Feminist Nightmares: Women At Odds

Feminism and the Problems of Sisterhood

Susan Ostrov Weisser

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9780814794920
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Though all women are women, no woman is only a woman, wrote Elizabeth Spelman in The Inessential Woman. Gone are the days when feminism translated simply into the advocacy of equality for women. Women's interests are not always aligned; race, class, and sexuality complicate the equation. In recent years, feminist ideologies have become increasingly diverse. Today, one feminist's most ardent political opponent may well be another feminist. As feminism grows increasingly diverse, the time has come to ask a painful and frequently avoided question: what does it mean for women to oppress women?

This pathbreaking, provocative anthology addresses this troublesome dilemma from various feminist perspectives, offering an interdisciplinary collection of writings that widens our understanding of oppression to take into account women who are at odds. The book examines the social, political, and psychological ramifications of this phenomenon, as evidenced in a range of texts, from women's antislavery writing to women's anti-abortion writing, from mother-daughter incest stories to maternal surrogacy narratives, from the Bible to the popular romance nove, from Jane Austen to Alice Walker.

The value of the volume is perhaps best summed up by an early response to the idea—This is a book that should never be written; feminists should concentrate on how men oppress women. Ironically, it is precisely because the subject triggers such responses, the authors argue, that a volume such as Feminist Nightmares has become a necessity.

IV.
FAMILY LIKENESSES

14
THE PROBLEM OF SPEAKING FOR OTHERS

LINDA ALCOFF

Consider the following true stories:

Anne Cameron, a very gifted white Canadian author, writes several semifictional accounts of the lives of Native Canadian women. She writes them in first person and assumes a Native identity. At the 1988 International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal, a group of Native Canadian writers decided to ask Cameron to, in their words, “move over,” on the grounds that her writings are disempowering for Native authors. She agrees.¹

After the 1989 elections in Panama are overturned by Manuel Noriega, President Bush declares in a public address that Noriega’s actions constitute an “outrageous fraud” and that “the voice of the Panamanian people have spoken.” “The Panamanian people,” he tells us, “want democracy and not tyranny, and want Noriega out.” He proceeds to plan the invasion of Panama.

At a recent symposium at my university, a prestigious theorist was invited to give a lecture on the political problems of postmodernism. Those of us in the audience, including many white women and people of oppressed nationalities and races, waited in eager anticipation for what he had to contribute to this important discussion. To our disappointment, he introduced his lecture by explaining that he could not cover the assigned topic, because as a white male he did not feel that he could speak for the feminist and postcolonial perspectives that have launched the critical interrogation of postmodernism’s politics. He went on to give us a lecture on architecture.

These examples demonstrate the range of current practices of speaking for others in our society. The prerogative of speaking for others remains unquestioned in the citadels of colonial administration, while among activists and in the academy it elicits a growing unease and, in some communities of discourse, it is being rejected. There is a strong, albeit contested, current within feminism that holds that speaking for others—even for other women—is arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically illegitimate. Feminist scholarship has a liberatory agenda that almost requires that women scholars speak on behalf of other women, and yet the dangers of speaking across differences of race, culture, sexuality, and power are becoming increasingly clear to all. In feminist magazines such as Sojourner, it is common to find articles and letters in which the author states that she can only speak for herself. In her important paper, “Dyke Methods,” Joyce Trebilcot offers a philosophical articulation of this view. She renounces for herself the practice of speaking for others within a lesbian feminist community, and argues further that she “will not try to get other wimmin to accept my beliefs in place of their own” on the grounds that to do so would be to practice a kind of discursive coercion and even a violence.²

Feminist discourse is not the only site in which the problem of speaking for others has been acknowledged and addressed, however. In anthropology there is also much discussion going on about whether it is possible to adequately or justifiably speak for others. Trinh T. Minh-ha explains the grounds for skepticism when she says that anthropology is “mainly a conversation of ‘us’ with ‘us’ about ‘them,’ of the white man with the white man about the primitive-nature man . . . in which ‘them’ is silenced. ‘Them’ always stands on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless . . . ‘them’ is only admitted among ‘us,’ the discussing subjects, when accompanied or introduced by an ‘us.’” ³ Given this analysis, even ethnographies written by progressive anthropologists are a priori regressive because of the structural features of anthropological discursive practice.

