Women: The Problem of Experience

What is generally known as first-wave feminism centered around women's struggle for the rights to acquire an education, own property, and vote. Emphasizing their capacity to reason, they appealed to rational men to recognize them as human beings. Although some women stressed women's role as the mothers of future citizens and evoked the importance of feminine qualities of care and nurturance as remedies to early problems of industrialization and urbanization, to the extent that they sought to insert feminine experience into a public sphere, first-wave feminists relied on a universal notion of participatory citizenship and accepted the importance of rights as the vehicle for entry.

Having won these rights, however, women remained subordinate to men. Consequently, they encountered the problem of voice: "If I am a rational, autonomous subject like you, why am I still different? Why is my voice still not heard?" In trying to answer this question, second-wave feminists began critiquing the notion of the modern subject, arguing that the "I" itself was already masculine. Understood from the outset as separate, autonomous, and independent, this "I" signified masculinity, the male experience of detachment from others.^[43] In contrast, women's experiences were said to be those of deep connection, both physical and emotional, to the people and world around them. For them, to utter "I" would be to deny the fundamental character of their femininity. Thus, second-wave feminists explained the limits of recognition possible at the assimilation phase as a failure of the politics of rights and equality and turned to a celebration of feminine specificity. Replacing the universal "I" with a particular one, they fought for recognition

of women's distinct moral voice, feminine cultural achievements, and those bodily needs specific to women. For many, recovering the feminine was viewed as essential for the survival of the species and the planet. Critical of the instrumental reason that has led to environmental destruction and the possibility of nuclear annihilation, their struggle to recover feminine and maternal values was thus profoundly outward oriented.

Underlying this struggle was an appeal to those experiences differentiating women from men. On the one hand, the emphasis on experience was an epistemological strategy. As Susan Sherwin writes:

Feminists do not assume that the truth is readily accessible if only we concentrate hard enough. Recognizing that what has been claimed to be objective and universal is in reality the male point of view, feminists seek to concentrate on women's own experience and explicitly avoid any claims of being "objective, abstract or universal."^[44]

On the other hand, it was an effort to give content and validity to the category "Woman"; that is, it was an attempt to solve the problem of the speaking subject by reauthorizing women's voices.^[45] For example, Catharine MacKinnon draws from the experiences voiced in consciousness raising as grounds not only for a new epistemology, but also for female subjectivity: "This process gives both content and form to women's point of view."^[46] In Only Words MacKinnon takes one set of experiences to be synonymous with Woman's point of view, asking the reader to adopt this perspective: "Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live, are unspeakable. . . . You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs."^[47]

Precisely this effort to ground the concept of Woman in women's experiences remained exclusionary. Rooted in an essentialist and reductive presumption that the experiences of white women—be they as mothers, heterosexuals, middle-class wives, white-collar employees, or victims—could stand for the experiences of all women, attempts to define the meaning and content of women's voices ended up alienating large numbers of women. Someone was already left out, as women of color, lesbians, and others explained.

The critique of essentialism led to an awareness of the myriad meanings and interpretations of experience. Women began to explore and write from their differences, emphasizing their particular experiences of

racism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, and "lookism" as well as their desires, longings, fantasies, and dreams. Numerous anthologies and collections issued as texts for women's studies courses sought to include difference by publishing firsthand narratives of the experiences of Anglo lesbians and lesbians of color, straight women of differing abilities and classes, and women whose ethnic and sexual identities escaped easy categorization. At the same time, white feminists sought to overcome their own essentialism by broadening notions of feminine experience and Woman's standpoint to include multiple experiences and standpoints.

