There have been a few interesting posts in response to my post Eyeliner, Razors, High Heels, and Bras. I really think that much of what different authors are describing is tangential to my original post, but…that doesn’t mean I didn’t find what they had to say interesting.
To sum up: it bothers me when feminists claim that women aren’t under pressure to dress/groom/act a certain way, and seems pretty akin to saying “sexism doesn’t exist anymore” because it’s plainly untrue to anyone who critically observes the world. It also bothers me when feminists assume women have no agency because of those social pressures, and set up a feminist anti-standard which says you can only be a “good” feminist if you don’t shave/don’t wear makeup/burn your bra/etc. The problem is that women have to make a “statement” politically in an arena which should be a matter of personal comfort and preference. Women are unable to make informed decisions for the sake of their health — shaving is bad for the skin, and so are many cosmetics, people fry their hair into submission rather than styling it in a way which keeps it healthy, and wearing or not wearing certain shoes or bras is uncomfortable for different women. The problem is that we feel we need to choose one way or the other, either for sake of fashion or feminism. Neither is the solution.

I think part of the problem is that I didn’t try to pretend to offer a solution other than “maybe we all ought to carefully examine our motivations before claiming that social conditioning doesn’t affect the way we present ourselves”. People can read a lot into something when you don’t pretend to know the answer; therefore, it seems that people had some wildly divergent ideas of what I was trying to get at when I was mostly making a pretty focused point (I’m sick of people claiming social pressure on women to dress/groom a certain way doesn’t exist) rather than a broad one (do I know how to fix this? hell no. dress how you want).

Right now, since I don’t want to make a massive post from hell, I’ll just address what Bitch | Lab had to say:

I don’t think young folks believe it — though it may still exist — but there was pressure on feminists to wear a kind of uniform. Anyone who wore make up or a dress? She had to have a really good fucking reason to get away with it and it would only be something temporary — like making your parents happy for their yearly visit. Your car should be appripriately “green” or a Volvo. Certainly not a beat up Plymouth that I had to crawl into from the passenger side.

But those things really aren’t the issue — though they are signposts marking the path I took to get to where I am now. Signposts that mark a rejection of what some might otherwise call hypocrisy. I was interested, not so much because it was hypocrisy, but to wonder why it existed at all. What seemed to make it impossible for us to not reproduce taste and style, even a feminist taste and style, which was enforced with its own judgments about what was feminist and what wasn’t, who belongs and who didn’t? Why, in spite of wanting to get away from that, did we reproduce it?

Where I differ is with Earlbecke is with the seeming certainty that it might be possible to create a world where everyone just wore whatever they pleased because they possess a self capable of making those decisions based on their little ol’ desires. It is a potentiality, this self, but it is a potentiality that’s being banked on: the potential for a self untouched by society in the self’s expression of its _true_ desires.

On this model, our true desires are like something we carry around with us in a little knapsack. In an ideal society, we’d be free of social structural systems of oppression and the stufff in the knapsack — our desires — would magically express who were are. We’d have this self beneath all the gunk and junk of oppression. It’d be our own special, unique self.

This really isn’t much different than the famous billiard ball model upon which classical economic theory is built. The little selves just bang up against each other: there are no internal relations. They carry around their properties and attributes, unfazed by banging up against all the other little self-encapsulated monads in a Leibnizian universe. (Leibniz is a philosopher who spoke of a world composed of monads)

On this model, we have our monad selves with attributes called preferences. We whip those preferences out of our knapsack when we go shopping, making decisions based on those preferences.

From a lefty perspective, the problem is that those preferences (desires) carry with them the mark of a structurally oppressive society. That society shapes our preferences and desires. We aren’t free. Our freedom is constrained by the demands of the system. We are, in other words, ideologically blinded by hetero/sexism, racism, ablism, and class exploitation and oppression.

Here, the problem is the knapsack — structural forms of oppression — that crush our true desires like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that got tossed around in a poorly designed knapsack.

But the problem, for me, is that this assumes that we just need to fix the knapsack so it doesn’t crush the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That, underneath the massive weight of those oppressions, there exist selves that could otherwise be free to have and express true needs and desires. They’ve just been prevented from expressing their true desires.

And what does this remind you of? Well, it reminds me of the essentialist gender categories that Butler worries about. Butler says that, even while social constructionists recognize that gender is largely socially constructed, you can still read an essentialism. It’s not just imported into the theory by accident. It’s also not simply a mark or trace left over by an ideology that hasn’t been completely erased from the theory. Rather, it is an essentialism that is constituted by social constructionist thought itself. Not shaped, but actually constituted by it.

Which is a fair enough point, and, I think, important to keep in mind when arguing just about anything. (Have I mentioned I love Bitch | Lab? Well, I do. She’s, like, so much more educated than I am.)

I don’t think we can say that people have “authentic” desires outside of cultural influence and personal experience. We’re the sum of our biological and genetic legacy, our culture and its history, our families, our friends, our enemies. To argue otherwise is to basically invalidate any anti-oppression work. It’s an easy answer which doesn’t actually solve anything — and I think too many well-meaning feminists, anti-racists, etc., fall into this trap. If all we needed to do to escape our systems of oppression were to free everyone to be their authentic selves, whatever that is, then we can ignore the historical, structural systems of inequality which continue to produce prejudice by shaping people’s attitudes and influencing their actions.

We will always be influenced by other people. There is no authentic self because who we are is deeply connected to other people and our environment. We are not the same person from minute to minute; our feelings and thoughts change. Our physical state fluctuates, develops, grows, degenerates. Ten years from now I won’t really have anything left of the person I used to be; the original tissue of my skin and organs will have all been replaced by new growth. Where within this constantly changing system, mind and body both, can we say the true “self”, uncorrupted by outside influence, unchanging, resides? Even if you believe in a soul (and I do), I think that arguing it is unchanging and static would be equally ignorant. To assign an authentic self is to be resigned to predestination, essentialism, determinism.

That is to say, basically, I agree with what Bitch | Lab has to say, and I understand why it’s frustrating because this assumption seems to underlie so much feminist thought and theory — and, really, it only perpetuates the problematic attitudes which make movements for social justice necessary in the first place, by clinging to the concept of essentialism. (This especially seems to be a problem in radical feminist theory, which, don’t get me wrong, I by and large agree with. For claiming to look “for the roots” so many feminists seem to actually miss or dismiss them. For me, a lot of queer theory seems to fill in the missing parts, but straight white radical feminists aren’t always willing to look at that.)

So I suppose this means we have a need to develop theories of feminism, theories of racial and cultural identity, theories of gender and sexuality and sexual orientation, which start from the ground up. Which do not rely on essentialism, on the idea of an essential, ideal, true, authentic self — because people are not platonic ideals, we are flawed and complex and inevitably in some way self-contradictory. We need theories which are pragmatic and work in the real world, the way that people actually live their lives, without being unnecessarily judgmental or divisive, attempting to address not only the theoretical roots and causes of oppression, but also dealing with the practical effects of inequality here and now.

Who’s up for it?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Body and Beauty Standards, Feminist Movement, Gender and Sex, Links, Politics, Sexuality, Society, Theory.