THEORY DICTIONARY
Section I: Key Terms and Definitions in Feminist Theory
Section II: Key Terms and Definitions in
Post-colonial Theory
* All terms and definitions in SECTION I are from:
Humm, Maggie. The Dictionary of
Feminist Theory.
Colombus:
* All
terms and definitions in SECTION I A
are from:
Gamble, Sarah. The Routledge Critical Dictionary
of Feminism and Postfeminism.
1999.
*All terms and definitions in SECTION
II are from:
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth
Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. Key Concepts In
Post-Colonial Studies.
* Several terms evidence the
overlap of feminist and post-colonial theory.
Please consider these
“junctures” very carefully.
* If you use any of these
definitions in your papers You
Must Cite the Source in Correct Documentation Format.
SECTION I:
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS IN FEMINIST THEORY
·The following is an alphabetical list of
terms included in
Section I.
·Terms repeated in both sections but defined
differently are in
BOLD:
|
|
SECTION
I A
Two terms which are opposites. For example, rational/irrational, white/black, man/woman. These binaries in turn produce hierarchies of
meaning which are then socially institutionalized. Binaries (also known as dichotomies) are
common in Western social and political thought and reflect the fundamental
dichotomy male/female. The first term in
any binary (‘man’) is usually seen as positive and superior to the other term
(‘woman’) but to depend on the second term for its meaning: for example,
male/female, culture/nature, active/passive.
A critique of binary opposites is
central to the work of Jacques Derrida (1967, 1978). Briefly, he argues that presence or identity is constructed only by an absence; women are women only
because they are not men and presence is therefore illusory. Derrida deconstructs these binary opposites
and problematises the view that identity and truth need to be
represented in oppositional terms.
Feminists also challenge the hierarchies implied in binary opposites.
Helene Cixous, the creative writer
and philosopher, argues that social representations depend upon gendered binaries. In opposition, Cixous creates a positive feminine
in a discourse which she calls ecriture feminine. See
Cixous (1976). Other feminist writers
argue that binaries could be reversed to privilege
women’s qualities (Daly 1978 and Rich 1976, 1980).
The rational/irrational binary structuring
male-based sciences is attacked by Sandra Harding
(1991). She argues that this binary
needs to be superseded by more plural, experiential
and feminist knowledge.
Systems of thought dominated by
binary opposites are also often racist.
For example, Patricia Hill Collins points out:
One must either be Black or white in
such thought systems – persons of ambiguous racial and ethnic identity
constantly battle with questions such as ‘What are you anyway?’ This emphasis on quantification and categorization
occurs in conjunction with the belief that either/or categories must be
ranked. The search for certainty of this
sort requires that one side of a dichotomy be privileged
while its other is denigrated. (Collins 1990, p. 225)
The study of human
and physical life. Questions of
biology are central to feminism because women’s oppression is
deeply determined by our ability to give birth. Feminist theory has always explicitly
recognized the importance, for women, of freedom from reproductive control
although de Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Firestone,
Feminist research is investigating
how women’s bodies function within the context of our lives and argues that our
biology develops in reciprocal and dialectical relationship with the ways in
which we live. See Lowe and Hubbard
(1983).
Some feminist theorists argue that
reconstructions of women’s ‘intrinsic’ biological nature are scientifically
meaningless and are usually politically or ideologically motivated. Sociobiology in particular
is attacked by feminist theorists because it renders the biological as
more important than the social origins of women’s roles. See Bleier (1984). All feminists agree that feminist theory must
dispel naturalistic explanations which provide
biological justifications for women’s economic and social limitations.
A historically
specific form of patriarchy in which patriarchy operates through class and
productive relations. The
subordination of women is shaped by specific modes of
production. One instance of the
collaboration between capitalism and patriarchy, which has been a focus of
discussion among feminist scholars, is the combination of protective
legislation and women’s exclusion from male dominated trade unions. See Hartmann (1976).
A system of domination over
subject countries. Feminist theorists argue that this process is
analogous to women’s experience of oppression in patriarchy.
In the absence of external colonies women become ‘a last colony’ (Werlhof et al. 1983).
The colonial process ‘naturalized’
colonized women as the counterpart of the ‘civilizing’ of European women. The two processes are
causally linked because of the creation of ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’
women and the polarization between the two is an organizing structural principle
of patriarchal capitalism. The
colonizers used a diametrically opposed value system vis-à-vis the women of the subjugated peoples as that used to their ‘own’ women.
See Reddock (1984).
In Sexual Politics (1970) Kate Millett was the first to point out to
the colonialisation of women in contemporary patriarchy. This colonialisation, Millett claims,
functions by a mechanism of the ‘interior colonialisation’ in women of male
values. Robin Morgan adds the dimension
of sexuality to Millett’s argument, by describing women’s bodies as the ‘land’
of male colonizers. See Morgan (1977).
Dalla Costa claims that the family
and household are a colony. Adrienne
Rich draws on Fanon’s theory that colonialisation is a metaphor never an
explanation, to argue that women’s oppression as mothers is a form of
colonialisation because men define and appropriate motherhood.
The difference
between the ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of research. In traditional research, a researcher is in
opposition to, and above the particular and lived experience of his
‘objects’. Liz Stanley and Sue Wise
argue that rejecting the scientist/person dichotomy will dismantle the power relationship which exists between researchers and
researched. See Stanley and Wise
(1983). The alternative to dichotomy is
a dialectic woman-centered theory.
Barbara Du Bois argues that
dichotomy is not, in any case, a property of nature but of a learned mode of
thought, a way of seeing and knowing that turns reality into rigid,
oppositional and hierarchical categories.
She says that the challenge for feminist science will be to see and
describe without recreating these dichotomies, without falling into the old
pattern of objectifying experience. See
Du Bois (1983).
A necessary
polarity between women and men and between women. Feminists define difference politically, not
simply in terms of sexual categories.
Defining difference has been the
single greatest contribution of second wave feminism to theory. Difference has two senses in feminism. A primary meaning is that women have a
different voice, a different psychology and a different experience of love,
work and the family from men. Difference
also means a negative category which includes the
exclusion and subordination of women.
Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone
express the view that women’s differences from men are the chief mechanism of
women’s oppression. ‘Difference’ is an
artifact of patriarchy and male and female are really two different cultures.
Much of the theoretical writing of
the 1970’s focused on gender difference and therefore
on psychological rather than on political, economic or social issues. For example, Nancy Chodorow argued that
gender difference stemmed from childhood psychosocial affiliations. Audre Lorde and more
contemporary theorists attack the false universalism in feminist
analysis as a form of neo-colonialism or neo-imperialism. They point to crucial differences between
Black and white women for example, to the enormous differential of power. ‘Difference is that raw and
powerful connection from which our personal power is forged’ (Lorde 1984b, pp.
111-12).
French theorists locate the meaning
of difference in power relations. Monique
Wittig argues that the ideology of sexual difference functions as a form of
censorship because it masks as ‘natural’ the social opposition between men and
women. Masculine/feminine, male/female
are categories which serve to conceal the fact that social differences always
belong to an economic, political, and ideological world. See Wittig (1982). Colette Guillaumin adds that difference is
quite simply the statement of the effects
of a power relationship. Difference is a
fact of dependence and a fact of domination.
See Guillaumin (1982). Jacques
Derrida uses la difference meaning
both to differ (in space) and defer (postpone) as an antidote to
totalitarianism. See Derrida (1967).
Radical feminism defines difference
as a great positive. Mary Daly claims
that to simplify differences would be to settle for a less than dreadful
judgement of the multiple horrors of gynocide.
Adrienne Rich suggests that an epistemological revolution can stem from
the different physiology of women. A new
revolution of consciousness comes from women’s unique capacity to nurture.
The relation
between language and social reality.
Sheila Rowbotham argues that
discourse is the instrument of
patriarchal domination and that struggle for power within discourses is an
issue of political importance for the women’s movement. See Rowbotham (1973b). Ros Coward argues that in order to understand
the construction of gender differences we need to look at the contexts,
transformations and definitions of sexuality in several discourses and how
these are produced.
See Coward (1978). Jean Elshtain
suggests that the nature and meaning of feminist discourse itself must be a
subject for critical enquiry. She
defines feminist discourse as a political discourse directed towards the
construction of new meanings. See
Elshtain (1981).
Sara Ruddick has called ‘maternal
thinking’ a feminist discourse which is imbedded with maternal values and ways
of seeing. See Ruddick (1984).
The term incorporates several
meanings. In sum, equality is based on the idea that no individual should be less equal
in opportunity or in human rights than any other. Liberal feminism campaigns for the granting
of full equality of formal rights to women as the solution to women’s
subjection. Equality, like equal rights,
would also to liberal feminists be part of a progressive rationalization of
human society. Harriet Taylor in The Enfranchisement if Women (1851)
pointed out that female inequality became a custom and tradition solely through
men’s superior strength. See Mill and Mill (1970).
One problem with liberal feminism is
that even with the granting of equality to women in public life,
women’s domestic labor will always be unequal to that of men. More subtly, the hidden patriarchal agendas
of public institutions can subvert the apparent equality of legal rights (see
Education).
Contemporary American theorists
argue that the principle of equality cannot be initiated
in a meritocracy. Sandra Harding
suggests that where standards of merit are more or less universally shared and
uncontroversial the equality of opportunity principle might function, but that
it is a reactionary device at times when social relations, structured by
institutions, need deep changes. See
Harding (1978-9).
The belief that differences between
women and men are essences – that there are unique male and female natures –
rather than the view that differences are socially/experientially
constructed. If differences are
essential then they are assumed to be universal,
‘natural’ and derive from biology.
Essentialism has many meanings in feminist theory including French
essentialism and strategic essentialism.
Feminists continually debate issues of essentialism but because most
feminist critiques are written by and as women, the key issue is whether there
are essential or innate differences between men and women and whether these are
biological or constructed.
Constructionist beliefs (for example, de Beauvoir’s concept ‘One is not
born but rather becomes a woman’) are more common in feminist theory (de
Beauvoir1953). Indeed ‘essentialism’ is
often a derogatory label used to dismiss those feminists believing in marked
gender differences. Currently feminist
theory is clarifying the term and distinguishing between essentialism as a
universal essence, essentialism as a commonality and essentialism as a
particular historical formation (Brah 1991).
Brah calls for a non-essentialist universalism; that is, a universalism which is historically produced.
Feminist theorists who focus on
essentialism include Luce Irigaray who suggests that there is an essential
feminine difference deriving from biological differences and that this
difference is repressed by patriarchy (Irigaray
1974a). By describing a plural feminine, Irigaray escapes the
risk of biological essentialism. Teresa
de Lauretis argues that feminists should
‘risk’ essentialism since this is what distinguishes feminist from non-feminist
thinking (de Lauretis 1991). For
example, Italian feminism draws on the notion of women’s essential and
originary difference which is maternal (Bono and Kemp
1991). Cultural and French feminists
agree that the maternal is an essential actual or potential female experience
(Rich 1976; Kristeva 1980).
Anti-essentialist feminists are
concerned that theories of essential gender difference are too biological or
too conservative. Deconstructionists
attack any fixed binaries (men/women) (Moi 1985). Following Lacan, psychoanalysts argue that
sexuality is constructed by language rather than
biology and that the subject of feminism is not ‘a woman’ since this would be
essentialist (Mitchell and Rose 1982).
Postmodernists challenge notions of universality within mass
culture. In addition
Black feminists challenge racist paradigms of an essential Black identity. For example, bell hooks attacks essentialism
by drawing attention to the interaction of class and gender with Black identities
(hooks 1991). Finally
bodily essentialism is challenged by Judith Butler’s poststructuralist concept
that gender is a ‘performance’ (
Debates about essentialism are
complex. Most feminists hold onto the
idea that critiques of essentialism need not betray the authority of experience. One
good example is Gayatri Spivak’s idea of ‘strategic’ essentialism or historical
moments of essentialism. Spivak claims
that if strategic essentialism is practiced by the
dispossessed themselves then essentialism can be powerfully disruptive (Spivak
1987).
In anthropology
ethnicity characterizes the culture of a distinctive, sometimes racially
distinct, group. Feminist
anthropologists are concerned about the arbitrariness of race categories and
that, whatever the system of classification, women often remain a ‘muted’
group. See Ardener (1981).
Feminists point, too, to how
sociology has pathologised and problematised ethnic communities in
Other feminists argue that we should
see ethnicity not as a cultural problem
but in the broader context of state harassment and the double oppression of
Black women. See Amos and Parmar (1984).
A way of thinking which is unable to
see differences and which universalises all values and ideas from the subject’s
experience of her own white ethnic group.
Eurocentricity creates models which leave no
room for validating the actual struggles and experiences of Black Third World
women. An example would be the image of
an Asian woman as ‘passively’ subject to oppressive family practices or to
think that the strength of Afra-Caribbean women is located only in
motherhood. Audre Lorde argues that
white feminism’s failure to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a
failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. See Lorde (1984).
Women’s private
awareness and knowledge drawn from participation in social life. The experience of women is often denied as ‘real’
or important and our difficulty in accepting the validity of our experience is
part of our cultural heritage and perpetuated in schooling. Feminists draw attention to the gap between
women’s experience of the world and the theoretical schemes we have available
in which to think about experience. See
Smith (1974).
The challenge is to convert women’s
private concerns into shared public concerns.
This occurs in consciousness-raising groups and also in the revaluation
of women’s experience as a part of social science methodology and theory. Feminism argues that personal, lived
experience is intensely political and immensely important politically. See Stanley and Wise (1983).
One hallmark of contemporary feminist
research in any field is the investigator’s continual
testing of the plausibility of the work
against her own experience. See Parlee
(1979). Reversing a longstanding
tradition of relying on (or being expected to rely on) the advice of male experts
gives women an ‘authority' of experience’.
See Diamond and Edwards (1977). Socio-historians argue that to study the
history of women, especially as it is recorded through
the consciousness of women themselves, is to discover how one’s life
experiences are joined to those of other women.
Marcia Westkott calls this ‘experiences of
consciousness-in-history’. See Westkott
(1983). Indeed, women researchers have
to begin with personal experience since traditional disciplines do not often
utilize women students’ personal or emotional experiences. For women an emotional reaction is, however,
often the foundation of critical thought and more astute
theory. See Rutenberg (1983).
It is precisely the rich and varied
experiences of contemporary feminism which contribute
to the variety of its theories.
Anthropologists argue that feminism theory must look for variety both in
the experiences of women in other societies and in the experiences of women of
different classes, races and nationalities in contemporary industrial
society. The claim to a diversity of
experience is an important part of the Black radical critiques of Audre Lorde
and Angela Davis. As Gerda Lerner
pointed out: if women’s experience is the norm, men will become the Other.
The definition incorporates both a
doctrine of equal rights for women (the organized movement to attain women’s
rights) and an ideology of social transformation aiming to create a world for
women beyond simple social equality. Gerda
Lerner argues that feminism must distinguish for itself between women’s rights
and women’s emancipation. See Lerner
(1978).
In general, feminism is the ideology
of women’s liberation since intrinsic in all its approaches is the belief that
women suffer injustice because of our sex.
Under this broad umbrella various feminisms
offer differing analyses of the causes, or agents, of female oppression.
Marxist feminists identify mainly
the sexual division of labor as a cause of oppression and Marxist feminism is
then an agenda of economic change.
Catharine MacKinnon on the other hand identifies sexuality as the
primary social sphere of male power. She
argues that feminist political theory must centre on the construction and
social determination of sexuality, since to feminism the personal is
epistemologically the political, and its epistemology is its politics. See MacKinnon (1982).
Feminism also incorporates various
methods of analysis and theory, if feminism is taken
to be the theory of the woman’s point of view.
Consciousness-raising is the quintessential method of feminism, and
since feminism means knowledge of existing things in a new light it needs a
distinctive account of the relation of method to theory.
Feminism’s method recapitulates as
theory the reality it tries to describe.
