The other week, during a seminar one of the students asked why do we have to focus all the time on subjectivity in gender studies and not move into "the big picture". She was quite annoyed with it. I didn't answer it right away because I tried to avoid being dismissive with the student in case but there was a good debate in class on this issue.
Today, in a vintage article from 1988, I found a good answer. Let the Butler speak: "...the feminist claim that that the personal is political suggests, in part, that subjective experience is not only structured by existing political arrangements, but effects and structures those arrangements in turn. Feminist theory has sought to understand the way in which systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices...my pain or my silence or my anger or my perception is finally not mine alone, and that it delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me in certain unanticipated ways."
Subjective experience is not detached from the political matrix and politics cannot exist without the internalized ideologies at work. Leaving one side out of the picture limits any understanding of personal OR political processes. And this is why, for example, psychoanalysis is still useful in understanding sexuality and sexual difference in patriarchal cultures.
