From amagatha@mailbox.syr.edu Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1995 00:58:21 -0400 (EDT) >From: "Anna M. Agathangelou" Reply to: matfem@csf.colorado.edu To: MATERIALIST FEMINISM Subject: Hennessy's article Hello everyone! Below you will find a short summary of Hennessy's article and seven questions. I guess we are ready to start the discussion. I apologize for not sending on October 1, 1995--Anna Women's Lives/Feminist Knowledge: Feminist Standpoint as Ideology Critique by Rosemary Hennessy Hypatia, Vol. 8, no 1. (Winter 1993) Summary Feminist standpoint as a theory occupies a pivotal place among materialist critiques in Western epistemology (p. 14). Standpoint theories challenge the assumption that being a woman avails one with a feminist understanding of the world. Feminist theorists like Harding and Jaggar have instead argued that the feminist standpoint position is a socially produced position and consequently it is not available to all women. What Hennessy challenges in this article is the decision by feminist theorists to not explain the "material links between feminism as a discourse and women's lives [an empirical point of reference prior to feminism]" (Hennessy, 1993: 14). Hennessy asks the following question: "But what exactly is the material connection between a feminist perspective and its starting point, between theory and lives?" (p. 16). Her questions arise out of her assumption that the social systems of power have not been adequately explained. At this historical moment, she sees their explanation as necessary and urgent as ever because these structures of power, or regimes as she calls them, have not dissapeared. On the contrary, they continue to regulate knowledge and people's lives and she strongly believes that the reason for their persistence and ability to reform is because the various aspects of the social have not been linked to our knowledges. She believes that this is necessary, now more than ever before as the capitalist hegemony continues to depend on an interdependent world system to make this linkage despite attempts in the academy and by feminist theorists to eclipse this reality of patriarchical capitalism which continues the oppression and exploitation of most of the people in the world. Hennessy locates feminist standpoint theories in Marxist historical materialism and suggests that they have the conceptual tools to explain the social relations (one instance of that is women's lives) in systemic terms. An understanding of women's lives that is based on systemic terms requires that "ideology is understood in its relation to social class and state power", which means that it is more than the cultural reproduction of ideas. She sees systemic analysis as the "limit term of sorts in feminist thinking" (16) because it is the only way that provides us with tools to understand why (not just how or the discursive) of women's lives and their reproduction within a patriarchal capitalist world. She defines systemic analysis as "a perspective that addresses social systems--structures of power like capitalism, patriarchy, or colonialism--and posits connections between and among them" (16). By conceptualizing social needs in Marxist terms, feminism gains the opportunity to use concepts like exploitation, materiality, and ideology. Hennessy states that according to Marxism the social is "an ensemble of economic, political, and ideological arrangements" (17) and the material and productive role of ideology is foregrounded in these social arrangements. She outlines for us two different feminist standpoint perspectives expressed in Haraway's work: tracing Hennessy's logic when she reads or is critically intervening, I will say, in other feminists' work is crucial. Her critical intervention allows for the reading of the existence of struggles (especially class I will say) in feminism which in the end are resolved especially in Haraway's work in favor of a logic of irony and playful postmodern one which as Hennessy may say the logic of patriarchical-capitalism (or exchange). A counter logic to Haraway's within feminist standpoint theory is that of Dorothy Smith. Her feminist standpoint theory "conceptualizes modes of knowing within a much more emphatically systemic analytic" (18) because she locates her critique within the political, economic, and ideological arrangements of capitalist patriarchy. Smith (1987b) locates the emergence of the academic social relations and relates them to other aspects of social production in the capitalist world system (Hennessy, 1995 my notes from her presentation at Syracuse). Smith, Hennessy writes, makes visible the ways academic disciplines produce both economic and ideological value by occluding the dependence of their dominant conceptual modes and their administering subjects on the work of invisible subservient groups-- women, blacks, working-class people. These are the workers who feed and care for the administrators and clean their labor supports (Hennessy, 1993: 19 quoting Smith 1987b). However, Hennessy has problems with Smith's "jockey[ing] between the objective conditions of women's lives and the discursive construction of the feminine" (19). What is important and needs to be explained is the material relationship between the discursive and nondiscursive. And that is the task of her article. As she is interested in articulating a feminist standpoint theory which is located in capitalist patriarchy, she analyzes the preconstructed which she defines as the "feature of any discursive fomation that produces the effect of an "always already there," conveying the sense of what everyone already knows" (p. 24). The preconstructed is the "place" upon which social struggles are displaced and the capitalist patriarchical social arrangements are thus condensed of their contradictions. It becomes the site upon which interventions can take place for tranforming the exploitative and oppressive class, gender, sexual and racial relations. What is necessary in making productive interventions is a theorization