“IS THE PERSONAL POLITICAL?” TAKE TWO:
“BEING ONE’S SELF
IS ALWAYS AN ACQUIRED TASTE”

Mary S. Leach
Ohio State University

In 1986 at the gathering of the Philosophy of Education Society in Montreal, I presented a paper asking the question, “is the personal political?” I answered this question in the affirmative by attempting to show and then support its varied use by feminists as a maxim “authorizing the private, subjective experience of the individual woman to be read in terms of/for its significance with respect to larger issues, to stand as/for “the issues” of contemporary society.”¹ I argued that the declaration had come to function as a political reminder and as a means to focus theoretical attention on the critical elaboration of the complex relationship, the site of struggle in/between the “self” and the world. And, I proposed that one reason this idea generated so much controversy within and outside the feminist movement — some objections clearly tinged with seemingly unwarranted fear — is because it belies much of traditional American Liberal theory. Especially endangered is the liberal hope of an abstract (i.e., masculine or male) political subject, an auto-determined individual and his site of interaction with other such individuals, civil society. Indeed, I argued that the entire question of the conjunction of the personal and political strikes at the core of that legacy of liberal theory which has produced for us a metaphysic, “a doctrine of belief which regards each individual as an atom, something having its own nature complete in itself.” This well-worn doctrine assumes an account of the “self” quite independent of the particular historical, material, and psychological forms of life in which each of us is situated. The idea that the personal is political purposely challenges the picture of the individual as abstracted, “that is, as given, with given interests, wants, purposes, and needs, and only then juxtaposed to society, which in turn is pictured as sets of actual or possible social arrangements which respond more or less adequately to those abstracted, individual, human requirements.”

The idea, I went on to propose, interrupts epistemological individualism which attempts to divide the world into two parts — the knower (mind) and the known (nature) — and which views the whole of our knowledge as built out of a mass of simple building blocks derived from direct individual “experience”. It also works to undermine methodological individualism, those types of explanations prevalent in the social sciences, which generally advance explanations of “elementary” forms of social behavior by invoking a variety of fixed psychological attributes within individuals. Labeling this mode of explanation “a piece of liberal ideology,” I tried to show that experience itself is not some single “natural” fact. Instead, it is a product of entire systems of social relations which are essentially time-bound, historically, culturally, and materially conditioned.

I concluded that taking seriously the idea of the “self” as socially constructed calls into question not only that cherished notion embodied in the ideology of liberal individualism but an entire system of policy decisions (in schools and in the wider society) that have been traditionally justified on the grounds that they are outcomes of the “natural” biological, intellectual, or psychological differences between males and females.

Now, I would like to continue work on this question because I think its meanings have changed and its uses multiplied. As a caveat, it was significant to the feminist movement and continues to ring “true” to most of us; as a construct, it now calls into question a variety of contemporary, liberatory feminist and educational discourses which tend to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be articulated and subsequent political action to be taken. Finally, and the reason of most interest to me here, it serves as an elaboration of the constituted status of identity and thus furthers attempts to locate the political in the signifying practices that establish, regulate, and deregulate identity.

“Female Trouble”

The rhetoric and subsequent debate around the idea that the personal is political foreshadowed theoretical work on the very notion of the “personal” and the “political” as traditionally conceived. Work on the “foundationalist fictions” that support the notion of a subject has taken place alongside the emergence of the political problem the feminist movement has encountered in its assumption that the term “woman” denotes a common identity. Challenges from women of color, working class and lesbian women especially have led to the questioning of a stable signifier that can command the assent of groups it purports to describe and represent. “Women” even in the plural has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause of anxiety. More broadly, now among many theorists and activists alike, there is very little agreement on what it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute the categories of “women” or sex, gender, or sexual desire.²

While various feminist approaches to understanding gender and the perpetuation of male dominance have led to new insights, most approaches have, in my view, been based either on the liberal fictional self that I criticized in my 1986 paper, or on oversimplified notions of the self and human agency. This has been a continuing problem for feminist theorizing and, I would argue, educational theorizing as well causing “female trouble” particularly for those involved in the critical pedagogy movement.