For example, feminism challenges universalisms and uses the pursuit of
consciousness itself as a form of political theory and practice. See Hartsock (1979).
Indeed some French theorists have
abandoned the use of the word ‘feminism’ altogether on the grounds that it is
one more ism. See Makward (1980).
Definitions of feminism by feminists
tend to be shaped by their training, ideology or
race. So, for example, Marxist and
socialist feminists stress the interaction within feminism of class with gender
and focus on social distinctions
between men and women. See Mitchell and
Oakley (1976). Black feminists argue
much more for an integrated analysis which can unlock
the multiple systems of oppression. See
B. Smith (1981). (The different
political theories of feminism are entered as
individual categories: see, for example, Anarchist feminism or Marxist
feminism.)
Like feminism, there is not, nor could be, a single definition of feminist since feminists
have many differing affinities – of sexual preference, class and race. In short, a feminist is a woman who
recognizes herself, and is recognized by others, as a
feminist. That awareness depends on a
woman having experienced consciousness-raising, knowledge of women’s oppression, and a
recognition of women’s differences and communalities.
Some feminists argue for a
definition that is future orientated – that a feminist must have a concept of
social transformation. See Eisenstein (1984). Others argue for a definition that recognizes
the validity of women’s contemporary experiences. See Duelli Klein (1983). ‘I myself have never been able to find out
precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express
sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute’ (West 1982, p.
219). But all feminists share a
commitment to, and enjoyment of, a woman-centered perspective.
A culturally
shaped group of attributes and behaviors given to the female or to the male. Contemporary feminist theory is careful to
distinguish between sex and gender.
Building on the work of Margaret Mead in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), such
theory takes the view that sex is biological and that gender behavior is a
social construction.
Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone
radicalized contemporary thinking about gender.
In The Dialectic of Sex
Firestone argues that gender distinctions structure every aspect of our lives
by constituting the unquestioned framework in terms of which society views
women and men. Gender difference, she
claims, is an elaborate system of male domination. The theoretical task of feminism is to
understand that system. The political
task of feminism is to end it.
Polarity is essential to gender
construction since each gender is constructed as the
opposite of the other. Simone de
Beauvoir was first to describe ‘woman’ as Other or
‘not man’. This concept of Otherness
underlies categories of contrasting characteristics labeled feminine and
masculine, for example ‘hysterical’ or ‘angry’ which reflect gender related
expectations.
Traditional sex difference studies are designed to prove that these characteristics are not
socially constructed but derive from biological differences. Feminists criticize pro-gender biological
evidence as being fallacious. See
Maccoby and Jacklin (1974). Feminist sociologists are able to show that
attributes that Western society considers ‘natural’ for women are usually
created by social pressures or conditioning.
The internalization of these attributes is called
gendering. See Oakley (1972).
Feminist anthropologists ask us to
study the significance of gender for the organization of social life so that we
can conceptualize a future society without traditional categories. See Rosaldo (1980). Gayle Rubin argues that gender is a product
of the social relations of sexuality because kinship systems rest upon
marriage. Every gender system exhibits
an ideology or cognitive system that relies on repression in order to present
gender categories as being fixed. See Rubin (1975).
This focus on gender as a locus of
power relations set the terms of debate for much theoretical writing of the
1970s. The great strength of
contemporary feminism lies in its dissection of the mythology surrounding
gender. Psychoanalysts argue that the
gender division of labor in the modern nuclear family, which gives exclusive
responsibilities for early childcare to the mother, produces
gender-differentiated people with desires and capacities to continue the gender
division of labor. Basing her theory on
gender differences observable in the ‘preoedipal’ period of development, Nancy
Chodorow claims that only a transformation of the social organization of gender
can lead to the disappearance of sexual inequality. See Chodorow (1978). Dorothy Dinnerstein felt that symbiotic
gender arrangements were leading to a planetary crisis affecting human
future. Less apocalyptically, Carol
Gilligan relies on Chodorow’s view of female gender identity to argue that this
identity formation makes women relational, unlike male gender identity which stems from separatism and autonomy. See Gilligan (1982).
The analysis which
Millett and Firestone began and which was extended and deepened by
Adrienne Rich and Nancy Chodorow shifted feminist theory from a focus on sex
roles to a woman-centred perspective. As
Catharine MacKinnon argues, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality
because gender is based on an ideology that attributes
its learned qualities to nature. See
MacKinnon (1982).
This term refers to the unconscious
or explicit assumption that heterosexuality is the only ‘normal’ mode of sexual
and social relations. Feminist theorists
agree that heterosexuality, as an institution and as an ideology, is a
cornerstone of patriarchy. For example,
heterosexism implies the suppression and denial of homosexuality and assumes
that everyone is, or should be, heterosexual.
Second, heterosexism relies on the fallacious superiority of the
dominant male, passive female pattern. See Darty and Potter (1984).
Other critics point out that
heterosexist values and norms legitimize the sexual division of labor. See Ferguson et al. (1982).
A feminist sensitivity to homophobia
is part of the ongoing attempt to free women’s studies from heterosexism. The assumption of heterosexuality both
reflects and reinforces ignorance about lesbian perspectives. Writers Adrienne Rich and Elly Bulkin, in
particular, are making feminist theory more truly inclusive from a lesbian
perspective.
A term used by feminist historians
to describe the virtual exclusion of women, their lives, work and struggle from
research. Although women’s contribution to
history is now being recorded, women’s contribution to
historical science is still not acknowledged.
See Lerner (1978).
Feminist theories of identity have
moved on from neo-Freudian psychoanalysis and current poststructuralist
theory. Feminists argue that identity is
not the goal but rather the point of departure of any process of
self-consciousness. They suggest that
women’s understanding of identity is multiple and even self-contradictory. See Bulkin et al. (1984).
The contemporary
debate about identity politics was initiated by feminist psychoanalysts who
described sources of female identity other than penis envy. For example, Nancy Chodorow suggests that the
first task of individuation women undertake is the discovery of the ego boundaries
between ourselves and our mothers. See Chodorow (1978). Feminists have gone on to argue that a
rejection of the mother, and hence of a true identity, is responsible for the
anti-feminism of some adult women. See
Flax (1980).
A feminist ideology is a body of ideas which describes the sexism of any particular society
and describes a future society in which sexist contradictions would be
eradicated. Sexist ideologies of
domesticity are those most attacked by feminist theorists since these ideas
depict a static and conservative image of women’s societal condition. By accounting for ways in which women’s
social conditions evolved historically and how male-defined social ideologies
perpetuate women’s inferiority, historians can recommend prescriptions for
change. See Cott and Pleck (1979).
Marxist critics argue that the
economic function of a social institution, like the family, needs to interact
with an ideological function in order to produce a stable patriarchal
unit. The task of sexist ideology, they
argue, is to capture and preserve the institution across changes in economic
production. Ideology has, then, an autonomy from economic formations. See Barrett (1980). The task of feminism is to expose the
contradiction between the two.
Other definitions of ideology – for
example, Althusser’s concept of ideology as the way we live in the world – have
encouraged feminist theorists to explore psychoanalysis. Juliet Mitchell describes how this concept of
ideology helped her understand the family from within, and therefore understand its relative autonomy in the
ideological superstructure of society.
See Mitchell (1971).
A consistent theme in all feminist
writing about ideology is that the values and goals of women’s ideal social
condition must form the basis of any feminist ideology. Some feminists, however, are concerned about
the project of theorizing ideology
itself. Susan Griffin argues that no
matter what feminist ideology is constructed, it will always presume the idea
of the Other and hence the possibility of
domination. See
Usually the control of one
state or country by another, or the economic and ideological control of Black
people by white. bell hooks argues
that this condition applies internally in
The traditional organization of ideas which is attacked by feminists in all
disciplines. See Spender (1981). Feminist theory pays attention to women’s
different ideas especially the way in which feminist knowledge is constructed through
the interaction of the self and the natural world. See Stanley and Wise (1983). Within feminism social knowledge and
self-knowledge become mutually informing and Marcia Westkott suggests that
feminist knowledge begins with an awareness of our relationship to the
historical context in which we live. See
Westkott (1983).
Socialist feminism characterizes
knowledge as a practical construct shaped by its social origins. Many feminists working in the sociology of
knowledge argue that disciplines are social phenomena with male-defined
objectives and male-defined environments.
See Bernard (1975). Other
feminists argue that the methods of sociology itself, its conceptual schemes
and theories, are built up within a male social
universe. See D. Smith
(1974). Mary Belenky’s Women’s Ways of Knowing (1986) argues
that women acquire knowledge through a different process than do men and, thus,
that the learning process demanded by academic institutions place women at a
major disadvantage.
Radical feminism argues that
knowledge does not grow in a linear way through the accumulation of facts and
the application of the hypothetico-deductive method but resembles ‘an upward
spiral’. Mary Daly uses the image of
spiraling to describe the growth of women’s knowledge and recommends that
feminists spin a new web of ideas like a spiral net. See Daly (1978). In this way radical
feminism has been able to create its own epistemological standards, and argues
that women have sources of special knowledge; for example, in Susan Griffin’s
concepts of nature. Radical feminism
sees the world as a structure of relations in process, a reality constantly in
evolution. See Hartsock (1975).
Feminist theory takes language to be
an index of patriarchal attitudes, and the sexual distribution of social roles
and status. See McConnell-Ginet
(1980). The relationship between
language and cultural categories was an issue in the sociology of knowledge
before contemporary feminism. For
example, Basil Bernstein relates variations in language to class, status and
education codes. However, language, its
uses and powers, has been of foremost concern to feminists. As early as 1946 the feminist historian Mary
Beard declared that the ambiguity of the generic masculine was a fundamental
social problem. Dale Spender thinks that
the power of language is basic to patriarchy and Shirley Ardener argues that
‘women’s speech’ exists because men have labelled it ‘women’s’. The debates about language characterize
contemporary debates in social and political theory: Sheila Rowbotham, for
example, argues that language is so much a part of political and ideological
power that its meanings need to be changed and cannot simply
be annexed. See Rowbotham
(1973b).
Feminist theory first analyses the
several forms taken by sexism in language.
These include the male generic, terms of address, and idioms. It aims to reinvent language. Barbara Du Bois suggests that poetic prose
can be one of the ways in which writers withdraw consent from a patriarchal
construction of reality (Du Bois 1983).
The problem is both one of concept formation within an existing
male-constructed framework of thought and one of creating a language
which can articulate an authentic understanding of the world. Radical feminism, understanding that language
is a weapon which diminishes the range of women’s
thought, argues that the liberation of women is rooted in the liberation of
language. Mary Daly in particular
creates a feminist vocabulary (Daly 1978).
Toril Moi claims that this
Anglo-American criticism depoliticises theoretical paradigms. See Moi (1985). The issue of re-creation involves some
feminists in rejecting the language of theory altogether and others in
investigating women’s body language. See
Abstract masculinity, according to Nancy
Hartsock, is a mode of conceptualization that emphasizes mutually exclusive
dualities. She suggests that this
accounts for hierarchical dualisms in social institutions
which underpin gender domination.
See Hartsock (1981). Masculinity
is not constructed on the basis of man’s real identity and difference but on an ideal difference constituted most
essentially in the cultural differentiation of Man from his Other. Nancy Chodorow describes these aspects of
masculinity in Western culture. She offers
a plausible psychoanalytic explanation for the male characterization of woman
as ‘Other’. This occurs, Chodorow
argues, because men learn to define themselves as not woman, not the mother, so
that masculinity is inevitably negative identity. Chodorow claims that there could be a
conscious break in the construction of masculinity (and femininity) if patterns
of mothering changed. See Chodorow
(1978).
Marxist feminists argue that the
ideology of masculinity has played a crucial role in the division of labor as
it has developed
historically, and that definitions of masculinity (and
femininity) that pervade our culture are pre-eminently constructed within the
ideology of the family. Barbara
Ehrenreich and Deirdre English talk of a transition from patriarchy to what
they call ‘masculinism’. They characterize
patriarchy as a pre-capitalist social order organized around household
production and ‘masculinism’ as the industrial capitalist system itself. Feminist theorists believe that these
concepts can highlight the complex importance of gender in differentiating
public and private spheres of activity.
See Interrante and Lasser (1979).
A particular focus of feminist
analysis is on the educational processes by which masculinity is defined and constructed.
See Deem (1978). For example,
feminist critiques of science point to the fallacious congruence between
rationality, knowledge and masculinity.
Evelyn Fox Keller suggests that masculine connotes autonomy, separation,
distance and particularly objectivity.
Hence, she argues, masculinity in science is located in the very
concepts of science and also in the way science separates subjects from
objects. See Keller.
In addition, feminists have often
described utopias as matriarchies.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, incorporated powerful visions of
matriarchy into her fiction and essays.
Given the particular forms of
repression in Western culture which women experience,
feminist psychoanalysis has a special interest in investigating how memory
structures concepts of the self. It
argues that memory preferences are gendered.
For example, Mary Jacobus claims that women’s memory is a revision or
representation of an ultimately irretrievable past – our memories of our
mothers (Jacobus 1987).
Feminist historians read the
memories recorded in women’s diaries in order to reclaim the personal and
communal histories of women. See
Smith-Rosenberg, 1985. Because much of
Black history comes through an oral tradition, memory plays a pivotal role in
Black culture enabling Black women to be both subjects and sources in their own worlds.
The memories of rural Black women are changing scholarship. See Darling (1987).
Many women artists are constructing
an aesthetic of memory. The writer
Maxine Hong Kingston describes ‘reverse memory’ which is a
memory of the future not the past and the artist Mary Kelly made her Post Partum Document an archaeology of
memories of family life.
A feminist politics of memory would
prevent women denying aspects of female experience and would be, what Adrienne
Rich calls, a feminist Re-vision.
The theory which
explains the discordance between what men expect women’s behavior to be and
what women actually do is called the theory of muted groups. According to Shirley and Edwin Ardener every society has a dominant ideology which
describes all social behavior. That
dominant ideology shapes thinking about social norms and expectations, supplies
the vocabulary used by, and reflects the image of reality held by, the dominant
group. Suppressed subgroups who have different views may lack the language to express
their views or conceptualize their differences.
According to the theory of muted groups the
dominant male perception may provide a model of the world whose existence and
pervasiveness impede the creation of alternative models. See Ardener (1981).
Women who are trained in academic
disciplines whose theoretical models correspond to a male perception of reality
may also find it difficult to discover a conceptual framework and vocabulary which expresses our own perception of
reality. See Smith (1974).
Sexual objectification is the primary form of
the subjection of women, Catherine MacKinnin argues. It is the male epistemological stance. There is no distinction, for women, between
objectification and alienation. See
MacKinnon (1982).
The objectification of women in art
and literature goes along with our objectification in pornography, claim
feminist critics, since pornography is merely a simplified version of general
objectification. Within culture, women
are a generic object whose subject is the male gender. Culture is itself predicted upon the
aestheticisation and objectification of women.
See Kappeler (1986).
Women have a double objectification
in pornography where we are the objects of men’s action in scenarios and the
object of representation with no correspondence to, or reference to, any real
objects. MacKinnon argues that this
process is hard to refute empirically because it acts as a barrier to
consciousness. When women experience objectification
we can evolve feminist methods which in turn can overthrow the distinction
between subjectivity and objectivity.
MacKinnon thinks that sexual objectification has its own periods, forms
and technology but that it might, potentially, have its own revolutions.
The apparently
value-free or neutral detachment of a researcher from a subject. It is normally polarized
to subjectivity. It is a contentious
concept of feminist research. Many
feminists argue that objectivity is the method of traditional disciplines
because they all deny the personal experience and emotions of women. The quest for objectivity and the tendency
towards isolation are now part of a masculine professionalisation because the
rhetoric of objectivity has influenced concepts of professionalisation and
academic style. See Furner (1975). Others argue that since no research can be
objective, feminists can use the appearance
of objectivity as a powerful tool for changing public opinion. For example, a good research method can be
objective while the researcher can still subjectively identify with her
topic. See Jayaratne (1983).
