This is What Feminism Looks Like: Visions of Solidarity through Postmodern Identity Politics

S c r o l l D o w n

Feminist postmodernism, rooted in theory, and politics of identity, rooted in social activism, have critiqued each other heavily. While both seek to understand and end oppression, they approach that task through different methodologies.

Postmodernists do not believe there is a “single, universal analysis of what sex oppression consists of” and that sex oppression must be examined in context historically, socially, and culturally (Hackett 338)*. In practice, this means that unitary notions of identity are replaced with “plural and complexly constructed conceptions of social identity ” (Fraser qtd. in Hackett 351). To do this, postmodernists analyze discourse, or the “ideas, images and practices” that are associated with a “particular topic, social activity, or institutional site in society,” to discern how “power operates through ideas and representations” (Stuart Hall qtd. in Hesse-Biber 265). This deconstruction of language complicates the notion of identity and its usefulness while acknowledging how power resides within those categories. Overall, a strength of postmodernism is its overall goal. They seek to shift their “foundations from identity to one of the functions of oppression” that allows coalitions to form and dissolve around issues. This allows identity to be a result of “contesting those oppressions, rather than a precondition for involvement”. In other words, identity becomes an effect of political activism instead of a cause that is “fluid, rather than fixed” able to change with time (Wilchens 86).

Outside of language, in a world where our identities have physical and material implications, identities are often a source for mobilizing against oppression. Rooted in activism, politics of identity feminists generate their arguments from shared social identities opposed to shared values or party affiliations. They argue that “members of subordinated groups have a distinctive experience of injustice that is a valuable resource for challenging their marginalization and for establishing greater self-determination” (Hackett, 339). A strength in this approach is the solidarity that can emerge from the identity politics of shared experiences.

As a result of their opposing approaches, postmodernism and identity politics are often seen opposition to one another. For postmodernists gatekeeping, or defining who is part of an identity group and who is not, is contradictory to liberation movements. Instead of liberating the identity one is fighting for, identity politics are “ fixing and stabilizing” identity “more firmly than before” (Wilchens 83). In turn, this creates normativities. Normatives are statements that “make claims about how things ought to be, or how they in general are” (Shotwell 141). However, postmodernism is critiqued by politics of identity for undermining feminist goals as it tends to remove a sense of community within feminism because it deconstructs identity groups (Frost qtd. in Hesse-Biber 51). Without a sense of what is a collective experience, feminists struggle to grasp how to move toward collective social and cultural change. As a result, envisioning unity across difference is often a speculative project for feminists; yet, authors like Alexis Shotwell, Sara Ahmed, and Chandra Mohanty, theorize open normativities of ethics, feminism, and Third World women to offer visions solidarity.

In this paper, I will explore Shotwell’s concept of open normativities as a form of postmodern identity politics. Next, I will analyze how Shotwell’s uses open normativies in her book Against Purity (2016) to advocate for an ethics that uses “practices of open normativies to pursue visions and practices hospitable for worlds to come, to determine what deserves a future” (Shotwell 163). I will then apply the concept of open normativities to Sara Ahmed’s understanding of feminism and womanhood in Living a Feminist Life (2017) and to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s conception of Third World women in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003). Then, I will analyze how viewing ethics, womanhood and feminism, and Third World women through the lens of open normativities enables us to think through a postmodern identity politic providing a roadmap for collective action and solidarity.

Alexis Shotwell, advocates for an ethical and political response that refutes purity politics which believes that a return to before harm is possible in her book, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. While Shotwell does not explicitly identify as a postmodern feminist, her critique of normativities lends itself well to the ideas of postmodernism. Shotwell addresses norms as “constrictive and restrictive” forces that limit “the range of subjectivities one might inhabit of sexuality and gender” (Shotwell 142). This postmodern critique of the gatekeeping that occurs when boundaries of normal and not normal are defined is important for Shotwell; however, Shotwell is careful to not throw away normativies completely (Shotwell 144). Attentive to how normativities, in the context of oppression, force people to conform to whiteness, able-bodiedness, wealth, and/or straightness Shotwell concurs with the claims queer and postmodern theorists that normativities tend to be harmful. However, she is critical of how queer and postmodern theorists have predominantly made normativity “synonymous with ‘bad,’” and argues we need normanitivies. If we toss normativities completely, how do queers and feminists talk about the norms they want to make (Shotwell 143)? Conceptually, normativies are “the process by which people claim that a given way of being is good or beautiful, or to be endorsed,” where there can be any number of ways of being (Shotwell 143). Shotwell sees a clear distinction between supporting a way of being and forcing people to live that way as conceptually normativies are nonrestrictive. In turn, Shotwell advocates for open normativities in order “for finding our bearings even in the process of working to change the world” (Shotwell 154).  

