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.
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Okay, suppose that I am a feminist activist. I work as a public interest lawyer, an advocate for women, arguing Title VII claims and sexual harassment claims day in, day out. I'm so good at it I even got a court in my district to unwittingly accept a very radical interpretation of Title VII as binding law. (I'm, in fact, proud to say that's all true). However, I also have a wife and, despite our otherwise-egalitarian relationship, when it comes to our sex life, we enjoy rape role play. Not softened-up "cheesecake" fantasies of rape, but intense sexual acts that would have me thrown in prison and disbarred were I to do them to anyone else. In fact, she loves it when I call her a "cunt" and a "whore," relishes when I accommodate her masochistic sexual proclivities and we both enjoy when I leave her with bruises. How exactly do my personal acts have any substantial bearing on my political acts?
Sure, there's a facial inconsistency, but how does what I do personally supercede what I accomplish politically? Yet they don't: The same man who advocates for women's rights one woman at a time in court, and may have helped many women I will never meet, is nonetheless the same man who beats his wife, subjects her (albeit willingly on her part) to harsh acts of sexual congress and says abusive things towards her. Which means either my private transgressions are perfectly consistent with my feminist beliefs (good luck finding a feminist who agrees with that proposition), or perhaps "the personal" really isn't "the political."
The problem with the axiom "the personal is political" is that it utterly misses that there is a public/private divide: By obscuring that divide and focusing on the private, you undermine real actions in the public. All this focus on subjectivity, on someone's individual behavior, does absolutely nothing to change what occurs in the public realm. Sure, the social context shapes the individual, but so what? Focusing on the individual misses that the primary goal ought be reconfiguring the social context, not over-analyzing the idiosyncrasies of personal behavior. What I do in private has little, if any, bearing on what I do in public, whether I'm an animal rights activist who eats meat or an environmentalist who drives an SUV. Sure, these are all, per se, inconsistent -- I'm a pure hypocrite -- but you notice, the only truly consistent people are the dead.
It's a nice thought: Hey, we just raise people's consciousness and the world changes! Unfortunately, 40 years later, other than a nice choir of the enlightened preaching their groupthink sermon to the converted, what has it accomplished?
My friend, if convictions produce only convicts, then they are useless. "The personal is political" might be a nice conviction, and certainly it justifies using plenty of flowery post-modern 50-cent words, but in the end it's an arbitrary maxim of no consequence. Your students sense that because they are still brash and precocious enough to think for themselves. They are not the convicts, so why sentence them to "vintage" (read: obsolete) ideas that were never relevant to begin with? Maybe the pupils ought teach the pedagogue for once.
(And, incidentally, while most of the first paragraph is true, one thing isn't: I'm a lesbian).
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