Susan Gubar does a fantastic job of outlining the recent history of feminist discourse in her essay "What Ails Feminist Criticism?", and I agree with many of her critiques of what she labels the first three phases of feminist criticism. Her narration of the evolution of feminism draws clear connections of what appears to be historical necessity between each succeeding phase, and her essay acts as an excellent point of access to contemporary theory. Its conclusion, however, is somewhat lacking; Gubar's attempt at a critique of poststructuralist feminism as undermined by its own obscurantism--particularly when compared to her very persuasive criticism of other brands of feminism--is unconvincing, and the essay in its entirety simply cements my personal belief that deconstructive gender theory (in the vein of Butler) provides the most useful framework for understanding sexual politics in contemporary society. In this post, I will briefly provide my own interpretation of Gubar's critiques of the first three phases of feminist discourse, and then I will argue that the poststructuralist school of feminism provides the most valid solution both to gender inequality and to "what ails feminist criticism" in this fourth phase of infighting.
Gubar's primary problem with the "critique" phase of feminism is its negative nature; it lamented the cultural dominance of the masculine and the exclusion of the feminine, but it did not have its own discourse. Its identity was entirely negative and therefore wholly defined and restricted by--as well as dependent on--the discourse of the masculine. (If you're interested in the paradoxically dependent nature of political and representational resistance in general, I'd recommend Eva Geulen's extremely sophisticated essay "Resistance and Representation: A Case Study of Thomas Mann's 'Mario and the Magician'" (New German Critique 68 (1996): 3-29).)
This inevitably led to the second phase--that of "recovery"--which had a positive identity; it developed a unique canon of woman writers and attempted to universalize the plight of women everywhere.
The recovery phase was immediately followed by the third phase--the "engendering of difference" phase--in which the feminist infighting began. Feminists quickly realized that the feminine experience of oppression could not be universalized, and the (in many ways unanswerable) question of race immediately complicated the field. White critics that excluded the literature of other races and ethnicities from their work were considered racist, and white critics that attempted to appropriate such literature were labeled colonialists. (This strikes me as excessively Marxist; in this logic, white feminists are analogous to the bourgeoisie, and all other races--here analogous to the proletariat--must act as their own saviors. This mindset is dangerously linked with violent revolution rather than peaceful political change, and its reliance on dichotomous racial hierarchies gestures toward an eventual inversion of the existing social structure--subjugating the hegemonic class of white feminists through the subjectivation of oppressed, racially other women--rather than the achievement of racial and gender equality.)
This lose-lose situation for white feminists was then reframed with the development of poststructuralist "identity" theory, which dislocated the concept of self and resisted the process of categorization altogether. Poststructuralist theory is appealing for many reasons: its refusal to define "woman" escapes the problems of the third phase and defeats racial hierarchies within the feminist movement, as it does not privilege any particular class, race, or ethnicity with being "more feminine" than any other; it acknowledges differences within and between genders while, through the logic of gender performativity and social construction, allowing for change within and exchange between constructed identities; and rather than subjugating or subjectivating a given race or gender, it moves outside of the logic of hierarchical power systems and avoids the danger of simply inverting the existing sexual-political situation.
Gubar's critique of this school of thought--primarily as voiced by Butler--is somewhat superficial. She questions the validity of the syntax of Butler's prose; this attack is overly (and ironically) formalist, and although Gubar claims that it has bearing on the realm of feminist linguistics, I read Butler's linguistic project as simply accessory, a little interdisciplinary treat to go along with her more substantial work on embodied sex and gender.