The most
thoroughgoing critique of objectivity has been made by feminist critics of
science. They argue the need for
objectivity, which is the need to dominate, has shaped the form of scientific
research and is part of scientific culture.
The association of science with objectivity, Evelyn Fox Keller argues, is based on its association with maleness. She defines the separation of subject and
object and the objectification of nature as a masculine mode because part of
the ways boys acquire their gender identity is by objectifying their
mothers. Keller attacks the arguments which assert an eternal opposition between (male)
objectivity and (female) subjectivity as being nihilistic. She claims that if the mythological
connection between (male) gender and science is dissolved,
this will benefit both the practice of science and social attitudes toward
maleness and femaleness. See Keller (1982). Chodrow, Dinnerstein and Keller echo males writers of the 1960’s like Marcuse who similarly
questioned the apotheosis of scientific objectivity, but what their feminist
perspectives contribute is the realization that objectivity is linked to patriarchy
not just to capitalism.
A description of
the nature of existence. A
feminist ontology has at its core a conception of a self-other relation that is significantly different
from the self-other opposition in traditional Western thought. A feminist ontology is a society organized
around the practice of mutual realization whose paradigms come from
mother-child relations and the practice of mothering and family living.
Radical feminism – for example, in
the writing of Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick and Carol Gilligan – claims that
ontology and epistemology imply each other.
A radical feminist ontology is one where everything is
connected to everything else. See
Whitbeck (1983). Nancy Hartsock claims
that women’s relationally defined existence, experience of boundary challenges
and activity of transforming both physical objects and human beings would
result in a world-view in which dichotomies would be foreign. See Hartsock (1981).
It is the standpoint of women which generates an ontology of relations and of
continual process.
Women’s oppression is the experience
of sexism as a system of domination.
Christine Delphy makes the point that the use of the term oppression is
crucial to feminist theory because it places feminist struggle in a radical
political framework. See Delphy (1980).
Contemporary feminists are united in opposition to women’s oppression, but differ
not only in their views of how to combat that oppression, but also in their
ideas of what constitutes women’s oppression in contemporary society. Liberal feminists believe that women are oppressed because we suffer discrimination; Marxists
believe that women are oppressed in production, while socialist feminists
characterize women’s oppression in the home as similar to the oppressive
experience of wage labor. Distinctions
between the so-called public and private spheres obscure the fact that the
subordination of women is part of the foundation of society. The apparent universality of women’s
oppression has encouraged radical feminism to conclude that this is the primary or fundamental form of
domination. As Ti-Grace Atkinson pointed
out, the oppression of women has not changed significantly over time or
place. Susan Griffin, Andrea Dworkin,
Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan and Shulamith Firestone all agree that women’s
oppression is primarily due to a universal male control of women’s bodies and
sexuality. Firestone’s
distinctive, biologically based theory, influenced by Marxism, attempts to
provide an account of women’s oppression that is both historical and
materialist. Firestone argues that biological imperatives are overlaid by social institutions. For example, sexual and child rearing
practices reinforce male dominance (Firestone, 1970).
Radical feminism argues that since
only patriarchy defines women by their sexuality, women’s oppression must be
located in the institutional practices of sexuality. For example, motherhood and rape reinforce
the innate and unchanging oppression of women by men. See Koedt (1973). In other words, where idealist definitions of
women’s oppression involved the idea that patriarchy was an ideology negotiated
through interactions, feminists now think women’s oppression is
derived from phallocentrism. See
Stanley and Wise (1983).
Adrienne Rich argues that when women
both take oppression as an object of understanding (that is, reflect on its
history), and feel oppression in a deeply personal way, we can assert ourselves
against it. See Rich (1976).
Other, The
A crucial concept developed by Simone de
Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1953) to
explain how, in patriarchal culture, woman is set up as the negative, the
inessential, the abnormal to the male. Women are Other
because they are defined by men as inferior.
De Beauvoir adopted a notion from Sartre about the basic conflictual
nature of human relations, arguing that woman as Other
was a metaphysical idea, a myth on which men had built society. The concept is pervasive, de Beauvoir
reveals, because woman accepts her Otherness, her inferiority. In her later writings
de Beauvoir expressed second thoughts about her formulation of this theme but
not about her articulation of feminism in terms of existentialism.
In French theory
the concept has two meanings: ‘Other’ as in relation to a speaking subject and
‘Otherness’ as outside the conceptual
system. Lacan, for example, describes
the unconscious of the subject as the discourse of the Other. By being a conscious ‘Other’, woman affirms
man in his manhood. See Lacan
(1966). The feminist critics, Helene
Cixous and Luce Irigaray, argue that Otherness, if defined as the feminine,
opens up new possibilities for women because by celebrating difference women achieve immanence.
A system of male authority
which oppresses women through its social, political and economic
institutions. In any of the historical
forms that patriarchal society takes, whether it is feudal, capitalist or
socialist, a sex-gender system and a system of economic discrimination operate
simultaneously. Patriarchy has power
from men’s greater access to, and mediation of, the resources and rewards of
authority structures inside and outside the home.
The concept ‘patriarchy’ is crucial
to contemporary feminism because feminism needed a term by which the totality
of oppressive and exploitative relations which affect women
could be expressed. Over and above this
particular characterization, each feminist theory finds that a different
feature of patriarchy defines women’s subordination. The two ends of the feminist
continuum might be represented on the one hand by Gayle Rubin who argues that
if we use the term sex-gender system patriarchy would be only one form, a male
dominant one, of a sex-gender system.
See Rubin (1975). The other
approach is that of Kate Millett or Shulamith Firestone. Millett argues that patriarchy is
analytically independent of capitalist or other modes of production and
Firestone defines patriarchy in terms of male control of women’s reproduction.
Socialist or Marxist feminists
prefer to locate patriarchy in a materialist context. They argue that the
capitalist mode of production is structured by a patriarchal sexual division of
labor. Capitalist class relations
and the sexual division of labor are mutually self-enforcing. For example, Heidi Hartmann defines
patriarchy as a set of social relations with a material base operating on a
system of male hierarchical relations and male solidarity. She denies that patriarchy is universal and
unchanging and claims that its intensity changes over time. See Hartmann (1976). Zillah Eisenstein suggests that an erosion in patriarchy begins to occur with structural
changes in the market place and changes in wage structures. Such conflicts between capitalism and
patriarchy, she claims, will undermine liberalism and the Welfare State. See Eisenstein (1982). Still within this materialist perspective,
Ann Ferguson argues, more positively, that the weakening of the patriarchal
family during capitalism created the material conditions for the growth of
lesbianism. See Ferguson et al. (1982).
Radical feminism, on the other hand,
equates patriarchy with male domination.
It is a system of social relations in which the class ‘men’ have power
over the class ‘women’ because women are sexually devalued. Radical feminism is
sometimes attacked as being ahistorical because it argues that
patriarchy cannot be periodised like the Marxist modes of production. For example, Mary Daly argues that patriarchy
is itself the prevailing religion of the entire planet. Radical feminism relies on feminist
psychoanalysis to provide explanations for this construction of patriarchy. The psychoanalyst Dorothy Dinnerstein claims
that patriarchy, or women’s exclusion from history, stems from the gender
formation of males and females and the double standard that this entails.
A term in feminist theory used to
describe the way society regards the phallus or penis as a symbol of power, and
believes that attributes of masculinity are the norm for cultural
definitions. The phallocentric fallacy
in disciplines is the assumption that ‘person’ stands for male and therefore
that women’s experience has made no contribution to disciplinary methods or
content. This perspective (sometimes
known as androcentric) makes women unknowable.
See Du Bois (1983). Feminists
argue that phallocentrism is a source of women’s oppression in education. See Stanley and Wise (1983). Feminist literary critics also draw attention
to how phallocentrism in literature establishes the idea that artistic
creativity is a masculine quality. See
Gilbert and Gubar (1979).
A concept devised by Jacques Derrida
to describe the meeting of phallocentrism with logocentrism. Phallogocentrism is how patriarchy models its
thought and language. Because
phallogocentrism is the name of the everyday discursive world, French feminists
are determined to replace this ideology with an alternative women’s language,
or ecriture feminine. The writings of Helene Cixous and Luce
Irigaray, in particular, contain new forms of expression using attributes of
female sexuality (of jouissance and
multiple pleasure) to replace phallocentric (male) pleasure which is singular
(the phallus). See Cixous (1981) and
Irigaray (1977b).
The term dates from the late 1950s
although the break up of colonial empires began immediately after the Second
World War. The prefix ‘post’ suggests
that ‘postcolonialism’ describes cultures after
independence but a postcolonial can be both a migrant ‘ethnic minority’ as well
as a national citizen, and postcolonial often describes any culture shaped by
imperialism. For these reasons postcolonial theory focuses on several issues:
identity in relation to nationalisms and imperialism; the role of the state;
and conflicts between traditional and contemporary cultures. Beginning with Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and continuing
in Edward Said’s Orientalism, through
to the feminist theories of Gayatri Spivak, Rey Chow and others, the central
attack is on Western ethnocentrism.
Other key features of postcolonial theory are:
a hybrid mixture of histories, languages and issues, both indigenous and
Western; a questioning of European discourse – its universalism and its genres;
and a struggle between place and displacement and language.
There are strong connections between
postcolonial and feminist theory in the way that both wish to give a voice to
historically marginalised people; see, for example,
the work of Alice Walker (
Gayatri Spivak is a leading
postcolonial critic who wishes to give the subaltern a voice in history rather than to speak for
Representation Feminism, alongside semiology and Marxism,
has made a complex appraisal of representation, or the construction of
images. The term ‘representation’ or
‘signification’ includes processes by
which meanings are produced. Feminists argue that representation
continually creates, endorses, or alters ideas of gender identity. Feminist analysis of advertisements, film,
photography, art and craft has produced many strategies for feminist
practice. For example, feminist critics
of pornography use the concept of representation to move from content analysis
to understanding the functions of pornography in society and how it is represented in terms of class, race and gender. See Kappeler (1986).
In art, feminism has had to
negotiate a new meaning of representation.
This is because the ideology of art includes ideas of self-expression which are masculine. See Parker and Pollock (1981). Some feminists look at ideological
representations of femininity in terms of the articulation of capitalist
production and consumption. See Women’s Studies
Group (1978). Other feminists focus on
the construction of subjectivity and look at the role of language using
insights gained from semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis. See Coward (1982). Laura Mulvey argues that representation is constructed on the absence of lack of female subjectivity because woman is the silent object of a
male gaze. See Mulvey (1975).
Feminist film criticism has
developed crucial accounts which describe how women
are constructed in media representations.
Ann Kaplan describes how cinema mechanisms dominate women through the
controlling power of the gaze, by the fetishisation of women and often through
the destruction of women in plot and narrative.
See Kaplan (1983). Feminist
filmmakers work to demystify representation.
For example, feminist films foreground the cinematic apparatus as a
signifying practice, refuse to construct a fixed
spectator, and mix documentary and fiction.
In order to suggest how the feminine might be
represented outside of patriarchal discourse, lesbian filmmakers work to
demystify representation. For example,
feminist films foreground the cinematic apparatus as a signifying practice, refuse to construct a fixed spectator, and mix
documentary and fiction. In order to
suggest how the feminine might be represented outside
of patriarchal discourse, lesbian filmmakers, such as Jan Oxenberg and Maya
Derek, create female images that depart radically from the representations of
dominant cinema. Currently, feminism
argues that there is no separation between ‘real’ relationships and representations
since representations are part of real experience in the way social discourses
are constructed. For example, Griselda
Pollock claims that we cannot make a separation between reality and signifying
practices, for in order to make any intervention in theory or practice we
require a soundly based historical analysis of ideology and codes of
representation in their historical specificity.
See Pollock (1987).
Black feminism argues that we need a
theory that takes into account the economic history of Black women’s (mis)representation
and ensuing stereotypes; for example, the ‘mammie’ figure of Hollywood cinema.
Attempts to represent Black women as cinematic subjects (for example, in The Color Purple) distort Black ideology
by re-asserting patriarchal power. See
Miller (1987).
In order to develop a feminist
cultural practice and theory that works towards productive social change it is
necessary to understand that representation is a political issue and to analyze
women’s subordination within patriarchal forms of representation.
In conventional sociology 'sex role' is a social role allocated to men and to women on the basis of biological sex. Feminist theory argues that gender-associated behavior is linked arbitrarily by society to each biological se. An attack on such sex-role stereotyping was the first agenda of contemporary feminism. Proving Simone de Beauvoir's thought that one is not born, but becomes a woman' feminists found sex roles to be a learned quality, an assigned status and part of an ideology which attributes women's roles to nature. For example, Kate Millett argues that se-role stereotyping ensures the social control of women, because from childhood women are trained to accept a system which divides society into male and female spheres and gives public power to males. Millett used the language and concepts of social psychology, in particular Robert Stoller's ideas of core gender identity, to argue that women are given expressive traits and men instrumental traits. Sex roles are a form of oppression because they keep women from social activity. See Millett (1970).
Alice Rossi, Jessie Bernard and Betty Friedan use social psychological analysis and argue that the contemporary oppression of women is the result of the inculcation of socially defined sex roles. Feminism thus revolutionized traditional sociology by showing how gender-associated behavior was created by social propaganda. For example, Elizabeth Janeway claims that women are really defined by domestic roles only in popular media. See Janeway (1971).
Much contemporary feminist research proves that observed psychological differences between the sexes are not innate but the result of sex-role conditioning, and uses many theoretical approaches from behaviorism to object relations theory. Phyllis Chesler in Women and Madness (1972) argues that expectations for abnormal or nonfunctioning human beings, and therefore the stereotype of femininity is a prescription for failure and madness. Other psychoanalysts found role theory to be inadequate because it relies on intentionality whereas sex roles are part of a family creation of appropriate personality structures. See Chodorow (1978). Sandra Bem and others claim that se-role stereotyping could be eliminated by the introduction of androgyny. Amon some radical feminists a commitment to abolishing sex roles is taken to imply a commitment to androgyny.
Radical feminism claims that the only solution to the issue would be to refuse the ascription of any characteristic, behavior or role to women. See Kreps (1973). Sex-role terminology was gradually abandoned by feminist theory with its general shift away from psychologically accounts.
In conventional sociology ‘sex role’
is a social role allocated to men and to women on a basis of biological
sex. Feminist theory argues that gender
associated behavior is linked arbitrarily
by society to each biological sex. An
attack on such a sex-role stereotyping was the first agenda of contemporary
feminism. Proving Simone de Beauvoir’s
first though that ‘one is not born, but becomes a woman’ feminists found sex
roles to be a learned quality, an assigned status and part of an ideology which
attributes women’s roles to nature. For
example, Kate Millet argues that sex-role stereotyping ensures the social
control of women, because from childhood women are trained to accept a system which divides society into male and female spheres
and gives public power to males. Millet
used the language and concepts of social psychology, in particular Robert
Stollers ideas of core gender identity, to argue that women are
given expressive traits and men instrumental traits. Sex roles are a form of oppression because
they keep women from social activity.
See Millet (1970).
Alice Rossi, Jessie Bernard and
Betty Friedan use social psychological analysis and argue that the contemporary
oppression of women is the result of the inclination of socially defined sex
roles. Feminism thus revolutionized
traditional sociology by showing how gender-associated behavior was created by social propaganda. For example, Elizabeth Janeway claims that
women are really defined by domestic roles only in
popular media. See Janeway (1971).
Much contemporary feminist research
proves that observed psychological differences
between the sexes are not innate but the result of sex-role conditioning, and
uses many theoretical approaches from behaviorism to object relations
theory. Phyllis Chesler, in Women and Madness (1972) argues that
expectations of feminine roles are expectations for abnormal or nonfunctioning
human beings, and therefore the stereotype of femininity is a prescription for
failure and madness. Other
psychoanalysts found role theory to be inadequate because it relies on
intentionality whereas sex roles are part of a family creation of appropriate
personality structures. See Chodrow
(1978). Sandra Bem and others claim that
sex-role stereotyping could be eliminated by the
introduction of androgyny. Among some
radical feminists a commitment to abolishing sex roles
is taken to imply a commitment to androgyny.