of discourse. Using the logic of historical materialism, she argues that reading women's lives as an ensemble of discourses whose hegemonic articulation relies on a preconstructed patriarchal and heterosexual organization allows for recognizing and making visible the insistence of totalities like patriarchy, heterosexuality, or imperialism which continue to organize people's lives in general, and women's lives in particular, in systematic and oppressive ways. She thus theorizes discourse as ideology, and, consequently, she is able to suggest that the feminist standpoint can be reconstructed and articulated as a critical practice. "It is [and should be] an act of reading that intervenes and rearranges the construction of meanings and the social relations they support" (27). To do that, materialist feminists need to rethink what is meant by standpoint. The major concept among them is materiality of knowledge. By this she means that in any historical formation, "what is possible to know is shaped by and in turn helps delimit the contradictory development and displacement of economic and political forces" (21). For example, under capitalism, exploitation and oppression are mystified in ways that people see such social arrangements as the ways things "naturally" are. Thus, ideology is a material force because it reproduces what comes to legitimately count as the "reality"--even while other economic and political material forces are shaped by ideology they are not reflected in it. Hennessy then argues that the materiality of the social is not based in an objective reality outside knowledge. Rather, it includes all of a culture's modes of intelligibility in an ensemble of economic, political, and ideological practices. Thus, "from the vantage point of ideology...the material is that which intervenes in production of the social real by being made intelligible....the discourses that constitute the material structures through which ideology works are shaped by the material relations that comprise economic and political practices" (22). Thus, women's lives and the feminist standpoint are always impacted by the "ensemble of social relations" and they are not just ideological. They are ideological constructs "whose parameters are unevenly and contradictorily shaped in specific historical moments by divisions of labor, and relations between state and civil society" (22). Consequently, women's lives cannot be separated from the contesting ways of making sense of them. It is thus important for standpoint theory to recognize that these "lives are not exclusively ideological". What Hennessy then avails to the feminist standpoint is the historical materialism's theory of idelogy through which she intervenes to shift the emphasis from a cultural analysis of several discourses to addressing the gaps in the dominant culture's ways of making sense of women's lives, gaps arising out of the contradiction between the democratic promises of equality and justice in modern societies and women's subordination in all arenas of social life". For her, the theory of ideology within historical materialism is the starting point to explain this gap and also to critique present knowledges that have not allowed an analysis of the contradictions of the social production of lives and knowledges. She argues that questions, problematics, and contradictions within texts of culture are the site upon which feminism can intervene to make explicit the historical contradictions they reveal. An "objective" logic or the logic of cultural analysis (signification) could not adequately address these contradictions and the self-contradictory moments in a culture's way of making sense. Critique, Hennessy suggests, is not a way of resolving cultural crisis. Its aim is to show that "internal contradictions in a cultural text are the product of crises in the larger social formation, contradictions that cannot be satisfied by the system as it is at present" (28). This critique allows for linking one cultural text to the larger social, economic, and ideological social arrangements and in making visible the contradictions of the patriarchal capitalist logic and its demand for exploitation and oppression of some at the expense of the many. This analytic makes possible the consideration of the effects of knowledges as always invested ways of making sense of the world. There is much more in the text of Hennessy that I wish to provide to you, however, in the interest of expediency, let's start our discussion now. These questions are not encompassing but I hope they can guide our discussion of her text: 1. In taking up women's oppression and exploitation, Hennessy privileges which social context? 2. What is the medium through which Hennessy intends to chart the progress of feminist standpoint theory (critique, theory, literature)? Why? How does she conceptualize alterity and why? How does she define the object of feminist inquiry? What is the conceptual map which she provides us and how does this map make a linkage between the global and the local? Why is the map useful for people interested in accounting women's oppression and exploitation and the feminist inquiry in particular? 3. What are the historical conditions that make possible the emergence of feminist standpoint theories that emphasize and resolve the tension between the existence of the collective subject (who is oppressed and exploited on gender, racial and class grounds) within their texts in favor of signification and a cultural analysis of women's lives? 4. According to Hennessy we need to reconceptualize knowledge, subjectivity, and cross-alliances. How can feminist standpoint theorists can do that and why? Where do they need to locate their knowledges and their "energies?" Why? 5. Why is it necessary for Hennessy to conceptualize feminist standpoint theory from a global analytic and what are the underlying conceptualizations of class, gender, and race within this kind of feminist standpoint theory that Hennessy puts forward in this article? Why is it necessary at this historical moment? What kind of social transformation is Hennessy putting forward through her reconceptualization of feminist standpoint theory? Why? 6. What ideological conditions make possible the understanding and explaining of particular institutions and "knowledge production" as autonomous sites? 