Simply adding an "s," however, failed to challenge the primacy of the white woman and her experiences. Class, race, and sexual orientation were presumed secondary to gender. As Norma Alarcon^[*] explains in her discussion of Anglo-American feminists' reception of the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, "Anglo feminist readers of Bridge tend to appropriate it, cite it as instance of difference between women, and proceed to negate that difference by subsuming women of color into the unitary category of woman/women. The latter is often viewed as the 'common denominator' in an oppositional (counter-identifying) discourse with some white men, that leaves us unable to explore relationships with white women."^[48]

But for some Anglo feminists the common-denominator approach seemed the only way to avoid excessive fragmentation. By emphasizing the relationships and expectations organized under a general category "Woman," they hoped to defend even as they created a common identity capable of uniting women. Fearing the demise of feminism in the face of a variety of hyphenated, identity-based movements, they adopted a just-add-it-on strategy to deal with difference: "Woman" was a generalized other to be concretized—later. Further, and perhaps more importantly, white feminists were reluctant to abandon either the category of experience just as it was becoming crucial to the writings of lesbians and women of color or the ideal of a feminist politics capable of uniting diverse women.

The awareness of the various meanings and interpretations of experience next appeared as a critical engagement with the concept of experience itself.^[49] By stressing the ways in which experiences are constructed and produced, and the connection between these experiences and a less singular and immobile conception of identity, recent feminists have sought to overcome the oppositions between essentialism and fragmentation, political agency and exclusion. Judith Butler criticizes the per-

ceived need to base feminist action on women's identities, arguing that this perception has impeded investigation into the "multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of 'women' are constructed."^[50] Leaving the category "women" open as a site of contested meanings will better facilitate coalition politics and allow for new identity concepts to emerge through engaged political action: "Without the compulsory expectation that feminist actions must be instituted from some stable, unified, and agreed upon identity, those actions might well get a quicker start and seem more congenial to a number of 'women' for whom the meaning of the category is permanently moot."^[51]

Until now, my argument has been that in its third phase identity politics shifts toward something like reflective solidarity. Although third-phase feminist work has involved itself in the close examination of the discourses, practices, and structures of power within which identities, sexualities, and genders are constructed and performed, I have to confess that finding within this work anything resembling an emphasis on solidarity is rather difficult. The ethical insights of third-phase feminism are sometimes overshadowed by vehement debates over notions of subjectivity and the regulatory production of the subject. The very investigation into relations between discourse and domination, the exposure of the workings of power in every aspect of our lives, seems to have supplanted the possibility of speaking about goals of freedom and equality for women. It isn't exactly correct to say that "power is everywhere; everything is coerced and constrained" because much of this work uncovers micropossibilities for disruption, agency, and transformation in the very workings of and reiterations produced in and through power. Nonetheless, this attention to power has itself produced a vision of the world that cannot account for the positive and communicative dimensions of our lives.^[52] Not only are microdisruptions and performative reiterations hardly enough to challenge the continued brutalization of women in their homes, the reinvigorated homophobia of the Right, and the continued economic exploitation of women across the globe, but such disruptions and reiterations themselves, as their theorists admit, can backfire, either manipulated by their opponents or coopted into new practices of violence. More importantly, once every possible position and move is reduced to a strategy, we are left asking, "But to what end?" Once communities and solidarities are replaced by networks of coercion and control, we are left wondering, "So why bother?"

But, of course, deep down, we know to what end and why we should

bother—women face continual, violence, degradation, harassment, rape, unwanted pregnancies, and inadequate health care; the United States and numerous countries throughout Europe are witnessing a renewed nationalism that expresses itself in racism, anti-Semitism, and organized acts of violence against women. All over the world women's bodies and labor are exploited and abused. What isn't clear to me is whether third-phase feminist theory has lost the outward orientation of the second phase or whether everything is outward oriented to the extent that there is no longer an inward orientation. On the one hand, the emphasis on microresistances seems to have replaced larger goals like "saving the world" with saving one's self—or at least securing for oneself a small scope of freedom. On the other hand, the ostensibly universal presence of violence and coercion in our everyday values, commitments, and relationships has fostered the perception of "enemies everywhere," which in turn fuels suspicions even of the connections "among us."