Radical feminism claims that the
only solution to the issue would be to refuse the ascription of any
characteristic, behavior or role to women.
See Kreps (1973). Sex-role terminology
was gradually abandoned by feminist theory with its
general shift away from psychologically based accounts. However, it remains true that more
Feminists agree that the subordination of
women is a central feature of all structures of interpersonal domination, but
feminists choose different locations and causes of subordination.
In approximate chronological order, contemporary feminist theory begins
with Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that because men view women as fundamentally
different from themselves then women are reduced to
the status of the second sex and hence subordinate. See Beauvoir (1953). Kate Millet’s theory of subordination argues
that women are a dependent sex class under patriarchal domination. See Millet (1970). Shulamith Firestone located women’s
subordination in the limitations of reproductions and childbirth. See Firestone (1970). Other radical feminists (for example, Susan
Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Koedt and Susan Griffen), in general, take
the view that a male control of sexuality and a male domination of nature
(specifically in rape and pornography) lead to woman’s subordination. The sociologist Elizabeth Janeway argues that
‘social mythology,’ or cultural subordination, has a sexual core as its specific
ideology. Feminist anthropologists argue
that the separation of public and domestic worlds and women’s relegation to the
domestic (or to nature) ensures subordination.
See Rosaldo and Lamphere (1974) and Ortner (1974).
Feminist psychoanalysis argues that women’s subordination comes from
the construction of sex-role stereotyping based on the practice of women'’
mothering. See Chodrow (1978) and
Dinnerstein (1976).
Since each individual feminist critic locates women’s subordination in
a different social, cultural or psychic zone each account would be too lengthy
to cite, but see Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy and Radical
Feminism.
The project of
feminist theory is to end women’s subordination. Jean Maker Miller offers the most intriguing
possibility of how this might be done by arguing that women’s subordination has
enabled us to develop specific skills- of cooperation and vulnerability- which could be a psychic starting point for the creation
of a new society. See Millet (1976).
The
term subject is unpopular in feminist theory because, in a grammatical sense,
it has a dominant/domineering connotation.
For example, positivism defines the ‘subject’ as a researcher standing
back from the ‘objects’ of study, or people.
The conventional view of the subject is one on whom research operations
are performed rendering her passive; in essence, an
object.
Renate Duelli Klein argues that we
should look for a more egalitarian term and that we could borrow the term
‘member’ from ethnomethodology. See
Duelli Klein (1983). Feminist social
scientists propose instead the term ‘participatory models’
which engage ‘subjects’ in the making of the research project. See Reinharz (1983). The reconceptualisation of the subject role
has become a major aim of feminist researchers.
In French feminist theory symbolic
means the language system of patriarchy.
Using techniques drawn from linguistics and psychoanalysis writers, such
as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray argue that the symbolic represents not only
a form of language but a way of thinking and ordering the world to the benefit
of men. Opposed to the symbolic is the
feminine semiotic or the representation of mother/child relations. Julia Kristeva argues that le symbolique is a domain of position
and judgement. Generally speaking, the
symbolic comes into being later than the semiotic – at the time of the ‘mirror’
stage; and it involves the establishment of a sign system. Synchronically speaking, the symbolic is
always present, even in the semiotic which cannot
exist without constantly challenging the symbolic. See Kristeva (1980).
Broadly, the
content of the Dictionary. More
particularly, feminist theory aims to create a deeper understanding of women’s
situation. Feminist theory begins with
women’s experience of oppression and argues that women’s subordination extends
from private circumstances to political conditions.
All feminist writers since the
Second World War, from Simone de Beauvoir onwards, are theorists as well as
writing in various disciplines. Certain
themes dominate their work: the use of ‘patriarchy’ as an organizing concept to
theorize the subordination of women; the concept that public/private divisions
structure women’s lives; the importance of utopian ideas; and theories of
subjectivity and the ideological.
However, feminist praxis, which is
both theory and action, has different priorities in feminist politics. For example, radical feminism is concerned to
redescribe reality as it appears only to women, and socialist feminists are
typically concerned to give a systematic explanation of that reality
generally. See Kittay and Meyers
(1987). Feminist art historians argue
that theories of cultural production can create feminist meanings from the interaction
of cultural phenomena and women’s work.
See Barry and Flitterman (1987).
Nonaligned feminists are often
suspicious of theory because they define theory as a dimension of male
repression and part of the violence inherent in rationality. For example, some feminist writers argue that
the language of theory can be an
instrument of domination. See Rowbotham
(1973b). However, Jean Elshtain and
others argue that it does not follow that all
language, including the language of theory, must spring from, or serve only,
the dominators. See Elshtain (1982a).
Feminists agree that feminist theory
must be distinguished from other theory (for example,
Marxism) because feminism focuses on sexuality or gender rather than on
material conditions as the base for ideological construction. See MacKinnon (1982). In addition feminist
theory and methodology relate closely to each other, which prevents feminist
theory from becoming static. See Duelli
Klein (1983). Feminist theory is
simultaneously political and scientific because feminist theorists use a
complex network of conceptual, normative, empirical and methodological
approaches. See O’Brien (1982). In sum, feminist theory unites immediate and
long-range goals in a dynamic unity of thought and the experiential.
The term dates from August 1952 when
Alfred Savvy, a French demographer, wrote ‘this
The view that all women, whatever
their race, religion, class or sexual preference, have something fundamentally
in common. Universalism relies on biological or
psychological universals. Michelle Rosaldo argues that women are
universally associated with the domestic, and men with
the public domain and that this underlies the universal subordination of
women. See Rosaldo and Lamphere
(1974). Nancy Chodorow argues that there
is a universally different socialization of male and female children. See Chodorow (1978).
Universalism is
sometimes called metaphysical feminism; and radical feminists (for
example, Adrienne Rich) suggest that a lesbian continuum is available
universally to all women. Barbara
Ehrenreich suggests that universalism neglects the fact that differences in the
position of women in different societies are quite significant from a feminist
perspective. See Ehrenreich (1976).
Universalism has come most under
attack from Black and lesbian feminists who are reinstating concepts of
difference. Audre Lorde sums this up by
arguing that universalism will align feminist theory with a form of
neocolonialism. See Lorde (1984b).
According to John Berger in Ways
of Seeing (1972), women are accustomed to being
the object of male regard; however, they do not return the gaze in order to
transform men into objects of desire. Instead, they
internalize the male point of view to become self-surveyors: in Berger's words,
'Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.' Drawing on
psychoanalytic theory, film critics such as Laura Mulvey have analyzed the way
in which films position male and female spectators differently. In Visual
Pleasure in Narrative Cinema' (1975), she argues that women are controlled in
films by having to act for men as sexual spectacles and through the assumed
gaze of a male hero and male director. in other words,
the gaze reproduced in films is voyeuristic in that it makes female subjects
the objects of male desire. Female spectators, interpellated as the recipients
of the male gaze, are similarly erased.
SECTION II: KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS IN POST-COLONIAL
THEORY
· The following is an alphabetical
list of terms included in Section II:2
· Terms repeated in both sections
but defined differently are in
BOLD.
· Agency
· Alterity
· Feminism
and Post-colonialism
· Fanonism
· Hegemony
· Ideology
· Mestizo/Metisse (See also Addendum I)
· Post-colonialism/Postcolonialism
Agency refers to the ability to act
or perform an action. In contemporary
theory, it hinges on the question of whether individuals can freely and
autonomously initiate action, or whether the things they do are in some sense
determined by the ways in which their identity has been
constructed. Agency is
particularly important in post-colonial subjects theory because it refers to
the ability of post-colonial subjects to initiate action in engaging or
resisting imperial power. The term has
become an issue in recent times as a consequence of post-structuralist theories
of subjectivity. Since human subjectivity is
constructed by ideology (Althusser), language (Lacan) or discourse
(Foucault), the corollary is that any action performed by that subject must
also be to some extent a consequence of those things. For the colonial discourse theory or Bhabha and
Spivak, which concurs with much of the post-structuralist position on
subjectivity, the question of agency has been a troublesome one. However, many theories in which the
importance of political action is paramount take agency for granted. They suggest that although it may be
difficult for subjects to escape the effects of those forces that ‘construct’
them, it is not impossible. The very
fact that such forces may be recognized suggests that they may
also be countermanded.
Alterity is derived from the Latin alteritae, meaning ‘the state of being
other or different; diversity, otherness’.
Its English derivatives are alternate, alternative, alternation, and
alter ego. The term alterite is more common in French, and has the antonym identite (Johnson and Smith 1990:
xviii).
The term was
adopted by philosophers as an alternative to ‘otherness’ to register a
change in the Western perceptions of the relationship between consciousness and
the world. Since Descartes, individual
consciousness had been taken as the privileged
starting point for consciousness, and ‘the “other” appears in these
[post-Enlightenment] philosophies as a reduced “other,” as an epistemological
question’ (xix). That is, in a concept
of the human in which everything stems from the notion that ‘I think, therefore
I am’, the chief concern with the other is to be able to answer questions such
as ‘How can I know the other?’, ‘How can other minds be known?’ The term ‘alterity’ shifts the focus of
analysis away from these philosophic concerns with otherness – the ‘epistemic
other’, the other that is only important to the extent to which it can be known
– to the more concrete ‘moral other’ – the other who is actually located in a
political, cultural, linguistic or religious context (xix). This is a key feature of changes in the
concept of subjectivity, because,
whether seen in the context of ideology, psychoanalysis or discourse, the
‘construction’ of the subject itself can be seen to be
inseparable from the construction of its others.
Literary theorists commonly see the
most influential use of alterity in Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the way in
which an author moves away from identification with a character (Todorov
1984). The novelist must understand his
or her character from within, as it were, but must also perceive it as other,
as apart from its creator in its distinct alterity. Importantly, dialogue is only possible with
an ‘other’, so alterity, in Bakhtin’s formulation, is not simply ‘exclusion’,
but an apartness that stands as a precondition of dialogue, where dialogue
implies a transference across and between differences of culture, gender, class
and other social categories. This is
related to his concept of ‘exotopy’ or ‘outsideness’, which is not simply
alienness, but a precondition for the author’s ability to understand and
formulate a character, a precondition for dialogue itself.
In post-colonial theory, the term has often been used interchangeably with otherness and
difference. However, the distinction
that initially held between otherness and alterity – that between otherness as
a philosophic problem and otherness as a feature of a material and discursive
location – is peculiarly applicable to post-colonial discourse. The self-identity of the colonizing subject,
indeed the identity of imperial culture, is inextricable from the alterity of
colonized others, an alterity determined, according to Spivak, by a process of othering. The possibility for potential dialogue
between racial and cultural others has also remained an important aspect of the
use of the word, which distinguishes it from its synonyms.
A term first developed in
psychoanalysis to describe a continual fluctuation between wanting one thing
and wanting its opposite. It also refers
to a simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion from an object, person or
action (Young 1995: 161). Adapted into
colonial discourse theory by Homi Bhabha, it describes the complex mix of
attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between colonizer and colonized.
The relationship is ambivalent because the colonized subject is never
simply and completely opposed to the colonizer.
Rather than assuming that some colonized subjects are ‘complicit’ and
some ‘resistant’, ambivalence suggests that complicity and resistance exist in
a fluctuating relationship within the colonial subject. Ambivalence also characterized the way in
which colonial discourse relates to the colonized subject, for it may be both
exploitative and nurturing, or represent itself as
nurturing, at the same time.
Most importantly in Bhabha’s theory,
however, ambivalence disrupts the clear-cut authority of colonial domination
because it disrupts the simple relationship between colonizer
and colonized. Ambivalence is therefore
an unwelcome aspect of colonial discourse for the colonizer. The problem for colonial discourse is that it
wants to produce compliant subjects who reproduce its assumptions, habits and
values – that is, ‘mimic’ the colonizer.
But instead it produces ambivalent subjects
whose mimicry is never very far from
mockery. Ambivalence describes this
fluctuating relationship between mimicry and mockery, an ambivalence that is
fundamentally unsettling to colonial dominance.
In this respect, it is not necessarily disempowering for the colonial
subject; but rather can be seen to be ambi-valent or ‘two-powered’. The effect of this ambivalence (the
simultaneous attraction and repulsion) is to produce a profound disturbance of
the authority of colonial discourse.
Ambivalence therefore gives rise to
a controversial proposition in Bhabha’s theory, that because the colonial
relationship is always ambivalent, it generates the seeds of its own
destruction. This is controversial because
it implies that the colonial relationship is going to be
disrupted, regardless of any resistance or rebellion on the part of the
colonized. Bhabha’s argument is that
colonial discourse is compelled to be
ambivalent because it never really wants colonial subjects to be exact replicas
of the colonizers – this would be too threatening. For instance, he gives the example of Charles
Grant, who, in 1702, desired to inculcate the Christian religion in Indians
(Bhabha 1994: 87). Grant’s solution was
to mix Christian doctrines with divisive caste practices to produce a ‘partial
reform’ that would induce an empty imitation of English manners.
The
idea of an authentic culture is one that has been present in many recent
debates about post-colonial cultural production. In particular, the demand for a rejection of
the influence of the colonial period in programmes of decolonization has invoked the idea the certain forms and practices
are ‘inauthentic’, some decolonizing states arguing for a recuperation of
authentic pre-colonial traditions and customs.
The problem with such claims to cultural authenticity is that they often
become entangled in an essentialist cultural position in which fixed practices become
iconized as authentically indigenous
and others are excluded as hybridized or contaminated. This has as its corollary the danger of
ignoring the possibility that cultures may develop and change as their
conditions change.
Significantly, this was not as
common a feature of the work of the early anti-colonialist writers working with
a Marxist model of culture (see anti-colonialism). Later post-structuralist models have found
the issue much more difficult to resolve, reflecting, perhaps, the political
problem of discovering a firm ground for material practice in an analysis that
emphasizes the radical instability of signs and the fundamental and persistent
difficulty of ‘grounding’ systems in an objective, material, extra-discursive
‘space’. In some respects, cultural essentialism, which is theoretically
questionable, may be adopted as a strategic political
position in the struggle against imperial power. Clearly, certain kinds of practices are
peculiar to one culture and not to others, and these may serve as important
identifiers and become the means by which those cultures can resist oppression
and oppose homogenization by global forces.
However, the emergence of certain
fixed, stereotypical representations of culture remains a danger. The tendency to employ generic signifiers for
cultures that may have many variations within them may override the real
differences that exist within such cultures.
Markers of cultural difference may well be perceived
as authentic cultural signifiers, but that claim to authenticity can imply that
these cultures are not subject to change.
This has been one of the most
contentious ideas in post-colonial discourse, and yet it is at the heart of any
attempt at defining what occurred in the representation and relationship of
people as a result of the colonial period.
Colonialism could only exist at all by postulating that there existed a binary opposition into which the world was divided. The
gradual establishment of an empire depended upon a stable hierarchical
relationship in which the colonized existed as the other of the colonizing culture.
Thus the idea of the savage could occur only if
there was a concept of the civilized to oppose it. In this way a
geography of difference was constructed, in which differences were mapped (cartography) and laid out in a metaphorical
landscape that represented not geographical fixity, but the fixity of power.
Imperial
The idea is contentious because it has been supposed that attempts to define the centre/margin
model functions to perpetuate it. In fact,
post-colonial theorists have usually used the model to suggest that dismantling
such binaries does more that merely assert the independence of the marginal, it
also radically undermines the very idea of such a centre, deconstructing the
claims of the European colonizers to a unity and a fixity
of a different order from that of others.
In this sense the dismantling of centre/margin (periphery) models of
culture calls into question the claims of any culture to possess a fixed, pure
and homogenous body of values, and exposes them all as historically
constructed, and thus corrigible formations.
