Unsettled Subjects: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique

by Susan Lurie

Overview

During the 1980s much of the work of feminist theory aimed to fully account for issues of class, race, and sexuality that previously had been overlooked. Susan Lurie argues that this work tended to privilege questions of race and class at the expense of gender, and frequently, if inadvertently, left patriarchal power unquestioned. Developing a feminist model that keeps multiple political forces in view, Lurie returns to three literary feminists from earlier parts of the century: Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Elizabeth Bishop. As Lurie argues, each of these women shows that both resistance to male domination and alliances between different oppositional politics rely on recognizing how power regulates a subject’s multiple beliefs.
In her analysis, Lurie traces each author’s strategies for revealing and challenging the ways that patriarchal gender ideology profits from what is always plural and contested female subjectivity. Only such an inquiry, Lurie demonstrates, can explain the impasses that have steered poststructuralist feminism away from gender as a category of analysis and can point toward the models necessary for a more complete feminist critique of patriarchal power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822398899
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	358 KB

About the Author

Susan Lurie is Associate Professor of English at Rice University.

Read an Excerpt

Unsettled Subjects

Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique

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By Susan Lurie

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9889-9

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CHAPTER 1

POSTSTRUCTURALIST FEMINIST SUBJECTS

Even as feminists increasingly investigate the relation between unstable female subjects and dominant gender ideology, I have argued, it is important to interrogate the impasses that have impeded and continue to compete with such promising developments. These impasses occur when the preoccupation with the critique of feminist identity, a critique that importantly destabilizes the category of "woman," also functions to deflect attention from the analysis of patriarchal power. And the complementary approach to the critique of identity, the celebration of a female subject's capacity for resignification, most often theorizes future possibilities that remain unformulated. Together these modes of analysis have led poststructuralist feminism away from feminist analysis, a trajectory that has been authorized in radical democratic terms; for feminism is frequently deemed most oppositional when it performs or advocates self-critique. When such oppositional insistence on differences between women functions primarily to shift categories of analysis from gender to other ones (e.g., race, class, nation), however, patriarchal power is granted an immunity to interrogation.

In this chapter I discuss three essays that respond to this impasse by attempting to reformulate politicized referents for the female and/or feminist subject. What all three demonstrate is why models of subjectivity that direct attention to how gendered domination relies on as well as succumbs to a subject's self-difference have been difficult both to formulate and to pursue. At issue is a competition between possible new oppositional formulations of subjectivity and reigning ones, which often retain their predominance. On the occasions when new models succeed in emerging, they remain vulnerable to displacement by the prevailing models that privilege for feminist politics the critique of identity and the valorization of multiple reference as emancipatory.

These difficulties in formulating a countermodel of the subject register, I will argue, precisely the operation of the regulatory mechanisms that cannot be fully illuminated without such a model. That is, the impasses in these essays emerge as themselves the product of how dominant gender ideology governs the critic's negotiation of multiple political and institutional commitments. In the case of these poststructuralist feminists, then, we can see how the regulation of female self-difference succeeds in preventing the emergence of the very formulations that could expose it. Yet to varying degrees and as a consequence of their commitment to feminist politics, the three essays also contest this prohibition. As we shall see, such contestation emerges from the capacity of oppositional politics to undermine the patriarchal agendas for which they can be appropriated and from historicizing female and feminist subjectivity.

I begin with a discussion of Judith Butler's "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism'" (1992), which prioritizes for poststructuralist feminism, and in the name of radical democratic politics, a polemic against stable referents for feminist terms. However, the very feminist issues she raises to support this polemic reveal its limits, including the fact that its a priori oppositional status blocks the emergence of crucial alternative descriptions of unstable subjectivity. From here I turn to the practice of white poststructuralist feminism as it interprets black women's culture and texts. It is in this context that the critique of white feminist identity is both indispensable and vulnerable to appropriations by dominant gender ideology. Christine Stansell's "White Feminists and Black Realities: The Politics of Authenticity" (1992) makes a conceptual leap for feminist theory, as it distinguishes between productive and conservative modes of the critique of white feminist identity. In another important move, Stansell calls for replacing a model of the subject that shifts people between categories with one that examines the effects of interarticulated positions. Nonetheless, despite a productive application of this model to black women's subordination, she continues to explain the coarticulation of race and gender for white women only in terms of an exclusionary white identity. If, in the course of this essay, a new oppositional formulation of unstable subjectivity emerges for black women, its application to white women is intercepted by privileging the critique of white identity.

Barbara Johnson's "Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston" (1987) explicitly links the possibility of rethinking deconstruction's models of difference to the multiple agendas a critic negotiates. That is, she overtly thematizes the process that, I am arguing, governs covertly the projects of all three of these essays. Moreover, she discerns in such structures of problematic address a similarity between the pressures on her own writing and those that Hurston negotiates. Despite these insights, however, her rethinking of the relation between self-difference and race representation is inhibited precisely by the multiple political and theoretical agendas she initially notes. These produce a prohibition against feminist reading in the name of antiracism whose hallmark, for both Hurston and herself, is the inability to distinguish a regulatory from an emancipatory self-critique.

