[On Tuesday, March 1, 2011, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the Unit for Criticism hosted a seminar with Nancy Fraser of The New School. Fraser is a Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar.]
Nancy Fraser’s “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History”
Written by Jungmin Kwon (Institute of Communications Research)
The seminar on March 1 addressed Nancy Fraser’s article, “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” published in the New Left Review (2009). The discussion that followed focused primarily on the applications and possibilities of her argument which anticipates the macrosocial analysis of the contemporary economic crisis which she outlined in her February 28 lecture on Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.
In her introductory remarks, Fraser explained that the financial crisis that began in 2008 has exerted a huge impact on her intellectually, motivating her to periodize our recent history including second wave feminism—the topic of her article. She explained that she hoped to frame the relationship between capitalism and feminism and to imagine the possibility of a post-neoliberal moment in the future. Both the lecture and the article point out that feminism and neoliberalism share a common hostility toward traditional authority; emancipatory movements such as feminism are therefore vulnerable to the allure of a free market economy.
Most of the seminar consisted in open question and answer. One set of questions was about the implications of the periodization in her writing. Some participants expressed the concern that Fraser’s historical framework is limited in its ability to explain details and dynamics beyond its particular sociocultural context. Another participant questioned the concept of “crisis” as a discourse, observing that there has already been a transition from meta-theories to minor issues. Finally, the construction of Westphalianism was criticized because of its complicities with the history of Western imperialism.
Professor Fraser agreed that her discussion of what happened to second wave feminism and capitalism cannot be universalized. Nonetheless, she pointed out that we still should be able to glean “big patterns” that will allow us to imagine an open future. To this end, she wanted to provide a model for intellectuals and activists since “there is no way through to transformation except by actually thinking about criticizing and struggling against capitalism.”
A few participants then moved to explore her concept of an “open future”: How open is the future, they pondered? What is politically possible? What are we supposed to do? Fraser acknowledged that the Left has not made much progress recently as emancipatory desires and actions are often co-opted and rechanneled by capitalism. In her article, she hoped to resituate second wave feminism in relation to a potential upsurge of the Left. Using the example of the Tea Party’s appeal, she argued that Left politics can also be participatory, not bureaucratic.
Building upon Fraser’s belief in possibility, one seminar participant pointed to the “idea of the public” in Fraser’s article and argued that the crisis of capitalism in fact offered a chance for an open future. It is unnecessary to be pessimistic because, with so many boundaries broken, actors have a number of resources to help them navigate the flow of possibilities.
Appropriately, the seminar closed with another return to Polanyi. Professor Fraser was asked what she found in Polanyi to inspire her own longstanding commitment to the importance of struggling for redistribution along with recognition. Fraser answered by reinterpreting Polanyi’s conceptualization of the foundation role of market. According to Fraser, Polanyi appreciates that the power of the market in capitalism and recognizes that the state’s power must be mobilized for redistribution to take place. Needless to say, markets should be regulated and situated differently from their position in the current neoliberal geography. For her, the most important thing was not any single system, either state or market, but the relationships and connections among multiple systems.
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body
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feminism
,
gender
,
social construction
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Toril Moi
by Unit for Criticism
[On Thursday, October 28, 2010, the Unit for Criticism and Anna Stenport of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures hosted “What Does It Mean to Claim that Sex, Gender, and the Body are Socially Constructed?,” a lecture by Toril Moi of Duke University]
Toril Moi’s “What Does It Mean to Claim that Sex, Gender, and the Body are Socially Constructed?”
Written by Claire Barber (English)
Last Thursday, Toril Moi addressed the question “Does it makes sense to claim sex, gender, and the body are socially constructed?” After playfully warning the group that her talk was “pure theory,” she laid out her analysis of the sex/gender distinction from the first chapter of What is a Woman? And Other Essays(1999). She ended her presentation by applying a theoretical framework from Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? (1999). I will present here the fundamental features of Moi’s argument. Then, I will pose several questions and propose an additional example of the body as situation which may complicate her conclusions. 
Moi’s objective is to develop “a theory of the sexually different body” by revisiting Simone de Beauvoir’s proposal in The Second Sex, that we should view the body as a situation (4). This move departs from a trend Moi sees as problematic in feminist theory, which works within the distinction between sex (biological) and gender (social/cultural). In her presentation, Moi sketched out the genealogy of sex and gender difference, beginning with biological models of sex from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and used the work of Beauvoir and Marcel Merleau-Ponty to complicate some later feminist responses to these essentialist models.
