussure,
Course in General Linguistics
, trans. Wade Baskin, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. For a persuasive critique of this move, see Pierre Bourdieu,
Outline of a Theory of Practice
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Similar objections to Bourdieu's are found in Julia Kristeva's “The System and the Speaking Subject,” in
The Kristeva Reader
, ed. Toril Moi, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, to be discussed below, and in the Soviet Marxist critique of Russian formalism from which Kristeva's views derive.

11
I leave it to linguists to decide whether it is useful for other purposes.

12
These criticisms pertain to what may be called “global” structuralisms, that is, approaches that treat the whole of language as a single symbolic system. They are not intended to rule out the potential utility of approaches that analyze structural relations in limited, socially situated, culturally and historically specific sublanguages or discourses. On the contrary, it is possible that approaches of this latter sort can be usefully articulated with the pragmatic model discussed below.

13
In earlier versions of this chapter, I was not as careful as I should have been in distinguishing “Lacanianism” from Lacan. In taking greater pains to make this distinction here, however, I do not mean to imply that I believe Lacan to be free of difficulties. On the contrary, I suspect that many of the basic critical points made here against “Lacanianism” tell against Lacan as well. But a much longer, more complex textual argument would be required to demonstrate this.

14
For the tensions between the Hegelian and Saussurean dimensions in Lacan's thought, see Peter Dews,
Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory
, London: Verso Books, 1987.

15
For the notion of “neo-structuralism,” see Manfred Frank,
What Is Neo-Structuralism?
trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

16
Dorothy Leland, “Lacanian Psychoanalysis and French Feminism,” in
Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture
, eds. Nancy Fraser and Sandra Bartky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

17
Here I believe one can properly speak of Lacan. Lacan's claim to have overcome biologism rests on his insistence that the phallus is not the penis. However, many feminist critics have shown that he fails to prevent the collapse of the symbolic signifier into the organ. The clearest indication of this failure is his claim, in “The Meaning of the Phallus,” that the phallus becomes the master signifier because of its “turgidity” which suggests “the transmission of vital flow” in copulation. See Jacques Lacan, “The Meaning of the Phallus,” in
Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne
, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.

18
A version of this argument is made by Dorothy Leland in “Lacanian Psychoanalysis and French Feminism.“

19
Deborah Cameron,
Feminism and Linguistic Theory
, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

20
For the declining significance of kinship as a social structural component of modern capitalist societies, see Chapter 7 of this volume, “Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism.” Also Linda J. Nicholson,
Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family
, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

21
In fact, the main function of this broad usage seems to be ideological. For it is only by collapsing into a single category what is supposedly ahistorical and necessary and what is historical and contingent that Lacanianism could endow its claim about the inevitability of phallocentrism with a deceptive appearance of plausibility.

22
See “The Blind Spot in an Old Dream of Symmetry,” in Luce Irigaray,
Speculum of the Other Woman
, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Here Irigaray shows how the use of a phallic standard to conceptualize sexual difference casts woman negatively as “lack.”

23
For an illuminating discussion of this issue as it emerges in relation to the very different—feminist object-relations—version of psychoanalysis developed in the US by Nancy Chodorow, see Elizabeth V. Spelman,
Inessential Woman
.

24
Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction—II,” in
Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne.

25
Even Lacanian feminists have been known on occasion to engage in this sort of movement-baiting. It seems to me that, in her introductory chapter to
The Daughter's Seduction
, Jane Gallop comes perilously close to dismissing the politics of a feminist movement informed by ethical commitments as “imaginary.” See Jane Gallop,
The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis
, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.

26
I have focused here on conceptual as opposed to empirical issues, and I have not directly addressed the question, is Lacanianism true? Yet recent research on the development of subjectivity in infants seems not to support its views. It now appears that even at the earliest stages children are not passive, blank slates on which symbolic structures are inscribed, but rather active participants in the interactions that construct their experience. See, for example, Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachman, “Mother-Infant Mutual Influence and Precursors of Psychic Structure,” in ed. Arnold Goldberg,
Frontiers in Self Psychology
:
Progress in Self Psychology
, Vol. 3, Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1988, 3–25. I am grateful to Paul Mattick, Jr. for alerting me to this work.