I conclude my discussion on the note of recuperation, not in deference to a monolithic, implacable mode of regulation but in order to foreground the importance of continually interrogating how power makes use of self-difference. At the same time, as I have noted, these essays also register the possibilities for resignification that poststructuralist feminists have been prone to celebrate. Such celebrations, present here in both Butler and Johnson, however, must be qualified by the difficulty of resignification dramatized by all the essays; for all three document a competition in which the self-difference that is the condition for challenging received meanings and identities is at the same time the condition for a reassertion of them.

Framing the Subject of Feminism

Judith Butler's article, "Contingent Foundations," responds to feminist concerns that postmodernism, by destabilizing terms for female subjects and female bodies, disempowers feminist politics. However, her laudable effort to make such instabilities the very condition for a radical democratic feminism is limited by a singular preoccupation with persuading feminists to destabilize their terms. As a result of this tenacious focus, an argument for a destabilization of terms that enables multiple (but unexplored) future meanings blocks a consideration of how dominant gender ideology also profits from self-difference and unstable terms.

By thinking of politicized categories as efficacious but contingent and mutable, Butler usefully claims, deconstructing feminism's terms widens the scope of rather than prohibits a "political necessity to speak as and for women" (15): "To deconstruct the subject of feminism is not, then, to censure its usage, but, on the contrary, to release the term into a future of multiple significations, to emancipate it from the maternal or racialist ontologies to which it has been restricted, and to give it play as a site where unanticipated meanings might come to bear" (16).

The virtue of this formulation is, as Butler phrases it in a later text, that "the sense of futurity opened up by the [political] signifier as a site of rearticulations ... is the discursive occasion for hope" (Bodies That Matter 219). By "politicizing dis identification" (219), women excluded by certain formulations of "woman" can resignify the term. And different female subjects, even as they deploy their respective articulations of "women," can keep the term under continual suspicion, not only for its potential exclusions but for its possible recuperation by patriarchal meanings.

But although such a deconstruction of the feminist subject promises hope for, rather than aims to censure, the political usage of feminist terms, here it does not lead to an exploration of what such a usage might look like for particular women. Instead of discussing possible articulations of feminist subjectivity, Butler proceeds to keep the feminist "question of postmodernism" focused on a polemic about the need to deconstruct feminist categories. If this polemic can be seen as leaving to others the politicized articulations it also advocates, a crucial "unanticipated" description of feminist subjectivity is foreclosed altogether: the subject whose potential for rearticulation, enabled by her self-difference, is the condition for producing and maintaining patriarchal meanings. This description of the subject cannot emerge, I will argue, on account of the referents Butler attributes to "restricting" and "emancipatory" discursive strategies, respectively: restriction is a function of exclusionary identifications and "the release [of stable terms] into a future of multiple significations" ("Contingent Foundations" 16) is the condition for emancipation. This opposition between restrictive identity and a liberating production of different significations precludes questions of how patriarchal power can regulate, as well as succumb to, multiple referents for and continual renegotiations of what "woman" means. And prime among such elided questions is that of how such regulation works by articulating female identity with a subject's other positions (in race, class, nation, institutional affiliation, and so on).

Butler's theoretical preferences for the meanings of "restricting" and "emancipating" strategies also have an analog in her descriptions of what constitutes the feminism bound up both with dominant ontologies and with the institutional power that supports them. Addressing what she perceives as an academic feminist establishment reluctant to scrutinize both its terms and its affiliations, Butler cautions her readers to recognize that questioning "the implication of the terms of criticism in the field of power is ... the very precondition of a politically engaged critique" (7). What feminists must realize is that power operates in advance to establish "who will be the subject who speaks in the name of feminism," and, as a result, critics must be wary of "who ... gets constituted as the feminist theorist whose framing of the debate will get publicity" (8).

While it is easy to endorse such vigilance about the inscription of feminist critics in institutional power, we must notice that Butler's admonition is directed only toward those critics whom she feels are reluctant to examine their politicized terms. As a result, she leaves uninterrogated the power that authorizes the "subject of feminism" whose singular project is the critique of feminist identity. For Butler, feminist entanglements with suspect institutional power have their symptoms only in the assertion of feminist terms; conversely, the critique of those terms signals only resistance to institutional power. Following out her own prescriptions for scrutinizing successful academic discourses, however, we should ask: What kinds of power might underwrite a feminism presented as most oppositional not when it analyzes patriarchal power (although it recommends future such analyses) but when it practices or advocates only self-critique?