One of the main problems Moi sees with feminist theories that work within the sex/gender distinction is that they do “not provide…a good theory of subjectivity or a useful understanding of the body” (114). Moi located the distinction in Gayle Rubin’s 1975 essay “The Traffic in Women” and in Judith Butler’s books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. Instead of arguing, as Butler does, that biological sex is as much a social construction as gender, Moi proposed that we focus on concrete bodies and the particular lived experiences of being embodied. The body, according to Merleau-Ponty “is fundamentally ambiguous” (qtd. in Moi 117), so only by examining particular bodies situated historically in their process of becoming can we gain any understanding of what it means to be a woman. This reading runs contrary to the abstract theories of embodiment suggested by poststructuralist feminists like Butler and also what Moi calls “the pervasive picture of sex” in early biological models (6).
Moi introduced new material to critique feminist theories asserting that sex, gender, and the body are socially constructed: what she called “the Hacking test for social construction claims.” (See Hacking 16 and Moi’s handout for additional information.) Moi used this philosophical framework to test the degree of commitment that social constructionists have to different aspects of the sex/gender system. She concluded that we should not reduce “sex” to mere hormones and chromosomes, and instead approach the body as historicists, the lived experience of gender as reformists, and the oppressive social relations of gender as revolutionaries.
That said, the Hacking test did not seem to do much for her argument; I saw the same final points emerge from What is a Woman?, and Moi left me wondering about the ultimate implications of her discussion of sex, gender, and the body. If we view the body through Beauvoir’s theories, then it is constructed partly by “the way in which the individual woman encounters, internalizes, or rejects dominant gender norms” (82). A woman does maintain some level of personal determination because a situation, according to Moi and Beauvoir, is “an irreducible amalgam of the freedom (projects) of [a] subject and the conditions in which that freedom finds itself” (74). Moi’s argument then seems to be that sex, gender, and the body are at some level socially constructed but not entirely. This conclusion shares some similarities with Hacking’s concept of the looping effect in The Social Construction of What?, and Moi’s presentation may have benefited from a discussion of this concept. But I wonder about the usefulness of the way in which Moi and Hacking hedge their conclusions. If we must, according to Moi, look primarily at particular cases of historically situated, lived experience, how or when can we extrapolate general conclusions from these examples?
One of the most interesting aspects of the presentation emerged during the question and answer period when Moi was asked how race factored into her reading of sex, gender, and the body. Moi elaborated an argument from What is a Woman? that relates race to sex as two different kinds of bodily situations (67-69; 79). One could imagine, she claimed, a society where race no longer had any social function, but could society transcend sexual difference in the same way? Moi argued that as long as babies are born helpless, society would have to find a way to organize itself to take care of these creatures. As she describes in the book, “[a]lthough biology places certain limitations on culture, our specific cultural arrangements cannot be read off from our biology” (79). An organization for the care of the young does not have to depend on sex, but it must exist in some form.
As I listened to Moi’s response, two important questions came to my mind: Is disability a situation or social category comparable to sex, race, and class, as discussed by Moi and Merleau-Ponty? And, if a society could exist that had moved past race, could one exist that was past disability? To address these questions, I must first locate the form of disability most appropriate to address here. Physical disabilities fit easily into Moi’s schema. I can certainly imagine a society that had moved past these situations—albeit one with more social services and a different understanding of “productivity” than today’s capitalist societies. Intellectual disabilities also seem like bodily situations society could transcend, with perhaps a greater level of difficulty and additional revision of “productivity” and “success.” Mental health issues or cognitive disabilities, however, may throw a wrench into Moi’s conclusions about the body.
To clarify my argument, let us turn to a particular example of this embodied situation, as Moi suggests. Pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs), including autism and Asperger’s syndrome, are diagnosed based on “delays in the development of socialization and communication skills,” according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Society has labeled these disorders “pervasive,” an interesting term when read with Moi’s analysis of biological models of sex in which researchers used physical differences (ovaries versus testes) to justify social differences between men and women. In the case of PDDs, biology, or the way in which the brains of these individuals are wired, does limit the effects of culture on their situations. Therefore, society labels these these bodies as pervaded by this disorder.