27
Kristeva, “The System and the Speaking Subject.”

28
“Renovation” and “renewal” are standard English translations of Kristeva's term, “renouvellement.” Yet they lack some of the force of the French. Perhaps this explains why Anglophone readers have not always noticed the change-making aspect of her account of transgression, why they have instead tended to treat it as pure negation with no positive consequences. For an example of this interpretation, see Judith Butler, “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,” in
Revaluing French Feminism
.

29
This tendency fades in Kristeva's later writings, where it is replaced by an equally one-sided, undiscriminating, conservative emphasis on the “totalitarian” dangers lurking in every attempt at uncontrolled innovation.

30
Butler, “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva.”

31
For an example, see Julia Kristeva,
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

32
See Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in
The Kristeva Reader
, ed. Toril Moi, and “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini” in Julia Kristeva,
Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature
, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

33
For a brilliant critical discussion of Kristeva's philosophy of language, one to which the present account is much indebted, see Andrea Nye, “Woman Clothed with the Sun,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
12:4, 1987, 664–86.

34
Butler makes this point in “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva.”

35
Reprinted in
The Kristeva Reader
, ed. Toril Moi.

36
I take the terms “humanist feminism” and “gynocentric feminism” from Iris Young, “Humanism, Gynocentrism and Feminist Politics,” in Young,
Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory
, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. I take the term “nominalist feminism” from Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
13:3, Spring 1988, 405–36.

37
For the terms “underfeminization” and “overfeminization,” see Riley,
“Am I That Name?”
For a useful critique of Kristeva's equation of collective liberation movements with “totalitarianism,” see Ann Rosalind Jones, “Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics,”
Feminist Review
18, 1984, 56–73.

38
On this point, see Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson, “Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism,” in
Feminism/Postmodernism
, ed. Nicholson, New York: Routledge, 1993.

39
I borrow this line from Toril Moi, who uttered it in another context in her talk at a conference on “Convergence in Crisis: Narratives of the History of Theory,” Duke University, September 24–27, 1987.

6

Feminist Politics in the Age of Recognition:
A Two-Dimensional Approach to Gender Justice

Feminist theory tends to follow the zeitgeist. In the 1970s, when second-wave feminism emerged out of the New Left, its most influential theories of gender reflected the still-potent influence of Marxism. Whether sympathetic or antagonistic to class analysis, these theories located gender relations on the terrain of political economy, even as they sought to expand that terrain to encompass housework, reproduction, and sexuality. Soon thereafter, chafing under the limits of labor-centered paradigms, additional currents of feminist theorizing emerged in dialogue with psychoanalysis. In the Anglophone world, object-relations theorists began to conceptualize gender as an “identity.” On the European continent, meanwhile, Lacanians rejected the term “gender relations” as too sociological and replaced it with “sexual difference,” which they conceptualized in relation to subjectivity and the symbolic order. In neither case was the initial intention to supplant Marxism
per se
; rather, both currents saw themselves as enriching and deepening materialist paradigms that too often lapsed into vulgar economism. By the 1990s, however, the New Left was only a memory, and Marxism seemed to many a dead letter. In that context, lines of thought that had begun by presuming Marxism's relevance took on another valence. Joining the larger exodus of intellectuals from Marxism, most feminist theorists took “the cultural turn.” With the exception of a few holdouts, even those who rejected psychoanalysis came to understand gender as an identity or a “cultural construction.” Today, accordingly, gender theory is largely a branch of cultural studies. As such, it has further attenuated, if not wholly lost, its historic links to Marxism—and to social theory and political economy more generally.

As always, the vicissitudes of theory follow those of politics. The shift, over the last thirty years, from quasi-Marxist, labor-centered understandings of gender to culture- and identity-based conceptions coincides with a parallel shift in feminist politics. Whereas the '68 generation hoped, among other things, to restructure the political economy so as to abolish the gender division of labor, subsequent feminists formulated other, less material aims. Some, for example, sought recognition of sexual difference, while others preferred to deconstruct the categorial opposition between masculine and feminine. The result was a shift in the center of gravity of feminist politics. Once centered on labor and violence, gender struggles have focused increasingly on identity and representation in recent years. The effect has been to subordinate social struggles to cultural struggles, the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. That was not, once again, the original intention. It was assumed, rather, by cultural feminists and deconstructionists alike that feminist cultural politics would synergize with struggles for social equality. But that assumption, too, has fallen prey to the zeitgeist. In “the network society,” the feminist turn to recognition has dovetailed all too neatly with a hegemonic neoliberalism that wants nothing more than to repress socialist memory.
¹