This is a much used word in
contemporary theory and in post-colonial criticism is mostly
employed in such terms as colonial
discourse, which is specifically derived from Foucault’s use of the
concept. Discourse was originally used
from about the sixteenth century to describe any kind of speaking, talk or
conversation, but became increasingly used to describe a more formal speech, a
narration or a treatment of any subject at length, a treatise, dissertation or
sermon. More recently, discourse has been used in a technical sense by linguists to
describe any unit of speech longer than a sentence.
However, the Foucauldian sense of
the term has little to do with the act of speaking in its traditional
sense. For Foucault, a discourse is a
strongly bounded area of knowledge, a system of statements within which the
world can be known. The key feature of
this is that the world is not simply ‘there’ to be talked about,
rather, it is through discourse itself that the world is brought into
being. It is also in such a discourse
that speakers and hearers, writers and readers come to an understanding about
themselves, their relationship to each other and their place in the world (the
construction of subjectivity). It is the ‘complex of signs and practices
which organises social existence and social reproduction’.
There are certain unspoken rules
controlling which statements can be made which cannot
within the discourse, and these rules determine the nature of that
discourse. Since a virtually limitless
number of statements can be made within the rules of the system, it is these
rules that characterize the discourse and that interest analysts such as
Foucault. What are the rules that allow
certain statements to be made and not others? Which rules order these statements? Which rules allow the development of a
classificatory system? Which rules allow
us to identify certain individuals as authors?
These rules concern such things as the classification, the ordering and
the distribution of that knowledge of the world that the discourse both enables
and delimits.
A good example of a discourse is
medicine. In mundane terms
we simply think of medicine as healing sick bodies. But medicine represents a system of
statements that can be made about bodies, about
sickness and about the world. The rules
of this system determine how we view the process of healing, the identity of the sick and, in fact, encompass the ordering of
our physical relationship with the world.
There are certain principles of exclusion and inclusion that operate
within this system; some things can be said and some
things cannot. Indeed
we cannot talk about medicine without making a distinction between different
kinds, such as ‘Western’ and ‘Chinese’ medicine. For these are two discourses in which the
body and its relationship to the world are not only different but virtually
incompatible. This explains the very
great resistance in Western medicine to forms of healing that
do not accord with its positivistic idea of the body. Until such practices as acupuncture or herbal
remedies could be incorporated into the positivistic
framework of Western medicine, by being incorporated into other ‘scientific’ statements,
they were rejected as charlatanism or superstition (they did not concur with
‘truth’). It is only very gradually that
such rules of exclusion, which keep a discourse intact, can be modified,
because the discourse maintains not just an understanding of the world, but in a real sense the world itself. Such incursions, when not controlled, may
represent a very great threat to the authority of the discourse.
Discourse is important, therefore,
because it joins power and knowledge together.
Those who have power have control of what is known
and the way it is known, and those
who have such knowledge have power over those who do not. This link between knowledge and power is
particularly important in the relationships between colonizers and colonized,
and has been extensively elaborated by Edward Said in
his discussion of Orientalism, in
which he points out that this discourse, this way of knowing the ‘Orient’, is a
way of maintaining power over it. Said’s
work lays more stress on the importance of writing and literary texts in the
process of constructing representations of the other than does Foucault’s,
whose concern is more widely distributed across a variety of social
institutions. Said’s insistence on the central
role of literature in promoting colonialist discourse is elaborated in his
later work (Said 1993), where he argues that the nineteenth-century novel comes
into being as part of the formation of Empire, and acts reflexively with the
forces of imperial control to establish imperialism as the dominant ideology in
the period. This emphasis has made
Said’s work of especial interest to those concerned with post-colonial
literatures and literary theory.
Foucault’s view of the role of
discourse though is even wider, and more pervasive, since he argues that
discourse is the crucial feature of modernity itself. For the discourse of modernity occurs when
what is said, the ‘enunciated’, becomes more important than the saying, the
‘enunciation’. In classical times,
intellectual power could be maintained by rhetoric, by
the persuasiveness of the speaker ‘discoursing’ to a body of listeners. But gradually the ‘will to truth’ came to
dominate discourse and statements were required to be either true or false. When this occurred, it was no longer the act
of discourse but the subject of discourse that became important. The crucial fact for post-colonial theory is
that the ‘will to truth’ is linked to the ‘will to
power’ in the same way that power and knowledge are linked. The will of European nations to exercise
dominant control over the world, which led to the growth of empires, was accompanied by the capacity to confirm European notions
of utility, rationality, discipline, as truth.
We can extend our example,
therefore, to talk about ‘Eurocentric discourse’, or the ‘discourse of
modernity’, that is, a system of statements that can be made about the world
that involve certain assumptions, prejudices, blindnesses and insights, all of
which have a historical provenance, but exclude other, possibly equally valid,
statements. All these statements and all
that can be included within the discourse thus become
protected by the assertion of ‘truth’.
Essentialism/Strategic Essentialism
Essentialism is the assumption that
groups, categories or classes of objects have one or several defining features
exclusive to all members of that category.
Some studies of race or gender, for instance, assume the presence of
essential characteristics distinguishing one race from another or the feminine
from the masculine. In analyses of culture it is an (generally implicit) assumption that
individuals share an essential cultural identity, and it has been a topic of
vigorous debate within post-colonial theory.
The Cartesian claim Cogito ergo
sum (I think therefore I am) was the basis for the stress on the individual
consciousness and the centrality of the idea of the human subject in the
dominant intellectual discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. The displacement of this
Enlightenment concern for the individual by post-structuralist views of subjectivity put considerable pressure
on contemporary cultural theory to revise this dominant way of conceiving of
human behavior.
Colonial discourse theory stressed
this also when it drew attention to the ways of speaking and thinking that colonialism employed to create the idea
of the inferiority of the colonial subject and to exercise hegemonic control over them through control of the dominant modes
of public and private representation.
Drawing on the critiques of language by post-structuralist theorists
such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, colonial
discourse theory contended that essentialist cultural categories were
flawed. This criticism was extended by various writers to the institutions through
which individual subjectivity achieved a sense of identity, for example ideas
of race or nation. The political
purpose of this critique was, in part, to expose the falsity of this mode of
representing the colonial subject as an other to the Self of the dominant colonial culture.
Ironically, then, the very process
of displacing the essentialist modes of identity ran counter to the pragmatic
use of such concepts in various local agendas designed to recover a sense of
self-worth and difference. The basis of
the National Liberation Movements of
the 1960s and 1970s was a recognition of the need to
recover or develop a local identity and a sense of distinction damaged by
imperial and colonizing discourses. At
the same time, theorists warned of the dangers of simply reversing the
categories of oppressed and oppressor without critiquing
the process by which such simple binaries had come into being in the first
place. They also warned of the dangers
of creating a new indigenous elite who would act
merely as neo-colonial puppets for
the old forces of the colonizing powers.
Theorists such as Gayatri Spivak
drew attention to the dangers of assuming that it was a simple matter of
allowing the subaltern (oppressed) forces to speak, without recognizing that
their essential subjectivity had been and still was constrained by the
discourses within which they were constructed as subaltern. Her controversial question ‘Can the Subaltern
Speak?’ (Spivak 1985b), was frequently misinterpreted to mean that there was no
way in which subaltern people could even attain a voice (see agency). Such negative misreadings of Spivak’s
position inevitably produced counter-claims from critics such as Benita Parry
who asserted the political necessity of maintaining the idea of oppositionality
between the binary divisions such as black-white, colonizer-colonized,
oppressed-oppressor (Parry 1987). In
fact, Spivak’s essay is not an assertion of the inability of the subaltern
voice to be accessed or given agency, but only a
warning to avoid the idea that the subaltern can ever be isolated in some
absolute, essentialist way from the play of discourses and institutional
practices that give it its voice.
In response to this negative
interpretation of her earlier work, perhaps, and in an attempt to reassert the
political force resident in her theory, Spivak spoke of the need to embrace a
strategic essentialism, in an interview in which she acknowledged the
usefulness of essentialist formulations in many struggles for liberation from
the effects of colonial and neo-colonial oppression. She remarked that ‘I think we have to choose
again strategically, not universal discourse but essentialist discourse. I think that since as a deconstructivist…I
cannot in fact clean my hands and say I’m
specific. In fact I must say I am an
essentialist from time to time’ (Spivak 1984-5: 183). And, again in the same interview she
remarked: ‘I think it’s absolutely on target…to stand against the discourses of
essentialism…[but] strategically
we cannot’ (184).
The conscious or unconscious process
by which Europe and European cultural assumptions are constructed as, or
assumed to be, the normal, the natural or the universal. The first, and possibly most potent sign of
Euro-centrism, as Jose Rabasa explains (1993), was the specific projection
employed to construct the Mercator Atlas itself, a projection that favoured the
European temperate zones in its distribution of size. The map of the world is not merely an objective
outline of discovered continents, but an ‘ideological or mythological
reification of space’ which opens up the territories
of the world to domination and appropriation.
‘The world’ only acquired spatial meaning after different regions had
been inscribed by Europeans, and this inscription, apart from locating Europe
at the top of the globe or map, established an ideological figuration, through
the accompanying text and illustrations, which firmly centralized Europe as the
source and arbiter of spatial and cultural meaning.
By the eighteenth century
this conception of a collective ‘
Edward Said’s Orientalism examines the ways in which Eurocentrism not only influences
and alters, but actually produces other cultures. Orientalism
is a ‘way of coming to terms with the orient that is based on the orient’s
special place in European western experience’ (1978: 1) or ‘the western style
for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the orient’ (3). This authority is, in Said’s view, a product
of a systematic ‘discipline’ by which European culture was able to construct
and manage the Orient during the post-Enlightenment period.
Euro-centrism is masked in literary
study by concepts such as literary universality, in history by authoritative
interpretations written from the point of view of the victors, and in early
anthropology by the unconscious assumptions involved in the idea that its data
were those societies defined as ‘primitive’ and so opposed to a European norm
of development and civilization. Some
cultural critics have argued that anthropology as a discipline in its classic,
unrevised form came in to being in such a close relationship with colonization
that it could not have existed at all without the prior existence of
Eurocentric concepts of knowledge and civilization. Eurocentrism is also present in the
assumptions and practices of Christianity through mission education and mission
activity, as well as in the assumed superiority of Western mathematics,
cartography, art and numerous other cultural and social practices
which have been claimed, or assumed, to be based on a universal,
objective set of values.
Fanonism (see also Critical Fanonism)
A term for the anti-colonial
liberationist critique formulated by the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon
(1925-1961). Fanon’s work in
However, Fanon, like other early
National Liberationist figures such as the Trinidadian C.L.R. James and the
Cape Verdean Amilcar Cabral, did not advocate a naïve view of the
pre-colonial. Fanon’s nationalism was
always what Edward Said in Culture and
Imperialism has defined as ‘critical nationalism’, that is, formed in an
awareness that pre-colonial societies were never simple or homogenous and that
they contained socially prejudicial class and gender formations that stood in
need of reform by a radical force. As Said has noted ‘[Fanon’s] notion was that unless national
consciousness at its moment of success was somehow changed into social
consciousness, the future would not hold liberation but an extension of
imperialism’ (1993:323). For
Fanon, the task of the national liberator, often drawn as he himself was from a
colonially educated elite, was to ‘join the people in that fluctuating movement
which they are just giving a shape
to…which will be the signal for everything to be called into question’ (1952:
168) (see cultural diversity/cultural difference).
Although Fanon is
sometimes recruited to the banner of a naïve form of nativism, he took a more complicated
view of tradition and the pre-colonial as well as of its role in the
construction of the modern post-colonial
state. Fanon, of course, recognized
and gave a powerful voice to the fact that for the new national leaders ‘the
passionate search for a national culture which existed before the colonial era
finds its legitimate reason in the anxiety shared by many indigenous intellectuals
to shrink away from that western culture in which they all risk being swamped’
and to ‘renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial springs
of their people’ (1961: 153-4). But he
also recognized the danger that such pasts could be easily
mythologized and used to create the new elite power groups, masquerading as the
liberators of whom he had warned.
A
national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract
populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of
gratuitous actions, that is to say actions which are
less and less attached to the ever present reality of the people. A national culture is the whole body of
effort made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and
praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself
in existence.
(1961:
154-5)
Throughout his
historical analysis, Fanon never lost sight of the importance of the subjective
consciousness and its role in creating the possibilities for the hegemonic control of the colonized
subject, and of the neo-colonial
society that followed political independence.
In studies such as ‘The Fact of Blackness’ (1952) he addressed the
importance of the visible signs of racial difference in constructing a
discourse of prejudice, and the powerful and defining psychological effects of
this on the self-construction of black peoples.
Much of Fanon’s work gives definition to the radical attempt to oppose
this in the discourses of the black
consciousness movement that emerged in
Feminism is of crucial interest to
post-colonial discourse for two major reasons.
Firstly, both patriarchy and imperialism can be seen
to exert analogous forms of domination over those they render subordinate. Hence the
experiences of women in patriarchy and those of colonized subjects can be
paralleled in a number of respects, and both feminist and post-colonial
politics oppose such dominance.
Secondly, there have been vigorous debates in a number of colonized
societies over whether gender or colonial oppression is the more important
political factor in women’s lives. This
has sometimes led to division between Western feminists and political activists
from impoverished and oppressed countries; or, alternatively, the two are inextricably entwined, in which case the condition of
colonial dominance affects, in material ways, the position of women within
their societies. This has led to calls
for a greater consideration of the construction and employment of gender in the
practices of imperialism and colonialism.
Feminism, like post-colonialism, has
often been concerned with the ways and extent to which representation and
language are crucial to identity formation and to the construction of subjectivity. For both groups, language has been a vehicle
for subverting patriarchal and imperial power, and both discourses have invoked
essentialist arguments in positing more authentic forms of
language against those imposed on them.
Both discourses share a sense of disarticulation from an inherited
language and have thus attempted to recover a linguistic authenticity via a
pre-colonial language or a primal feminine tongue. However, both feminists and colonized people,
like other subordinate groups, have also used appropriation to subvert and adapt dominant languages and
signifying practices.
The texts of feminist theory and
those of post-colonialism concur on many aspects of the theory of identity, of
difference and of the interpellation of the subject by a dominant discourse, as
well as offering to each other various strategies of resistance to such
controls. Similarities between ‘writing
the body’ in feminism and ‘writing place’ in post-colonialism;
similarities between the strategies of bisexuality and cultural syncreticity,
and similar appeals to nationalism may be detected (Ashcroft 1989).
In the 1980s, many feminist critics
(Carby 1982; Mohanty 1984; Suleri 1992), began to argue that Western feminism,
which had assumed that gender overrode cultural differences to create a
universal category of the womanly or the feminine, was operating from hidden,
universalist assumptions with a middle-class, Euro-centric bias. Feminism was therefore
charged with failing to account for or deal adequately with the
experiences of
the
assumption that all of us of the same gender, across classes and cultures, are
somehow socially constituted as a homogenous group identified prior to the
process of analysis…Thus, the discursively consensual homogeneity of ‘women’ as
a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of
women. (Mohanty 1984: 338)
Domatila Barrios de Chungara’s Let Me Speak demonstrates how the
material reality of different groups of women can lead to very different
perceptions of the nature of political struggle. When she was invited
to the International Women’s Year Tribunal in
More recently, feminism has been
concerned that categories like gender may sometimes be
ignored within the larger formation of the colonial, and that
post-colonial theory has tended to elide gender differences in constructing a
single category of the colonized. These
critics argue that colonialism operated very differently for women and for men,
and the ‘double colonization’ that resulted when women were subject both to
general discrimination as colonial subjects and specific discrimination as
women needs to be taken into account in any analysis of colonial oppression
(Spivak 1985a, 1985b, 1985c and 1986; Mohanty 1984; Suleri 1992). Even post-independence practices of
anti-colonial nationalism are not free from this kind of gender bias, and
constructions of the traditional or pre-colonial are often
heavily inflected by a contemporary masculinist bias that falsely
represents ‘native’ women as quietist and subordinate.
