The Politics of Contradiction

Abstract

nature of the self is a contested topic among feminists, many of whom deny that the self is a unified entity about which universal claims can be made. The presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions, writes Judith Butler in a book that aims at complicating the category of the female subject.1 perspectives of Third World have also fostered the view that may elude representation because the category women often functions in an imperialist fashion, obscuring the resistance to Western values which Third World women's choices often embody.2 category woman, Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak claims, ought to be understood as a metaphor without a literal referent, one that functions best when it is employed strategically and not representationally.3 As a consequence of these and similar positions, recent feminists have largely maintained that women's irreducible difference from each other ought to be the focus of feminist theory. However, Martha Nussbaum has argued that the rich cultural diversity that characterizes the lives of the world's is consistent with there being some essential human functions that must be maximized if there is to be advancement in the status of the world's women. All women, she points out, need food and shelter, and all ought to have access to education.4 It is consistent both with the poststructuralist problematization of the category of women and with Nussbaum's view that there is a great deal that share to maintain, as I do in this essay, that the feminist self is the site of a fundamental contradiction, and that it is because of this contradiction that the figure of the feminist carries both critical and transformative potential. feminist is one who inhabits but resists patriarchy She must, on account of this, be understood as the site of both an epistemic and a temporal disjunction. First, we must understand her to straddle the difference between the ideology in which she is situated and her particular difference from it. This requires an epistemic duplicity: she must function in a patriarchal world and thus maintain a coherent understanding of it and her place within it, but at the same time she must be conscious of her individual difference from the patriarchal ideology, an ideology that constrains her possibilities. These are both vital aspects of her self. Second, the epistemic duplicity goes hand-in-hand with a temporal contradiction. feminist's particularity precedes the ideological world into which she is thrust because she is the Dasein [determinate being] which filters and synthesizes that world into a comprehensible coherent whole. In this sense, her particularity is the condition for her experience, but this same particularity is also a consequence of the patriarchal world, since the latter constitutes her. difference, then, between the ideological character of Western patriarchal culture in which the feminist necessarily participates and the feminist's particularity inserts the feminist into a contradictory position that has both epistemic and temporal dimensions. However, it is precisely because of this contradiction that the feminist self harbors the possibility of transforming both itself and its cultural environment. In order to demonstrate how my model of the contradictory feminist self arises out of a rich history of feminist theory, I shall first examine some theories of the feminist self, beginning with one offered by Simone de Beauvoir. This examination of feminist understandings of the subject of feminism will, I hope, demonstrate the need for the conception of the self that I advance in the second half of this essay. A Detour Through History Simone de Beauvoir, in Second Sex, distinguished between men and on the basis of the kind of action which characterized their interactions with the environment. …