Feminism, Constraint, and Radical Interactionist Theory
To separate feeling from thinking constrains interaction between individual
and the entirety of the rest of reality, and between each individuals' experience
of reality and the socially shared analogue of reality. Patriarchy has self-perpetuating
tendencies which can be understood as products of the severe constraints
placed on interaction as it would otherwise occur. These constraints exist
in our minds; they themselves, with their proscriptions on taking individual
feelings seriously as a basis of knowledge, exist as shared conceptual structures
(Johnson 1987) which, insofar as they
form the basis of behavior and of the interpretation of behavior for most
people who form our environment, are quite vividly real.
Oppression, the result of (or the experience of) this self-perpetuating
form of interactive constraint, is a situation in which the apparent social
consensus, the culturally shared and expected analogue of reality, would
come into unresolved conflict with experience-based emotionally-informed
assessments of reality made by the individual. This illustrates an interesting
relationship between the existence of objective reality and experience of
oppression--not that oppression is caused by or causes lack of objectivity
in the structuring of shared cognitive norms, but that they coincide as
part of the same pattern of reality (a type of constrained epistemological
and social interaction). Oppression is an interactive phenomenon; it is
felt, or sensed by the input of emotion, which precedes interpretation.
The intellectual sense of harmony and elegance can guide the interpretation
of those who dare to interpret, moving feeling into perception, or intellectual
awareness, and one has consciousness of oppression. Oppression does not
exist only in the individual's mind (subjective reality) or in the world
external to the mind of the oppressed individual (objective reality), but
in the abstract epistemological relationship of self to context and to interpretation
and expression, and it has an effect on the individual independent of whether
the individual successfully analyzes the situation and conceives of it as
an oppressive one.
Inequality, a dimension of oppression created by the competitive exerting
of control, does not (as linear models of power imply) mean that the most
successful oppressor-controller "wins"; no one is free. This is
the essence of fluid-essentialism--a conceptualization of oppression without
a class of "culprits" who are successfully oppressing to their
own benefit. Patriarchal oppression is characterized as an immobilization
contest in which men compete with each other in an attempt to paralyze and
rigidify the behavior of as many people as possible. The "winners"
are significantly less tightly constrained than the "losers",
but are nevertheless considerably more immobilized themselves than they
would be in the absence of this enterprise.
The interactive processes of patriarchal oppression explain and are explained
by the specific system of shared belief and concepts which delineate patriarchal
society. Although all human social activity is constrained in certain universal
ways, and presumably any social system would come with its own specific
forms of interactive constraint, the patriarchal system happens to be a
constraining system which limits interaction and communication in such a
way as to create and maintain inflexibility, which is experienced as oppression.
(Since the processes and the structures are actually aspects of each other,
and both of them aspects of the overall phenomenon of specifically constrained
interaction, the apparent tautology and paradoxical cause-and-effect loop
is entirely legitimate; the conceptual distinction between process and structures
is an artificial human convenience that makes description easier, but they
do not actually have separate existence).
I have been describing constraint in gender-neutral terms, but the specific
pattern of oppressive constraint is necessarily gender-specific. That is,
the value system of patriarchy constructs the experience of and meaning
of emotion differently for men and women, diverting the currents of sexual
expression into differently constrained patterns in such a way that the
desire to express sexuality is harnessed to polarized concepts of sexual
viability. The operation of patriarchal constraint focuses on us sexually.
It works by polarizing society by gender, defining the genders rigidly according
to sex-appropriate behavior, and then tying the intensity of sexuality to
these constraints-
I think that sexual desire in women, at least in this culture, is socially
constructed as that by which we come to want our own self-annihilation.
That is, our subordination is eroticized in and as female; in fact, we get
off on it to a degree, if nowhere near as much as men do. This is our stake
in this system that is not in our interest, our stake in this system that
is killing us.
(MacKinnon, 1987, p. 54)
Sexuality is a powerful force which may have a tendency to help individuals
transcend social constraint; but when tightly constrained itself, it can
also work as a conservative constraint-preserving force, as when access
to sexual experience is socially organized so as to be readily available
only to those who conform to the behaviors delineated by their prescribed
role.