One illuminating account of the
connections between race and gender as a consequence of imperial expansion is
Sander L. Gilman’s ‘Black bodies, white bodies’ (1985), which shows how the
representation of the African in nineteenth-century European art, medicine and literature,
reinforced the construction of the sexualized female body. The presence of male or female black servants
was regularly included in paintings, plays and operas as a sign of illicit
sexual activity. ‘By
the nineteenth century the sexuality of the black, both male and female,
becomes an icon for deviant sexuality in general’ (228). Furthermore, the ‘relationship between the
sexuality of the black woman and that of the sexualized white woman enters a
new dimension when contemporary scientific discourse concerning the nature of
black female sexuality is examined’ (231).
Notorious examples of prurient exoticism, such as the Hottentot Venus
displayed on tour in
In settler colonies, although
women’s bodies were not directly constructed as part
of a transgressive sexuality, their bodies were frequently the site of a power
discourse of a different kind. As
critics like Whitlock have argued, they were perceived
reductively not as sexual but as reproductive subjects, as literal ‘wombs of
empire’ whose function was limited to the population of the new colonies with
white settlers.
Hegemony, initially a term referring
to the dominance of one state within a confederation, is now
generally understood to mean domination by consent. This broader meaning was
coined and popularized in the 1930s by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who
investigated why the ruling class was so successful in promoting its own
interests in society.
Fundamentally, hegemony is the power of the ruling class to convince
other classes that their interests are the interests of all. Domination is thus exerted not by force, nor
even necessarily by active persuasion, but by a more subtle and inclusive power
over the economy, and over state apparatuses such as education and the media,
by which the ruling class’s interest is presented as the common interest and
thus comes to be taken for granted.
The term is useful for describing
the success of imperial power over a colonized people who may far outnumber any
occupying military force, but whose desire for self-determination has been suppressed by a hegemonic notion of the greater
good, often couched in terms of social order, stability and advancement, all of
which are defined by the colonizing power.
Hegemony is important because the capacity to influence the thought of
the colonized is by far the most sustained and potent operation of imperial
power in colonized regions. Indeed, an
‘empire’ is distinct from a collection of subject states forcibly controlled by
a central power by virtue of the effectiveness of its cultural hegemony. Consent is achieved
by the interpellation of the
colonized subject by imperial
discourse so that Euro-centric
values, assumptions, beliefs and attitudes are accepted as a matter of course
as the most natural or valuable. The
inevitable consequence of such interpellation is that the colonized subject
understands itself as peripheral to those Euro-centric values, while at the
same time accepting their centrality.
A classic example of the operation
of hegemonic control is given by Gauri Viswanathan, who shows how ‘the
humanistic functions traditionally associated with the study of literature –
for example, the shaping of character or the development of the aesthetic sense
or the disciplines of ethical thinking – can be vital in the process of
sociopolitical control’ (1987: 2). Such control was maintained by the British government when
it took responsibility for education in
One of the most widely employed and
most disputed terms in post-colonial theory, hybridity
commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural
forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. As used in horticulture, the term refers to
the crossbreeding of two species by grafting or cross-pollination to form a
third, ‘hybrid’ species. Hybridization
takes many forms: linguistic, cultural, political, racial, etc. Linguistic examples include pidgin and creole languages, and these echo the
foundational use of the term by the linguist and cultural theorist Mikhail
Bakhtin, who used it to suggest the disruptive and transfiguring power of
multivocal language situations and, by extension, of multivocal
narratives. The idea of a polyphony of voices in society is implied also in
Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, which emerged in the Middle Ages when ‘a
boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and
serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture’ (Holquist 1984: 4).
The term ‘hybridity’ has been most
recently associated with the work of Homi K. Bhabha, whose analysis of
colonizer/colonized relations stresses their interdependence and the mutual
construction of their subjectivities (see mimicry
and ambivalence). Bhabha contends that all cultural statements
and systems are constructed in a space that he calls
the ‘Third Space of enunciation’ (1994: 37).
Cultural identity always emerges in this contradictory and ambivalent
space, which for Bhabha makes the claim to a hierarchical ‘purity’ of cultures
untenable. For him, the recognition of
this ambivalent space of cultural identity may help us to overcome the exoticism of cultural diversity in favor of the recognition of an empowering
hybridity within which cultural difference may operate:
It
is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a
colonial or postcolonial provenance. For
a willingness to descend into that alien territory…may open the way to
conceptualizing an international
culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the
inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.
(Bhabha 1994: 38)
It is in the ‘in-between’ space that carries
the burden and meaning of culture, and this is what makes the notion of
hybridity so important.
Hybridity
has frequently been used in post-colonial discourse to
mean simply cross-cultural ‘exchange’.
This use of the term has been widely criticized, since it usually
implies negating and neglecting the imbalance and inequality of the power
relations it references. By stressing
the transformative cultural, linguistic and political impacts on both the
colonized and the colonizer, it has been regarded as
replicating assimilationist policies by masking or ‘whitewashing’ cultural
differences.
The idea of hybridity also underlies
other attempts to stress the mutuality of cultures in the colonial and
post-colonial process in expressions of syncreticity, cultural synergy and transculturation. The
criticism of the term referred to above stems from the perception that theories
that stress mutuality necessarily
downplay oppositionality, and increase continuing post-colonial
dependence. There is, however, nothing
in the idea of hybridity as such that suggests that mutuality negates the
hierarchical nature of the imperial process or that it involves the idea of an equal exchange. This is, however, the way in which some
proponents of decolonization and anti-colonialism have interpreted its
current usage in colonial discourse
theory. It has also been subject to
critique as part of a general dissatisfaction with colonial discourse theory on
the part of critics such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Benita Parry and Aijaz
Ahmad. These critiques stress the
textualist and idealist basis is such analysis and point to the fact that they
neglect specific local differences.
The assertion of a shared
post-colonial condition such as hybridity has been seen
as part of the tendency of discourse analysis to de-historicize and de-locate
cultures from their temporal, spatial, geographical and linguistic contexts,
and to lead to an abstract, globalized concept of the textual that obscures the
specificities of particular cultural situations. Pointing out that the investigation of the
discursive construction of colonialism does not seek to replace or exclude
other forms such as historical, geographical, economic, military or political,
Robert Young suggests that the contribution of colonial discourse analysis, in
which concepts such as hybridity are couched,
provides
a significant framework for that other work by emphasizing that all
perspectives on colonialism share and have to deal with a common discursive
medium which was also that of colonialism itself:…Colonial discourse analysis
can therefore look at the wide variety of texts of colonialism as something
more than mere documentation or ‘evidence. (Young 1995: 163)
However, Young
himself offers a number of objections to the indiscriminate use of the
term. He notes how influential the term
‘hybridity’ was in imperial and
colonial discourse in negative accounts of the union of disparate races –
accounts that implied that unless actively and persistently cultivated, such
hybrids would inevitably revert to their ‘primitive’ stock. Hybridity thus became, particularly at the
turn of the century, part of a colonialist discourse of racism. Young draws our attention to the dangers of
employing a term so rooted in a previous set of racist assumptions, but he also
notes that there is a difference between unconscious processes of hybrid
mixture, or creolization, and a conscious and politically motivated concern
with the deliberate disruption of homogeneity.
He notes that, for Bakhtin, for example, hybridity is
politicized, made contestatory, so that it embraces the subversion and
challenge of division and separation.
Bakhtin’s hybridity ‘sets different points of view against each other in
a conflictual structure, which retains “a certain elemental, organic energy and
openendedness”’ (Young 1995: 21-22). It
is this potential of hybridity to reverse ‘the structures of domination in the
colonial situation’ (23), which Young recognizes, that Bhabha also
articulates. ‘Bakhtin’s intentional
hybrid has been transformed by Bhabha into an active moment of challenge and
resistance against a dominant colonial power…depriving the imposed imperialist
culture, not only of the authority that it has for so long imposed politically,
often through violence, but even of its own claims to authenticity’ (23).
Young does, however, warn of the
unconscious process of repetition involved in the contemporary use of the
term. According to him, when talking
about hybridity, contemporary cultural discourse cannot escape the connection
with the racial categories of the past in which hybridity had such a clear
racial meaning. Therefore
‘deconstructing such essentialist notions of race today we may rather be repeating
the [fixation on race in the] past than distancing ourselves from it, or
providing a critique of it (27). This is
a subtle and persuasive objection to the concept. However, more positively, Young also notes
that the term indicates a broader insistence in many twentieth-century
disciplines, from physics to genetics, upon ‘a double logic, which goes against
the convention of rational either/or choices, but which is repeated in science
in the split between the incompatible coexisting logics of classical and
quantum physics’ (26). In this sense, as
in much else in the structuralist and post-structuralist legacy, the concept of
hybridity emphasizes a typically twentieth-century concern with relations
within a field rather than with an analysis of discrete objects, seeing meaning
as the produce of such relations rather than as intrinsic to specific events or
objects.
Whilst assertions of national
culture and of pre-colonial traditions have played an important role in
creating anti-colonial discourse and
in arguing for an active decolonizing
project, theories of the hybrid nature of post-colonial culture assert a
different model for resistance, locating this in the subversive counter-discursive practices implicit
in the colonial ambivalence itself so undermining the very basis on which
imperialist and colonialist discourse raises its claims of superiority.
In its most general sense,
imperialism refers to the formation of an empire, and, as such, has been an
aspect of all periods of history in which one nation has extended its
domination over one or several neighboring nations. Edward Said uses imperialism in this general
sense to mean ‘the practice, theory, and the attitudes of a dominating
metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory’, (Said 1993: 8), a process
distinct from colonialism, which is
‘the implanting of settlements on a distant territory’. However, there is general agreement that the
word imperialism, as a conscious and openly advocated policy of acquiring
colonies for economic, strategic and political advantage, did not emerge until
around 1880. Before that date, the term
‘empire’ (particularly the British variety) conjured up an apparently
benevolent process of European expansion whereby colonies accrued rather than were acquired. Around the
mid-nineteenth century, the term ‘imperialism’ was used
to describe the government and policies of Napolean III, self-styled ‘emperor’,
and by 1870 was used disparagingly in disputes between the political parties in
The expansionist policies pursued by
the modern industrial powers from 1880 have been described
as ‘classical imperialism’ (Baumgart 1982: 5).
The year 1885, when the Berlin Congo Conference ended and the ‘scramble
for
The significant feature of
imperialism then is that, while as a term used to describe the late
nineteenth-century policy of European expansion it is quite recent, its
historical roots run deep, extending back to Roman times. Derived from the Latin word imperium to describe its sovereignty
over the Mediterranean world, the term Imperium
populi Romani was not merely rhetorical, it defined the sovereignty
invested in the people and bestowed by the people on its magistrates
abroad. It was this Republican use of
the term that
Imperialism in its more recent sense
– the acquisition of an empire of overseas colonies – is associated with the
Europeanization of the globe which came in three major
waves: the age of discovery during the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the age of mercantilism during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the age of imperialism in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Europeanization was chiefly effected not by
governments and states, but rather by those hundreds of thousands of colonists,
merchants, missionaries and adventurers who permeated the non-European
world. This general Europeanization of
the globe is much harder to trace, but it is important to understand the extent
to which European imperialism is grounded on this diaspora of ordinary travelers,
explorers, missionaries, fortune hunters and settlers over many centuries.
Both the Roman internationalist and
Carolingian dynastic senses of imperialism were very different from that which
emerged as a consequence of the development of the nation-state. Hobson makes the point that colonialism ‘is a
natural overflow of nationality’, its test being ‘the power of colonists to
transplant the civilization they represent to the new natural and social
environment in which they find themselves’ (1902: 7). But it is clear that mercantilism, or mercantile
capitalism (that is, the ‘merchant’ capitalism that existed before the
Industrial Revolution), was a significant feature of the European acquisition
of colonies, and one tied up with national sentiment. During the mercantilist age, which began
roughly with Cromwell’s Navigation Act of 1651, rivalry between the European
powers was based no longer on religion but on the competitive acquisition of
wealth, particularly gold and silver, and its consolidation through the
discouragement of imports by tariffs and the encouragement of exports through
bounties and rebates. The principle was
that one nation’s gain was another’s loss, since the world’s wealth was thought to be a fixed quantity. (Adam Smith critiqued
the mercantile system in the Wealth of
Nations published in 1776, pointing out the absurdity of confusing material
wealth with money.) But mercantilism was
important to its supporters because ‘its purpose was not to maximize welfare,
but to promote the economic and political independence of the nation-state’
(Lichteim 1971: 51). All European powers
in the mercantilist age believed that the acquisition of colonies was
beneficial, if only to deprive competitors of potential wealth.
Surprisingly, empire building did
not die out with the end of mercantilism and slavery but increased apace during
the nineteenth century. Hobsbawm in Industry and Empire (1968) proposes that
the earlier
After 1815,
Although Lenin’s analysis of
imperialism in Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) has become
perhaps the most influential in twentieth-century political economy, this
specifically economic definition of the term was developed from J.A. Hobson,
whose disgust with the war in
There are several arguments against
purely economic views of European imperialism, not the least of which is the
argument by historians such as Robinson and Gallagher that there was a
continuation of imperial policy that became openly aggressive only in the
1880s. Empirical studies reveal that the
flow of profit from colony to metropolis was not as great as had often been
supposed during this period. Such was
Prime Minister Disraeli’s reluctance about maintaining costly colonies that
More importantly for post-colonial
theory, there was a continuous development of imperial rhetoric and of imperial
representation of the rest of the globe from at least the fifteenth
century. As a continuous practice, this
had much more to do with the desire for, and belief in, European cultural
dominance – a belief in a superior right to exploit the world’s resources –
than pure profit. Said observes that the
rhetoricians of imperialism after 1880 ‘deploy a language whose imagery of
growth, fertility, and expansion, whose teleological structure of property and
identity, whose ideological discrimination between “us” and “them” had already
matured elsewhere – in fiction, political science, racial theory, travel
writing’ (Said 1993: 128). This is, of
course, the most significant omission from accounts by economic theorists of
imperialism: that the ideological grounding, the language of cultural
dominance, the ideology of race and the civilizing mission of European cultural
dominance had been accelerating since the eighteenth century.
The nineteenth-century growth in the
activity of humanitarian organizations and missionary societies, which provided
continuity between imperial policies before and after 1880, was a powerful impulse
of classical imperialism. This, allied
with the growth in exploration and
travel, the perception of the new lands as regions of adventure and renewal
where the Anglo-Saxon race could regenerate, or as ‘el dorados’, sites of
fabulous wealth, provided very compelling motivation for the movement of
European peoples to the colonial margins.
Clearly there is a case for arguing the
existence of different kinds of imperialisms clustered around the philanthropic
and exploitative, and indeed the worst colonialist scandals were exposed by
humanitarian and missionary organizations.
But the subtle way in which the two could become
enmeshed can be seen in the work of David Livingston, whose claim was
that ‘Christianity, Commerce and Civilization’ must go hand in hand. His aim was to promote legal trade and thus
eradicate slavery and exploitation, to which end he encouraged the building of
roads and railways and the establishing of steamship routes. But the very conjunction demonstrates the
extent to which the European presence in
Ultimately, however, it was the
control of the means of representation rather than the means of production that
confirmed the hegemony of the European powers in their respective empires. Economic, political and military dominance
enabled the dissemination of European ideas through the powerful agencies of
education and publishing. But it was the
power of imperial discourse rather than military or economic might that
confirmed the hegemony of
imperialism in the late nineteenth century.
By 1914, the age of ‘classical imperialism’ had come to an end, but by
this time imperialism had demonstrated its protean nature, its ability to
change centres, to adapt to the changing dynamic of world power and ultimately
to develop into globalism, arguably its natural successor in the late twentieth
century.