Certainly patriarchal ideology benefits when feminist analysis itself is displaced rather than materially engaged by the critique of feminist identity and/or the polemic in favor of such critique. That such a displacement occurs in the name of a more democratic feminism registers the fact that patriarchal prohibitions can be interarticulated with otherwise oppositional interpretive strategies. And the status currently enjoyed by a singular feminist focus on the critique of feminist identity marks how such interarticulations can attract the support of institutional power. Thus, I am arguing, we need to consider how Butler's influential framing of feminist debate is implicated, however unwittingly, in a complex "field of power," one where institutional and patriarchal power can converge with otherwise oppositional politics and epistemologies. For her prioritizing of a polemic about the need to deconstruct feminist identity, advanced in the name of a more radically democratic feminism, here effectively limits feminist deconstruction to the insistence that feminists must destabilize their terms.

Nevertheless, her interest in making the deconstruction of the feminist subject enrich rather than delimit feminist politics helps expose the way her own framing of this project undermines it. If this kind of framing is symptomatic of how patriarchal ideology can regulate a critic's multiple oppositional commitments, Butler's feminist politics also pose a challenge to this regulation. Although the deconstruction of the feminist subject insistently means for Butler a return to the polemic against feminist identity, she does not eliminate, as such polemics usually do, specific references to the effects of patriarchal power. Indeed she raises feminist issues that can be fully explored only by considering how gender ideology requires unstable female subjectivity. As a result, avoiding such an inquiry becomes visible as a repeated displacement of feminist issues with a polemic against feminist foundational terms.

Rather than only enumerating feminism's exclusions, Butler predicates the essay's initial argument against feminist identity on an analogy with the way other emancipatory rhetorics can exclude "women." When she notes that "otherwise compelling call[s] for radical enfranchisement" can erase women as the subjects of oppression, and when she asks, "How do we theorize the exclusion of women from the category of the oppressed" (14), Butler introduces into her argument a crucial issue for contemporary feminism: the tendency for women's oppression to disappear in or even bolster other oppositional discourses. But her answer to the question of how this exclusion is accomplished — that oppression can operate through "the very erasure that grounds the articulation of the emancipatory subject" (14) — tells us only what can be theorized by describing the identity formation of diverse emancipatory subjects. And it does so because her question is framed by an a priori theoretical agenda: to use a feminist recognition that other emancipatory subjects can exclude women to spark a recognition that feminist subjects can be grounded by similar erasures. Indeed, her agenda guarantees from the outset a predetermined shift in critical attention from the critique of patriarchal ideology (which benefits from the exclusion of women from categories of the oppressed) to the critique of feminist practices.

What remains untheorized, as a result, are perhaps the most urgent questions for contemporary feminism about the erasure of women's oppression in the name of other oppositional categories: How can critiques of feminism's exclusionary identity themselves contribute to the elimination of women from the category of the oppressed? How do a woman's self-divisions generate her commitment to a critique (often a self-critique) of feminist identity that omits women from the category of the oppressed? What we cannot illuminate with the model of discrete exclusionary subjects, nor even with a model of one subject who shifts between exclusionary positions, is how women can come to articulate a feminist position that eschews the practice of feminist politics itself. How can we explain a feminism that insists on, without investigating, differently located women while it effectively shifts certain "women" from the category of "oppressed" to that of "privileged" (in race, class, nation)? For these inquiries we need a model that links discursive regulation not only to a subject's stable, exclusionary identity but to the way identity itself is inherently unstable, constituted as an interarticulation of a subject's multiple positions and investments. Indeed only such a model can illuminate the dynamics by which the question of the exclusion of "women" from the category of the oppressed, once it is brought under discussion, continues to have for this poststructuralist feminist critic its "anticipated" and most politically effective feminist referent in the question of feminism's oppressive exclusions. Moreover, that this question is Butler's main concern in an academic feminist climate that overwhelmingly takes differences between and within women as a point of departure for criticism and theory would seem to indicate a critical impasse. Butler's difficulty in rearticulating the possibilities for poststructuralist feminist analysis, I am suggesting, may be symptomatic of a process that prevents her from theorizing its effects: the regulation of intersections between feminism, radical democratic politics, and theoretical commitments that shifts attention away from "women" as a category of oppression.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Unsettled Subjects by Susan Lurie. Copyright © 1997 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.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Chapter 1: Poststructuralist Feminist Subjects,
Chapter 2: Antiracist Rhetorics and the Female Subject: The Trials of Zora Neale Hurston,
Chapter 3: Women's Development and "Composite" Subjectivity: Feminism and Social Evolution in Ellen Glasgow,
Chapter 4: "Caught in a Skein of Voices": Feminism and Colonialism in Elizabeth Bishop,
Epilogue: Toward a Poststructuralist Feminist Counterhegemony,
Notes,
Works Cited,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

Unsettled Subjects will establish Susan Lurie as a central figure within feminist and postcolonialist theory as she intervenes courageously within perhaps the most heated and long-lasting of feminist debates.”—Kaja Silverman, University of California, Berkeley


“The critical project of Unsettled Subjects is both necessary and daring. It articulates the postmodern impasse for white feminism that deconstruction’s destabilizing of the category ‘woman’ has generated and, through very thorough readings of modern American women writers, demonstrates how this impasse may be overcome.”—Lora Romero, Stanford University

From the Publisher