{"id":20220,"date":"2015-07-22T06:00:35","date_gmt":"2015-07-22T10:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=20220"},"modified":"2015-07-20T18:13:44","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T22:13:44","slug":"feminist-questions-to-ask-instead-of-is-it-feminist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2015\/07\/22\/feminist-questions-to-ask-instead-of-is-it-feminist\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminist questions to ask instead of “Is it feminist?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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With the latest round of thinkpieces about Rihanna’s BBHMM video, it seems like we’ve finally reached peak “Is it feminist?” I mean, it’s been a long road up to this peak, but this question feels like it’s growing stale and exhausting its ability to generate clicks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs it feminist?\u201d has always been a disciplining and normalizing question, one that centers particular kinds of women (privileged women) as the proper subject of feminism, and so on. This is what academic feminist theory learned in the 1900s, right? Anyway, \u201cIs it feminist?\u201d might be a productive question when feminism is itself a minority discourse, but in the era of Branded Post-Feminism(\u2122), \u201cIs it feminist?\u201d it\u2019s more normalizing than not. To be a lot theoretical about it: \u201cIs it feminist?\u201d used to serve as an instance of Rancierian disagreement<\/a>. The question used to disrupt and at least give a little pause to hegemonic modes of thought and practice. But it\u2019s not disruptive anymore; its disruption has itself been normalized. (Think, for example, of how \u201cdisruption\u201d in general is fetishized as a term for innovation.)<\/p>\n

But \u201cIs it feminist?\u201d is not the only way to start a feminist analysis or to think critically about gender politics. \u201cWhat is it?\u201d or \u201cIs X a Y?\u201d is like the oldest question in philosophy; \u201cti esti…?\u201d (\u201cwhat is\u2026?\u201d) is Socrates\u2019 whole M.O<\/a>. Philosophers have developed a lot more types of inquiry since then. We could, for example, ask \u201cWhat is gendered and how?\u201d or \u201cWhat are the gendered components of this and how do they interact?\u201d or, as Cynthia Enloe puts it, we can ask \u201cWhere are the women?<\/a>\u201d or \u201cWhere are the gender minorities?\u201d or \u201cWhere are the nonbinary people?\u201d<\/p>\n

All the way back in 1949 Simone de Beauvoir identified the problems with “what is…?” or “is it….” style questions, and offered some alternative types of questions to ask instead. She\u00a0begins the introduction to The Second Sex<\/a> with a critique of these\u00a0questions. Modeling the first part of the introduction after a Platonic dialogue, Beauvoir repeatedly asks \u201cWhat is a woman?\u201d: Biology? Nope. Metaphysical essence? Nope. Something made up, a false belief we should just get rid of? Nope. \u201cWoman\u201d is, Beauvoir argues, a situation in patriarchal power relations: \u201cShe is determined and differentiated in relation to man, while he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other\u201d (26). The \u201cWhat is\/Is it\u2026?\u201d questions get the ontology wrong. (See the \u201cscope of the verb \u2018to be\u2019\u201d discussion on p.33 of TSS…from a Beauvoirian perspective “Is it…?” questions are all asking after “serious [that is, predetermined] values” and are thus all grounded in bad faith.) Woman\/feminist isn\u2019t a definite thing or feature or set of features; it\u2019s a status in a particular type of gendered social and epistemological structure. So, as Beauvoir concludes:<\/p>\n

But what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous\u00a0freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness. Woman\u2019s drama lies in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that constitutes her as inessential. How, in the feminine condition, can a human being accomplish herself? What paths are open to her? Which ones lead to dead ends? How can she find independence within dependence? What circumstances limit women\u2019s freedom and can she overcome them? These are the fundamental questions we would like to elucidate. (37).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Following Beauvoir, we could say this: “feminist” is a situation or relational status. Something cannot “be” feminist. It can<\/em> assist or impede our ongoing reproduction of patriarchy–it can do<\/em> things. Notice the questions Beauvoir asks at the end of this quote: they’re all action-oriented: What can one do? What does the material situation allow? How might one effectively change the concrete reality of patriarchy so that nobody finds themselves in this contradictory concrete status of feminization? Beauvoir’s questions are\u00a0also contextually dependent: whether or not something assists or impedes the ongoing reproduction of patriarchy depends on the concrete specifics of that particular situation, how patriarchy manifests itself there and then.<\/p>\n

So, those are a few feminist questions you can ask instead of “Is it feminist?” Do y’all have some favorites to add to the list?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the latest round of thinkpieces about Rihanna’s BBHMM video, it seems like we’ve finally reached peak “Is it feminist?” I mean, it’s been a long road up to this peak, but this question feels like it’s growing stale and exhausting its ability to generate clicks. \u201cIs it feminist?\u201d has always been a disciplining and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20220"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20221,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20220\/revisions\/20221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}