Of course, feminism is hardly alone in this trajectory. On the contrary, the recent history of gender theory reflects a wider shift in the grammar of political claims-making. On the one hand, struggles for recognition have exploded everywhere—witness battles over multiculturalism, human rights, and national autonomy. On the other hand, struggles for egalitarian redistribution are in relative decline—witness the weakening of trade unions and the co-optation of labor and socialist parties in “the third way.” The result is a tragic historical irony. The shift from redistribution to recognition has occurred just as an aggressively globalizing US-led capitalism is exacerbating economic inequality.
²

For feminism, accordingly, this shift has been double-edged. On the one hand, the turn to recognition represents a broadening of gender struggle and a new understanding of gender justice. No longer restricted to questions of distribution, gender justice now encompasses issues of representation, identity, and difference. The result is a major advance over reductive economistic paradigms that had difficulty conceptualizing harms rooted not in the division of labor, but in androcentric patterns of cultural value. On the other hand, it is no longer clear that feminist struggles for recognition are serving to deepen and enrich struggles for egalitarian redistribution. Rather, in the context of an ascendant neoliberalism, they may be serving to displace the latter. In that case, the recent gains would be entwined with a tragic loss. Instead of arriving at a broader, richer paradigm that could encompass both redistribution and recognition, we would have traded one truncated paradigm for another—a truncated economism for a truncated culturalism. The result would be a classic case of combined and uneven development: the remarkable recent feminist gains on the axis of recognition would coincide with stalled progress—if not outright losses—on the axis of distribution.

That, at least, is my reading of present trends. In what follows, I shall outline an approach to gender theory and feminist politics that responds to this diagnosis and aims to forestall its full realization. What I have to say divides into four parts. First, I shall propose an analysis of gender that is broad enough to house the full range of feminist concerns, those central to the old socialist-feminism as well as those rooted in the cultural turn. To complement this analysis, I shall propose, second, a correspondingly broad conception of justice, capable of encompassing both distribution and recognition, and third, a non-identitarian account of recognition, capable of synergizing with redistribution. Finally, I shall examine some practical problems that arise when we try to envision institutional reforms that could redress maldistribution and misrecognition simultaneously. In all four sections, I break with those feminist approaches that focus exclusively on gender. Rather, I situate gender struggles as one strand among others in a broader political project aimed at institutionalizing democratic justice across multiple axes of social differentiation.

1. GENDER: A TWO-DIMENSIONAL CONCEPT

To avoid truncating the feminist problematic, and unwittingly colluding with neoliberalism, feminists today need to revisit the concept of gender. What is needed is a broad and capacious conception, which can accommodate at least two sets of concerns. On the one hand, such a conception must incorporate the labor-centered problematic associated with socialist-feminism; on the other hand, it must also make room for the culture-centered problematic associated with putatively “post-Marxian” strands of feminist theorizing. Rejecting sectarian formulations that cast those two problematics as mutually antithetical, feminists need to develop an account of gender that encompasses the concerns of both. As we shall see, this requires theorizing both the gendered character of the political economy and the androcentrism of the cultural order, without reducing either one of them to the other. At the same time, it also requires theorizing two analytically distinct dimensions of sexism, one centered on distribution, the other centered on recognition. The result will be a
two-dimensional conception of gender
. Only such a conception can support a viable feminist politics in the present era.

Let me explain. The approach I propose requires viewing gender bifocally—simultaneously through two different lenses. Viewed through one lens, gender has affinities with class; viewed through the other, it is more akin to status. Each lens brings into focus an important aspect of women's subordination, but neither is sufficient on its own. A full understanding becomes available only when the two lenses are superimposed. At that point, gender appears as a categorial axis that spans two dimensions of social ordering, the dimension of
distribution
and the dimension of
recognition
.

From the distributive perspective, gender appears as a class-like differentiation, rooted in the economic structure of society. A basic organizing principle of the division of labor, it underlies the fundamental division between paid “productive” labor and unpaid “reproductive” and domestic labor, assigning women primary responsibility for the latter. Gender also structures the division within paid labor between higher-paid, male-dominated manufacturing and professional occupations and lower-paid, female-dominated “pink collar” and domestic service occupations. The result is an economic structure that generates gender-specific forms of distributive injustice.