7. Hennessy suggests that we need to make the connection between the discursive and the nondiscursive. Why is it necessary? How would this linkage be useful for the understanding of women's oppression and exploitation and under what conditions would this linkage allow for transformation? >Fromwillis@VAX1.ELON.EDU Date: Sun, 08 Oct 1995 07:52:18 EST >From: Lucindy Willis Reply to: matfem@csf.colorado.edu To: MATERIALIST FEMINISM Subject: Hennessy's article Did I miss something? I am relatively new to matfem so I am clueless as to where the discussion on hennessy's article takes place. I received the summary. Maybe I didn't read the fine print. Is there a separate line or time for discussion? I'll go back and look at the summary but in case the instructions aren't there could someone reply to me privately? Lucindy Willis@vax1.elon.edu >Fromchouinar@mcmail.CIS.McMaster.CA Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 18:15:04 -0400 (EDT) >From: Vera Chouinard Reply to: matfem@csf.colorado.edu To: MATERIALIST FEMINISM Subject: Re: Hennessy's article Greetings all! I'd like to share a few thoughts re: Hennessy's article and Anna's questions about it. For me, the key contribution of this article is the notion that feminists can and should move toward more 'process-oriented' critiques of multiple discourses as ideology through zooming in on the complex relations between non-discursive practices and the social construction of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses as ideology or, in other words, on how material aspects of women's lives become appropriated within/articulated with ways of knowing the world which perpetuate and sometimes challenge prevailing ideologies and the material relations of class, gender, race and so on that sustain them. It is, in my view, a welcome call for materialist feminists to take the whole question of how women make sense of their positions and lives and how these ways of making sense translate into practices (non-discursive and discursive) of knowledge construction and use that reinforce or unsettle hegemonic ideologies and social relations of 'ruling' as more central and problematic to the feminist project than has been the case to date. Her paper is more a 'call to arms' than a fully fledged framework, although she does suggest key concepts like articulation and 'interdiscourse' which would help us to understand how knowledges are constructed in practice and (potentially at least) to identify cracks, fissures, and revolutionary possibilities in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses. As she notes, understanding ideology as multiple and interconnected discourses opens the way toward considering the difference that multiple identities and standpoints make to women's ways of knowing and acting, and to how power is produced through the construction and use of knowledge. There are many issues that would have to be addressed in order to flesh out this general direction, including: 1) what exactly do we mean by 'articulating principles' (through which cultural ideas are appropriated into particular discourses)? 2) through what discursive and non-discursive practices do women come to use particular principles as the basis for associating/connecting ideas drawn from multiple discourses? 3) what exactly distinguishes feminist ideology critique from 'common sense' interpretations of women's lives? It seems to me that more is involved than critical, reflexive versus empiricist approaches to understanding women's lives and that there are political issues, like elitism within the women's movement, that have to be grappled with. 4) how do struggles to assert the authority of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses feed back into processes of empowerment and disempowerment? For example, how and why do women decide to act on contradictions in discourse identified through ideology critique in some situations and not in others--to connect ideas and practice? There are lots of other issues arising from Hennessy's proposed approach and I trust others will raise them! In closing, I wanted to respond very briefly to some of the questions that Anna raised: I don't really think that Hennessy means to privilege a particular context of social life, but rather to connect ideological, practical and relational aspects of women's lives. In practice, I suppose one could argue that the realm of ideas and knowledge production/use come to the fore in the sort of ideology critique she is proposing. I don't know that there is any causal necessity in the emergence of this sort of feminist ideology critique at this particular time, but certainly developments like postmodernism, associated intellectual 'angst' among academics and the political force of conservative/reactionary critiques in restructuring the state etc. can all be seen as problematizing the links between ideas, practices and power and encouraging interventions like Hennessy's. I think too that it is worth considering the impact of the backlash against feminism in various quarters on how we formulate problems. I think the question of the sorts of potential social transformations that one can envisage from Hennessy's framework is an important one and one that Hennessy could usefully elaborate on. I guess that generally I would see it as finding ways of unleashing or fully utilizing the power of women's critical, feminist knowledge to create more reflexive (and potentially subversive) understandings of women's ways of knowing and to think through the 'difference ideas make' to the strategies that women adopt to contest their oppressions. Connecting discursive and non-discursive practices is central to Hennessy's project and, I think, rightly so. Radical