This term is adapted from the ‘Manichaean heresy’ of the third century AD which propounded a dualistic theology, according to which Satan was represented as co-eternal with God. Matter was evil and God by His nature could not intervene in the world of evil matter. Thus Christ could not have been born into the flesh and had to be only spirit – a heresy against the doctrine of Christ’s dual nature as both Man and God. The implication that the two realms of spirit and matter were always and eternally separate and could never be linked implies an extreme form of binary structure, and it is this that contemporary post-colonial usage references. The concept was popularized by Abdul Jan-Mohammed (1983, 1985) who developed Frantz Fanon’s identification of the Manichean nature of the implacable opposition of colonizer and colonized.
In the field of post-colonial studies, Manicheanism is a term for the binary structure of imperial ideology. Jan-Mohammed uses the uncompromisingly dualistic aspect of the concept to describe the process by which imperial discourse polarizes the society, culture and very being of the colonizer and colonized into the Manichean categories of good and evil. The world at the boundaries of civilization is perceived as uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable and ultimately evil, while the civilized culture is the embodiment of good. The consequences of this for colonial discourse are that the colonizer’s assumption of moral superiority means that ‘he will not be inclined to expend any energy in understanding the worthless alterity of the colonized’ (1985: 18). Much literature of cultural encounter,
instead of being an exploration of the racial Other…affirms its own ethno-centric assumptions; instead of actually depicting the outer limits of ‘civilization’, it simply codifies and preserves the structures of its own mentality. While the surface of each colonialist text purports to represent specific encounters with specific varieties of the racial Other, the subtext valorizes the superiority of European cultures, of the collective process that has mediated the representation. Such literature is essentially specular: instead of seeing the native as a bridge toward syncretic possibility, it uses him as a mirror that reflects the colonialist’s self image. (JanMohammed 1985: 19)
Borrowing from Lacan, JanMohammed claims that colonialist literature can be divided into ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ modes. The writer of the ‘imaginary’ text tends to ‘fetishize a nondialectical, fixed opposition between the self and the native. Threatened by a metaphysical alterity that he has created, he quickly retreats to the homogeneity of his own group.’ Writers of ‘symbolic’ texts tend to be more open to a modifying dialectic of self and Other, and it is this preparedness to consider the possibility of syncretism that is the most important factor distinguishing it from the ‘imaginary’ text. Ultimately, according to JanMohammed, it is the ability to subvert or avoid the economy of Manichean allegory.
Further
Being on the margin, marginal. The perception and description of experience as 'marginal' is a consequence of the binaristic structure of various kinds of dominant discourses, such as patriarchy, imperialism and ethnocentrism, which imply that certain forms of experience are peripheral. Although the term carries a misleading geometric implication, marginal groups do not necessarily endorse the notion of a fixed centre. Structures of power that are described in terms of 'centre' and 'margin' operate, in reality, in a complex, diffuse and multifaceted way. The marginal therefore indicates a positionality that is best defined in terms of the limitations of a subject's access to power.
However, marginality as a noun is related to the verb 'to marginalize', and in this sense provides a trap for those involved in resistance by its assumption that power is a function of centrality. This means that such resistance can become a process of replacing the centre rather than deconstructing the binary structure of centre rather than deconstructing the binary structure of centre and margin, which is a primary feature of post-colonial discourse. Marginality unintentionally reifies centrality because it is the centre that creates the condition of marginality. In simple terms we could ask 'Who are the marginal?' Marginal to what?' We might be tempted to reply spontaneously, 'imperialism marginalizes, the colonized people are marginalized.' But they are neither all marginalized nor always marginalized. Imperialism cannot be reduced to a structure, a geometry of power that leaves some particular races on the margin. it is a continuous, processual, working through individuals as well as upon them. It reproduces itself within the very idea of the marginal. Therefore, despite its ubiquity as a term to indicate various forms of exclusion and oppression, the use of the term always involves the risk that it endorses the structure that established the marginality of certain groups in the first place.
Further reading: Gunew 1994; Jordan and Weedon 1995.
These terms, respectively Spanish and French in origin, semantically register the idea of mixing races and/or cultures. Initially, they emerged from a colonial discourse that privileged the idea of racial purity and justified racial discrimination by employing the quasi-scientific precursors of physical anthropology to create a complex and largely fictional taxonomy of racial admixtures (mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, etc.).
Mestizo differs from creole and from metisse in so far as its usage reflects the older, large-scale Spanish and Portuguese settlement of their South American and Meso-American possessions. This early settlement led to an intensive cultural and racial exchange between Spaniards and Portuguese settlers and the native Indians, in so many cases prior to the influence of black African slaves upon this cultural melange. The relatively early date of this colonizing process, and the equally early date at which Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas achieved their independence, means that in Latin American cultural discourses the idea of mestizo is much more developed as a positive ‘national’ cultural sign, as a sign of shared if disputed indigeneity.
Both terms
have gradually moved from a pejorative to a positive usage, as they have begun
to reflect a perception in these cultures that miscegenation and interchange between the different cultural diasporas had produced a new and
powerful synergistic cultural forms,
and that these cultural and racial exchanges might be the place where the most
energized aspects of the new cultures reside.
These terms have not been used widely to
describe aspects of cultures outside the
Further
The term
‘modern’ derives from the late fifth-century Latin term modernus which was used to
distinguish an officially Christian present from a Roman, pagan past. ‘Modern’ was used in
the medieval period to distinguish the contemporary from the ‘ancient’
past. But ‘modernity’ has come to mean
more than ‘the here and now’: it refers to modes of social organization that
emerged in
The concept
of modernity is therefore significant in the emergence of colonial discourse. Modernity is fundamentally about conquest,
‘the imperial regulation of land, the discipline of the soul, and the creation
of truth’ (Turner 1990: 4), a discourse that
enabled the large-scale regulation of human identity both within
Understanding
modernity as a discourse rather than an epoch involves seeing it as
characterized by major discontinuities separating modern social institutions from traditional social orders. Giddens identifies three: the pace of change,
the scope of change, and the nature of modern institutions. The advent of various technologies initiated
an ever accelerating pace of change, and the scope of this change came to
affect the entire globe (Giddens 1990: 6).
Many social forms and processes are not found
in pre-modern societies: the nation-sate, the dependence on inanimate power
sources, the commodification of products and wage labor, formal schooling, the
secularization of values and norms, and the predominance of urban forms of
life. These differences distinguish
colonizing
Apart from the distinctiveness of modern social institutions, and the many other reinforcing processes that accompany them, modernity can be characterized by developments in philosophical thought. The conception of modernity as a periods that was superior to the past, buttressed as it was by the replacement of divine providence with the autonomous rational human mind, effectively ended the veneration of tradition and paved the way for the Enlightenment philosophical project of developing ‘a rational organization of everyday social life’ (Habermas 1981: 9). In turn, of courses, this character of Enlightenment thought consolidated the assumption of European cultural authority as its influence spread throughout the world. Science and rationality were assumed to be the only possible courses for modern consciousness, and modern (i.e. European) social institutions were then, and are still, regarded as creating ‘vastly greater opportunities for human beings to enjoy a secure and rewarding existence that any type of pre-modern system’ (Giddens 1990: 7).
Rationality
became such a core feature of ‘modern’ thought that its origin as a
specifically European mode of thinking was forgotten
by the time
Contemporary debate interrogates the relationship between modernity and post-modernity. Theorists such as Haberman see modernity as an unfinished project and the ‘post-modern’ as simply a stage of modernity, while others see the post-modern as a sign of the dissolution of modernity. Post-modernity may also be characterized as offering a different set of discontinuities from modernity. However, it would appear that the revolution in social organization and philosophical thought, and the geographical expansion that modernity entailed, still remains a fundamental constitutive feature of social life in contemporary times.
Further reading: Giddens 1990; Habermas 1981, 1987; Turner 1990.
The idea of the nation is now so firmly fixed in the general imagination, and to form of state signifies so widely accepted, that it is hard to realize how recent its invention has been. In 1882, the French Orientalist Ernest Renan, addressing an audience at the Sorbonne in a lecture entitled, ‘What is a nation?, felt it necessary to remind his audience of the historical beginnings of the idea of a nation:
Nations…are something fairly new
in history. Antiquity was unfamiliar
with them;
Renan traces the emergence of the nation-state to the break-up of the classical and medieval empires, locating its cultural provenance in a specifically European political and social environment. That nations were and are profoundly unstable formations, always likely to collapse back into sub-divisions of clan, ‘tribe’, language or religious group, is nothing new, and the false tendency to assign this unstable condition to specific regions or conditions (‘balkanization’, ‘the Third World’, ‘underdeveloped countries’) is reflected in contemporary discussion of national questions.
As thinkers as early as Renan were aware, nations are not ‘natural’ entities, and the instability of the nation is the inevitable consequence of its nature as a social construction. This myth of nationhood, masked by ideology, perpetuates nationalism, in which specific identifiers are employed to create exclusive and homogeneous conceptions of national traditions. Such signifiers of homogeneity always fail to represent the diversity of the actual ‘national’ community for which they purport to speak, and, in practice, usually represent and consolidate the interests of the dominant power groups within any national formation.
Constructions of the nations are thus potent sites of control and domination within modern society. This is further emphasized by the fact that the myth of a ‘national tradition’ is employed not only to legitimize a general idea of a social group (‘a people’) but also to construct a modern idea of a nation-state, in which all the instrumentalities of state power (e.g. military and police agencies, judiciaries, religious hierarchies, educational systems and political assemblies or organizations) are subsumed and legitimized as the ‘natural’ expressions of a unified national history and culture. Timothy Brennan comments on this modern collapsing of the two concepts of nation and nation-state:
As for the ‘nation’ it is both historically determined and general. As a term, it refers both to the modern nation-state and to something more ancient and nebulous – the ‘natio’ – a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging. The distinction is often obscured b nationalists who seek to place their own country in an ‘immemorial past’ where its arbitrariness cannot be questioned. (Bhabba 1990: 45)
The confusion of the idea of the nation with the practice and power of the nation-state makes nationalism one of the most powerful forces in contemporary society. It also makes it an extremely contentious site, on which ideas of self-determination and freedom. Of identity and unity collide with ideas of suppression and force, of domination and exclusion.
Yet for all
its contentiousness, and the difficulty theorizing it adequately, it remains
the most implacably powerful force in twentieth-century politics. Its displacement has proved to be very
difficult even within internationally oriented movements such as Marxism, at
least in the Stalinist form in which it emerged in the
The complex
and powerful operation of the idea of a nation can be seen also in the great
twentieth-century phenomenon of global capitalism, where the ‘free market’
between nations, epitomized in the emergence of multinational companies,
maintains a complex, problematic relationship with the idea of nations as a
natural and immutable formations based on shared collective values (see globalization). Modern nations such as the
Nations and nationalism are profoundly important in the formation of colonial practice. As Hobson puts it:
Colonialism, where it consists in the migration of part of a nation to vacant or sparsely peopled foreign lands, the emigrants carrying with them full rights of citizenship in the mother country…may be considered a genuine expansion of nationality. (Hobson 1902: 6)
Hobson was explaining the economic emergence of late
nineteenth-century imperialism, but
the link between nation and expansion is much older – emergence of the
nation-state and the imperial-capitalist economies of post-Renaissance
This complex
story which is here, of course, grossly simplified, became the basis for a
narrative that acted to consolidate the interests of the new trading classes
and which demanded new social formations that either integrated older forms
(municipal kingdoms, city-states or city leagues) or developed new ones
(oligarchic and radical republics) to represent the interests of the new
trading classes whose wealth, derived from the distance trade with colonies,
replaced and challenged the power of the old feudal aristocracies. These new ‘national’ entities demanded a new
national narrative, the ‘Story of a Nation’, which became disseminated through
‘imagined communities’ of speakers and listeners (or writers and readers) (
French
Enlightenment thought heralded a shift in the theory of the ‘nation’, a shift
that sought to relocate the legitimacy of the modern nation-state in a theory
of the ‘people’ based on the idea of a universal set of principles (the ‘Rights
of Man’) rather than on mythic and historical origins. In its strict form, the impulse to create
such a Universal vision is transnational and its revolutionary tendency to
cross borders can be seen in the effects of
Enlightenment thinking on many nations in
Conversely,
in the
Significantly,
the rump of the last medieval imperialisms, that of
the Austro-Hungarian fragment of the erstwhile
Orientalism This is the term popularized by Edward Said orientalism, in which he examines the processes by which the ‘Orient’ was, and continues to be, constructed in European thinking. Professional Orientalists included scholars in various disciplines such as languages, history and philology, but for Said the discourse of Orientalism was much more widespread and endemic in European thought. As well as a form of academic discourse it was a style of thought based on ‘the ontological and epistemological distinction between the “Orient” and the “Occident” (Said 1978: 1). But, most broadly, Said discusses Orientalism as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient ‘dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by attacking it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (3). In this sense it is a classic example of Foucault’s definition of a discourse.
The significance of Orientalism is that a mode of knowing the other it was a supreme example of the construction of the other, a form of authority. The Orient is not an inert fact of nature, but a phenomenon constructed by generations of intellectuals, artists, commentators, writers, politicians, and, more importantly, constructed by the naturalizing of a wide range of Orientalist assumptions and stereotypes. The relationship between the Occident and the Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. Consequently, Orientalist discourse about the Orient. Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western hegemony over the Orient from the eighteenth century onwards, there emerged ‘a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical these about mankind and the universe’ (7). Orientalism is not however, a western plot to hold down the ‘Oriental’ world. It is:
A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction . . . but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which . . . it not only creates but maintains. It is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even incorporate, what is a manifestly different world. (Said 1978: 12)
Significantly, the discourse of Orientalism persists into the present,
particularly in the West’s relationship with ‘Islam’, as is evidenced in its
study, its reporting in the media, its representation in general. But as a discursive mode, Orientalism models
a wide range of institutional constructions of the colonial other, one example
of being the study, discussion and general representation of
The
generalized construction of regions by such discursive formations is also a
feature of contemporary cultural life.
Oddly enough Orientalism spills over into the realm of
self-construction, so that the idea of a set of generalized ‘Asian’ values
(e.g. Asian democracy) is promoted by the institutions and governments of
peoples who were themselves lumped together initially by Orientalist rubrics
such as ‘the East’ (Far East, Middle East, etc.), the Orient or Asia. Employed as an unqualified adjective, a term
like ‘
Further reading: Said 1978
Other/other
In general terms, the ‘other’ is anyone who is separate from one’s self. The existence of others is crucial in defining what is ‘normal’ and in locating one’s own place in the world. The colonized subject is characterized as ‘other’ through discourses such as primitivism and cannibalism, as a means of establishing the binary separation of the colonizer and colonized and asserting the naturalness and primacy of the colonizing culture and world view.
Although the term is used extensively in existential philosophy, notably by Sartre in Being and Nothingness to define the relations between Self and Other in creating self-awareness and ideas of identity, the definition of the term as used in current post-colonial theory is rooted in the Freudian and post-Freudian analysis of the formation of subjectivity, most notably in the work of the psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s use of the term involves a distinction between the ‘Other’ and the ‘other’, which can lead to some confusion, but it is a distinction that can be very useful in post-colonial theory.
In Lacan’s theory, the other – with the ‘o’ – designates the other who resembles the self, which the child discovers when it looks in the mirror and becomes aware of itself as a separate being. When the child, which is an uncoordinated mass of limbs and feelings sees it image in the mirror, that image must bear sufficient resemblance to the child to be recognized, but it mist also be separate enough to ground the child’s hope for an ‘anticipated mastery’; this fiction of mastery will become the basis of the ego. This other is important in defining the identity of the subject. In post-colonial theory, it can refer to the colonized others who are marginalized by imperial discourse, identified by their difference from the centre and, perhaps crucially, become the focus of anticipated mastery by the imperial ‘ego’.