The primary characteristics of this disorder, as described by NINDS, lie in the lack of biological investment an individual with a PDD may have in socialization. Some autists, for example, do not recognize other people as significant elements in their attempts to process the environment in which they are situated. This choice is not a conscious one; instead it occurs because of the way autistic brains are wired. Perhaps it is true that “our specific cultural arrangements cannot be read off of biology,” as Moi noted above, but at a biological level, these individuals may not receive the same pleasure from communication as neurologically typical individuals. They may not, therefore, seek out such situations, leading to a breakdown in socialization.
Moi would likely argue that no individual would encounter and respond to social norms in the same way, but her argument about social construction relies on the fact that an encounter will occur. What if it does not? I must then ask, Does socialization ground this diagnosis because these individuals are not as responsive to the typical means of social construction? Does society worry about individuals who lack a desire to participate in it? A society that unconditionally accepted the means of socialization that individuals with PDDs may prefer is difficult for me to imagine. It would be radically different from today’s society and would require a redefinition of what “society” means.
This example of cognitive disability then functions more like sex than race or physical/intellectual disability, in terms of the difficulty that society would have transcending the social functions. Yet, Moi’s conclusion that biology cannot determine cultural arrangements does not seem to apply to this example. Perhaps I have taken Moi’s argument about the social construction of sex, gender, and the body too far, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Philip Guston's, "Sea," 1980
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feminism
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film review
,
history
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Andrea Ferber (Art History)
Pamela T. Boll’s most recent film Who Does She Think She Is?(2008) was screened Thursday May 7th as part of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory’s Feminist Futures conference. The documentary focuses on women balancing motherhood and creative drives. Although well-intended and insightful at points, the film left many in the audience wanting—for a more weighted concentration on motherhood or creativity (with less conflation between the two), and for examples of female artists who have achieved prominence in their field rather than women who manage to subsist on their artistic work but will not make it into the history books.
Boll follows five women—two sculptors, a painter, an actress, and a printmaker/ “goddess” teacher as they describe their decision to pursue art while being the best mom they can be. While some in the post-film discussion commented on the “diversity” of the women, I saw racial and ethnic diversity trumped by the structural homogeneity of these women’s lives in which mothering either was the primary function or was regarded as a forsaken primary task because of the pull of art. All five women had children (resulting in an unquestioned alignment between women, femininity, motherhood and artistic expression). All were in a roughly comparable socioeconomic class (financially stable enough to choose to pursue art even if it did not provide sufficient material needs for themselves and their children, often because of the ambiguous assistance of male husbands or ex-husbands). All were heterosexual and either were or had been married. Moreover, the highly conventional parenting relations depicted in the film reinforce parenting primarily as a woman’s responsibility. Additionally, art seemed in all of these cases to have been fueled by self-expression. Indeed, most of the artwork derived its forms and content from an essentialized “womanness” and/or reproductive femininity; none was focused on politics or some other “non-women’s” issues. As Patricia J. Williams described it in her input from the audience, the documentary reduces art to an expression of or escape from domestic life. Three of the five women were divorced, presenting the idea that a woman might manage success in her art and as a mother, but probably at the expense of a romantic relationship. Some of the most significant artist-moms were never mentioned: Mary Kelly, Mary Beth Edelson, or Nancy Spero, to name a few.
The success of Born Into Brothels is a big act to follow. Boll proved that she is capable of excellence, but audiences will have to wait to see if she can fill those shoes with her next project.
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biopower
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esposito
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feminism
,
foucault
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Samantha Frost (Political Science)
In responding to Penelope Deutscher’s Monday presentation, “Biopoliticized Maternity and the Trope of Immunization,” I want to briefly outline the questions and insights that animate her main argument and then offer some questions and observations that, hopefully, may provide the basis for our broader discussion.
Deutscher considers how we might understand the operations of biopower in feminisms in which claims to women’s reproductive rights are articulated in a language or rhetoric that participates in state racism: women must have control over their reproductive lives in order to ensure the vitality of the volk, the people, the racialized nation. Deutscher is interested in tracing how such feminisms participate in the unfolding of biopower. And of course, she finds that Foucault is not much of a direct help in his writings.