This has profound effects upon the gendered construction of goodness and
properness of thought, mood, personality, and behavior. These patterns are
intricate, but key among them is the major pattern in which constraints
upon women put a more emphatic discouragement on analytical thinking and
input into the social analogue (i.e, women are considered even less than
men to be capable of seeing anything for themselves, or having thoughts
worth hearing) whereas the constraints upon men are more emphatic in setting
restrictions on the acknowledgement, expression, and interpretation of feelings.
Women are emotionally exploited as sources of empathy and rapport, for feelings
as commodities separated from meaning and power and self-determined purpose.
While less thoroughly distanced from feeling, females are methodically disregarded
and trivialized for what they think, and are also didactically instructed
in how to be in ways that emphasize feelings as commodities and emotional
interaction (with men, especially) as duties and virtuous behavior, thus
preserving some of the pleasant aspects of emotional existence while rendering
them "safe". The advantages of having interconnected emotional
rapport and interpersonal communication are thus partly preserved but separated
from the social-analogue-refreshening processes (French
1985). Radical feminist observations to the effect that men parasite
off of women's energies like so many vampires at a blood-feast (see Daly, 1978, for example) refer to this phenomenon.
Feelings, therefore, should join sexuality and reproduction in feminist
analysis of what is most thoroughly women's own, but from which they are
most alienated. (MacKinnon used that phrase construction to centralize sexuality
in "Feminism, Marxism, Method
and the State", 1982.)
Men, less discouraged from lofty cognitive processes and less behaviorally
constrained in action, are tightly constrained in emotional terms. Due to
the epistemological centrality of emotion, this cuts men off from a clear
sense of the meaning of things. Deprived, therefore, of a good part of the
information necessary for an understanding of their circumstances, men's
implementation of the authority to act and the responsibility for determining
action through analysis pits their authority against their lack of good
comprehension of the very area of which they have charge. Although one use
of the authority to act in an area about which one has very little understanding
is to decide not to act at all, the situation is inherently frustrating
and tends to encourage behaviors that seek control-that which can be controlled
can perhaps be at least partially understood, and then at least the capacity
to act may be of use. When a gendered value system that actively values
the male possession of control (French
1985) exists alongside of this dynamic situation, or perhaps gives rise
to it, the tendency is increased. Men, therefore, function as the agents
of the prime directive of the patriarchal constraint system: establishing
and maintaining control for its own sake. Under such conditions, the degree
to which norms can be stretched or experimentally abandoned is sharply curtailed,
and rigidly disciplined predictability is attained at the expense of flexibility
and responsiveness (French 1985).
I have been giving an overview of the "micro" / interactive component
of radical feminist theory of oppression. On a more "macro" level,
fluid-essentialist radical feminist theorists have explained themselves
more often and more completely, so people are more likely to be aware of
the tenets involved. This is not to say that the "macro" level
is an area in which radical feminist thought is less open to attack. In
seeking to understand the origins of patriarchy, radical feminist theorists
confront a difficult task, since patriarchy seems to be as old as recorded
history. This implies that any rendering of historical processes by which
human society became patriarchal is likely to be hypothetical and beyond
the scope of verification by the data available to us, now and possibly
forever. Fisher (1979) and French (1985) both construct theoretical models
for the origins of patriarchy, each of which contend that prior to patriarchy
we existed and interacted as a social species in a manner that did not oppress
women or, for that matter, anyone else. The social change that led to patriarchy
is described in both hypothetical reconstructions as involving social responses
and interpretations of a materially real sexual difference--the reproductive
capacity of women. I described earlier the sense in which compliance with
gendered patterns can be eroticized for individuals, thus effecting constraint.
On a more utilitarian and practical level, constraining sexuality directly
addresses the process of reproduction, a crucial area that would probably
be targeted for control by a society facing survival threats-a small, unexpected
fluctuation in the birthrate in either direction or of the social circumstances
of birth, for that matter, could constitute a crisis for small and precarious
societies.
