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Title: Identity Construction Workers
Author: Heather-Noël Schwartz
Date: 1999
Language: en
Topics: postmodernism, feminism, identity
Source: Retrieved on October 16, 2007 from https://web.archive.org/web/20071016193622/http://members.aol.com/ThryWoman/PFII.html

Heather-Noël Schwartz

Identity Construction Workers

The main problem that I would cite between Feminism and Postmodernism is

the bridging of feminist activism and postmodernism’s deconstructionism.

Deconstructing the terms “Women” and “Oppression” strikes at the heart

of feminism which bases its theories and activism on these very terms.

Feminism risks losing itself through existential deconstruction. But

postmodern theories cannot be ignored. They reveal important

under-theorized areas of feminism and thus offer feminists another

position in which to theorize, mobilize and even act.

Postmodernism attempts to deconstruct many of the categories that

feminists have placed at the center of their theories and activism.

Postmodernism claims that terms such as “oppression” are simply

constructs that actually inhibit women’s freedom because making claims

of oppression strengthens the dichotomy of “oppressor and oppressed.” In

contradiction to this, Foucalt and Derrida suggest that “individual

motivations and intentions count for nil or almost nil in the scheme of

social reality. We are constructs-that is, our experience of our very

subjectivity is a construct mediated by and/or grounded on a social

discourse beyond (way beyond) individual control.”[1] This I think masks

feminist (and non-feminist) agency and leads one into inaction. However,

the postmodernist claim that feminists are partly responsible for

continuing their own oppression suggests that feminists do have agency

in which to act upon society. It is this agency in which feminists can

consciously and responsibly create open and temporary identities that I

consider to be the best possible means of uniting postmodernism and

feminism.

Postmodernism unveils the oppressive structures that are built into

feminist theories. It reveals not only feminists’ role in continuing the

dichotomies of oppression, but also the failure of feminist terms such

as “woman”to include the diffuse perspectives of various women.

Postmodernism answers these problems by deconstructing everything and

forcing feminists into a corner. Postmodernists claim that “[t]here is

no essential core ‘natural’ to us, and so there is no repression in the

humanist sense.”[2] But this sounds a lot like the old saying “It’s all

in your head”. Feminists are pointed towards their oppressive categories

and forced not only to answer for them but destroy them. Granted,

feminist categories have been able to exist only by virtue of

disregarding the differences that exist within the terms used. However,

destroying categories is not the answer. Feminists who attempt a

postmodernist deconstruction of feminism without first deconstructing

postmodernism end up annihilating feminist agency.

Deconstructing postmodernism involves asking “Who is to benefit from the

destruction of the term “Woman”. “Whose interests are served within

postmodern theory?”. By the term “interests”I mean both intentional and

unintentional. I answer these questions by suggesting that although

postmodern theorists may have developed their theories in the best

interests of feminists, the net result of runaway deconstructionist

postmodern theorizing would only serve the interests of non-feminists.

Identity for feminists becomes a central concern here for “[w]ithout a

notion of objectivity, feminists have difficulty claiming that their

emergence from male hegemony is less artificial and constructed than

that which they have cast off.”[3] Activism (whether it be physical,

oral or textual) becomes impossible because any purposeful movement

creates constructed identities, thus forcing out other identities in the

process. But these constructed identities are only definitionally

impermeable. When one considers an alternative construction that is

based upon temporary[4] and open identities, feminist activism becomes

possible and therefore feminist interests are once again able to be

served.

Another piece of deconstructed postmodernism is postmodernism’s ability

to easily do away with any and all constructions. Identity categories

are regarded as “mere constructions” that can only impede (and even

prevent) one’s progress towards freedom. But one must ask whether people

who are not white, middle-class academics would agree with the idea that

identities are “mere constructions”. Would they consider themselves as

being within a postmodern world? “Post-Modern” implies that one has gone

beyond the “modern”, has exhausted one’s use of “constructed” identities

within the media, the law, academia, and feminist or non-feminist

circles. It suggests years of debate and theorizing and a general

agreement made among those theorizing that all avenues of modernist

“constructions” and their uses in critique and protest have out-lived

their value and are now detrimental to one’s self or group. But outside

of academia, outside of the white, middle-class feminist world, Who has

finished articulating their “constructions”, and Who has never begun?

Would a black woman who works in an assembly plant declare that

African-Americans had fully represented themselves in the public and

academic spheres? Would she consider the terms “African-American” and

“woman” as mere “constructions” that were only sustaining her many

oppressions?