analysts often posit, but rarely demonstrate, the difference that particular ways of thinking about and discussing issues makes in political practice e.g. to coalition-building and other ways of trying to surmount divisions in the women's movement, to decisions about whether and when to participate in collective resistance efforts and so on. Hennessy invites us to look more closely at the processes through which ideas are lived and acted upon and in doing so, challenges us to come to grips with knowledge as a material force in women's lives. I must apologize for going on much longer than intended--the mark of a stimulating article! I am really looking forward to learning what the rest of the 'reading group' thinks. All the best, Vera Chouinard >Frommreeves@epas.utoronto.ca Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 12:27:53 -0400 (EDT) >From: Margaret Reeves Reply to: matfem@csf.colorado.edu To: MATERIALIST FEMINISM Subject: Re: Hennessy's article Like Lucindy Willis, I too did not receive the initial comments and discussion questions sent on the article and chapter 3. I wonder if someone could repost the message, or if not, could you respond to me privately? Many thanks, Margaret Reeves mreeves@epas.utoronto.ca >Fromh_grehan@central.murdoch.edu.au Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 11:01:05 +0800 >From: Helena Reply to: matfem@csf.colorado.edu To: MATERIALIST FEMINISM Subject: Hennessys article Hi everyone, Just a few thoughts in response to both Anna and Nancy. We found both analyses very useful and engaging and feel that we have a clearer understanding of Hennessys text now. Nancy's call to consider the effects of ideologies on everyday practices was engaging and useful. In response to Anna however, we are still unclear about question seven. What is Hennessys definition of the non-discursive (what is delineated by it) - we have difficulties mapping the non-discursive in relation to mat fem analysis - can anyone shed some light on this for us? Thanks xxxxx Helena and Debbie Murdoch University Perth Western Australia Helena Grehan Theatre and Drama Studies Murdoch University Perth Western Australia >FromJane.Haslett@UAlberta.CA Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 07:18:58 -0600 (MDT) >From: Jane Haslett Reply to: matfem@csf.colorado.edu To: MATERIALIST FEMINISM Subject: Re: Hennessys article I agree with Helena that the dicursive/nondiscursive binary that Hennessy= sets up is a very difficult one to understand - first of all, there seems= to be nothing that is not discursive, since we put everything into language, even to ourselves, in order to make sense of it. Perhaps "discourse" is seen as opposite to bodily (material) reality, but when writing about bodies recently I realize that even they are understood in terms of discourse - in other words, we translate "body language" into words at some level. I find Hennessy's book most compelling and useful, but our body reading group did have trouble figuring out the "non-discursive" that she alludes to, but never quite explains. Jane (Jane.Haslett@ualberta.ca) >Fromchouinar@mcmail.CIS.McMaster.CA Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 12:01:12 -0400 (EDT) >From: Vera Chouinard Reply to: matfem@csf.colorado.edu To: MATERIALIST FEMINISM Subject: Re: Hennessys article Greetings all! I too find it a challenge sorting out the discursive from nondiscursive (and not just I should add in Hennessy's writing!). Having said that, I also think it important to see the 'binary divide' as= an invitation as well as an engima. I find it helpful to think about the= distinction in terms of practice, i.e. the discursive being communicative= practices via the medium of language and the nondiscursive being practices with direct aims other than communication, such as picketting or refusing to follow disciplinary orders in the workplace. Given this, admittedly simple (e.g. where does body language 'go'?), distinction, it seems to me that the challenge Hennessy poses is that of understanding the difference that particular ways of engaging in discourse and 'reading' ideologies makes to material practices like political resistance and, importantly, vice-versa. Understood in this way, the 'binary divide' becomes more of a 'dialectic' and indeed an invitation to= really wrestle with the ways that we come to identify with particular ideologies (interpellation) and construct particular 'mind sets' or ways of understanding/knowing that are rooted not only in discourse but also in how are ideas are translated into non-discursive practices (e.g. selecting which feminist protests to participate in) which 'filter' our experiences of the world and power divisions and influence how we appropriate and 'articulate' ideas from hegemonic ideologies and ultimately, whether we can challenge prevailing relations of power in discursive and non-discursive ways. This is a 'process' or 'analytic' reading rather than a 'categorizing' one (e.g. this is discourse, that isn't etc.) and, I think, is consistent with the dynamic conception of ideology as process that Hennessy is trying to convey. What do you think? Let's have some other readings to mull over!! Take care, Vera Chouinard P.S. one of the 'are's above should be 'our'--sorry! On Tue, 17 Oct 1995, Jane Haslett wrote: > I agree with Helena that the dicursive/nondiscursive binary that Hennessy > sets up is a very difficult one to understand - first of all, there seems > to be nothing that is not discursive, since we put everything into > language, even to ourselves, in order to make sense of it. Perhaps > "discourse" is seen as opposite to bodily (material) reality, but when > writing about bodies recently I realize that even they are understood in > terms of discourse - in other words, we translate "body language" into > words at some level. I find Hennessy's book most compelling and useful, > but our body reading group did have trouble figuring out the > "non-discursive" that she alludes to, but never quite explains. Jane > (Jane.Haslett@ualberta.ca) >