Open normativities offer an alternative to how we understand normativities now. Simply, open normativities name “those normativities that prioritize flourishing and tend toward proliferation, not merely replacing one norm with another” (Shotwell 155). Flourishing, in this sense, is the goal of open normativities. In the context of oppression, normativities contribute to death and degradation when people fall outside of the current norms, but open normativies recognize and push limits that broaden participation in a normative resulting in liberation and flourishing. As lives become welcomed into normativies they move closer to the norm and consequently farther from death. Here, Shotwell offers a code of ethics in an attempt to address how to resist oppression by promoting flourishing. Acting morally, in her definition, is “holding in view how one’s actions open or close down the possibilities for others to unfurl their possibilities…” because our freedom is entangled and created in conjunction with other’s freedom (Shotwell 131). This code of ethics, as a result, is only successful in collaboration, as our freedom and, in turn, our flourishing- is dependent on other’s ability to be free and flourish.

Additionally, she is also is critical of the boundaries set within norms she calls for in her ethics. How we define groups, in this case, and who is allowed to flourish and have a future, must be critically examined. This code of ethics through the lens of open normativities, for Shotwell, does not have to mean completely new ways of being for flourishing to occur. Recognizing that we exist in a world with material implications, open normativities allows for ways of being, identities that have been suppressed, to exist as a way to promote flourishing. Our ways of being can reference marginalized traditions that are subordinate to current dominant and oppressive norms making room for them to exist and thrive (Shotwell 160). As a result, mobilizing around marginalized identities is still an option within open normativities as long as it is attentive to gatekeeping.

Beyond ethics, Shotwell’s claims that within almost any writing on sex and/or gender-based oppression and resistance will tend to be references to normativities (Shotwell 143). “To be queer and feminist,” to Shotwell, “is to resist norms” that are oppressive (Shotwell 143). Sara Ahmed, feminist scholar and activist, offers a look into this feminist resistance against norms in her book Living a Feminist Life. In her text, Ahmed views feminism as a work in progress where becoming “a feminist is to stay a student” (Ahmed 11). Part of feminism being a work in progress has been defining the normativity of women that feminism advocates for. Ahmed argues against the current normativity of women included within feminism. In order to do this, Ahmed acknowledges that throughout the history of feminism, Black and lesbian women had to “insist on being women before they became part of the feminist conversation” (Ahmed 234). Ahmed uses this example of how feminism historically was extremely white and heterosexual to propel her next argument for the inclusion of trans women. She claims, “Trans women have to insist on being women” so often in the face of violence, that for her, an anti-trans stance is to be anti-feminist (Ahmed 234). Ahmed supports her claim by stating it a “feminist project” to create worlds that dismantle the worlds that support “gender fatalism (boys will be boys, girls with be girls)” (Ahmed 234). Worlds of gender fatalism are deadly, not only in determining how cisgender women are supposed to be, but also for how trans women are supposed to exist or not exist.

Ahmed’s concept of women included in feminism presented is a form of an open normativity. Reflecting on how feminism has opened or closed down possibilities, Ahmed advocates for trans womanhood to be a valid way of being included in feminism (Shotwell 131). Noting the violence trans women face, Ahmed brings them into the conversation to promote their survival and flourishing. Importantly, she does not advocate that everyone has to live their life as trans, but simply notes it is a supported way of being. Here, Ahmed has made the space of womanhood in feminist more open and inclusive while also still working from a place of identity politics. Ahmed’s identity politics acknowledges that “if gender norms operate to create a narrow idea of how” women should be-white, small, not labored, delicate- then those who “who understand themselves as women, who sign up to being women, will be deemed not women” (Ahmed 234). For Ahmed, if feminism is not open to multiple ways of being a woman then women cannot mobilize.

However, Sara Ahmed is not the only feminist using forms of open normativities in her feminism. Chandra Mohanty in her book, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, argues for a decolonization of the construction of Third World women by Western feminists to promote for “women of different communities and identities to build coalitions and solidarity across borders” (Mohanty 226). According to Mohanty, the term “Third World” refers not only to “geographical location and sociohistorical conjunctures” but also includes “minority peoples or people of color in the United States” (Mohanty 44). Establishing this identity group is crucial for Mohanty’s claims about who holds epistemic privilege for visions of justice and decolonization. In this sense, Mohanty can be read as arguing for identity politics due to her defending that the most “disenfranchised communities of women” are more likely to envision justice as they have the “most inclusive viewing of systemic power” (Mohanty 232). It is in this identity that Mohanty sees a potential in “demystifying capitalism and for envisioning transborder” justice (Mohanty 250). This social positionality serves as a resource for these women to mobilize against the experiences of injustice. By including women of color from affluent and/or Western nations in her definition of Third World women, Mohanty is opening space to recognize the difference of inequality that exists within this identity (Mohanty 116).

