Feminism is an
interesting, if at times divisive, topic for discussion at every level of
conversation. When it is said that Feminism is ‘divisive’, it should not just
simply be implied that there is a division between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’
of feminism, per se, but that Feminist thought is as equally divided internally
as it is with other schools of thought externally. No doubt, with it being
International Women’s Day earlier this week, there will be a number of voices
discussing the topic. Of these voices, it is important to recall that there is
not necessarily a Manichean (‘Us and Them’) conflictual division between those
who are interested by or practice feminist politics, and those who negate it as
‘cancel culture’ or subversive – despite the constructed narrative.
With the broad and
formal discussion of the so called ‘Culture Wars’ across every platform or
media outlet, it can often be easier to think in these terms. Indeed, this polarized
dualism can offer some kind of foundation or map to navigating the ‘cultural politics’
of the times. The trouble with such a foundation is its inability to detect nuances,
broadly subsuming different argumentation into two binary oppositional camps –
e.g. ‘For’ and ‘Against’, and this undermines not only the fragility of
perspective but also a certain willingness to understand the wider group one
does not fall into. This is not to suggest that one should necessarily be
‘anti-foundationalist’ as this always risks falling into a kind of pure
relativism, where one’s capacity to judge is hindered by understanding as
opposed to aided by it. So, I would like to briefly sketch out why I think that
Feminism is an interesting tradition of thought to engage with and why it is not
an ideology as a short introduction to the tradition to commemorate this International
Women’s Day.
The first thing to note
is that I understand Feminism to be a tradition of thought, as opposed
to an ideology. Ideology is totalising; where any single idea takes the
position of an all-encompassing γνῶσις [gnosis], able to award meaning
to anything within the historical framework of that particular logic, i.e., it
becomes a key to gaining a watertight foundational understanding to mediate all
aspects of life.[1]
The term ‘ideology’ itself implies, as the political theorist Hannah Arendt claims,
“that an idea can become the subject matter of a science just as animals are
the subject matter of zoology, and that the suffix -logy in ideology, as
in zoology, indicates nothing but the logoi, the scientific statements
made on it”, and as such, “it is the logic of an idea. Its subject
matter is history to which the ‘idea’ is applied”.[2] The primary ‘idea’ fundamental
to National Socialism, for example, was the concept of historical ‘race
struggle’, which could then be pseudo-scientifically applied to explain every
object or process by this logic. Q. ‘Why is this computer in existence?’ A. Race
struggle, and this is why... Q. ‘Why am I unemployed and others are not?’ A. Race
Struggle, and this is why… Q. ‘Why is x the way it is?’ A. Race Struggle,
and this is why... [3]
You get the picture. All understanding can be subsumed by the applied logic of a
single idea, eradicating the faculty of thought altogether.
I understand that this
may be a particularly narrow grasp of ideology, however it is the most apt
because it allows us to separate the truly ‘ideological’ from merely partisan,
ideational, moralistic, principled or pragmatic forms of politics. Ideology is
totalising, it encompasses and can explain all things with the pseudo-scientific
appeal to and application of its supposed skeleton-key like logic. Feminism is not
this. Although there is a large debate concerning what should be included under
the umbrella of ‘Feminism’, the very fact that there is an absence of such a
totalising single piece of knowledge or idea stands testament to this fact.
Some may suggest the notion that ‘Women are treated unfairly, unjustly or
unequally in comparison to Men’ is the central ‘idea’ of feminism, and so permits
its qualification as an ideology. Nevertheless, such a stipulation would ignore
(a) that even this as a central tenet is highly contested by a number of
feminists, and (b) that this cannot be scientifically totalised (pseudo or not)
to a universal level of the all-encompassing in order to explain any and all
things. In this manner, Feminism is not ideological, it is a tradition
of thought, or rather an approach mediating our socio-political
constructions and edifices.
The internal and
historical factions of feminism are often seen as being divided into a number of
waves: first, second, third, and sometimes a fourth. Each wave has added to the
feminist discourse in some manner over time, almost in a geological fashion
where each layer bleeds into the next. This implies that with every new addition
comes a series of internal conflicts between the propositions and stipulations of
the various waves. For example, First Wave Liberal Feminism, following the
thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, centred its focus on the struggle of women in
the public sphere, whereas Second Wave Liberal Feminism, headed by such individuals
as Betty Friedan, shift emphasis to women’s rights and experiences of subjugation
in the private as well as public spheres. This extended the aims of the
feminist movement beyond that of property rights or suffrage alone and thus triggered
a chain of dialogues about the relation between the public and private spheres
as a whole.