It becomes apparent that those who are least affected by group

identities, who lose nothing by destroying one’s self-constructed

identity, are an elite[5] few. As Christine Sylvester warns feminists,

“[t]o reject gender as another oppressive and oppressing social

construct is all well and good on an abstract intellectual level. In

practice, it means erasing people who do not agree with our

interpretation of gender as the futile, the fleeting, or the

fatuous.”[6] I believe that this is true not only of gender but of

identities such as race, class, age, etc. What does deconstructing

identity mean for African-American women? What does it mean for

Third-world women? How do feminists around the world act upon their

interests if their interests are considered “mere constructions”? On an

even more practical level, what do you put on a poster? Who or what do

you protest against? If I am continuing my own oppression, in the name

of Freedom no less, am I not my own worst enemy? How do you protest

against yourself? Feminism becomes existentialist angst. Activism

becomes silence[7] . Protest, as feminists have known it, becomes

irrelevant. Freedom is not achieved through protest, and in a strange

Orwellian way, inactivism=activism. Obviously, those who are “mere

constructions” are not having their interests served by this form of

activism. Therefore, in order to avoid nihilism, postmodern feminist

theory must allow for a conscious understanding of how and why

constructed identities work for activists, while recognizing that

“identity” is always being modified. Activism is therefore able to serve

the interests of feminists by allowing the gender category “woman” to

exist as a historically[8] temporary position of protest.

Although postmodernism regards identity constructions as idealized,

abstract categories, postmodernism is in its own way an idealization of

society and its individual members. Postmodernism assumes that everyone

is a player. It assumes that I and the rest of the world are in

agreement with the theory that oppression is continued by identity

categories, and that from here on out we will all work towards

eradicating those constructions. It assumes that the world is on the

same theorized track passing modernism by together, and now consciously

immersed in a postmodern world. However, if I, or an elite few, are the

only ones who are deconstructing the postmodern world then nothing has

changed. Identity constructions and activism becomes necessary again

once you leave your apartment. Therefore, a truly deconstructivised

world can only exist as long as we sit inside our rooms and think happy

thoughts.

Against the mound of problematic assumptions made by (and consequences

resulting from) postmodernism there are important lessons for feminist

activists to learn. One of these is, of course, how identity

construction has in the past kept others from being activists. Identity

can imprison by becoming universalized, ahistorical and static. Activism

implies agency and feminist agency comes from a conscious understanding

of how identity politics works[9]. A responsible use of identity, an

identity that is historically situated, leads neither to radical

subjectivism nor essentialism. Linda Alcoff points out that , “[w]hen

the concept ‘woman’ is defined not by a particular set of attributes but

by a particular position, the internal characteristics of the person

thus identified are not denoted so much as the external context within

which that person is situated [among a network of relations]....If it is

possible to identify women by their position within this network...then

it becomes possible to ground a feminist argument for women, not on a

claim that their innate capacities are being stunted, but that their

position within the network lacks power and mobility and requires

radical change.”[10] Feminists in the U.S., in India, in the academy and

in the assembly plant can benefit from a politics that is theoretically

malleable.

In conclusion, postmodernism and feminism can merge at the point of

identity consciousness. Feminism regains an activist position by

admitting that although “we all have authority... ‘none of us can pride

ourselves on being sure-footed.” [11] Activism does not avoid theory and

can effectively proceed only from theory. The use of postmodern

deconstructionism in understanding the categories that feminists posit

as fundamental to the theories and goals of feminism provides a wider

space for feminists with alternative identity categories and theories to

unite. Instead of nihilism, postmodernism creates a stronger, more

encompassing feminism whose members are not contained by identity

categories but are instead existing among a web of identities.

[1] Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The

Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory”, Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tong,

Feminism & Philosophy, Westview Press Inc., 1995, p.440

[2] Linda Alcoff, F & P, p.440

[3] Katherine Bartlett as quoted by Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory

& International Relations in a Postmodern Era, Cambridge University

Pres, 1994, p.138

[4] “Consciousness, therefore, is never fixed, never attained once and

for all, because discursive boundaries change with historical

conditions.“Teresa de Lauretis as quoted by Linda Alcoff, F& P, p.446

[5] “the nature of privilege is to obscure the ways it exists at others’

expense.” Nancy Hirschmann as quoted by Sylvester, IR, p.46. “Splitting,

not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of

scientific knowledge.” Donna Harraway as quoted by Sylvester, IR, p.60

[6] Sylvester, IR, p.13

[7] “an effective feminism could only be a wholly negative feminism,

deconstructing everything and refusing to construct anything.” Linda

Alcoff, F & P, p.441

[8] “in that political, theoretical self-analyzing practice by which

relations of the subject in social reality can be rearticulated from the

historical experience of women”[where the specificity of a feminist

theory may be sought]Teresa de Lauretis as quoted by Linda Alcoff, F &

P, p.446

[9] “women are socially produced and socially capable of producing a

life-politics of struggle against complex systems of oppression.”

Sylvester, IR, p.64

[10] Linda Alcoff, F& P, p. 451

[11] Minh-ha Trinh as quoted by Sylvester, IR, p.99