The debate within feminism
* discussion article For the last three decades, Marxists have been missing an interesting and important debate taking place within the feminist movement, argues Lidia Cirillo In fact, the left has always been keener to take up women's protests and demands than to try to understand what women were thinking, saying and writing. And, since Marxist debate is today almost non-existent, current Marxist thinking is more or less unable to confront other theories... The debate within feminism is based on material gains: the transformations in women's daily lives, and above all their massive entry into the world of culture. This has certainly given feminists sophisticated tools, allowing feminism to emerge once and for all from the phase of a fragile sub-culture, but it has not yet produced the "epistemological ruptures" hoped for in the various academic disciplines. This "professors' feminism" has some similarities to the "professor's Marxism" sed by Regis Debray in 1968. But, while Marxism refers constantly to a structured if differentiated movement, feminist theory has only been able to refer to a politically fragmented and often marginal (though constant) reality.
In Italy, after the great mobilisations of the 1970s, feminist theory lived on in a wide range of magazines, associations, centres and collectives which shared a similar discourse and similar codes. It has had a marked influence on women of the left and particularly intellectuals. For Marxists, the primary interest lay in the fact that the women's movement is the other political subject - apart from the worker's movement - which has constructed a genuine theory for itself, using extremely sophisticated cultural instruments. These include, most notably, psychoanalysis, but also philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, sociology and anthropology. While containing inevitable mythic elements -like any other project for liberation and change- feminist intellectual constructs contribute to an understanding of the logic of human relations from which living Marxism could well benefit.
Since the 1970s, the debate has developed in different directions according to the areas of expertise of the intellectuals involved. Some theorists developed an economic and social analysis that demonstrated the impossibility of understanding
30 International Viewpoint #300 the mode and relationships of production or the dynamics of class without fully taking into account women's roles in reproductive tasks and the function of the male-female power relation. However, the broadest and most interesting debate -to which all others in some sense referconcerns the issue of subjectivity. If we compare this discussion to the Marxist debate, a strange asymmetry emerges: For Marxists, theory has been an analysis both of objective reality, including economic mechanisms, social dynamics and political phenomena, and of the subject: of class consciousness, the vanguard and the party.
The development of feminist theory, by contrast, has been strongly biased toward the second element: analysis of the subject. This is neither a coincidence nor a confirmation of differentialist stereotypes (man = objectivity; woman = subjectivity; it is, instead, the result of women's evident need to achieve greater self-awareness due to the specific nature of the oppression they have undergone, which has contained a strong ideological component and has strongly stamped women's identity:
If, in any process of liberation, the alteration of material living conditions necessarily goes hand in hand with a critique of the dominant ideology, then for women, the critique must in the final analysis address the so-called female identity.
Subjectivity and identity are closely linked concepts: a subject necessarily possesses an identity to which it submits itself or which it constructs for itself. The debate on subjectivity has gone to the roots of the issue with the aid of psychoanalysis. Feminism has subordinated itself to this discipline to such a degree that one could say, without undue exaggeration, that in the past few decades it has become a political movement that has adopted psychoanalysis as its ideology.
If Marxist theory was to enjoy a revival, it could not ignore this debate, where the formation of individual and collective, personal and political, subjectivity emerges as a process that is far more complex, precarious and ambivalent than that traditionally theorised by Marxist culture. The debate on difference was first and foremost a discussion of subjectivity, even though it was often expressed in other terms. The adoption of difference as a political paradigm for (many) feminists dates back to the early 1970s and was partially inspired by the thinking of the
Black movement - the revival of nationalism as the nationalism of the oppressed, Fanon, Black Pride and Malcolm X.
However, to a certain extent, this relates to a specific demand of women or;
more correctly, a sector of emancipated and usually politicised women who no longer faced problems of material survival or exclusion from the public arena. Based on theoretical reflection, such women formulated a movement in the opposite direction to forced entry into inaccessible areas. In other words, they isolated or distanced themselves, in a movement that frequently went hand in hand with the construction of political subjectivities that were independent of other movements and political organisations dominated and led by men. This same distancing and ditferentiation also characterises the dynamic of the construction of the individual, male or female, who becomes a subject through the awareness of being other than or different from the person caring for him/her, almost always the mother.
A similar dynamic is also evident in the construction of collective subjects: whenever a human group has adopted common objectives (or believes it has done so), this has involved a parallel cutting-oft, separation or rupture from the rest of the world, while gathering together the individuals or sub-groups of which it is
National identity is particularly significant from this point of view. Feminism has dealt with subjectivity in inappropriate terms (although, as we will see, in its own terms) first and foremost because it has used schemas inherited from European nationalism of the early 19th century, including the polemic against equality. seen as a downward levelling or standardisation. These schemas were then borrowed by anti-colonial revolutions, due either to the mediation of Western-educated intellectuals or the anthropological dimension of the movements themselves. All subjects have an identity, but not all identities are constructed on the basis of differences between one and the other. In the worker's movement too there emerged problems of identity which Marxism proved unable to resolve through its elevation of the distinguishing features of the lower classes. This was in fact achieved by other, more primitive social movements whose claims against injustice were based on their own poverty and humility. The reclaiming of one's own culture, history, or specificity -real or presumed- is typical of nationalist movements and has become a dead end for
This process has not only emerged as a result of external influences. Using more complex and cultivated language and applying more knowledge to the issue feminism has repeated an old polemic tha has constantly divided the movement bet ween the options of reclaiming or conduc ting a critique of gender difference. The decision to lay claim to roles and righ has often gone hand in hand with a tacti of reclaiming female functions and exper tise: women demanded rights as soldien
mothers or simply as mothers; they demanded public-sector posts on the basis of their abilities as educators and administrators.
