A PRAGMATIC POST-STRUCTURALIST ACCOUNT of OPPRESSION and RESISTANCE by Erin C. Tarver Di

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ETD - Electronic Theses & Dissertations FEMINIST SUBJECTS AND FEMINIST ACTION: A PRAGMATIC POST-STRUCTURALIST ACCOUNT OF OPPRESSION AND RESISTANCE By Erin C. Tarver Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Philosophy May, 2011 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Kelly Oliver José M. Medina Lisa Guenther Shannon Sullivan To J.M and D. Where You Are, I am Home. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………………….…ii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………….iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………………………..…v Chapter INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1 I. RETHINKING INTERSECTIONALITY: MICHELLE OBAMA, PRESUMED SUBJECTS AND CONSITUTIVE PRIVILEGE.10 Abstracting Perversity: Sex or Race, Beauvoir or Fanon……………………….13 ‗The Woman‘ and ‗The Negro‘…………………………………………………28 Intersections, Subjects and Privilege……………………………………………38 II. SIGNIFYING ‗HILLARY‘: MAKING (POLITICAL) SENSE WITH BUTLER AND DEWEY……………………49 Performativity, Discourse and ‗Hillary‘………………………………………...54 Interaction, Meaning and the Relational Emergence of Bodies………………...72 Making Sense of Hillary, Making Sense of Relational Selves………………….83 III. WHENCE THE (WISE LATINA) SUBJECT? FOUCAULT, SOTOMAYOR AND THE EFFECTS OF POWER…………………….89 Power, Subjects and Truth………………………………………………………92 Wise Latinas and Mestiza Subjects……………………………………………105 Situation, Governmentality and First-World Subjects…………………………121 IV. RESISTING, RESIGNIFYING, RECONSTRUCTING: THE CHALLENGE OF PALIN FOR FEMINIST POLITICS………………………...137 Situating the Subject and Remaking the Social………………………………..140 Pit Bulls, Lipstick and the Limits of Resignification…………………………..156 Interactions, Shared Meanings and Problems of ‗The Public‘………………...167 ‗Pro-Life‘ ‗Feminism,‘ Resignification and Adjudication…………………….176 V. CONCLUSION: ANTI-OPPRESSIVE MOVEMENTS AND FEMINIST FUTURES…………………………………………………………..197 VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………204 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. ―Introducing Barack ‗Arugula‘ Obama‖……………………………………………..51 2. Justice Sotomayor on the cover of Latina magazine………………………………..116 3. Women in home-made ‗wise latina‘ t-shirts………………………………………...117 4. Manufactured ‗wise latina‘ t-shirts………………………………………………….118 5. Young white girls emulate Sarah Palin……………………………………………...165 iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ANZALDÚA Borderlands/La Frontera (BF) BEAUVOIR The Second Sex (SS) BUTLER Bodies that Matter (BTM) ―Contingent Foundations‖ (CF) Excitable Speech (ES) ―For a Careful Reading‖ (FCR) Gender Trouble (GT) Precarious Life (PL) Undoing Gender (UG) DEWEY Democracy and Education (DE) Experience and Nature (EN) Human Nature and Conduct (HNC) Liberalism and Social Action (LSA) The Public and its Problems (PP) The Quest for Certainty (QC) ―The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology‖ (RA) FANON Black Skin White Masks (BSWM) FOUCAULT Discipline and Punish (DP) ―Governmentality‖ (G) The History of Sexuality vol. 1 (HS) Power/Knowledge (PK) Security, Territory, Population (STP) ―The Subject and Power‖ (SP) v INTRODUCTION This project began in 2008, in the few frenzied months prior to the Presidential election that brought the discussion of the politics of gender and race into mainstream American discourse. Like so many other feminists and race theorists, I was jolted to find that the questions and concerns that guided my philosophical work were suddenly headline news, and at times both elated and appalled by the content of those appearances. Beyond the covert racism, misogyny and heterosexism that so frequently characterized the mainstream methods of approaching the candidacies of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Sarah Palin—or their respective constituents— I was convinced that there was something decidedly lacking in the popular political discourse at the time. Moreover, I had a hunch that this conceptual lack was at least in part responsible for the problematic features of this discourse: I believed that the (at times unintentional) slippages into racist, sexist, classist or homophobic discourse on the part of frequently well-meaning people was due, at least in part, to a failure to take seriously the extent to which they themselves were constitutively involved in the sorts of practices they were discussing. I was, that is, concerned with the ways in which the phenomena we were suddenly all talking about—racism, sexism, etc.