The distinct waves of
Feminism place a certain emphasis on different phenomena, experiences or
concepts. Second Wave, differing to first wave, explores the politics of gender
and the experiences of women both socially and in the private sphere, be
that in terms of reproductive rights, as a labouring class, sexuality, domestic
abuse and so on. One of the greatest failures of the Second Wave was its lack
of account for the different subjective (or closed intersubjective) experiences
of women in relation to their subject. This led to the formation of a ‘Third
Wave’ that sought to address this issue of experiential exclusion, raising consciousness
for and adding the subjective experiences of the non-white, queer, ‘Trans’,
post-colonial and/or posthuman subject to the wider feminist discourse. The
concept of ‘intersectionality’, discussed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a fantastic
illustration of this. Crenshaw contended that critical feminist studies did not
take into account the dynamic interaction of race and gender in contributing to
the everyday tribulations of non-white women, and as such needed to become ‘intersectional’.[4]
Equally, Judith Butler,
and her work on performative linguistics and norms of Gender, enabled a certain
insight into relaxing the connection we uphold and recreate between the manner
in which we hail bodies as being gendered and the production of exclusion or
vulnerability. For instance, Butler achieves this by attempting to critique the
subtle connection between ‘biological’ or ‘anatomical’ sex, gender norms, and
one’s supposed role in the process of heterosexual reproduction.[5] By seeking to relax this
performative nexus, we open the space for new forms of liveable life to be led
without a crushing sense of vulnerability or potential for bodily harm. Whose
experience, whose subject, or process of subjectivation, is excluded when
gender norms are constructed and (re)performed thusly? Fourth Wave, all be it
disputed, continues along a similar path to that of third wave, but focusses
attention on the relationship between sex, gender, the subject and the increasing
magnitude communicative and practical technologies play a part in social life,
such as the effect of social media and combatting the subjugation of women on a
digital as well as material plane of social existence (e.g. #MeToo). What
unites these different factions, however? How do they come together to form a tradition
of thought?
Despite their discrepancies
and differences, the varying feminist perspectives are unified in the overall
assertion that ‘the body’, one often gendered, experiences the effects of
social, political, economic and normative structures, making that body limited
or vulnerable in some manner. The First wave centred its emphasis on the female
body achieving the legal and political rights of the public sphere, rights that
are overtly justified through the universalist liberal frame of inalienable
human rights. The gendered female body is entitled to public rights because
that body is a human body, authorised by that virtue to engage with the
political sphere because they are thus a political animal, by definition,
inalienably, a ζῷον πoλιτικόν [zōon politikon]. As liberal rights
extended into the private sphere, so too did the discourse around the politico-structural
limitation of the feminine body. As a body endowed with inalienable rights,
these rights of personhood do not end at the threshold of the private sphere[6], nor can critiques of
productive labouring life escape a lens examining how the division of labour is
drawn along normative lines between gendered bodies[7], or even how our
historico-theoretical notions of contractual civic society and political
obligation relate to the gendered body.[8] With the inception of
intersectional feminism, the gendered body was exposed as an overt site of
normative clustering – where norms, structure, power, discourse, linguistics
and performative experience collide. Questions such as ‘How is a gendered body
constructed?’, ‘How do gendered bodies experience gender norms differently by variations
of their bodied subject?’, ‘How do gendered bodies experience vulnerability by virtue
of their gendered status?’, ‘How does historical locality add to the
experiences of a gendered body?’ or even ‘What constitutes a gendered body?’ fell
front-and-centre of the third wave discourse.
No, Feminism is not an
ideology. It lacks an overarching claim to some gnosis that is applicable as an
all-encompassing logic of life and history. Nonetheless, despite its
variations, despite its splinters, fractures and divisions, through its
corporeal dimension Feminism has forged a tradition of thinking about
the constitutive relationship between the body, structure, politics, norms, social
life and gender. Whether or not one agrees with the premises and conclusions
of individual feminists or feminist groups, the Feminist tradition challenges
us to think corporeally, to consider life as a bodied subject, where norms
collide to cluster around our bodied existence, and how our experiences of
these bodies encounter ‘the political’. This, therefore, is without a doubt a
valuable asset and another precious discursive tool we can employ to think our
way through the strange times we navigate.
[1] This is uniquely discussed in the
work of Eric Voegelin, who married the political theology of Gnosticism with
the ideological forces of the twentieth century: Eric Voegelin (2012) The
New Science of Politics: An Introduction, Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press; (2012) Science, Politics, Gnosticism: Two Essays,
Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc.
[2] Hannah Arendt (1979) The
Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Inc., p. 469.
[3] Q implies ‘Question’, and A
implies ‘Answer’.
[4] Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) ‘Demarginalizing
the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University
of Chicago Legal Forum, 1(8), pp. 139-167.
[5] Judith Butler (1990) Gender
Trouble, New York: Routledge.
[6] See: Betty Friedan (1963) The Feminine
Mystique, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
[7] See: Simone de Beauvoir (2014) The
Second Sex, London: Vintage Random House
[8] See: Carole Pateman (1988) The Sexual Contract, Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Picture by: Ian Aberle, 'Feminism, My 2nd Favorite "F" Word - Dallas Women's March 2018', https://www.flickr.com/photos/ianaberle/26030565758