At the same time and even before the end of the last century, other voices emerged that urged women not to exploit "feminine virtues" since the primary effect would be to trap women ever more deeply in a normative and marginalising femaleness. The movement known in Europe as radical feminism [in the United States this term is applied to differentialist feminism] has been marked throughout the 20th century by a critique not just of misogynist claims but also of highly flattering images of femininity.
Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva argued that the best thing women could do was to consistently reject any identity or statement applied to them. In this apparently bizarre idea, they were simply making a balance-sheet of feminism understood not just as women's political battle for their own rights but also as a critique of the ideology of male-female
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION relations.
We cannot accept the soundness of this
Women's lives in the new global economy argument because it does not just concern the present, but implies that it will be impossible for women ever to achieve their own gendered language, become
Penny Duggan & Heather Dashner (editors)
• E4/$5/35FF. Cheque payable to P. Rousset, IIRE, Postbus 53290, 1007 Amsterdam, Netherlands. * subjects or speak for themselves. Differentialism, which has often - and not by chance - refused to call itself feminism, has worked toward reconfirming, one by one, all the stereotypes about femininity:
The identity debate in Italy woman is mother, is inclined toward domesticity, is more gifted for relationships and caring; she is non-rational, conthe bias according to which individuals - left-wing tradictory, subjective, intuitive; she is nature, matter, weak-mindedness.
How did this approach emerge? The answer is simple: a political and cultural context arose in which certain sectors of women came to believe it was more useful to reclaim than to critique differenceidentity. A significant factor in the first approach was the academic nature of this feminism, which dealt with disciplines and trends (structural antropology, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis) that scarcely lent themselves to the relativisation and historical contextualisation of male-female relations. Women who demanded rights as the mothers of soldiers at the end of the 19th century did so within the framework of the militarist ideology then dominating Europe. At the end of the day, this is not so distant from the logic of emale academics who claim professional spaces on the basis of women's alienation from Reason in an era where the prestige of the intellect is at an all-time low.
We have a second reason for saying that the discussion of subjectivity has been expressed in inappropriate terms: on the one hand, feminist theorists who have turned their attention to the subject have been forced to use cultural instruments that deal in the death, decentring, division, deconstruction and fragmentation of the subject. On the other hand, it is difficult for them to invent theories other than
We have dealt with identity, which is men and women alike- present themselves to and are perceived in the world; we have discussed its strategic feature of adapting to its milieu as well as the fact that it is closer to the conscious than the notion of consciousness. We have also talked about the role of experience in subjectivity and the dual meaning of the term subject: subjection to certain social contraints or the capacity for self-determination and self-defence. We have attempted to understand the phenomena that increase -but also separate and fragment- the subjects demanding political recognition: from lesbians to women of colour and the transsexual subject.
This debate has spawned tons of literature. But the new reader may be disappointed, and have the impression that this issue has no immediate relationship to politics. Many of the intellectuals involved in the debate are psychoanalysts or philosophers and the subject they deal with is more often the individual rather than the collective or political subject -although of course the two are closely linked. But Marxists should be equipped to select, translate and redefine issues according to specific political demands. In my own country, Italy, there has been a total failure in this regard. For several years, women -including revolutionaries- failed to glean anything from this debate apart from a few items of ideological jetsam. Nowadays they tend to drop the issue like a hot potato
It was to help to understand these feminist debates and to work against this trend that we, the feminists and Marxists in the Party of Communist Refoundation, started up the Quaderni Viola (Violet Notebooks) five years ago. So far we have published four issues
• Meglio Orfane (Better to be an Orphan), for a feminist criticism of difference philosophy;
• Donne e Rifondazione (Women and Refoundation), theses for a women's congress; -
• Maria e il Mago (Mary and the
Magician), papers from a women's conference on the crisis of the left and the rise of the right in Italy:
• E l'ultima chiuda la porta (Last one out closes the door), the importance of identifying as a lesbian.
We will shortly bring out Letters to Roman Women, a book explaining feminism to communists: difference identity and distance; symbolic mothers, essentalism, post structuralism and postmodernity; gender and types, lesbianism and passing, queer theory, death of the subject and the death agony of the patriarchy. [LC]
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* discussion article those dominating the academic milieu; first and foremost this is because the ability to enter the academic environment and create a career within it always depends on the ability to adapt; also, while discourses based on the tribulations of the subject may have severe limitations, they nonetheless have a certain descriptive power.
Can it be coincidental that the subject became a theoretical issue once more only after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and through the second half of this century, at a time when the international worker's movement -the only subject potentially equipped to alter the course of history- was facing very real difficulties?
Throughout the course of this debate, identity feminism has been severely criticised. In the United States, the birthplace of differentialism, feminist theory has turned the full circle to return once more to the positions of the 1970s (Betty Friedan, Kate Millet) which claim that sex difference is an ideological construct. This does not, of course, mean that sex has nothing to do with gender, but rather that sex is always situated in a historical and cultural context and that attempts to define what belongs specifically to one sex rather than the other, without regard for context, lead one deeper into a necessarily misogynist metaphysic of the sexes.
The critique made of former identity feminism has often taken the form of a critique of the subject's attributes - which are necessarily illusory due to the illusory nature of the subject itself. We could say, jokingly (although it is not so funny) that this is man's umpteenth crime against women: When they needed to talk about subjectivity, men deprived them of the tools to do so - and were able to do so because they have millennia of cultural monopolisation behind them.
At the same time, the result of this state of affairs is not just limited to an inappropriate use of language in feminist theory. The most important effect has been feminist theorists' resumption of a debate on the subject and an awareness that it was the main issue on the agenda. In a sense, this implies the theoretical - if only fledgling - renaissance of the subject since anyone who has a practical demand sooner or later finds the words to express it. *