THE MAN QUESTION THE MAN QUESTION Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory KATHY E. FERGUSON UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES OXFORD Parts of Chapter 1 are taken from Kathy E. Ferguson, "Inter- pretation and Genealogy in Feminism." Signs 16 (Winter 1991): 322-39. © 1991 by the University of Chicago. All rights re- served. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. Parts of Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are adapted from Kathy E. Ferguson, "Subject-centeredness in Feminist Discourse," in Kathleen Jones and Anna Jonasdottir, eds., The Political Inter- ests of Gender (London: Sage Publications, 1988). Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. Oxford, England © 1993 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ferguson, Kathy E. The man question : visions of subjectivity in feminist theory / Kathy E. Ferguson, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-520-07939-6 (cloth : alk. paper).— ISBN 0-520-07991-4 (pbk. : alk. paper). 1. Feminist theory. 2. Feminist criticism. I. Title. HQ1190.F49 1993 3°5-42'01—dc20 91-48337 CIP Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require- ments of American National Standard for Information Sci- ences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. @ For my mother Laura Ferguson Rinker and my grandmother Marie Badgley Sears for their courage and their love Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii 1. Interpretation and Genealogy in Feminism 1 Ontologies and Subjectivities 10 Languages, Histories, Politics 16 Ironic Convergences and Common Front Politics 27 2. Male-Ordered Subjectivity 36 Identity and Desire in Hegel 41 Feminist Alternatives to the Hegelian Subject 58 3. Praxis Feminism 69 Creating Praxis Feminism 70 Essentialism? 81 Ironic Interventions 91 4. Cosmic Feminism 97 Creating Cosmic Feminism 98 Kitsch, Appropriation, and Irony ill 5. Linguistic Feminism 121 Creating Linguistic Feminism 122 Kitsch, Irony, and the Traffic In Between 136 vii viii Contents 6. Mobile Subjectivities 153 Tragic Choices, Happy Endings, or Ironic Encounters 155 Class Encounters of a Third Kind 167 Ironic Convergences, Coalition Politics, and Kitsch 178 Notes 185 Bibliography 217 Index 227 Preface This book is about contending visions of self and clashing claims to knowledge in contemporary feminist theory. It reflects my own odyssey through and around feminism for the last twenty years. My goal is to connect theories about politics and the self to meta- theoretical claims about reality and truth. This connection raises a question: Why concentrate on the latter issues if one's primary concern is with the former? I understand metatheory to reflect the impulse to ask questions about questions, to inquire into that recalcitrant yet (for some) ir- resistible realm of inquiry into the thematizations of one's themes. But is metatheory not hopelessly "academic" in the negative con- notation of that term, an activity irremediably disconnected from the world? I think not. There is a less than subtle class bias in the belief that only academics inquire into their inquiries (though we may have particularly perverse ways of doing so). My metatheoret- ical focus forces me, as one reader commented (complained, ac- tually), "to treat theories designed to change the world in terms of how they understand the world." The point of doing this is to draw into view unarticulated assumptions and expectations that operate silently within one's theories. Knowing how theories of change un- derstand the world helps one to understand how these theories can act in the world, what they may accomplish, what their unintended consequences may be, and what possibilities may lie unexamined within the terrains they inhabit. Metatheory is irresistible to me because it is so important politically: political and ethical differ- ences ride on, reflect, and produce the metatheoretical differences they then disguise. Poking around and prodding within those dis- guises strike me as significant feminist tasks. ix X Preface The two central metanarratives I am exploring I have named, perhaps unfamiliarly, interpretation (articulations of women's ex- perience and women's voice) and genealogy (deconstructions of the category of women). The arguments for and against these catego- ries come later. Here I want to respond briefly to the charge that I am (secretly, perhaps dishonestly) favoring genealogy while pre- tending to bring the two into dialogue. Certainly my intellectual debts to Nietzsche, Foucault, and their contemporary fellow-trav- elers are evident—but so, I hope, are my debts to Aristotle, Marx, Arendt, and the anarchists, to name a few. I am pushing genealogy in the sense that I am privileging an anti-foundational perspective. I am also pushing interpretation in that I insist on the need, first, for stable points from which to practice politics, and, second, on criteria to distinguish the differences I advocate from those I op- pose. The "mobile subjectivities" for which I argue in Chapter 6 are the products of interpretation in the sense that they are stand- points of a sort, places to stand and from which to act. But they are also fluid and multiple; they are informed by genealogy's desire to let difference be; they are hard to essentialize because their con- creteness resists abstract formulations. To those readers firmly rooted in either of these metatheoretical positions ("Women's experience is . . ." versus "Stop talking about women"), I may appear to be advocating only the other. But it is this rootedness in one position or the other that I am attempting to problematize. I don't want to give up the tension-filled dialogue between them by making one the primary position and the other a footnote. Two decades of fem- inist critiques and visions rub elbows in this text with genealogical suspicions about the reliability of critique and the self-destructive- ness of vision. I want to show how to live and work with the ten- sions between them, how to gain intelligence and energy through the friction their conversations generate. Enter, irony. I came upon the concept of irony as though redis- covering an old friend. My efforts to hold onto some versions of both interpretation and genealogy initially reminded me of a toy from childhood, an apparatus made of two wooden balls attached to each other by a hidden string running through a central frame. When you tug on one of the balls, the other recedes from view as it disappears into the frame. Dropping the first to pursue the sec- ond yields the same result. The challenge was to keep them both