JAY: >>I don't usually comment in threads on the nature and academic place of
>>feminist theory and research, mostly because I don't believe that men can
>>be authoritative on these matters, and that we too often tend to deflect or
>>misrepresent core feminist concerns and perspectives, even with the best
>>intentions.
>>
GEORGE: >By this do you mean that women should not comment on masculinity,
that
>African Americans should not comment on anything to do with non-minorities,
>and that white persons can say nothing about race accept to the degree that
>it relates to the "white race" (whatever that is)?
The rest of my original posting I think makes it a bit clearer what I
believe are the limitations of our abilities to work with theoretical
positions and methodologies that are constructed from experiential
viewpoints that we do not share. In general, in traditional
masculine-logical paradigms about theoretical or scholarly discourse, it is
only _specialized but universally available_ experience that is needed to
make a claim of expertise and legitimacy with respect to an expert
discourse. Think of physics, or even anthropology.
What is radically different in the case of more postmodern discourses and
scholarships, such as feminism, queer theory, postcolonial criticism, the
discourses of _negritude_, etc. is that the experiences from which they
derive are NOT universally available. You cannot enter these perspectival
frames authoritatively as an observer, but only as a primary participant.
There is no "apprenticeship" for a man to being a woman, for a straight man
to becoming a gay man, a European-American to becoming an
African-American, etc. These are not communities of practice that can be
entered through peripheral participation -- yes, you can be a peripheral
participant, as the ethnographer is, but you cannot become a native by this
route, or in most cases by any route. This is even more extreme than say
the problem of becoming a Jew or a Catholic if not born or raised one.
Note that the impermeability of the community is not inherent in its
practices as such, but rather in the way it is defined-by-exclusion through
the practices, mainly, of the dominant community with which it stands in
contrast (though also by some of its own boundary-maintaining practices).
This is quite different from the more subtle and hidden barriers that might
tend to exclude women of feminized identities, or less-masculinized gay
men, say, from becoming members of a community of practice like elite
military combat units with hyper-masculinized identities, or in less
extreme cases, members of CoPs such as engineers or architects, as
discussed in earlier posts.
I would not say that women cannot comment on the phenomena of masculinity;
I would welcome their comments as a contrastive perspective to male
perspectives. But just as males cannot normally comment on the experience
of developing a feminine identity, nor characterize the meaning of these
experiences in the context of male-female social relations (including power
relations, conflict relations, etc.) as construed by women ... so the same
is also true mutatis mutandis of the reverse. In such a case, one must also
always bear in mind the _asymmetry_ in these social relations, so that what
dominant groups have to say about marginalized or oppressed groups simply
cannot be mostly trusted because of the enormous interest stake dominant
castes have in ideologically justificatory viewpoints on those they
exploit. You don't expect masters to objectively characterize the
identities of slaves, colonialists the colonized, men on women, adults on
childen (a very radical case, and the source of my greatest doubts about
the possible objectivity of much developmental psychology), straights on
gays, etc.
But because of the asymmetry in the relations, the reverse is NOT exactly
the same case. The oppressed, while clearly also biased by their need for
liberation, their just hatred of oppressors, or in some cases their
over-adaptation to the necessities of their condition (i.e. acceptance of
dominant views), still seem, in my reading and experience, to have far more
useful critical insights into the ways of their oppressors (categorially,
not necessarily individually) than vice versa. So I would find women's
views on male psychology much more illuminating than men's views about
women's needs and motivations, or gay insights into straight culture vs.
the reverse claims, or African-Americans' insights on "White" culture, etc.
The oppressed MUST understand their oppressors, and oppressors MUST NOT
understand those they oppress.
But NONE of us can understand the "emic" or insider perspective of a group
from which we are categorially excluded by the practices of a larger social
system that includes both, and especially not that Other's perspective
toward our own group. And, by implication, NONE of us can understand in any
comprehensive way a complete categorial system (e.g. the gender system, the
class system), because we cannot view it from more than one position within
it, and we cannot do so because of how the system itself operates. This
leads to the most radical of the postmodern dilemmas: either we simply give
up the idea that there can be coherent 'master narratives' or general
overviews of such systems, or we try to imagine an alternative involving
the creation of new communities in which not only are the various
mutually-excluding viewpoints represented (as in a research collective,
say), but these specialized subcommunities create new kinds of relations
among the viewpoints themselves ... i.e. the members alter their
fundamental, say, gender perspectives -- if this is possible.
Such an approach of course ultimately still cannot return one to the
positivistic nirvana, since such a research collective to succeed would
have to, in some critical ways, shift its own perspective outside that of
the rest of the community, and so become newly unable to co-construct its
insider perspectives. Of course the more radical view of this is simply
that a theoretical overview of the system is only needed if it can help to
change the system, and the collective will have already done this locally
and can dispense with pretensions to omniscience...
Dominant males can and do talk about anything they want to, but it is the
oldest principle of scholarly criticism that one should always consider the
source. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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