To make new sense of the question and to show its changing complexities I will, in what follows, sketch out three competing theories of the self currently articulated with increasing refinement within feminisms and argue that the third which incorporates particular insights of Foucault to critique the notion of fixed “gender identities” and “natural sexes” holds interesting, new possibilities for helping us to extricate ourselves from some old metaphysical predicaments. The remaining section of my paper will suggest practices used by feminists and others to challenge notions of fixivity of gender identity and unified selves. I will end by posing one strategy for teachers who can begin in their classroom to mount their own challenge to these notions so dear to our liberal humanist educational ideals.

A Foundationalist Fable:

The first view of the self derives from the views of the classical liberal philosophers, from John Locke to Rousseau, to von Humbolt to Thomas Jefferson. This view, characteristic of many contemporary Americans of both liberal and conservative bent, holds that the self is a unified, rational thinking subject, possessed of free will and the ability to choose life goals and means to achieve them, as long as fate or external coercion does not interfere. On the view that all humans are rational maximizers who operate to maximize their own self-interest, women do not differ from men in terms of personal identity and the human ability to choose reasonable goals and means to them.³ Thus, if men and women make different choices as to how to develop their “human capital”, that is their skills and abilities, including their degree of formal education and job training, this is due not to innate gender preferences and skills (e.g., that men are more competitive and aggressive and women more nurturant and submissive). Rather, it is a result of the realistic options that society and the individual circumstances of women provide. Thus, more men than women pursue graduate degrees, or careers in management and other high-paying work in the fields of business, politics and medicine because women choosing as men do would have to face much sexism and would have to work twice as hard and be twice as lucky to succeed. In a male dominant society, it is not rationally maximizing for women to make the same choices as men, especially since most women want to be wives and mothers — whether this is socialized or innate — and these goals are more difficult to combine with the typical high-paying masculine career.

The explanation of women’s different, certainly lesser self-worth on this view is that women lack the skills that are highly valued in our society. Furthermore, men, because of their comparative social and economic advantage, treat women as inferior.

There are at least two political conditions necessary, then, for women to develop a better sense of self. First is a feminist social policy that makes it less worth men’s while to continue their sexist treatment of women — affirmative action programs, for example. Second are feminist educational programs which compensate women for the lack of skills society has denied them by encouraging the development of those skills necessary to compete in a man’s world. State legislation for quality child-care centers, for instance, and a changed consciousness that pushes towards gaining direct power without men’s “favors”, will come from changed social structures that help women to become more like men — in motivations, personalities and job skills.

The I and the Other:

Another dominant strand of theories of the self focuses on differences.⁴ These theories variously argue that there really are extreme personality and capacity differences between the genders. These differences, whether originally innate or socialized (appeals are made to both), are so much a part of the identities of males and females that they cannot be changed. People’s “selves” are not analogous to little chameleons, taking on or shedding their personal properties as it is expedient. Rather, since human personal identity is essentially relational, a personal identification with one’s gender is an essential characteristic of personal identity. Men and women, then, define themselves in relation to different social norms learned in childhood. Since a man or woman’s sense of self (and self-worth) is essentially connected to success or failure in meeting gender-related standards, women’s sense of self or self-worth cannot be ultimately achieved by imitating men or by adopting masculine capacities or goals. Rather, women must find collective ways to socially revalorize feminine-identified values and skills in order that women can reclaim a sense of self-worth denied by a male-dominated system.

There are at least two schools of thought among difference theorists on the question of the inevitability of gender differences. There are the biological determinists who maintain that it is inevitable that masculine traits and inner sense of self will be different from feminine ones. Testosterone makes men more aggressive, while women’s reproductive capacity not only creates womb envy in men but makes women more nurturant and altruistic in relation to others. Given these biologically based gender conflicts, systems of compulsory heterosexuality have been set up for the benefit of men to keep women from bonding with each other and children to the exclusion of men. One political solution on this view would be for women to learn to value their “authentic” selves by relating to each other as friends and lovers, separating themselves and thereby challenging the dominant patriarchal culture by providing an example to other women of a freer life — one more in tune with women-centered values.