As a result, while Mohanty does not use the term open normativities, she is engaging in this concept by making room for women who often are lumped into the category of Western women who have their struggles erased in a global context. Hesitant to make her language static, Mohanty is critical of her own language choices in advocating for this identity. For her, our language is still imprecise and inadequate where she can only use what best captures what she is trying to say (Mohanty 225). Mohanty demonstrates this by revisiting her language choice of Third World versus First World women from her first chapter, to looking at using words such as One-Third and Two-Thirds World or North/South in her last chapter. This hesitancy shows that this category is fluid and able to change to make room for others as open normativities do. Notedly, Mohanty notes this should not be confused with “universal sisterhood” which “erases material and ideological power differences within and among groups of women” (Mohanty 116). In this identity, attentiveness to difference is key for Mohanty as she is concerned with the material, historical, and political power with this group.

By seeing Mohanty’s definition of Third World women, Ahmed’s visions of womanhood in feminism, and Shotwell’s code of ethics through the lens of open normativities it enables us to think through a postmodern identity politic providing us roadmap for collective action and solidarity in today’s world. Fluid and ever-changing, Mohanty’s identity of Third world women through the lens of open normativities creates room for marginalized identities from around the globe to unite. Aware of shifting language and understanding, but also to material implications, Mohanty draws on both postmodernism and identity politics to advocate for her goals. Her postmodern identity politics guides us to understand the collectivity of a group while also noticing the differences of power, history, and politics that exist simultaneously.  

In Ahmed’s visions of womanhood in feminism, she too is attentive to language and how it has been a barrier for those who are included in feminism. Who has been considered “woman enough” has been a defining factor in the subject of feminist advocacy and for Ahmed we cannot stop at including Black and lesbian women. She insists on the inclusion of trans womanhood as a womanhood that should be valued in feminism. This attentiveness to the gatekeeping that has occurred lends itself to postmodern identity politics as Ahmed acknowledges how if we define woman narrowly then people who identify or are deemed women will not be considered women. For Ahmed, this is crucial in the future of mobilizing for feminists causes collectively.

Ethically, Shotwell addresses how gatekeeping can act as a way to push people into the margins, to mark their way of life as non-normative and thus closer to death. This postmodern critique of identity politics, however, does not cause Shotwell to completely reject identity. Identity itself is entangled for Shotwell with others’ identities which are situated in a world of normativities. By “finding our bearings” in identity, particularly open normative identities, Shotwell believes we can engage in the “process of working to change the world” (Shotwell 154). Inspired by Robert McRuer, Shotwell calls for a politic that “acknowledges the complex and contradictory histories of our various movements, drawing on and learning from those histories rather than transcending them” (McRuer qtd. in Shotwell 171). Rather than foregoing identity completely, her attentiveness to material implications of oppression allows for mobilization around identity as a way to promote flourishing while also being attentive to how language shapes that flourishing in this postmodern identity politics.  

In retrospect, while all three authors’ different arguments can be seen through the lens of open normativities they all are promoting visions of solidarity. Mohanty gives us transnational solidarity based on the “recognition of common interests” of decolonizing work where we can aim to move from “essentialist notions of Third World feminists struggles” (Mohanty 7). Ahmed’s call for feminist solidarity where “we keep each other up” and “loosen the requirements to be in a world” makes “room for others to be” (Ahmed 232). Additionally, Shotwell offers us a praxis that is situated in the present, but is working toward speculative futures of recognizing and mobilizing around our own interdependence-socially, materially, and biologically- which co-constitutes our freedoms (Shotwell 172). In turn, these authors give us roadmaps of how to manifest unification in a world that has become divided by race, political parties, borders, gender, and class. Perhaps it is here, in the open normativies of identity that political action will unite those who often are seen in opposition.

Notes

*Note, postmodernism does not apply solely to ending sex oppression, it can be any type of oppression. This quote just happened to use the example of sex oppression.

(May 2018)

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.

Hackett, Elizabeth, and Sally Haslanger. Theorizing Feminisms. Oxford University Press, 2006.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders Decolonizing Theory, Practicing

     Solidarity. Duke University Press, 2003.

Shotwell, Alexis. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. University of

    Minnesota Press, 2016.

Wilchins, Riki Anne. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Firebrand Books,

    1997.

 

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