New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology » November 18th: Feminism’s Non-Monolithic Nature

November 18th: Feminism’s Non-Monolithic Nature

Plan for the Day

McRobbie Essay

McRobbie, Angela. “Feminism, Postmodernism, and the ‘Real Me.’” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Keller. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 598-610.

McRobbie’s article critiques the subject(ed) ideal of feminism. She argues that the concept of feminism is not simply defined or even definable philosophy (in terms of having a concrete definition or essentialized qualities). Working from a postmodern perspective, McRobbie shows feminism in a state of flux, ever changing and developing through discourse (p. 603). McRobbie shows feminism as a philosophy that would reject monolithic narratives of itself because having a dominant ideal or driving force is a patriarchal concept. It’s best, according to McRobbie, to see feminisms–multiple discourses–and “[f]eminist thinking should…attempt to represent and analyse what it is to be female” (p. 604).

essentialism: for any specific kind of entity (i.e., a class, group, ethnicity,”race,” etc.), there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must posses.

subjection: process by which a person becomes relegated to a position or place under the power or authority of another.

{I forget where the above definitions come. I didn’t make them up, but I don’t think they came from one particular source.}

  • p. 600: “The notion of the ‘real me’ suggests the fictive unity of the self and the essentialism entailed in the search for a person.”
  • p. 601: “…beware of meta-narratives. Knowledge is not pure or in the mind but moves in a game. Habermas, in contrast, sees the Enlightenment as an ideal not a reality.”
    • “We can retain hope of objectivity in universals (the good life, the better society) without having ‘naive expectations.’ Enter the theory of communicative action/reason.”
    • Oh the Good Life / Full of fun
  • p. 602: McRobbie appears to privilege Stuart Hall’s approach of “adopt[ing] a strategy of unsettlement and an embracing of the idea of difference and hybridity….It is focused around the ‘new ethnicities’ and it looks out for the connections among subjugated people which emerge from within the tracks of the metacommunications networks of the new global order.”
  • p. 603: “Enlightenment concepts, which have been part of an apparatus of regulation and subordination hidden under the great achievements of rationality and knowledge.”
    • “…on whose behalf do we think as critical feminist intellectuals?”
    • “What is the responsibility of the feminist intellectual? Is it not, in part, to think about thinking and thus to unveil some of the power relations caught up in the category of knowledge?”
  • p. 604: “Such an emphasis on desire inevitably runs the risk of positing desire as the source of a new essentialism.”
    • “…we must revisit the sites of assumed essentialism and work through them. We should explore the boundaries by going back to them.”
  • p. 605: Growing philosophy: “as the society within which feminism exists also undergoes quite dramatic changes, this too has an impact on what feminism is and can be.”
    • “Judith Butler…disputes the assumption that there ‘must’ be a foundation and a stable subject to have a politics. She sees this as authoritarian, the use of the must’ clause.”
      • This “must clause” refers to Boolean operations for searching as opposed to grammar where must isn’t a clause but a modal/helping verb.
    • Postmodern fragmentation not a problem: having multiple discourses or arguments “allows for open debate and dispute about boundaries and disciplines and what constitutes a study, what is knowledge.”
  • p. 606: “The category of women has to be released from the anchoring which feminism felt it needed. ‘What women signify has been taken for granted too long…. We have to instead break from the list of meanings and expand the possibilities of what it is to be a woman’ (Butler, 1992:16).”
    • “Sex imposes a uniformity on bodies for the purposes of reproductive sexuality. This is also an act of violence.”
    • “…it is frightening to think that without truth, pure power might prevail.”
    • “‘At its best postmodernity invites us to engage in a continual process of dis-illusionment with the grandiose fantasies that have brought us to the brink of annihilation’ (Flax, 1992b:460). Feminist postmodernism does not eliminate the subject or the self but finds it in operation as a series of bit parts in the concrete field of social relations.”
  • p. 607: Feminist social self formed through discourse and experience: “The feminist social self…is an amalgam of fragmented identities formed in discourse and history and called into being both by the experiences of femininity and by the existence and availability of a feminist discourse whether that comes in the form of books, education, mass media, or through friends, politics and community.”
    • “The ‘real “respectable” me’ is also the product of a certain kind of psychoanalytical violence where desire is also constrained and endlessly defined in culture around the tropes of heterosexuality.”
  • p. 608: “…abandoning the ‘real me’ need not mean resignation, despair, or simply being reconciled to the loss of wholeness.”
    • “In short the strength of feminism lies in its ability to create discourse, to dispute, to negotiate the boundaries and the barriers…”
  • Abandon the search for the “real me”(p. 609): The “real me” is a mask, but the search leads to questions about what it means to be a woman.

So, what does it mean to search for the ‘real me’?

Also, in light of McRobbie’s essay, what does F/feminism mean today. Perhaps I can show a clip from the presentation I gave this past weekend.

Queer Theory and Deconstruction

Queer theory: critical theory emerging in the 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies; critiques or provides “queer readings” of texts to question/challenge the idea that gender is part of the essential self; the theory uncovers socially constructed views of sex, gender, sexuality, and identities.

  • Queer theorist Michael Warner: [commenting on the institutions that appear to be just given…] “The dawning realization that themes of homophobia and heterosexism may be read in almost any document of our culture means that we are only beginning to have an idea of how widespread those institutions and accounts are.”

Deconstruction: critical theory that examines the historical traditions (often mediated by ideology) that create meaning–specifically in words but useful for cultural studies.

Next Class

We’ll finish up McRobbie if needed and then move on to our last reading: Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience.” Don’t forget to do your last Weekly Discussion Post before 11:00pm, Friday, 11/22.