The social schools of difference include some of feminist psychoanalytic theory as well as various radical feminist theories.⁵ These social difference theorists argue that the personality differences between males and females, though they are central to personal identity and difficult to change, are not biological. Rather, they are socially produced through the social division of labor, particularly in parenting. These sexual divisions create in women a more altruistic and relational sense of self than is found in men, who are produced with a more oppositional and autonomous, hence more competitive and self-interested sense of self. Gender identity for a boy means that to be male is not to be female, he learns to define himself oppositionally (I am not mother, I am not female). Feminist psychoanalytic theory tends to suggest that women should have recourse to feminist therapy to undo the damages of being denied the proper nurturance for self-autonomy in early childhood. The collective political strategies of radical feminism, however, tend to reject this individualist solution in favor of a collective empowerment process involving affirming the socially insufficiently recognized value of the feminine. Women-only peace protests, for example, work to reclaim the value of maternal thinking as opposed to militaristic thinking.

Both the rationalist and difference theories descried above, while providing various ways of thinking about the self, are limiting in important ways. Both are generally static and primarily essentialist. That is, they conceive of the self as a given unity with certain fixed qualities, though they disagree about what those fixed qualities are. Thus, they both fall prey in serious (although varied) ways to an atomistic view of the self.

Identity as a Practice:

One alternative selectively uses poststructural impulses, particularly those within the work of Foucault, critical psychoanalysis and feminist critical theory. It focuses fruitful attention on analyses of the discursive and textual practices in our culture through which the constructs “male” and “female” are established and maintained.⁶ In order to further “trouble” the gender categories that have supported gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, feminist cultural workers have incorporated questions of language, power, discourse and signification into a critical consideration of the viability of “the subject” as the ultimate candidate for representation or, indeed, liberation. Turning away from metaphysics, which demands that we think in terms of categories, accidents, things and substances, in an effort to expose the liberal humanist suppression of the historical, political, material and racial construction of the “female sex”, some feminists are seeking to occasion its subversive resignification and proliferation beyond the binary frame.

We understand identity, the self, the subject not as the “I” which somehow emerges out of the substance of a body, but as an action — the action of speaking about itself. Understanding action as a signifying practice allows us to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life. In other words, the self requires language in order to be told what it is, and it cannot properly be said to “be” a self outside this telling.⁷

A language that is metaphysical, which works with binary conceptual oppositions mis-takes identity categories — the body, sex, gender, and sexuality that are in fact the effects of practices, institutions, and discourses which themselves have multiple and diffuse points of origin. In this sense, language refers to an open system of signs by which intelligibility is insistently created and contested. As historically specific organizations of meanings, discourses present themselves in the plural, coexisting within temporary frames, and instituting unpredictable and inadvertent convergences from which specific modalities of discursive possibilities are engendered. The (female) subject is constituted in “gender” to be sure, not by “sexual difference”, but rather by languages and cultural representations; a subject engendered in the experiencing of race and class as well. Gender, both as representation and as self-representation, is the “product of various social technologies, such as the media and the cinema, and of institutional discourses, espistemologies, and critical practices, as well as practices of daily life”⁸

Now, we can see that the subject is not determined by the rules, what Foucault might call the juridical systems of power, through which it is generated “because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces precisely through the production of substantiating effects.”⁹ Agency, then, can be located within the possibility of variations on that repetition. If the injunction to be a given gender takes place through discursive routes: to be a good mother, to be a heterosexually desirable object, to be a fit daughter, to be an appropriate worker, to be a good citizen, for example, then the convergence of such discursive injunctions with all their attendant contradictions can help produce the possibilities of complex reconfigurations and redeployments. The critical task for us on this view is to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those convergences.