Of course, once one moves away from third-phase feminist writing and looks at feminist actions, the possibility of solidarity reemerges. And, fortunately, there are important exceptions within feminist writing itself. I am thinking here of work done by feminists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Susan Bordo, Nancy Fraser, bell hooks, Martha Minow, and Iris Marion Young. The problem, then, is the increased distance between debates in feminist theory and "real life." The dismay expressed by women students new to feminism, the anguish voiced by feminists of color at the exclusionary and orthodox world of theory, and the increased disregard of feminist colleagues in other, more practical, disciplines remind us of the need for a reflective solidarity among women, of the need for accountability within our theories. If we forget or disregard the importance of solidarity and responsibility, we risk allowing investigations into localized configurations of power to replace our awareness of and complicity in larger relationships and interconnections.

So while I agree with and respect Butler's contention that coalitions have to acknowledge their contradictions and that the conditions and limits of dialogue must be interrogated, I disagree with her claim that the effort to establish an ideal form for coalitions is a reinsertion of sovereignty. In fact, I find Habermas's account of the conditions for agreement in moral argumentation extremely helpful for imagining an ideal form for coalitions. Generally speaking, the conditions of practical discourse require that the participants respect one another as competent and truthful speakers, recognize the worthiness of each other to raise

issues and claims, and understand each other as a responsible agent.^[53] With these sorts of requirements, coalitions can move beyond competing identity claims and achieve a reflective solidarity. Participants would have to respect the identities of each other while acknowledging the right of each to question and challenge the claims made on the basis of these identities. Identities are respected without remaining fixed, thus allowing for both the transformation of existing identity categories and the possibility of coalitional agreement and action.

Returning to my discussion of third-phase feminism and the problem of women's experience, although I accept the importance of what Teresa de Lauretis has referred to as the "erotic drive" of feminist theory, one that "enhances images of feminism as difference, rebellion, daring, excess, subversion," I nonetheless emphasize the "ethical drive" that works toward community and accountability as it appears in some recent critiques of experience.^[54] Whereas many have focused on Donna Haraway's perverse and ironic myth of the cyborg, I look to the appeal to accountability in her investigation of experience. According to Haraway:

It is crucial to be accountable for the politics of experience in the institution of women's studies. Such accountability is not easy, nor is it obvious what forms it might take, nor how struggles over different articulations of experience and different positionings for making these articulations should be addressed. Nor can experience be allowed simply to appear as endlessly plural and unchallengeable, as if self-evident, readily available when we look "inside" ourselves, and only one's own, or only one's. group's. . . . Feminism is collective; and difference is political, that is, about power, accountability, and hope. Experience, like difference, is about contradictory and necessary connections.^[55]

Similarly, I see in Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's reading of Minnie Bruce Pratt's autobiographical essay not only a new notion of multiple and shifting subjectivity but also the possibility of a reflective solidarity. Their reading seeks to challenge the simple "conflation of experience, identity, and political perspective."^[56] As they look at the shifts and displacements, the exclusions and contradictions, in Pratt's narrative of the relationship between home, community, and her own identity as a white, Southern lesbian, they expose the multiple and overlapping systems of power and relations of oppression in which identities are constructed and experienced. They conclude that community "is the product of work, of struggle; it is inherently unstable, contextual; it has to be constantly reevaluated in relation to critical political

priorities; and it is the product of interpretation, interpretation based on an attention to history."^[57] The community they envision is thus reflectively solidary. Its members engage in questioning and interpretation, reevaluating the expectations members have of one another in light of their contexts, histories, and political priorities.

What Martin and Mohanty's essay shares with Haraway's is an emphasis on the local and specific that does not hesitate to extend to and evoke the global—both challenge the colonialist prioritizing of the West. Martin and Mohanty deliberately chose Pratt's Western feminist text because it "attempts to expose the bases and supports of privileges even as it renegotiates political and personal alliances."^[58] Haraway continues her discussion of experience with a reading of Nigerian author Buchi Emechta. "Inclusions and exclusions," Haraway concludes, "are not determined in advance by fixed categories of race, gender, sexuality, or nationality. 'We' are accountable for the inclusions and exclusions, identifications and separations, produced in the highly political practices called reading fiction."^[59] As each writer moves from local to global, then, each implicitly suggests the possibility of a universal solidarity, a reflective solidarity that posits the possibility of a community of all us by evoking our responsibility for each other.