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WHY STORIES MATTER
The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory
By CLARE HEMMINGS
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4893-1
Chapter One
PROGRESS
The following statement from Feminist Theory is as uncontroversial as it is typical of accounts that describe Western feminist theory's development over time:
There is no disputing that feminist theory, methodology and practice have undergone substantial change since the heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pressure from within and outside and rapidly changing contexts have resulted in a multiplicity of theoretical and practical approaches to the issue of how to challenge and change the gendered nature of everyday life. (Feminist Theory 2003)
It is self-evident—"there is no disputing"—that the last four decades of feminist theorizing, together with the uneven but tangible emergence of academic feminism, have resulted in an increased range of theoretical frameworks to draw on, as well as an increased number of feminist texts published. It is not only the proliferation of approaches and methods that we can be certain about, but, as the extract below makes clear, the displacement of one set of approaches by others, the move from natural, essential truths to the uncertain pleasures and dangers of poststructuralist approaches:
As we all know, the study of gender and sexualities in the humanities and social sciences of the past 15 years has been characterized by the prominence of poststructuralist analytical approaches that challenge the biology-based naturalness of genders and sexualities, and emphasize, in different ways, the socio-cultural and discursive construction of sexual categories and identities. (Nora 2005)
Further, not only do "we all know" that this trajectory accurately describes what has happened in the study of gender and sexualities, but we can also all agree that such theoretical transformations are in line with, in fact propel, transformations in the object of study—gender and sexuality—itself:
Without question, certain historical developments, technologies and theoretical insights have forced gender's slide from sexed bodies. Ranging from queer fantasy and transsexual surgeries to critiques of essentialism, these developments make it seem that there is little which is true, fixable or stable about gender meanings. (Feminist Theory 2003)
Where we used to accept natural, biological givens, perhaps because things were simpler back then, we now need and have theoretical insights and practices that are more appropriate to the complex world we currently inhabit, one our theoretical insights have played their part in creating. As I hope is clear from the extracts I have introduced thus far, such assertions about the transformations understood to typify both theory and the world it engages (or produces) leave no room for doubt; indeed the more assertive the statement—"without question"—the more singular the story about the recent past of Western feminist theory appears to be.
But what if we do not "all know" the same things about what has happened in Western feminist theory's recent past; what if we were to understand the "we" of the address as inaugurated by rather than inaugurating this repeated certainty? What if we start to dispute that which there "is no disputing" and begin to query its relentless rhetoric? What if we approach the question of Western feminist theory's recent past with greater hesitancy and ask both what is missed in the certainty of such progress narratives and what some of the effects of the same certainty might be? What does such incontrovertibility tell us about the present and those "heady days" long past, beyond what we are already expected to know? How might the development of a sceptical relationship to what Megan Jones characterizes as "the conceptual truth-claims of feminist thought" (1998: 118) provide insights into what these descriptions do and how they do it? As indicated in my introduction, I want to start the analysis of Western feminist storytelling here with a dual approach: on the one hand, holding in mind that such narrative insistence can never be entirely accurate, is always at least contested; and on the other, asking after the work that this narrative momentum effects, what it inculcates, particularly in its authoritatively descriptive guise. In this approach, I have been particularly influenced by Robyn Wiegman's careful readings of the multiplicities that make up U.S. academic feminism's institutional history, and her insistence that singular feminist narratives about that history actively work to depoliticize the field (1999a; 2002; 2004).