The focus upon the politics of reproduction thus makes gender political,
due to essential biological sex differences (thus making such theorists
"essentialists"). The social meaning of that difference, on the
other hand, is definitely not an automatic one (thus making their essentialism
"fluid"), since it was different before patriarchy, and since
patriarchy was not necessarily an inevitable phase anyway:
If we consider that our species existed for some two hundred thousand
years without imposing burdens on a subject class, and that the phenomena
discussed in these pages have existed only for a little over five thousand
years, during which survival has been rocky and imperfect, it is clear that
the stages [of patriarchy] traced [in this book] were not inevitable in
form. At the moment, it looks as if even the liberality of the evolutionary
process has been stretched...patriarchy had a long run for its money...but
the point of no return is close. Apocalypse or change are our only alternatives.
Given the long prehistory of our species, I imagine the second will prevail.
(Fisher 1979), p. 405)
There is not a widely agreed-upon "myth of origin" among radical
feminists, though. Marilyn French conceptualizes a historical changeover
to patriarchy as the result of the tension between matrifocal society and
the male desire to be more important in the overall scheme of things (which
would have been a "timeless" tension until the rise of patriarchy).
Elizabeth Janeway (1971) looked in
the same direction as Nancy Chodorow
(1987) and identified the cause of patriarchy as the psychodynamics
of infant and mother or child and mother, seeing patriarchy as the (ahistorical,
ongoing) male response to fears of female power which originate in each
man's childhood. Robin Morgan (1982),
although she does not give a specific account, strongly implies that women
were for the most part responsible for leading us into the social arrangements
which became patriarchy, although at the time they did so those arrangements
were not destructive or oppressive to us. My favorite theorist of patriarchal
origins, Elizabeth Fisher, described
a historical set of conditions revolving around the social pressures of
material necessity that arose during the "neolithic revolution"
when we changed from hunting and gathering to farming and the domestication
of animals, and posits that reproductive control came to displace reproductive
capacity, both symbolically and materially, and ended up largely in the
hands of men. Ultimately, verification is difficult if not impossible, but
knowing the origins of patriarchy is not critically necessary for a theoretical
rejection of its inevitability or goodness for the species.
There is actually considerably more agreement on form and effect. Most radical
feminists say that women's oppression is a fundamental model for men's pursuit
of power over other people-the process of dominating women was expansively
broadened to oppress category after category of men, too. The urge to dominate
must exist as part of the effect of patriarchy on men; and the liberation
of women from this systematic oppression is a fundamental prerequisite for
the liberation of all people from what is actually a universally destructive
social pattern.
Once established, patriarchy has an equilibrium all its own. Deprived of
input into the social analogue, individuals spend their lives disregarding
their ability (and that of others) to see matters for themselves; they tend
to accept this situation as normal, and even those who listen to their intuitive
sensibility find interpreting what they intuit to be a difficult project.
Meanwhile, patriarchy has long since come to include a self-perpetuating
value system that condones physical as well as other social violence towards
deviants from conceptual and behavioral norms.
Patriarchy, the control-obsessed response (French
1985) of the human species to certain forms of stress (Fisher
1979), maintains a specific social analogue of reality by constraining
interaction as if the elimination of individual perception (or at least
the sharing of it with other individuals) were the only "reality
check' keeping society functioning instead of dissolving into a meaningless
collection of randomly behaving individuals holding dangerously warped concepts
and behaving in destructive and unpredictable ways. Military attitudes towards
individual free will and the role of individual thinking is a particularly
vivid example (Slater 1991). Just as
the military mode of order and control is thought to be more appropriate
than democracy on the battlefield, patriarchy in general may be an adaptation
to a crisis requiring order and control for similar reasons of urgency outweighing
the advantages of freedom, flexibility and experimentation. French and Fisher
consider the possibility that the rigidity of patriarchy may have had some
utilitarian use within a limited context of scarcity and physical-environmental
duress. They imply that patriarchy may be best understood as the response
of the species to survival-threatening stress, a reactive valuation of control
and preservation of the status quo in the face of threatening contextual
situations, but that it has long since outlived that context.