—were involved in making us who ‗we‘ were. Since then, I have been concerned to articulate a philosophical feminist account of the relationship between such entrenched patterns of meaning-making as race, gender, sexuality and class, and the subjects who are formed by and contribute to them. This topic, on its own, is not new for feminists—or, for that matter, for philosophers. Feminists influenced by Judith Butler‘s now-classic Gender Trouble have frequently suggested that sexist discourse shapes the lives and bodies of women, and Foucaultian philosophers (among others) have argued that discursive 1 regimes produce populations, subjects and objects of desire. Still, it is hardly the case that feminists or philosophers are univocal in their support of such a theory—or that they should be. Feminists have rightly raised concerns about the political implications of a theory that would render women and people of color the passively constituted, necessarily ―othered‖ victims of discursive power, while philosophers have asked how, precisely, it is possible to account for the literal production of subjects by discourse without thereby assenting to a linguistic monism—or remaining willfully ignorant of the bodily organism. Moreover, even if we assume for the sake of argument that the relationship between discourse and subjects is compatible with the world of our experience (which at least appears to be full of material things, ideas, political power and alteration), it is not obvious how the ideality of discourse might reach the material self at all, much less constitute it; nor is it clear how selves (or collections of selves) so constituted might change over time—or how any of this might get off the ground at all, given that we need selves to get ―discourse‖ in the first place. While there is thus, in some quarters, general assent to the notion that subjects and discourses of gender or race are related, it is, I submit, necessary to think more carefully about that relation, and to offer an account of it that can respond both to concerns about the political agency of constituted subjects and—relatedly—to concerns about the ontological status of subjects, material organisms and their meanings. This project is just such an account. While it is deeply informed and influenced by the rich history of feminist theory, particularly that which locates itself within the post-structuralist (Foucaultian, Butlerian) tradition, it is not simply post-structuralist. Indeed, I am concerned here to offer an account that draws on the resources of both post-structuralist and pragmatic philosophies. This combination, I will argue, can solve the feminist problem of the relationship 2 between subjectivity and discourse (particularly oppressive discourse1) without involving itself in the difficulties I sketched above. The addition of a specifically Deweyan pragmatic theory of meaning, I will suggest, dissolves the primary ontological worry about the relationship between the ideality of discourse and the materiality of the bodily organism—and does so in a way that concomitantly offers a potential inroad to the problem of political agency. Dewey‘s conceptualization of meaning as interactional and relational, in combination with Foucault‘s account of the productive effects of power for populations and subjects and Butler‘s articulation of that power as specifically gendered, sexualized and racialized through the citation of previous meanings, can help us to articulate precisely why and how oppressive discourse matters for subjects. This articulation, moreover, is crucially dependent upon its relationship to the historical and evolving literature of feminist, race, queer, post-colonial and Marxist theories. As such, it will situate itself within, draw upon, and distinguish itself from some of the most important works in this literature—including those by Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Anzaldúa and Gayatri Spivak. The account I will offer thus may be understood as functioning similarly to its own description of the emergence of subjects: like a tree whose bark and leaves and specific root system are the products of its interaction with the surrounding environment— and yet which may be distinguished from it. The project proceeds first by suggesting problems with some of the most historically influential feminist and anti-racist theories of oppression and selfhood, then by offering a 1 I use the term ―oppressive discourse‖ to refer to patterns of socially-transmitted meaning that have the effect of hierarchically organizing populations and selves as more or less privileged, worthwhile, human, or ethically significant. These include (most prominently in the context of this project) sexism, racism, heterosexism and classisim. I use this umbrella term not to indicate that each has identical features, but as a shorthand reference to a variety of phenomena that function similarly—and which we typically conceptualize with reference to their subordinating effects. However, n.b., my use of

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