On the utter futility of the politics of identity and difference

Yesterday's post about the the extent that mainstream feminist thinking is implicated in trans exclusinary radical feminism generated some great comments. In particular, my impression that Women and Gender theorists overwhelmingly defined gender differences as being in the contingent realm of culture and sex differences as being in the realm of nomic necessity was mistaken. However, nobody took up the main point I was trying to make (and it should be clear that no one has an obligation to do so) so I'll try to frame it more generally.

First, with respect to gender, it's not enough to problematize the gender/sex distinction merely by arguing that sexual difference itself is imbued with cultural and epigenetic factors. Has the debate gone beyond that sort of generic culturally relativist move? It was not clear from the comments. The challenge by Serano and Garcia is in part from the other direction; denying that aspects of gender difference are in the realm of nomic necessity leads to other forms of oppression. From Sullivan's post, the denial of this by many feminist activists involves systematically ignoring or dismissing the testimony of many trans people, and this suppression accounts for much of the acrimony between TERFs and transgender people.

Second, the gender/sex issue wasn't a little bit orthogonal to the problem I tried to pose, which was that much feminist theory (at least the stuff I studied seven years ago) wasn't able to navigate a Scylla and Charibdis between politics of identity and difference. Serano and Garcia argue that even recent feminist theorists (who are aware of the danger) end up denigrating femininity and telling women that they should have traditionally masculine traits. But if the alternative is Carol Gilligan or Glover type theory, no thanks. Glover critiques the "final girl" in horror movies (the last possible victim who survives and kills the killer) as a "male adolescent in drag" in part because the final girl has "masculine" attributes such as planning and use of reason. As far as infantalizing condescension goes, this is about on par with pesticide companies giving pink teddy bears to women with breast cancer.

I actually think that this is an instance of a broader structural problem with all theory that seeks to ground an emancipatory politics in politics of identity or difference. Politics of identity (to be differentiated from identity politics, on this more below) in the first instance correspond to characteristic tropes of many "first wave" feminists. The goal is to undermine the discursive and political norms that justify oppression in terms of the positing of systematic differences. The theorist critiques the Aristotelian assumptions about differences that might justify oppression, and the activist tries to render these norms no longer operative in society. The danger, of course, is that the oppressed group is in effect being told that they would not be oppressed if they could just be more like the oppressors. And to prove this, some members of the oppressed group are allowed to join the ranks of the oppressors. But, of course, this just serves to legitimate the oppression. I worry about belittling the heroic fight against apartheid in the United States and South Africa by mentioning them in this context (and I am not saying that things are nearly as bad today as they were), but I must. In South Africa part of the deal was to put a select few people connected with the ANC on the boards of corporations. And then of course,

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

But the idea that you too might be able to be a man ends up legitimating a system where it is actually apriori that very few will ever get to be men. My post on the manner in which Gordon Ramsay's TV shows legitimate neo-liberalism explored this dynamic.

A natural response to this is a specific politics of difference, in the first instance rejecting the Orwellian deal where you might be able to be an oppressor as long as you become indistinguishable from them. This make sense. After all, the deal is a priori only available to a few. However, in practice this often reverts to the kind of inverted Aristotelianism of someone like Carol Gilligan. Women really don't use logic and all that stuff, but are better for all of that. I'm reminded of an intro. student of mine from fifteen years ago who, in a brilliant instance of Pythonesque logic, defended the women being forced to cover there entire bodies in public with the following syllogism:

1. Wome forced to wear a burka women are wrapped up.
2. A gift is more valuable than a non-gift.
3. People wrap up gifts.
4. A woman forced to wear a burka is more valuable than one not forced to wear a burka.

The danger of opposing politics of identity with politics of specific difference is always going to be affirming the very differences that are part of the oppression. Cultural reappropriations surrounding rap music in the United States, Britain, and France are often instances of just this. The narrators of NWA's Straight Out of Compton are distilled instances of this trope, cartoon projections of white racism, but somehow valorized.

In continental theory at least, this dialectic between politics of generalized identity and specific differences gives rise to a sort of generalized philosophy of difference. One doesn't simply invert the previous paradigm, but instead critiques all politics of identity. Specific philosophies of difference are shown to be correctly called "identity politics," and rejected as more of the same.  This generalized philosophy of difference is instanced in the kind of French queer theory that Tristan Garcia critiques, but it is familiar to American conference attenders, where you see instances of the hyper-nominalist strategy that tries to show that any instance of some field of difference (such as gender) is a construction. It is a short step from this to enjoining people to either embrace fluidity or take a kind of existentialist ownership of their own identity. Once you realize there is no there there to any possible identity of that sort, you have no excuse not to realize that you are responsible for all of your behavior that can be categorized according to a that identity.

In a wonderful Hegelian move, Garcia argues that such philosophies of generalized difference simply revert back to philosophies of identity. The virtues demanded of all of us by the French theorists in question are simply the traditional Aristotelian masculine virtues. The person who does not accept gender fluidity is weak and passive, that is feminine in the Aristotelian sense and worthy of censure. This contrasted with the strong, dedicated person who embraces fluidity.

The broader point one can glean from this is taht in structures of oppression, oppressors are by definition those who get to dictate the acceptable forms of difference. So philosophies of generalized difference are once again nothing more than a crude instance of philosophies of identity, promulgating the cruel neo-liberal fantasy that everyone could be an oppressor. . . 

All of the above is really just a Hegelian thought experiment, but I think it does illustrate many of the dangers involved in trying to ground an emancipatory politics in the categories of identity and difference. I might go further and argue that the very idea that such categories are foundational with respect to emancipation might itself be a self-legitimating bit of the dialectic constitutive of neo-liberalism. As Bruno Bosteels might say, one of the many the Baron von Munchhausen moments where the system pulls itself up by his own hair. But I'm not sure that this is the case. Likewise, if I understood Hegel better I would tie this in some manner to his claim about identity being the identity of identity and difference. But that probably wouldn't help things.

From reading Garcia, I'm sure that there is relevant work in the Marxist tradition concerning how to ground emancipatory politicis without a crude class based dialectics. I would conjecture that feminist Marxists have long been onto the problem of grounding critique in the categories of difference and identity. It would be interesting to take that as a starting off point for looking at systematic* alternatives.

[*If none of the above resonates with analytical philosophers, it might be because we analytic philosophers are ironically much more Husserlian than the Husserlians. We're very good at bracketing all sorts of possibly relevant presuppositions in order to make it possible to get down to the matter at hand. Thus an analytic feminist philosopher can more easily attend to various bits of the dialectic without having to think about the dialectic itself, which involves the possibility of a systematic philosophy addressing the issue at hand. This is fine. It probably goes without saying at this point that the only thing all of the authors of this blog have in common is that we take both traditions to be valuable.]