From the recognition perspective, in contrast, gender appears as a status differentiation, rooted in the status order of society. Gender codes pervasive cultural patterns of interpretation and evaluation, which are central to the status order as a whole. Thus, a major feature of gender injustice is androcentrism: an institutionalized pattern of cultural value that privileges traits associated with masculinity, while devaluing everything coded as “feminine,” paradigmatically—but not only—women. Pervasively institutionalized, androcentric value patterns structure broad swaths of social interaction. Expressly codified in many areas of law (including family law and criminal law), they inform legal constructions of privacy, autonomy, self-defense, and equality. They are also entrenched in many areas of government policy (including reproductive, immigration, and asylum policy) and in standard professional practices (including medicine and psychotherapy). Androcentric value patterns also pervade popular culture and everyday interaction. As a result, women suffer gender-specific forms of
status subordination
, including sexual harassment, sexual assault, and domestic violence; trivializing, objectifying, and demeaning stereotypical depictions in the media; disparagement in everyday life; exclusion or marginalization in public spheres and deliberative bodies; and denial of the full rights and equal protections of citizenship. These harms are injustices of misrecognition. They are relatively independent of political economy and are not merely “superstructural.” Thus, they cannot be overcome by redistribution alone but require additional, independent remedies of recognition.

When the two perspectives are combined, gender emerges as a two-dimensional category. It contains both a political-economic face that brings it within the ambit of redistribution, and also a cultural-discursive face that brings it simultaneously within the ambit of recognition. Moreover, neither dimension is merely an indirect effect of the other. To be sure, the distributive and recognition dimensions interact with each other. But gender maldistribution is not simply a by-product of status hierarchy; nor is gender misrecognition wholly a by-product of economic structure. Rather, each dimension has some relative independence from the other. Neither can be redressed entirely indirectly, therefore, through remedies addressed exclusively to the other. It is an open question whether the two dimensions are of equal weight. But redressing gender injustice, in any case, requires changing both the economic structure and the status order of contemporary society. Neither alone will suffice.

The two-dimensional character of gender wreaks havoc on the idea of an either/or choice between the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition. That construction assumes that women are either a class or a status group, but not both; that the injustice they suffer is either maldistribution or misrecognition, but not both; that the remedy is either redistribution or recognition, but not both. Gender, we can now see, explodes this whole series of false antitheses. Here we have a category that is a compound of both status and class. Not only is gender “difference” constructed simultaneously from both economic differentials and institutionalized patterns of cultural value, but both maldistribution and misrecognition are fundamental to sexism. The implication for feminist politics is clear. To combat the subordination of women requires an approach that combines a politics of redistribution with a politics of recognition.
³

2. GENDER JUSTICE AS PARTICIPATORY PARITY

Developing such an approach requires a conception of justice as broad and capacious as the preceding view of gender. Such a conception, too, must accommodate at least two sets of concerns. On the one hand, it must encompass the traditional concerns of distributive justice, especially poverty, exploitation, inequality, and class differentials. At the same time, it must also encompass concerns of recognition, especially disrespect, cultural imperialism, and status hierarchy. Rejecting sectarian formulations that cast distribution and recognition as mutually incompatible understandings of justice, such a conception must accommodate both. As we shall see, this means theorizing maldistribution and misrecognition by reference to a common normative standard, without reducing either one to the other. The result, once again, will be a
two-dimensional conception of justice
. Only such a conception can comprehend the full magnitude of sexist injustice.

The conception of justice I propose centers on the principle of
parity of participation
. According to this principle, justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another
as peers
. For participatory parity to be possible, at least two conditions must be satisfied. First, the distribution of material resources must be such as to ensure participants' independence and “voice.” This “objective” condition precludes forms and levels of economic dependence and inequality that impede parity of participation. Precluded, therefore, are social arrangements that institutionalize deprivation, exploitation, and gross disparities in wealth, income, and leisure time, thereby denying some people the means and opportunities to interact with others as peers. In contrast, the second condition for participatory parity is “intersubjective.” It requires that institutionalized patterns of cultural value express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem. This condition precludes institutionalized value patterns that systematically depreciate some categories of people and the qualities associated with them. Precluded, therefore, are institutionalized value patterns that deny some people the status of full partners in interaction—whether by burdening them with excessive ascribed “difference” or by failing to acknowledge their distinctiveness.