Gubar's primary critique of poststructuralist feminism, however, is that it is obscurant. I believe that she confuses "obscurantism"--her favorite thing to associate with poststructuralism--with "skepticism." Poststructuralism works against a unity of meaning and refuses to believe in essential sex or gender; this is analogous to Descartes' radical skepticism of the existence of the human body. Gubar is firmly entrenched in the discourse of sexual difference, and she seems to read gender like a Freudian analyst reads psychological symptoms: although she may acknowledge the social construction of gender, she believes that gender is a symptom--a manifestation--of the sort of platonic truth of biological sex. This reasoning assumes a real connection between gender and sex and between sex and the body. Butler's skepticism rejects this; rather than draw a conclusion that is likely to be correct--that gender and sex are connected in a specific way--she acknowledges the impossibility of knowing the nature of this connection for certain. She is not obscurant; she is radically skeptical and therefore logically realistic--like the school of epistemological phenomenalism--past the point of traditional (and conservative) common sense. The poststructuralist deconstruction of intra- and interracial (as well as intra- and intergender) relationships eliminates the problems of what Gubar calls "critical election" and "critical abjection," placing all forms of identity on an equal level of academic and practical validity.
While all of these schools and phases of feminism are valuable for their historical place in the narrative of feminist theory and their work in the blending of various academic discourses, I am convinced that the most useful mode of feminist criticism is the poststructuralist mode. It locates itself outside the logic of dichotomous hierarchization and allows the individual experiences of women (and groups of women) to coexist under the broad umbrella of "feminism." Although Gubar treats Friedman's suggestion that "gender studies" as a discipline be abolished in favor of a more comprehensive field of "identity studies" as radical, such a move is perhaps the only feasible way of reconciling the diverse and often antagonistic theorists of gender, sexuality, race, and class, as well as the incredibly nuanced intersections of these various factors.
You say that “deconstructive gender theory (in the vein of Butler) provides the most useful framework for understanding sexual politics in contemporary society.” A couple of things stand out here. First, and this is merely a comment, theoretical templates like Butler’s strike me as sociological and anthropological. I suspect that ideas like Butler’s could not emerge unless there was some human society that had a good amount of historical and anthropological knowledge about past societies and began to see differences in behavior, mores, custom, ways of life, gender roles and expectations, etc.. I’m not questioning your use of the word ‘deconstructive’ here, I’m just saying that I’m not sure that gender theory can be primarily described as deconstructive. Second, you say that theory provides the most useful framework for understanding sexual politics. What is it that theory allows us to do in this regard?
ReplyDeleteI take it that by saying “deconstructive gender theory...provides the most useful…” that this is, in your way, a response to Gubar. This is a good response and I want to add to that response. Gubar is, it seems to me, very much concerned with the practical, liberatory potential of feminism when a lot of it has become saturated in what she takes to be defeatist (from a certain perspective) gender theory. However, in that gender theory can be deconstructive, therein lies its primary and most useful liberatory potential. I mean that if it can be shown that much of the circulating meanings of gender and gender identification are based on performance which is culturally situated, this has the result of dismantling a big chunk of traditionally held beliefs about gender as exemplified by past societies. I mean something like the following. a) For the most part, past human societies maintained the belief that gender roles were more or less naturally fitting to each sex or that they were not unnatural enough to deserve any serious attention. Past societies maintained the belief that gender roles were not up for grabs and that various forms of gender-based compulsion, enforcement, and exclusion were desirable or normatively correct. b) Gender theory points out the insubstantial bases upon which such ideas hinge by historicizing and situating gender as something that is mutually reinforced and produced. c) This opens up not only possibilities but also provides one a theoretical and normatively orientated basis for critique against existing gender-based forms of oppression.
When I used the term "sexual politics," I simply meant the relationships between genders and sexes in contemporary society; I completely agree that Butler's theoretical paradigm is socially based.
ReplyDeleteI also completely agree that the historical narrative of gender relations is important to contemporary theory. This is where the term "deconstructive" comes in: Butler's analyses of pre-existing cultural mores (i.e. the essentialist norms you reference in "point a") tend to point out the contradictions within and define the limitations of cultural understandings of gender. She deconstructs these understandings and, in the process, gestures to a more fluid and equitable model of gender relations--the political goal that you yourself gesture toward in "point c."