The Other – with the capital ‘O’ – has been called the grande-autre by Lacan, the great Other, in whose gaze the subject gains identity. The Symbolic other is not a real interlocuter but can be embodied in other subject such as the mother of father that may represent it. The Symbolic Other is a ‘transcendent or absolute pole of address, summoned each time that subject speaks to another subject’ (Boons-Grafe 1992: 298). Thus the Other can refer to the mother whose separation from the subject locates her as the first focus of desire; it can refer to the father whose Otherness located the subject in the Symbolic order; it can refer to the unconscious itself because the unconscious is structured like a language that is separate from the language of the subject. Fundamentally, the Other is crucial to the subject because the subject exists in its gaze. Lacan says that ‘all desire is the metonym of the desire to be’ because the first desire of the subjects is the desire to exist in the gaze of the Other.
This Other
can be compared to the imperial centre, imperial discourse, or the empire
itself, in two ways: firstly, it
provides the terms in which the colonized subject gains a sense of his or her
identity as somehow ‘other’, dependent; secondly, it becomes the ‘absolute pole
of address’, the ideological framework in which the colonized subject may come
to understand the world. In colonial
discourse, the subjectivity of the colonized is continually located in the gaze
of the imperial Other, the ‘grand-autre’. Subjects may be interpellated
by the ideology of the maternal and nurturing function of the colonizing power,
concurring with descriptions such as ‘mother
On the other hand, the Symbolic Other may be represented in the Father. The significance and enforced dominance of the imperial language into which colonial subjects are inducted may give them a clear sense of power being located in the colonizer, a situation corresponding metaphorically to the subject’s entrance into the Symbolic order and the discovery of the Law of the Father. The ambivalence of colonial discourse lies in the fact that both these processes of ‘othering’ occur at the same time, the colonial subject being both a ‘child’ of empire and a primitive and degraded
Subaltern, meaning ‘of inferior rank’, is a term adopted by Antonio Gramsci to refer to those groups in society who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes. Subaltern classes may include peasants, workers and other groups denied access to ‘hegemonic’ power. Since the history of the ruling classes is realized in the state, history being the history of states and dominant groups, Gramsci was interested in the historiography of the subaltern classes. In ‘Notes on Italian history’ (1934-5) he outlined a six point plan for studying the history of the subaltern classes which included (1) their objective formation; (2) their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formations; (3) the birth of new parties and dominant groups; (4) the formations that the subaltern groups produce to press their claims; (5) new formations within groups and political parties (Gramsci 1971: 52).
Gramsci claimed that the history of the subaltern classes was just as complex as the history of the dominant classes (52), although the history of the latter is usually that which is accepted as ‘official’ history. For him, the history of subaltern social groups is necessarily fragmented and episodic (54), since they are always subject to the activity of the ruling groups, even when they rebel. Clearly they have less access to the means by which they may control their own representation, and less access to cultural and social institutions. Only ‘permanent’ victory (that is, revolutionary class adjustment) can break that pattern of subordination, and even that does not occur immediately.
The term that has been adapted to post-colonial studies from the work of the Subaltern Studies group of historians, who aimed to promote a systematic discussions of subaltern themes in South Asian Studies. It is used in Subaltern Studies ‘as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way’ (Guha 1982: vii). The group – formed by Ranajit Guha, and initially including Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman and Gyan Pandey – has produced five volumes of Subaltern Studies: essays relating to the history, politics, economics and sociologies of subalterneity ‘as well as the attitudes, ideologies an belief systems – in short, the culture informing that condition’ (vii).
The purpose of the Subaltern Studies project was to address the imbalance created in academic work by a tendency to focus on elites and elite culture in South Asian historiography. Recognizing that subordination cannot be understood except in a binary relationship with dominance, the group aimed to examine the subaltern ‘as an objective assessment of the role of the elite and as a critique of elitist interpretations of that role’ (vii). The goals of the group stemmed from the belief that the historiography of Indian nationalism, for instance, had long been dominated by elitism – colonialist elitism and bourgeoisie-nationalist elitism – both the consequences of British colonialism. Such historiography suggested that the development of a nationalist consciousness was an exclusively elite achievement either of colonial administrators, policy or culture, or of elite Indian personalities, institutions or ideas. Consequently, asserts Guha, such writing cannot acknowledge or interpret the contribution made by people on their own, that is, independently of the elite. What is clearly left out by the class outlook of such historiography is a ‘politics of the people’ (4), which, he claims, is an autonomous domain that continued to operate when the elite politics became outmoded.
One clear demonstration of the difference between the elite and the subaltern lies in the nature of political mobilization: elite mobilization was achieved vertically through adaptation of British parliamentary institutions, while the subaltern relied on the traditional organization of kinship and territoriality or class associations. Popular mobilization in the colonial period took the form of peasant uprisings, and the contention is that this remains a primary locus of political action, despite the change in political structure (6). This is very different from the claims of elite historiography that Indian Nationalism was primarily an idealist venture in which the indigenous elite led the people from subjugation to freedom.
Despite
the great diversity of subaltern groups, the one invariant feature was a notion
of resistance to elite domination. The
failure of the bourgeoisie to speak for the nation meant that the nation of
The notion of the subaltern became an issue in post-colonial theory when Geriatric Spivak critiqued the assumptions of the Subaltern Studies group in the essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ The question, she claims, is one that the group must ask. Her first criticism is directed at the Gramscian claim for the autonomy of the subaltern group, which she says, no amount of qualification by Guha – who concedes the diversity, heterogeneity and overlapping nature of subaltern groups – can save from its fundamentally essentialist premise. Secondly, no methodology for determining who or what might constitute this group can avoid this essentialism. The ‘people’ or the ‘subaltern’ is a group defined by its difference from the elite.
To guard against essentialist views of subalterneity Guha suggests that there is a further distinction to be made between the subaltern and the dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local levels. However, Guha’s attempts to guard against essentialism, by specifying the range of subaltern groups, serves only, according to Spivak, to problematize the idea of the subaltern still further. ‘The task of research is to investigate, identify and measure the specific nature of the degree of deviation of [the dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local level] from the ideal [the subaltern] and situate it historically’ (Spivak 1985b: 27). But, asks Spivak, ‘what taxonomy can fix such a space?’ For the ‘true’ subaltern group, she says, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself. One cannot construct a category of the subaltern that has an effective voice clearly and unproblematically identifiable as such, a voice that does not at the same time occupy many other speaking positions.
Spivak goes on to elaborate the problems of the category of the subaltern by looking at the situation of the gendered subjects of Indian women in particular, for ‘both as an object of colonialist historiography and as a subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant’ (28). For if ‘in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’ (28). Spivak examines the position of Indian women thorough an analysis of a particular case, and concludes with the declaration that the ‘subaltern cannot speak’. This has sometimes been interpreted to mean that there is no way in which oppressed or politically to marginalized groups can voice their resistance, or that the subaltern has only dominant language or dominant voice in which to be heard. But Spivak’s target is the concept conceptual categories an unproblematically constituted subaltern identity, rather than the subaltern subject’s ability to give voice to political concerns. Her point is that no act of dissent or resistance occurs on behalf of an essential subaltern subject entirely separate from the dominant discourse that provides the language and the conceptual categories with which the subaltern voice speaks. Clearly, the existence of post-colonial discourse itself is an example of such speaking, and in most cases the dominant language or mode of representation is appropriated so that the marginal voice can be heard. Further reading: Gramsci 1971; Guha 1982; Spivak 1985b
The question of the subject and subjectivity directly affects colonized peoples’ perceptions of their identities and their capacities to resist the conditions of their domination, ‘subjection’. The status of the human individual was one of the key features of the Enlightenment philosophy. Descartes’ declaration that ‘I think, therefore I am’ confirmed the centrality of the autonomous human individual, a founding precept of humanism, a precept that effectively separated the subject from the object, thought from reality, or the self from the other. The individual, autonomous ‘I’ was one that operated in the world according to this separation and was no longer to be seen as merely operated upon by divine will or cosmic forces. The individual self was separate from the world and could employ intellect and imagination in understanding and representing the world. The autonomous human consciousness was seen to be the source of action and meaning rather than their product. This is a position referred to as ‘Cartesian individualism’, one that tended to overlook or downplay the significance pf social relations or the role of language in forming the self.
Although debate about subject-object relations continued in European philosophy throughout the nineteenth-century, with the critique of subject-centered reason culminating in Nietzsche’s philosophy, the most influential contemporary shift in this Enlightenment position began in the thinking of Freud and Marx. Freud’s theories of the unconscious dimensions of the self revealed that there were aspects of the individual’s formation that were not accessible to thought, and which thus blurred the distinction between the subject and the object. Marx, in assessing the importance of the economic structure of society to the lives of the individual workers, made the famous claim that ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, not on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’ The combined effect of these two thinkers upon the twentieth-century thought was radically to disturb the notion of the integrity and autonomy of the human individual, the theory of subjectivity becoming more formally elaborated by their followers.
The concept of subjectivity problematizes the simple relationship between the individual and language, replacing human nature with the concept of the production of the human subject through ideology, discourse or language. These are seen as determining factors in the construction of individual identity, which itself becomes an effect rather than a cause of such factors. The overlap between theories of ideology, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism has amounted to considerable attack upon the Enlightenment assertion of individual autonomy, and continuing debate centers on the capacity of the so formed by these broad social and cultural forces either to disrupt or to undermine them.
Ideology The most influential development of Marx’s notion of ‘social being’ was Louis Althusser’s theory of the subject’s construction by ideology. Ideology is the system of ideas that explains, or makes sense of, a society, and according to Marx is the mechanism by which unequal social relations are reproduced. The ruling classes not only rule, they rule as thinkers and producers of ideas so that they determine how the society sees itself (hegemony). This ‘misrepresentation’ of meaning and social relations is referred to by Marx as ‘false consciousness’, or a false view of one’s ‘true’ social conditions, something that has a coercive power over the subordinate classes. But for Althusser, ideology is not just a case of the powerful imposing their ideas on the weak: subjects are ‘born into’ ideology, they find subjectivity within the expectations of their parents and their society, and they endorse it because it provides a sense of identity and security through structures such as language, social codes and conventions. In ideology, the subjects also represent to themselves ‘their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there’ (Althusser 1984: 37). That is, subjects collude with ideology by allowing it to provide social meaning.
Ideology
is perpetuated, according to Althusser, by ideological state apparatuses such
as church, education, police, which interpellate subjects, that is,
apparatuses that ‘call people forth’ as subjects and which provides them the
conditions by which, and the contexts in which, they obtain subjectivity. Interpellation has been explained in the
following way: when a policeman hails you with a call ‘Hey you!’, the moment you turn round to acknowledge you are the
object of his attention, you have been interpellated in a particular way, as a
particular kind of subject.
Psychoanalysis Perhaps the most influential development of Freud’s theories of the unconscious was made by Jacques Lacan’s combinations of psychoanalysis and structuralist analysis of language. He contended that Freud’s major insight was not that the unconscious exists, but that it has structure – the ‘unconscious is structured like a language,’ but it is a ‘language which escapes the subject in its operation and effects’. The similarity to the structure of language was crucial to Lacan because the subject itself is produced through language in the same way that language produces meaning.
The subject is formed through a series of stages. In an initial stage the infant exists as a dependent and uncoordinated complex of limbs and sounds that can form mo distinction between self and other. In the second stage, the ‘mirror stage’, the infant begins to distinguish itself from the other by perceiving a split between the ‘I’ that looks, and the ‘I’ that is reflected in the mirror. While this need not refer to an actual mirror, the ‘other’ who is perceived as separate from the self appears to have unity and control of itself that the perceiving ‘I’ lacks. Although such control is imaginary, the infant nevertheless desires that which it lacks and sees it in the image of the other. Because the child is held up to the mirror b the mother, or sees itself ‘reflected’, so to speak, in the gaze of the mother, it also sees similarity to, and different from, the mother, who becomes the first love object, the first locus of desire. The final stage is an entry into language, a passing from the imaginary phase to the symbolic order in which the subject comes to discover that the locus of power is now located in the ‘phallus’. This principle is also called the Law of the Father, and Lacan’s theory asserts that the subject obtains an understanding of its gender at the same time it enters into language. Entering this stage, the subject is both produced in language and subjected to the laws of the symbolic that pre-exist it. The laws of language are themselves metonymic of the cultural complex of laws and rules and conventions into which the subject moves and through which it obtains identity.
Though the subject may speak, it does so only in terms that the laws of language allow. Just as Saussure had argued that the signs that make up a language do not name a preexisting reality but produce it through a system of differences, so Lacan argues the that the position of the ‘I’ within language, the subject, does not simply represent the presence of a subject that pre-exists it, but produces it by a system of differentiations between the ‘I’ and that which is not the ‘I’. This distinction is not static but continuous, the subject being in a continual process of development. Such a process forms a basis for Derrida’s rejection of the concept of ‘presence’. Both subjectivity and the language that produces it constitute a process in which meaning is never fully present in any utterance but is continually deferred.
Lacan’s theory of the development of the subject has given rise to other approaches, notable those of feminist critics such as Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray, who concede the importance of language to subjectivity but who contest Lacan’s privileging the phallus, despite its imaginary status. These theorists emphasize the ‘feminine’ or androgynous aspects of pre-Oedipal language and its potential for development outside the confines of the patriarchally dominated symbolic order.
Discourse The construction of subjectivity within certain historical, social and cultural systems of knowledge in a society has been elaborated on the work of Michel Foucault. Just as the subject, in psychoanalytic terms, is produced by, and must operate within, the laws of language, so discourse produces a subject equally dependent upon the rules of the system of knowledge that produces it. In this respect, discourse is both wider and more varied than either ideology or imperial gaze in which the observed find themselves constituted. When a writer takes this position, as occurs time and again in Orientalist discourse, the invulnerable position of the observer affirms the political order and the binary structure of power that made that position possible. As in the panoptic on, the writer ‘is placed either above or at the center of things, yet apart from them so that the organization and classification of things takes place according to the writer’s own system of value’ (Spurr 1993: 16)
The writing of explorers and travelers in the nineteenth century who adopted the motif of ‘monarch of all I survey’ gives clearest evidence of the panoramic nature of the imperial gaze, but it may be found also in the description of the interiors or in accounts of the surveillance of the body itself. David Spurr gives this account of a passage from the explorer Stanley’s journal:
She is of light brown complexion, with broad round face, large eyes and small but full lips. She had a quiet modest demanour, though her dress was but a narrow fork clout of bark cloth…I notice when her arms are held against the light, a whitey-brown fell on them. Her skin has not the silky smoothness of touch common to the Zanzibaris, but altogether she is a very pleasing little creature. (Spurr 1993: 23)
‘The eye treats the body as a landscape: it proceeds systematically from part to part, quantifying and spatializing, noting color and texture, and finally [assign an aesthetic judgment which stressed the body’s role as a subject to be viewed’ (23). The woman has been captured during a skirmish, a reminder that the freedom of the gaze depends on the security of the position from which it is being directed:
This concept if the gaze becomes important for post-colonial discourse because such surveillance, which corresponds to and confirms the gaze of colonial authority, may be reversed. This is, in Bhabbha’s formulation, a particularly potent aspect of the menace in mimicry: the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from its essence. The metaphoric displacing and returning of the imperial gaze is a fundamental operation of the appropriation of imperial technologies, discourses and cultural forms. The colonized subject not only alters these to local needs but also uses them to direct the gaze upon the colonizer and thus reverse the orientation of power in the relationship. Further reading: Foucault 1977; Spurr 1993.
A term sometimes used to avoid the problems some critics have associated with the idea of hybridity in identifying the fusion of two distinct traditions to produce a new and distinctive whole. The term is often used in religious studies, but has also found favor in theatre criticism with references to a syncretic performance tradition or a syncretic ritual.
This term refers to the reciprocal influences of modes of representation and cultural practices of various kinds in colonies and metropoles, and is thus 'a phenomenon of the contact zone', as Mary Louise Pratt puts it. The term has been used by ethnographers to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture (e.g. Taussig 1993).