The recognition that there is a problem in speaking for others has followed from the widespread acceptance of two claims. First, there is a growing awareness that where one speaks from affects the meaning and truth of what one says, and thus that one cannot assume an ability to transcend one’s location. In other words, a speaker’s location (which I take here to refer to their social location, or social identity) has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker’s claims and can serve either to authorize or disauthorize one’s speech. The creation of Women’s Studies and African American Studies departments were founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the advocacy for the oppressed must come to be done principally by the oppressed themselves, and that we must finally acknowledge that systematic divergences in social location between speakers and those spoken for will have a significant effect on the content of what is said. The unspoke premise here is simply that a speaker’s location is epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next section

The second claim holds that, not only is location epistemically salient but certain privileged locations are discursively dangerous.⁴ In particular, the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behal of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for. This was par of the argument made against Anne Cameron’s speaking for Native women: Cameron’s intentions were never in question, but the effects of her writing were argued to be counterproductive to the needs o Native women because it is Cameron who will be listened and paid attention to. Persons from dominant groups who speak for others are often treated as authenticating presences that confer legitimacy and credibilit on the demands of subjugated speakers; such speaking for others does nothing to disrupt the discursive hierarchies that operate in public spaces. For this reason, the work of privileged authors who speak on behalf of the oppressed is coming more and more under criticism from members of those oppressed groups themselves.⁵

As social theorists we are authorized by virtue of our academic positions to develop theories that express and encompass the ideas, needs, and goals of others. However, we must begin to ask ourselves whether this is ever a legitimate authority, and if so, what are the criteria for legitimacy? In particular, is it ever valid to speak for others who are unlike me or who are less privileged than me?

We might try to delimit this problem as only arising when a more privileged person speaks for a less privileged one. In this case, we might say that I should only speak for groups of which I am a member. But this does not tell us how groups themselves should be delimited. For example, can a white woman speak for all women simply by virtue of being a woman? If not, how narrowly should we draw the categories? The complexity and multiplicity of group identifications could resul in “communities” composed of single individuals. Moreover, the concept of groups assumes specious notions about clear-cut boundaries and “pure” identities. I am a Panamanian-American and a person of mixed ethnicity and race: half white/Angla and half Panamanian mestiza. The criterion of group identity leaves many unanswered questions for a person such as myself, since I have membership in many conflicting groups but my membership in all of them is problematic. On what basis can we justify a decision to demarcate groups and define membership in one way rather than another? For all of these reasons it quickly becomes apparent that no easy solution to the problem of speaking for others can be found by simply restricting the practice to speaking for groups of which one is a member.

Adopting the position that one should only speak for oneself raises similarly difficult questions. For example, we might ask, if I don’t speak for those less privileged than myself, am I abandoning my political responsibility to speak out against oppression, a responsibility incurred by the very fact of my privilege? If I should not speak for others, should I restrict myself to following their lead uncritically? Is my greatest contribution to move over and get out of the way? And if so, what is the best way to do this—to keep silent or to deconstruct my discourse?

The answers to these questions will certainly differ significantly depending on who is asking them. While some of us may want to undermine, for example, the U.S. government’s practice of speaking for the “third world,” we may not want to undermine someone such as Rigoberta Menchu’s ability to speak for Guatemalan Indians.⁶ So the question arises as to whether all instances of speaking for should be condemned and, if not, how we can justify a position that would repudiate some speakers while accepting others.

In order to answer these questions we need to become clearer on the epistemological and metaphysical issues involved in the articulation of the problem of speaking for others, issues that most often remain implicit. I will attempt to make these issues clear, and then I will turn to discuss some of the possible responses to the problem before advancing a provisional, procedural one of my own. But first I need to explain further my framing of the problem.

In the examples used above, there may appear to be a conflation between the issue of speaking for others and the issue of speaking about others. This conflation was intentional on my part. There is an ambiguity in the two phrases: when one is speaking for another one may be describing their situation and thus also speaking about them. In fact, it may be impossible to speak for another without simultaneously conferring information about them. Similarly, when one is speaking about another, or simply trying to describe their situation or some aspect of it, one may also be speaking in place of them, i.e., speaking for them. One may be speaking about another as an advocate or a messenger if the person cannot speak for herself. Thus I would maintain that if the practice of speaking for others is problematic, so too must be the practice of speaking about others, since it is difficult to distinguish speaking about from speaking for in all cases.⁷ Moreover, if we accept the premise stated above that a speaker’s location has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker’s claims, then both the practice of speaking for and of speaking about raise similar issues. I will try to focus my remarks in this paper on the practice of speaking for others, but it will be impossible to keep this practice neatly disentangled from the practice of speaking about.