In this chapter I extend my line of inquiry by mapping, sceptically, Western feminist progress narratives, with particular attention to how the meaning and momentum of this aspect of Western feminist storytelling is textually secured and mobilized. This first chapter will provide the building blocks of my subsequent analysis of loss and return narratives, which use similar markers to complicate the story, and reinflect these to different ends. Let me provide a range of initial examples from some of the journals I have analysed to get the discussion underway:
Over the past decade, general theorists within feminism have developed increasingly sophisticated responses to questions about how best to theorize power and subjectivity.... (Signs 2000)
The development of Women's Studies occurs through crucial shifts in the theoretical paradigms of feminism and the political preoccupations of the women's movement. These shifts have both deconstructed the founding premises of feminist theory and generated a greater depth to feminist thinking and research. (Feminist Review 1999)
During the 1970s we could argue straightforwardly that women were marginalized and subordinate—that women lived and suffered under patriarchy. This claim now requires some urgent refiguring in order to move towards a more nuanced understanding of how and why marginalization and subordination continue and how they were changed. (Feminist Review 2000)
The breadth of feminist issues is now much broader than ever before and intersects with a number of theories about gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, class, corporeality and popular culture, to name just some areas of current complex feminist discussion. (Feminist Theory 2002)
First, the question of universal female subordination is set in focus, then the second phase, when eyes are opened for "the differences of the difference," and a third deconstructivist phase where multiple genders, floating gender boundaries and the body become the key issues of interest. (Nora 2001)
Identity politics has overcome the homogenizing tendencies of second-wave feminism by acknowledging the differences among women and, most significantly, attacking the hierarchy concealed in the category "woman". (Feminist Theory 2000)
The most interesting and far reaching of the rethinking of theoretical frameworks and of feminism itself would be the rewriting of the mind-body split and the rethinking of the sex/gender distinction. These poststructuralist feminist arguments had radical consequences for the understanding of the gendered nature of knowledges, and even more significant consequences for the ways in which identities came to be understood as multiple, unstable positions which could therefore be negotiated and possibly changed. (Australian Feminist Studies 2000)
I have included the above examples all together to give a sense of this narrative of progress told across journal sites on either side of the millennium as one that is general and repeated. It is, I expect, a story familiar to many readers, and one that we are likely to reproduce ourselves in teaching or writing contexts. It is a story I was told as a student in the mid-1990s, and one I find myself telling students now, whatever my intentions. In one way or another, through curriculum design, through what is included in an "advanced" or "introductory" academic feminist class, or through the narratives we produce in lectures or in our readings and corrections of student work, we reproduce this understanding of Western feminist theory as having progressed, and in a particular manner. We have moved from a time when we knew no better, a time when we thought "woman" could be the subject and object of liberation, to a more knowing time in which we attend to the complexity of local and transnational formations of gender and its intersections with other vectors of power. Further, in the extracts above, this is a familiar account of the institutionalization of feminist knowledge and thus describes the development of "Women's Studies" (from the second extract) as well as feminist theory more generally. Indeed, in both progress and loss narratives, academic feminism is often understood as an agent, one that has acted upon and transformed Western feminist theory and practice.
I will return to some of the more intricate themes represented in the above extracts later in the chapter, but for now I want to outline some of the more striking features of a progress narrative. First, it is clearly a positive account, one told with excitement and even relish. It is a narrative of success and accomplishment and positions feminist theory, and its subjects, as attentive and dynamic. Second, it is a narrative with a clear chronology: we are taken from the past—in one extract explicitly the 1970s—via key shifts in politics, theory, and feminism's subject, and towards a complex feminist present. The shifts represented are from singularity of purpose and perspective to understandings that emphasize multiplicity, instability, and difference. The enthusiasm for these shifts is enacted through the use of terms describing current approaches as "interesting," "far reaching," "complex," generative of greater "depth" and nuance, "increasingly sophisticated," and so on. Indeed, the epistemological shifts referred to are consistently rendered as possessing the urgency and eye-opening capacities of a new political moment. Third, these shifts in time and approach are not represented as an inevitable flowering of difference and multiplicity, but are the outcome of that critical energy, directed explicitly at older approaches seen as lacking. In the extracts cited above, "founding premises" are "deconstructed," assumptions about women's subordination require "urgent refiguring," and "homogenizing tendencies" must be "overcome." Feminist theory has moved away from, indeed has directly distanced itself from, earlier preoccupations with "patriarchy," "woman," and "female subordination," focusing instead on intersections of power—"gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, class"—the "gendered nature of knowledges," and the limits of earlier approaches. Thus, a Western feminist progress narrative transforms rather than merely adds to existing approaches, deconstructs and moves beyond as well as forward. The story is one of change brought about through displacement: of feminist objects, epistemologies, and subjects. Integral to the momentum in the above extracts is the enthusiasm about these transformations in both object of inquiry and methodology. Western feminist progress narratives position their subjects as energetic and analytically astute, as generative of and residing in a well-earned state of positive affect.