Sexual Subversions

Feminists and gay groups have long recognized, in part because of the public consternation it promotes, that the imitation of gender, folks in drag, for instance, evokes not merely laughter but a sense of cognitive imbalance. It would seem that the imitation of women implicitly suggests to us that gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that somehow passes as the real. Performers in drag destabilize the very “distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates. Acts of gender can be seen for what they are…performances effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame.

Feminists and others have also effectively use the parodic repetition of the “original” to reveal the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the “natural” or original. Feminist groups calling themselves “Ladies Against Women”, for example, often appear in Fourth of July Doo-Dah parades behind groups like the “Marching Fidels”. Dressed in demure outfits complete with hats, high heels and white gloves, they carry signs saying “I’d rather be ironing”, “Protect the unconceived”, “Born to clean”, “Save the Stoles Foundation”, or my personal favorite, “69¢ is too much”.

While teachers are limited in some of the practices in which they can engage, one very concrete strategy to use in the classroom could be to make the practice of writing in the sense of compositional practice, at least an equal partner with the presenting of academic discourse in its current form. More writing on the part of students is already a recommendation in many reform reports. However, the idea behind compositional writing is not to reproduce, re-present the discourse in the effort to show how much the student has acquired of the “knowledge” that the teacher (the one who knows) has successfully transmitted to the student (the one who is supposed to learn what the teacher knows). Instead, the exercise is designed for students to explore for themselves, by purposely using the discourse of their daily lives, both “public” and “private”, the discourses of the family and the community, the way those interact with the discourses of expert knowledge. Rather than an essay that attempts to faithfully replicate “prior knowledge”, a completely transparent re-presentation of ideas, like grammatological writing this process would focus on invention borrowing the images and the discourses of women’s daily lives to practice the exchange of discourses on the circulation of ideas through the principle discourses and their institutions organizing our culture.¹⁰

Compositional writing is produced for oneself, to bring into awareness the montage of different discourses, to think the relationship, among oral, literate and even electronic cultures. Gendering stories from the family should certainly be put into self-conscious question. Students could gain recognition of the expectations of themselves as “males” and “females”, and the replication of gendered relations across discourses along with the attendant gender bias within them. The norms of gender, the confusions and ambivalence inherent in the idea of female particularity can be called to attention and the varied means of representation for our own self-(re)presentation can begin. It would be a deliberate start to change the acquired taste of being one’s gendered self by rendering it incredible.

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¹ See Mary S. Leach, “Is the Personal Political?” in Philosophy of Education, ed., Nicholas Burbules (Normal, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1987), 169-181.

² For a theoretical attempt to grapple with the writings of women of color, see Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

³ For discussions of this view of the self see much of the earlier feminist writings. Some feminists, following Beauvoir, argue that only the feminine gender is marked, that the universal person and the masculine gender are conflated. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. E.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1973).

⁴ For discussions of the problem of difference in feminist thought, see Elizabeth V. Spellman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). For theories of sex difference based on biological determinations, see Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978) and Laurel Holliday, The Violent Sex: Male Psychobiology and the Evolution of Consciousness (Guerneville, California: Bluestocking Press, 1978).

⁵ Perhaps the most influential here has been the work of Chodorow and Gilligan. For variations on the theme of difference, see Joyce Treblicot, ed., Mothering (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allenheld, 1983).

⁶ Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault,” in Feminism as Critique, eds., Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Basil Blackwell, dist. by University of Minnesota Press, 1987). For a discussion of theoretical analysis of sex and gender bias in education see Bronwyn Davies and responses in Educational Philosophy and Theory 21, no. 1 (1989): 1-35.

⁷ Roy Schafer, Language and Insight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975); Emile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” in Problems in General Linguistics, tr. M. Meck (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 224-226.

⁸ Teresa deLauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

⁹ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 145.

¹⁰ I am building here on the work of Gregory Ulmer. See R.L. Rutsky, “Tele-Lessons: A Preface to the Pedagogy of Gregory L. Ulmer,” Strategies, Vol. 2 (1989): 2-23.