The worship of Control-as-God forms a closed system. Orthodoxy for its own
sake is the quintessentially patriarchal process, and control of the social
analogue--which means prevention of change--is the product. The traditional
patriarchal religious concepts of social order attributed order to a transcendent
masculine control-obsessed God (French
1985; Johnson 1987) and denied
the possibility that mere individual humans (especially women) could make
improvements by contributing any new insights or meaningful critique of
the existing concepts of social or physical reality. There is a modern Godless
version, too--the "monkey fallacy" (Watts
1966):
According to the deists, the Lord had made this machine and set it going,
but then went to sleep or off on a vacation. But according to the atheists,
naturalists, and agnostics, the world was fully automatic. It had constructed
itself, though not on purpose. The stuff of matter was supposed to consist
of atoms like minute billiard balls, so small as to permit no further division
or analysis. Allow these atoms to wiggle around in various permutations
and combinations for an indefinitely long time, and at some time in virtually
infinite time they will fall into the arrangement that we now have as the
world. The old story of the monkeys and typewriters.
In this Fully Automatic Model of the universe[human] beings, mind and body
included, were parts of the system, and thus were possessed of intelligence
and feeling as a consequence of the same interminable gyrations of atoms.
But the trouble about the monkeys with typewriters is that when at last
they get around to typing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, they may at any
moment relapse into gibberish. Therefore, if human beings want to maintain
their fluky status and order, they must work with full fury to defeat the
merely random processes of nature.
(1966, p. 58)
Therefore, preservation of the status quo and conformity to the social consensus
takes a high priority; since meaning and order are believed to have arisen
spontaneously rather than as the result of individual cognition and communication,
people's feelings about the quality and meaning of things, including their
own experiences, are relegated to the discard barrel of dismissible and
dangerously volatile subjectivity.
Social change is possible at all only because successful identification
and elimination of deviant nonconformists, who begin to trust their own
abilities to figure out life and the universe for themselves, has not been
a perfect process but rather a statistically operant one. To deviate has
meant to gamble. Some gambles paid off in the sense that communication of
new ideas and concepts made it past the barriers of doctrine, and in chaotic,
jerky spasms interaction has apparently demonstrated a long-range tendency
towards loosening of constraint.
When power is thought about in terms of the need for control as a response
to crisis, it is possible to consider circumstances under which control
/ power-oriented ways of constructing social relations might be desirable
without necessarily seeing power as inherently desirable and therefore inevitably
sought. This makes it possible to explain its presence as the central motif
in society as we know it while leaving room to theorize an alternative social
configuration in which oppression would not be endemic. And oppression is
intrinsic to any social system that is designed around power. Control requires
inequality and tends to require hierarchical stratification, which would
again be a useful adaptation to a crisis situation, since centralization
of authority is a means of acquiring short-term efficiency and control at
the expense of flexibility, creativity, and long-range effectiveness).
Plainly, though, say the radical feminists, patriarchy has no redeeming
features as a way of being for us at this point, however utilitarian it
might or might not have been for us in the past--
The only true revolution against patriarchy is one which removes the
idea of power from its central position, and replaces it with the idea of
pleasure. Despite the contempt in which this quality has been held for several
millennia, pleasure, felicity--in its largest and deepest sense--is actually
the highest human good...
To restore pleasure to centrality requires restoring the body, and therefore,
nature, to value...If women and men were seen as equal, if male self-definition
no longer depended upon an inferior group, other stratifications would also
become unnecessary...
The foregoing is a sketch of feminist beliefs...the movement is not aimed
at overthrow of any particular government or structure, but at the displacement
of one way of thinking by another...Feminism increases the well-being of
its adherents, and so can appeal to others on grounds of the possibility
of greater felicity. Integration of the self, which means using the full
range of one's gifts, increases one's sense of well-being: if integration
of one's entire life is not always possible because of the nature of the
public world, it is a desirable goal. Patriarchy, which in all its forms
requires some kind of self-sacrifice, denial, or repression in the name
of some higher good which is rarely (if ever) achieved on earth, stresses
nobility, superiority, and victory, the satisfaction of a final triumph.
Feminism requires the entire self in the name of present well-being, and
stresses integrity, community, and the jouissance of present experience.
(French 1985, pp. 444-5)
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