How do these common glosses work to persuade their reader that the shifts they describe are both accurate and desirable? How do they produce the enthusiasm we are likely to want to share? We can already see that the work is not achieved by direct citation of particular theorists, or by analytic attention to debates over any of these issues. Instead the narrative certainty is textually achieved by techniques of comparisons that propel the momentum described above, that combine time and critique to create the appealing endorsement outlined above. We can see this textual technique already in the above extracts, which describe a trajectory from sameness to difference, singularity to multiplicity, or simplicity to complexity. Further, these relationships are temporally secured, where the former term belongs to the past and the latter term to the present. The shifts are complete; the past is over. Neither is the move from sameness to difference a neutral one occurring gently with the passing of time. Sameness is consigned to the past precisely because of the critical efforts of those who occupy the present position of difference, as indicated above. Thus the characterization of feminist sameness or singularity is as not only over but as necessarily over, dusted as well as done. In this respect, a critical as well as temporal hierarchy is established between textual comparisons between terms. Laying claim to being the subject of this Western feminist progress narrative, laying claim to being on the side of complexity and multiplicity, enthusiasm rather than nostalgia, one thus adopts a shared past, and crucially, one that is displaced through that very enthusiasm in the present. In narrative terms, one is not given the opportunity to choose homogeneity or singularity instead, because we will want to be on the side of sophistication not homogenization, proliferation not unidimensionality, intersectionality not intractability, and thus belief not defeatism. We will want to take up the opportunities these narratives provide to be an optimistic subject of Western feminist theory.
To take up the desired position of subject of this critical displacement, the required shift is not only from one set of objects or concerns to another, but also from one set of perspectives, approaches, or methodologies to another. These reveal and effect the displacement necessary to produce the present narrated in progress narratives. Shifts are not only from sameness to difference, then, but also from the epistemological and ontological assumptions central to their logic. As the above extracts emphasize, instead of an emphasis on and investment in female experience as the ground of feminist knowledge and action, we must insist on the irreducibility of gendered experiences, and thus on the instability of experience as a term and ground for Western feminist inquiry. And instead of an investment in sex/gender as a critical tool to reveal kinship norms and social structures, we insist on deconstruction as the primary tool for revealing sex/gender's exclusions. In contrast to asserting women's universal subordination and the importance of its transformation into action, we focus on power as diffuse and changing, and the subjects and objects of violence or marginality as not fully known in advance. These shifts do more than describe the terms sameness and difference themselves. They describe shifts in critical investments and methodologies that transform what we mean by the key terms—and related terms such as power, subjectivity, and agency—as well. In effect, in charting moves from sameness to difference, and singularity to multiplicity, Western feminist progress narratives also chart a move from one set of schools of thought—radical or socialist—to another—poststructuralist or postcolonial. As an attempt to represent the complicated relationship between sameness and difference and other related textual pairs, I often denote this as sameness -> difference. I do so to highlight the epistemological and temporal direction of the comparison, in which the latter term critically transforms rather than merely comes after the former.
The binary relationships described and instantiated here not only anchor theoretical, political, and temporal shifts, but disciplinary ones too. If we have displaced experience as the ground of feminist knowledge production, we have also displaced empirical observation as a primary feminist method for accessing and transforming the social world. If instead we celebrate the possibilities opened up by a focus on what was excluded in these former accounts, then we come to prioritize textual deconstruction as a method too. How we understand power will thus also determine what we think comprises an effective intervention. This next, rather early, extract is particularly explicit about the methodological underpinnings of the Western feminist progress narrative:
Empirical studies conducted from a range of theoretical perspectives (radical, socialist and liberal feminist) have all in some way affirmed the existence of women's experience as a source of privileged understandings, if not the basis of an alternative social science. Now, however, the deconstruction of "women" is having profoundly destabilising effects upon feminist theorising and research....
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WHY STORIES MATTER by CLARE HEMMINGS Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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