Foucault, it turns out, has a blind spot. When he analyzes sexuality, sex, and the biopolitical management of populations, he develops his insightful account of how biopower constitutes subjects, of how biopower’s elaboration forms the basis for resistance that is incorporated into the elaboration of biopower itself. In other words, there is no outside to power; instead we must speak of subjects’ redeployment or redirection of power, a redirection that doesn’t undermine or detract from power but rather enables subjects to use it to their relative advantage even as they become more enmeshed in its tentacles and operations. Now, what Deutscher points out is that when Foucault is confronted with questions about feminism, particularly as feminists have made claims about reproductive rights, he chokes, theoretically. In other words, whereas he talks of resistance to imperatives about sexuality in terms of the complex operations of biopower, he seems unable to draw on that analysis of power in talking of women’s resistance to imperatives vis a vis reproduction. Instead, he reverts to the language of defiance and counter-attack--a language that positions feminists as outside of and countering biopower and not as participating in it.
Deutscher marks this as a curious blindspot in Foucault’s thinking: for all his attention to sex, sexuality, and the biopolitical management of the life of the population, he does not seem to recognize that these turn on women’s reproductive capacities and that therefore the control and management of women’s reproductive lives is necessarily at the center of the operations of biopower.
For intellectual succor, Deutscher turns to Roberto Esposito’s effort to expand the political insights available through Foucault’s account of biopower. Esposito notes that biopolitics--the management and enhancement of life--is inextricably bound up with thanatopolitics--the dispensing and management of death. Indeed, he claims that each is the obverse of the other. However, Foucault and his commentators often disregard the obverse relationship between biopolitics and thanatopolitics, instead favoring analyses that point to either the productive or the destructive elements of biopower. Esposito suggests that the notion of immunity might be helpful to highlight the points of contact between the destructive and maximizing elements of biopower. With the immunity model of power, biopower divides itself, fights against itself, in order to preserve itself.
Deutscher argues that it might be helpful to analyze feminist politics of women’s reproductive rights through the model or trope of immunity. Within this model, as women’s reproductive capacities are harnessed for the purposes of enhancing the vitality of the race/nation, feminists deploy a language of rights and autonomy that is framed in terms of the vitality of the race and nation. Accordingly, feminists’ rights rhetoric participates both in their subjection to biopolitical imperatives as well as in the thanatopolitical designation of the unwanted racial others. It is not clear to me, in Deutscher’s analysis, whether the racialized feminisms are the relevant instance of biopower’s immunitary self-negation (feminism qua protest movement takes a form that serves or protects the biopolitical imperatives of the nation), or whether the racialization of the feminisms is the relevant instance of biopower’s immunitary self-negation (racialization is feminism’s effort to preserve itself in the face of biopolitical imperatives). In other words, insofar as it serves the biopolitical imperatives of the nation, feminists may make demands for women’s reproductive autonomy. Here, the racial other is sacrificed for the sake of the survival of feminism. Or perhaps both these immunitary moments are in play. So a question I have, then, is about where Deutscher locates this immune response.
A second question concerns the close relationship Foucault and Deutscher sketch between women’s reproduction and the racial interests of the state. If women are constituted as political subjects through biopolitical interest in and management of their reproductive capacities, are political claims about reproduction necessarily steeped in forms of racism? Given the analysis Deutscher wants to develop, is it possible to articulate non-racist feminist claims about women’s reproductive rights, or will they always be a reformulation of the racialized terms through which women’s reproductive capacities vehiculate racialized biopolitical imperatives?
A final question I have--it is perhaps more an observation than a question--concerns Esposito’s intention to use the immunitary model of power to develop what he calls an affirmative biopolitics. I have to say I am not yet clear what this might be. Part of me wants to say that it might be seen in those movements in which racialized others--those who are the subjects of thanatopolitics--redeploy the rhetoric of race to make claims for the right to have families--the right to give birth, to reproduce. I am thinking here of Latinas, Native Americans, or African-American women who have been caught up in the longstanding eugenics policies of the US. And of course, since such redeployments are made precisely through the language of race, they are also a retrenchment of biopolitics: are such feminist movements instances in which an immunitary logic of biopower is at play? Would this constitute an affirmative biopolitics (it enhances life as it undermines thanatopoltics)? Or is an affirmative biopolitics, as Esposito also seems to suggest, one in which discourses of reproduction would no longer be enclosed within specific racial bodies, detached from the nation? Might one substitute the vitality of the planet for the vitality of the nation? And if we did so, what difference would that make to women’s efforts to be roughly self-determining with respect to their reproductive life cycle?
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