If “speaking about” is also involved here, however, the entire edifice of the “crisis of representation” must be connected as well. In both the practice of speaking for as well as the practice of speaking about others, I am engaging in the act of representing the other’s needs, goals, situation, and in fact, who they are. I am representing them as such and such, or in post-structuralist terms, I am participating in the construction of their subject positions. This act of representation cannot be understood as founded on an act of discovery wherein I discover their true selves and then simply relate my discovery. I will take it as a given that such representations are in every case mediated and the product of interpretation (which is connected to the claim that a speaker’s location has epistemic salience). And it is precisely because of the mediated character of all representations that some persons have rejected on political as well as epistemic grounds the legitimacy of speaking for others.

And once we pose it as a problem of representation, we see that, not only are speaking for and speaking about analytically close, so too are the practices of speaking for others and speaking for myself. For, in speaking for myself, I am also representing my self in a certain way, as occupying a specific subject-position, having certain characteristics and not others, and so on. In speaking for myself, I (momentarily) create my self—just as much as when I speak for others I create their selves—in the sense that I create a public, discursive self, a self which is more unified than any subjective experience can support, and this public self will in most cases have an effect on the self experienced as interiority. The point is that a kind of representation occurs in all cases of speaking for, whether I am speaking for myself or for others, that this representation is never a simple act of discovery, and that it will most likely have an impact on the individual so represented.

Although clearly, then, the issue of speaking for others is connected to the issue of representation generally, the former I see as a very specific subset of the latter. I am skeptical that general accounts of representation are adequate to the complexity and specificity of the problem of speaking for others.

Finally, the way I have articulated this problem may imply that individuals make conscious choices about their discursive practice free of ideology and the constraints of material reality. This is not what I wish to imply. The problem is a social one, the options available to us are socially constructed, and the practices we engage in cannot be understood as simply the results of autonomous individual choice. Yet to replace both “I” and “we” with a passive voice that erases agency results in an erasure of responsibility and accountability for one’s speech, an erasure I would strenuously argue against (there is too little responsibility-taking already in Western practice!). When we sit down to write, or get up to speak, we experience ourselves as making choices. We may experience hesitation from fear of being criticized or from fear of exacerbating a problem we would like to remedy, or we may experience a resolve to speak despite existing obstacles, but we experience in many cases having the possibility to speak or not to speak. On the one hand, a theory that explains this experience as involving autonomous choices free of material structures would be false and ideological, but on the other hand, if we do not acknowledge the activity of choice and the experience of individual doubt, we are denying a reality of our experiential lives.⁸ So I see the argument of this paper as addressing that small space of discursive agency we all experience, however multilayered, fictional, and constrained it in fact is.

The possibility of speaking for others bears crucially on the possibility of political effectivity. Both collective action and coalitions would seem to require the possibility of speaking for. Yet influential postmodernists such as Gilles Deleuze have characterized as “absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others,”⁹ and, as already mentioned, important feminist theorists such as Joyce Trebilcot have renounced the practice for themselves, thus causing many people to question its validity. I want to explore what is at stake in rejecting or validating speaking for others as a discursive practice. But first, we must become clearer on the epistemological and metaphysical claims implicit in the articulation of the problem.

A plethora of sources have argued in this century that the neutrality of the theorizer can no longer, can never again, be sustained, even for a moment. Critical theory, discourses of empowerment, psychoanalytic theory, post-structuralism, feminist and anticolonialist theories have all concurred on this point. Who is speaking to whom turns out to be as important for meaning and truth as what is said; in fact what is said turns out to change according to who is speaking and who is listening. Following Foucault, I will call these “rituals of speaking” to identify discursive practices of speaking or writing that involve not only the text or utterance but their position within a social space that includes the persons involved in, acting upon, and/or affected by the words. Two elements within these rituals will deserve our attention: the positionality or location of the speaker and the discursive context. We can take the latter to refer to the connections and relations of involvement between the utterance/text and other utterances and texts as well as the material practices in the relevant environment, which should not be confused with an environment spatially adjacent to the particular discursive event.

Rituals of speaking are constitutive of meaning, the meaning of the words spoken as well as the meaning of the event. This claim requires us to shift the ontology of mea...